9 - Constitution

5 more days, guys. 5 more days.

5 days of form-filling. 5 days of English Christmases. 5 days of sleeplessness and then I am at last 23 years old.

It's funny. I've spent the last four or five months of my time here repeatedly telling people old and young how old I am, but when push comes to shove and I think about how old I'm gonna be this Thursday I actually can't remember. I don't feel any older than I did at 21, and that was two years ago. Maybe this is it until the big three-oh; maybe I'm doomed to feel adolescent for another seven years.

Well, I don't much mind. Case in point, I don't think I've been this excited about a single day in a good couple of years. Maybe even longer. This is the sort of excitement that preceded things like cars shaped like Noddy's car that you could ride around in, or video game consoles named after bodily fluids. That's all old news. But these days I find myself sitting around at home, iPhone in hand, watching a Scandinavian fellow make a freakishly overweight man/woman clown thing and let it loose in Saints Row 2 because I just cannot contain my excitement without at least grabbing a sniff of things to come.

That's right. On Thursday 15th December I shall be unboxing something called a Prima Note Galleria QF770 (with a few personal alterations) and starting a new generation of computer gaming which has been until now locked away from me by the powers that be (I'm looking at you, Gates). That's right, I shall be the proud owner of a Japanese gaming laptop. It's like a nerdy man's equivalent of swimming with dolphins. Today, I bring to you the story of my soon-to-be fateful union with Giganoss. That's his name, by the way. I made it myself.

So, when trying to buy technology in Japan there's a bit of a problem that first has to be overcome, and that's language. I studied Japanese for four and a bit years, but at no time did they tell me the Japanese for 'solid state drive', 'graphics card' or even 'gaming laptop'. You may think that last one a bit of an obvious translation, but it's actually a good example of the difficulties faced. Like at home, laptops in Japan are sometimes called 'laptops', and sometimes 'notebooks', and that last one is the more widely used one. That's the first hurdle over with. Now, if I were to search Google for "gaming notebook computer" (in Japanese, duh) I get manufacturer pages full of gibberish technobabble and, unsurprisingly, bias. If I search for "game note" I get online shops and their smiley, ignorant 'I don't know what this is but I have a funny feeling you want it' sites. But if I search for, and this took a fair bit of researching, 'ga-note' (that's gey-nou-to) I get what I was really after, which is the opinions of real people. That's the second hurdle. The third is then translating those opinions into English and sifting them for lies or those tricky pros that are actually cons. Y'know, like being told the hard disk has a lot of memory space. Turns out that's not so great, in that these days the 'in' thing is one of these aforementioned solid state drives. It's like a hard disk drive, only it doesn't have moving parts, and this somehow makes it faster. In my search of the internet, the one resounding opinion that always came back to me was that HDDs in a modern gaming laptop are a waste. SSDs are the way forward, and I bet you there was only a handful of shops in this whole country that would have been willing to let me in on that little nugget free of charge.

Still on the topic of language, though, I found that once you find a nice collection of opinions that are written by people who care about the same things you do (I fluked and got one first try) deciphering their Japanese isn't all that difficult. Everybody speaks politely, explains things in detail and offers friendly advice, presumably because we all come together in the mutual gain group of 'people who like gaming computers'. This is where I got my SSD tip.

But Pete, I hear you shout from across the sea, why go to all that trouble to search through the endless internet when you could have done that anywhere in the world? You're in Japan now. Why don't you just go down to the store and ask? And yes, that's a decent question. The chaps at PC World would have been very helpful if I'd gone with the same request in England, so why not do the same here. Well, let me tell you something about Japanese technology stores. You get the smaller shops that are owned by brands, they're not a great place for research because they'll only get you to buy their product and nobody else's. Then you get the massive ones, like our local Labi in Sannomiya, which has whole floors decked out with swanky, new computers. A Labi employee would theoretically be bias-free, but unfortunately they are a little difficult to come by. On a computer purchase floor, the computers are all divided up by brand. And so are the staff. Staff who will kindly inform you that the computers on their side of the shop are exactly what you are looking for, not like the over-priced paperweights that OTHER side is selling.

And here's another problem. Technology may be the fish of the day here in the Land of the Rising Sun, but gaming technology that isn't a console or a handheld device is still a real niche. PC gaming (as I mentioned in my latest article on SquareGo.com [/shamelessselfadvertising]) is rare in Japan. Games like Skyrim and World of Warcraft are virtually unknown over here, unless they get a console release as well. Consoles are the big sellers, played by all, and computers are used for word processing and low-spec free-to-play massively multiplayer games like Grandia Online and little else unless you're a massive geek. If you are, you need to look a little bit harder for your gaming fix.

