McAloha Burger? McDonald's Japan is Great マクドナルド; Tokyo

You can't escape the Golden Arches.  They are everywhere, even here in Japan.  They call McDonald's マクドナルド　, transliterated (butchered) into makudonarudo  or simply makudo.   Almost every station has one, and there are two within a five-minute walk from my apartment.  Recently, however, like in the U.S., McDonald's has been suffering here in Japan.  Scandals involving their Chinese-chicken suppliers, shortage of potatoes and foreign objects being found in the food has really hurt them.

Essentially, the beauty which allowed Mikey-D's to spread throughout the world, systemization of food supply and preparation, is naturally at work here, and Chicken McNuggets here taste and look identical to the ones you eat at O'Hare airport, Tsim Sha Tsui and at the Luxor.    However, the food here looks a bit better than the food in the U.S. it seems, more like the pictures of the food.  Maybe that's due to the Japanese attention to detail.  Another difference is the selection of food items here.  As described in my Mister Donuts post, seasonal and limited-time items are very popular here.  McDonald's is no different, and they have new items on an almost monthly basis.

The current seasonal items on the menu involve Japan's favorite vacation spot, Hawaii.  They have two different special Hawaiian sandwiches for late February and the month of March, a pulled-pork sandwich somewhat resembling the McRib, and a Loco Moco burger.  If you aren't familiar with Hawaii, Loco Moco is a staple of lunch plates there, a hamburger with a sweet sauce and an egg on top with white rice.   The Loco Moco burger featured at McDonald's has everything but the rice. 

Here it is.

Cheese, two patties, a nice specialty bun, special Loco Moco sauce and an egg.

I definitely think that I maxed my daily caloric intake with this single burger, but it was pretty darned good.  Back to the systemization of food, the fries are identical here.

Fry mountain!!!

Along with the specialty sandwiches, they have a pineapple pie, banana milkshake and Hawaiian fruit pancakes (for some reason, Japanese people associate I-Hop style pancake creations with Hawaii; they have no idea that pancakes are the staple of many breakfast places) to round out the limited-time Hawaiian items.

 I whole-heartedly recommend you try the Loco Moco burger.  The patties and cheese taste the same, but that sauce and egg combo really hit the spot.  A really nice blend of sweet and savory.  Hurry up because the month/campaign is ending soon.

Here are some past limited-time items:

Chili-cheese fries 

Funky BBQ Beef and Funky BBQ Chicken.  Gotta love the names.

Speaking of the above, (American Vintage 1980's), I remember a time when McDonald's was not something you got for dinner.  It was the mid-80's when this change occurred, and soon McDonald's was enjoyed throughout the day and night.   Remember this campaign?

Right. They took Bobby Darin's Mack the Knife and conveniently turned it into Mac Tonight.  I actually remember reading that the advertising agency that created the campaign and McDonald's did not obtain the proper rights and ended up settling with the Darin estate due to such violation.  No fair use defense there as a lot of midnight hamburgers were sold as a result of the campaign. They even had Happy Meal toys for that creepy Moon Man.  That get's me thinking.  Maybe I'll hit up eBay to satisfy my nostalgic toys fix in the Moon Man.  In any event, have a good one and try the Loco Moco burger if you have the chance.

Marvel War of Heroes- Why I Stopped Blogging For a Year and a Half

Yep.  That's the truth and nothing but the truth.  I got heavily sucked into one of those freemium games from the iTunes store (it's available from the Google store too).  It started out so innocently and ended up not so great.  Let me explain.

First, I'm a comic book dork as well as a person who has, well a disposition to gambling.  That's a lot of wells there. As to this gambling, I mean in the sport card packs/ collectible games type of gambling.   I love opening Upper Deck hockey cards knowing there is a chance I can get that 1 out of 1000 pack signed Patrick Kane card.  Or buying 10 boxes of Mage Knight figures trying to get that super rare Solonavi figure.   Well these freemium games are just like that.   Even though they are free to play, to be able to win, do well, etc., it's likely that you will be required to spend money to do so.  And it's likely you will have to spend lots of money.   Here were my very mighty cards when I was at the top of my game:

Nice team, Iron Man, Thor, Ghostrider, Captain America and Invisible Woman.  Three Ultra Legendary Cards in my deck!

