I went to Kintaro with Jackson, Walley, Walley’s Girlfriend, and Alena. We went to the new location in Montrose, which is much more centrally located for everyone.
I met up with Alena at the restaurant while waiting for the others.
We talked about fighting games, mostly the somewhat recently released Guilty Gear Strive, which had a bit of a rocky start but has otherwise been very well received. According to Jackson, it does an especially good job at tutorializing it’s mechanics, which is something that fighting games have historically struggled with.
We also talked more about our plans for the Japan trip. For now, we are mostly just waiting to see what happens with the Covid situation, and how the travel restrictions will pan out. We are going to not try and get the tickets as early as we did before, and will also try and get refundable tickets.
Also, while we are planning for 2 weeks, there is a possibility that I could plan for 3 weeks, and spend the last week doing some solo traveling after everyone else has gone home. I will have to see how many vacation ours I will be getting by October.
Afterward, we went to Jackson’s house and played some Guilty Gear using the various arcade fight sticks that Walley had supplied. It was mostly Walley VS Jackson, but I played a few rounds against Both Jackson and Walley, and actually managed to do pretty well, especially as my started learning how to actually do particular attacks on purpose, instead of random button mashing.
I started with Sol Badguy (yes, that is his name), since he is sort of the “main character” of guilty gear, and I also tried May, who’s fighting style consists of hitting people with a giant anchor, and throwing dolphins at them.
I did keep hitting the taunt button by accident, which resulted in some funny situations.
After we were done fighting, I helped Jackson set up the Valve Index VR headset that he got at a yard sale. We had to move some of his furniture around to get enough space for it to work, but it mostly went pretty smoothly. He didn’t have that many VR games to try it with, so he installed The Lab, which is sort of a portal themed VR playground. There were some environments that were really impressive, and also a robot dog you could pet and play fetch with.
Walley’s girlfriend got to try VR for the first time, but she mostly just found it disorienting.