Enter Dospara. This computer shop is a little out of the way, up some stairs within Center-gai, and stocks gaming computers almost exclusively. For a little while I even believed all the computers were different brands (oh, what a fool I was). So here's what I had to do. The internet kindly told me that Dospara gaming computers are fairly well known here in Japan, and a bit more digging brought up that their latest model is popular, cheap and probably the best on the market. The website even stacked this computer against Alienware's latest child, though the comparison was probably a little skewed in that Alienwares are hard to get a hold of this far out of their home territory. Fortunately for me, there's this other way that gaming computers can be put through their paces, something called 3DMark. 3DMark is a program that uses game cutscenes to test a computer's ability to play a given game. Did you know this? The popular example at the moment is the opening cutscene from the new Monster Hunter Frontier Online 2, which plays along with 3DMark. The program racks up points as fast as it can while the game plays, so any lag experienced with the video, even if it's visually invisible, slows down the point gain. I think that's pretty ace. Shops will have these cutscenes playing on loop with the points tallying up before your very eyes. Though most computers will vary by a few hundred points each time they play, the average can be posted on, say, review websites as a good indication of the computer's gaming quality. And don't you start thinking that it's a program that's only used with the real top-scorers. I saw a word-processing laptop in Joshin's (another big shop) with some kind of self-built graphics card that was doing horribly, and they still let it sit out there and tell everybody. Presumably this was because the brand doesn't specialise in gaming hardware, so what have they got to lose.

Okay, so I found a good model to look at. Dospara, like many shops, offers the chance to tweak the design of the computer before you buy it and, under Steph's suggestion, I did just that on their website before printing off an order form and bringing it in to the shop to get a look at. See, being foreign, the chances of me owning a credit card are a little slim, and I don't really fancy the challenge of trying. So any purchases come out of my account back home (expensive) or in cash. If I buy in-store, I can pay in cash. I felt a bit bad extracting just under a third of all my money in the country in one go, but it got there safely, so no harm done. The real surprise came when I offered the form to one of the clerks, who then used one of the store computers to replicate the order online. He then took me through each of my choices, reminded me what they all meant, and made some suggestions. And you know what? He even suggested an SSD that he said was a better model for my needs even though it was cheaper. I was pretty amazed. At that particular time I didn't have the cash with me. I didn't want Giganoss lying in a box in my room for several weeks without me able to open him up, it would kill me. So last week I went in again and made the same order (with the same guy. He didn't remember me, which is funny seeing as how I was foreign and stick out like a sore thumb. Maybe they get a lot of us in there...) which he again went through part by part to confirm. When I mentioned I was also after a mouse and one of those nifty cooling racks, he made some recommendations there, too. Y'know, one of those USB fan things you put a laptop on to take out some of the heat. They didn't have a big enough cooling rack in the store that day, so he added it to my order and said I could pick it up when the computer was ready. Which is tomorrow, by the way. I'm picking it up tomorrow. I may not sleep tonight, even though I won't get to play it until Thursday. What came (hah, I typed 'game' there for a second. Shows what I'm thinking about.) as an even bigger surprise was that, as opposed to a couple of weeks prior, it was now the start of the winter sales, so I would get a discount on my purchases and a free 16GB SD card. If even I needed a sign that God was okay with my hedonistic spending. (I needn't point out tomorrow's Sunday, either.)

Phew. There we have it. That's the story so far. As a previous sentence may have clued you in, the big game I'm looking forward to getting my grubby hands on is Saints Row The Third. It's easily a hundred times any PC game I've played since Portal 2. But is it a game a Christian should really be getting excited about? Hm. I've already sworn to myself not to hurt the pedestrians unnecessarily, and to only shoot at those who shoot first. You think that'll seal it? We'll see how long that deal lasts in just under a week, eh? I'm also looking forward to being able to properly play Terraria and Minecraft for a change. Do you see how deprived I've been? Minecraft, for pity's sake! Baby's been a real joy to work with (that's my netbook, the little laptop I'm currently working on) but boy does she not know a thing about games. Time to see what I've been missing these past years.

Okay, that's all I had to say. Or rather, with Steph's laptop out of batteries and an 80s themed party jointly in my honour in a little while, it's time for me to go.

Thanks for reading.