The Marvel game is at heart, a card game, albeit electronic cards.  To get cards that have good abilities, you have to buy card packs ("CP").  These CP are expensive and the odds of getting good cards are so poor that it really is like trying to win a jackpot on a Five-Timer slot machine.  The packs are usually some crazy amount like 3 bucks for a card.  Some are even 20 bucks for like 5 cards.  Each CP typically features a new, really powerful card and the rest is pretty much crap.  Here's an example of what a CP looks like:

Nice.  A really impossible to get Mystique.  Well this one isn't so hard to get. You are guaranteed to get her after you buy 10 10-dollar packs.  100 bucks...

You pay the money for the CP... And then you get your cards like this:

Not a great card, but better than most of the crap you get.

She's hot.  Can you guess the crowd they aim for with these cards?

If you get a good card, you are featured on the main CP page with the details of when you get the good card.   It's just like when the casinos put pictures of jackpot winners on the walls.  Here's an example of when I got a pretty decent card:

Mr. Gambit to be played by Tatum Channing in yet another Marvel movie next year.

So what do you do with the cards you ask?  There are different events that rotate each month but each involves using your cards for a goal such as fighting others in a war in an alliance, using a deck to fight giant bosses in a raid and coop in teams at times and other events.   You build a defense deck and an offense deck.  Here is a victory I had using my offense deck.  I crushed some other guy's defense deck.

That Former Enemies was my favorite card of all time.  I miss it.

This is amazing.  At one point I was in the 7th best alliance in the world (for this game).  It's name is Guerilla Warfare.  Great guys.   So one thing great about WOH is the people you meet.  I'll talk more about this later.  In GW we had 40 members and consistently communicated on the Line app.  You get to know people by their screen names and as per the WOH rules, we are not supposed to share personal information.  In that sense, like heroes, we all had secret identities.  Everyone just knew me as... Popsghostly.  Here is our ranking after one war...

That's nuts. 7th in the world!

So along with cards, something called power packs, or, PP, are very powerful.  The more PP you use, the more you can attack.  Since real money trading is not allowed in the game, PP, which is tradeable, has become the in game currency.  So you can trade a valuable card for like 4000PP.   You can buy PP from the WOH store, which is like 50PP for 20 bucks.  You can also buy PP from others on the black market.  It's much much more cheaper there.  As a matter of course, trading for a card with PP is a much better deal than trying to get it via CP.   There is a market for cards and it is on the Line app.  During my heyday, I was in like 70 trade rooms where posters post cards for sale.  There are even auction rooms.

Cold hard...PP

Typical market post

As to trading, thievery is rampant.  The makers of the game know this, so they specifically disclaim any liability for trading in their rules.  You can only trade with people in your alliance and 50 teammates.  That's like 90 people in total.  You can somewhat get around this by having multiple accounts.  Also, you can drop teammates and add ones to facilitate trading, but unfortunately, there is a 2-week trade ban.  So people resort to having middlers, i.e., I trade with a teammate who is connected to another teammate who is connected to another teammate and so on.  I was involved in a trade once with 9 people.  That is where cards are stolen.  Thieves strike on a weekly basis and you'll see posts warning about a certain thief in trade rooms.  The thief then just closes his account, and starts another one.  It's terrible and a reason you should only use middlers you trust.

