Brian Ashcraft's saved articles

brianashcraft
Brian Ashcraft
brianashcraft
Originally from Texas, Ashcraft has called Osaka home since 2001. He has authored six books, including most recently, The Japanese Sake Bible.

Good to hear that the original control style is still available for those who want it. Looks like this might just be able to both gain the interest of newcomers turned off by the stiffness and difficulty of the old games and please old fans who just want to play a Monster Hunter with modern graphics. Read more

The problem with bows and light bowguns is that new players don’t learn how to properly use them. They’re not shooting in the range sweet spot with the bow, and they wonder why their kill times are way off in solo or duo. They might appear to be “cool” weapons, but they actually take some effort to properly use. Read more

Before the article even loaded, I was pretty confident which toy it would be Brian, haha. Read more

I just can’t seem to enjoy Shin-chan anymore. Because I get reminded that author stupidly went up the mountains alone and died when he fell. And its never going to be finished. Read more

Goddamn that shit made my skin crawl.
If any POS even attempts to take his side and call it “a friendly punch”;
Go punch yourself in the face with that same drunken force. Read more

Sorry, but his excuses are total bullshit. Read more

As impressive as this seems at first glance, its also ludicrous. Why work so hard and waste so much time? Just to say you can? I mean that’s fine. It doesn’t make it any less a waste, especially considering Excel has’t added anything to the process that could be achieved much quicker with many other programs.
Read more

This dude really need to look at some Illustrator tutorials, damn man. Read more

No disrespect to the chef, but whatever that Tuxedo Kamen ‘dish’ is, it definitely looks like something scooped out of a drainage canal near some cherry blossoms.
Read more

I’m surprised this wasn’t a focus in the marketing way back when the XB1 S first came out in Japan or any region for that matter. They could’ve totally weaponized this feature back when Sony announced that the PS4 Pro WASN’T going to have UHD-BD playback. Read more

To be fair, with the cost of the Xbox One S currently, it is actually one of the cheapest options for a 4K Blu-ray player. They are freaking expensive. Heck that is the main reason I’m getting a Xbox One X (although I’d probably get one even if I didn’t have a 4K TV as I like having all the latest consoles so I can Read more

Now playing

Japan always does the best video game dance commercials.

I remember last year at a SEGA arcade shop in Makuhari, there was a crane game with those hooks and you have the get the hook inside the circle to get the prize. I had 4 friends with me and I kept winning everytime and asking the people working there to put the new prize on so I can keep winning, and I asked them to

Wow! This is a great post, Brian. My friend Hiro was actually trying to educate me about this exact thing about 7 years ago in Akihabara. To this day, I still wasn’t really able to see what he was pointing out, but boy, did you make it clear as day. Read more

If the text is shown up as random characters you need to change your text encoding to Shift-JIS. It’s that old... Read more

I love the repeating star background on the Star Fox 64 page...