So what happened?  I was reading the Daily Herald on its app one day in like April 2013 and an ad for Marvel WOH was on the bottom of the screen.  I clicked on it, downloaded the game, and the rest was history.   Sadly, I became addicted to the game, and at times, put it in front of the things I loved the most, my family and friends.  So this is a confession of sorts and an apology.  I also put the game in front of important things like improving my Japanese and... working on this blog!  Another terrible part of the game is that I spent lots of money on it.  Lots of money.  (At least I was able to get a lot back when I retired.  I'll explain that later).  Getting shitty cards in CP, which is the norm, put me in a really bad mood.  So I'm apologizing for that too.   Once a many times, I rushed home and ignored my family because it was my one-hour slot with the shared deck.  Or I skipped breakfast with the family because we had a war for my alliance at 7am on a Saturday (the time difference was tough because most of my friends and ally mates were in the States or Europe so they were playing at completely opposite times than me).  In sum, I really wish I had that year and a half back.  I'm happy that my family and friends have taken me back (I hope).

But there are some positives.  I did make some really good friends in the game, people I still talk to.  So a quick shout-out to Draxx, Hulk, Jmil, Thad, Batman and Steven.   In fact, Draxx suggested that I reach out to the blog followers and explain my absence.  I broke the WOH rules and had coffee with Batman in real life and saw, naturally, Guardians of the Galaxy, a Marvel flick, with Jmil last summer.  And if I have the time, I'll definitely hang out with these guys in the future.  Also the trade rooms are flooded with memes.  This is one of the favorite ones I found.  Hilarious...

Tough luck for Seattle fans.

So what lead to my retirement?  Well, I wanted to be closer to my family and improve my Japanese and work on the blog again.  Really good reasons.   I think they like me much better now.  

Also, my retirement was due to the cards themselves.  WOH keeps on making more and more powerful cards.  At one point, I realized that I just couldn't keep up any longer.  Further, it is the nature of the cards themselves.  Unlike a Michael Jordan rookie card, these cards are not tangible objects- they are just files.  But worst of all, you don't really own anything.  Pursuant to the WOH TOS (rules), all you have is a license to to play WOH, a license which gives you the right to use their cards.  They are not even your cards!  At one point I actually started researching whether there were cases acknowledging propriety interests in the cards (or other virtual items for say a game like Warcraft) beyond the license, but as of late 2014, I didn't find anything on point.  Pursuant to the TOS, WOH can just close up shop and you would have no redress for your lost cards.  

This is a real Marvel card from the physical card game Overpower... As to realness... Her proportions are not.

In the last month, I traded all of my cards for PP and then sold the PP.  I was able to recover enough of my investment to, well, buy airfare for a family of four to somewhere far, far away.  I get my family and time back, make some good friends and go on a nice vacation, so this does have a happy ending after all.

Thanks for the read, and really glad to be back.

Gacha Machine Attack!!! New Star Wars and Disney machines!

Wifey is sick so I had the chance to bring the kids shopping.  Since it was just the three of us, I brought them to places we tend to avoid as a family, the game center, the toy section of the department store and to get ice cream from the ice cream vending machines. 

Naturally, we ended up in the gacha gacha machine section of the store.  Being in Japan, one can't escape gacha gacha machines, which are the Japanese versions of those 25-cent toy machines in front of U.S. supermarkets.  Unlike their U.S. counterparts, these machines are 200 and 300 yen (just under two and three bucks).  The toys in the gacha machines are much much better than U.S. toys in the quarter machines and they are big business.  All of the major toy brands can be found in the machines, Disney, Marvel, Pokemon, Godzilla, Hello Kitty, etc.  As an aside, I remember getting a neon orange digital watch (or maybe my sister got it) from a quarter machine when I was like 11 years old.  That really was like hitting the jackpot since the rest of the toys in the machine were like rubber insects, metal puzzle tricks and goofy teeth.  We were astonished that the watch on the cardboard sign in the machine was actually in the machine.  That just shows how crappy the prizes in the U.S. quarter machines are.  The machine was in front of Child World by the way.  Now that's a blast from the past along with Venture, Zayre and Monkey Wards.  Sadly, Kaybee Toys, Borders, Circuit City are also now amongst the retailers not with us anymore.  Enough with the nostalgic crap, back to the machines.

I have a suspicion that the lower level of government interference here allows these machines to be everywhere as small chokable toys are heavily regulated in the U.S.   

Here's the aisle:

There are four rows of machines here.

Mandatory Disney machine.  I think there were 10 different Disney prizes. 

Star Wars mini-helmets. Cool shit.

              Line products.  I highly recommend the Line app.  It kicks iMessage's ass.  Totally faster and easier to send pictures.

The contents of the machines change like every two weeks or so.  The girls chose pretty normal stuff, Disney, and purikua, a Japanese princess show like Sailormoon.  Look below to see what it is.

Of course, she got the bird rather than the princesses.  That'll cause us repeated trips to the machine.

The stuff above is pretty standard fare.  Below is the stuff that Japan is famous for.

Mini-samurai helmets.

Pop dancers.

Just what everyone's iPhone needs- a futon!

Zombie fruit.

We have full-sized swimwear models.  Why not full-sized green army men?

Mini-table games.

No words to describe this.

My personal favorite- deep-fried construction vehicles. Let me say that again.  Deep-fried construction vehicles. WTF?! Seriously.  I can imagine the R&D department of this company telling management that there is a true need for deep-fried construction vehicles.  Gotta love Japan.

The kids were happy with their prizes, so 400 yen did not go to waste.  The truth is, these days you can't get much happiness for under 5 bucks.  My oldest one got a Little Mermaid mirror and the younger one got the bird figure (I think she was just pretending to be happy as I suspect she wanted a princess figure).   There actually is a district in Tokyo that is famous for these gacha machines.  I'll talk about it later.

White Day (ホワイトデー); patisserie Sadaharu AOKI Paris, Roppongi, Tokyo

It's that time of the year again.  White Day.  What is "White Day" you ask?  Well, White Day is the male equivalent to Valentine's Day in Japan.  The Japanese did it again; that is,  interpreted something their own way like their 119 for emergency calls, use of "blue" to describe "green "traffic signals, and Santa Claus crucified on the cross (I've actually only heard about this).  The Japanese have bifurcated (look that up in the dictionary) Valentines Day into two holidays.  On Valentine's Day here, February 14, girls give chocolates to guys, and on March 14, guys return the favor to girls that they got chocolate from.  Both of these days fall/fell on Saturdays in 2015 so it means leaving chocolate with its recipient on a Friday.

This tradition started in the 70's from what I understand from Mr. Wikipedia.  Great feat of entrepreneurship by the candy companies since the Valentine's Day/White Day gifts here are much much more than those cheapy paper Spiderman valentines with phrases like "I Caught You In My Love Web" or "My Spidey Sense Tingles When You Are Around"  and those chalk-flavored candy hearts. Yeah, they definitely are high-fiving each other for creating two holidays.

Guys receive one of two types of chocolate,　本命チョコ　honmei choco or 義理チョコ giri choco. 　The former is for your love interest or at least someone you like a lot.  The latter is obligatory chocolate.  Luckily, since girls dictate the chocolate giving, as a guy, I only have to reciprocate based on what I received.  So naturally, that means lots of giri choco!  I shouldn't feel that bad though.  At least I got chocolate.  Had this been my elementary school days or junior high school days, maybe even my high school days, I'd get little or no chocolate except from my mom.  Sad panda indeed.  Now I got a wife, a mother-in-law, daughters, secretaries and co-workers!

So where should I get my White Day gifts?  Hmmmm....  For a fleeting second, the Chinese in me was thinking of going to the convenient store and getting the money saving stuff.  However, my office is in Roppongi Hills, a very plush area of Tokyo, and well, that just wouldn't be acceptable.  So I chose here: patisserie  Sadaharu AOKI Paris in nearby Midtown.  The chocolate is beautiful and the girls dig it.

Here are some pics:

This is where it's at.

Look at them... Truly little chocolate pieces of artwork.

Some of my purchase.

I ended up getting macaroons and some chocolate cookies.  To be honest, they were a bit pricey, but I do greatly enjoy having the company of my co-workers.  AOKI's chocolate truly is artwork.  

There was a time when I used to buy chocolate for my wife from AOKI and we would savor each piece (I'd only buy (or could afford) 3-4 pieces at a time).  The chocolate was a treat truly worth being savored.  What I mean is that it is extremely smooth chocolate with a very delicate flavor.  The slight flavor is real and it does not have the artificial feel with regular store-bought chocolate.    Really good stuff, a really nice treat for hard work.  If you've never had luxury time chocolate, I definitely recommend trying.  Prior to my experience, I really could not tell the different between Hershey kisses and chocolate from a place like AOKI.  For the presentation and flavor, I give AOKI 5 five cocoa beans out of 5 cocoa beans.

Jackpot!!! Baymax escapes from the UFO Catcher!

Well if any of you have been to Japan, you'll know the popularity of UFO Catchers a.k.a claw machines.  I believe UFO Catchers got their name from Toy Story and the little green aliens scooped up from Pizza Planet.  UFO Catchers are everywhere here-  every shopping mall has a game center stocked with these guys.  Unlike their American claw machine brethren, these UFO Catchers generally have two-pronged claws (although some, like the one below have three).  The price to play these guys is generally 100 (a buck) yen for smaller prizes and 200 (2 bucks) yen for larger prizes with discounts like 6 tries for 500 yen for smaller prizes or 3 tries for 500 yen for larger prizes.  To win, it is generally much easier to push things over the edge than actually picking them up.  I've seen limp shaky claws a plenty in my lifetime. 

Interestingly (and dangerously) enough, there is a UFO Catcher right on the ground level of the building that houses my gym, which inevitably leads to some UFO Catching action on my part.   Here it is:

Damn they are cute... 

Yep, proud winner of a Baymax...

So you are probably wondering how many attempts it took me to get him... I'm going to stay mum on that.  I will tell you though it was less than the 1200 yen (12 bucks) or so that it would take to get him from a toy store.   That's it for now.  Talk later!

Update.

Guess what?

Won't tell you how much it took for this one either.

Have a good weekend!

Legends Sports Bar, Roppongi, Tokyo

Well, my first post in over a year is for an awesome place, Legends Sports Bar & Grill in Roppongi.  This place is great.  Being a Chicago sports fan, I miss watching my Blackhawks.  Yeah I know that I can watch games on Slingbox or on Gamecenter Live, but nothing beats watching games on the big screen and not during the morning.  So that's what I really mean by "miss watching them."  If the game is on their package (or if you have a game package, they will let you put it on one of their screens for you and your friends to watch), then game on!  Just be careful not to find out the score before you watch it during the night.  The staff is particularly helpful here and will do their best so you don't find out scores.

That said,  the actual best part of this joint is the food itself.  They have great burgers, and good wings (to go along with nice cold draft beers) as shown below.

 

Go Hawks!!!

 Spicy wings.  While they won't beat BW3, they are good, especially for a place with few wings like Japan (buffalo wings are hard to find in Japan).

 Go Hawks again!!!

Here is the Smokin' Joe burger with pepper jack cheese and smoked bacon.  Yum-Oh!!!  The fries come in the little basket and are freshly cooked.

They recently started a point card system where card holders get discounts.  Using my card last week, I got the Spicy Lamb Burger (not pictured).  That was awesome too.

All in all though, the burgers, even without the point card, are a good deal for around 1000 to 1200 yen (10 to 12 bucks).  They are maybe a third pound and are made-to-order.  I think the wings set us back about 800 yen or so for 6.  Please correct me if I'm wrong about the wings.
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So in sum, I give this place five out of five hockey pucks for the food and five out of five hockey pucks for the great, friendly staff.  I can't wait to go back.

Back In Action

Well... A year and change was a lot of time off from posting.  I got busy at work and well, a lot of excuses.   Trust me... There will be new posts in 2015!!!