Stuff from Japan

SPOILER ALERT!

Tamagotchi

An Unofficial Tamagotchi page
Another Unnofficial Tamagotchi page
The Official Bandai America Tamagotchi page "the original virtual reality pet"
"If it's not an egg, it's not the original tamagotchi!"

These seem to be starting a craze (as MtG did) in the US. They are selling for fifteen to twenty dollars each here. They are pretty much summed up by the motto above. At the Unofficial site above you can download a computer version (for Pilot?), and there are links to things for Win95, although they might be hard to find (look on the sweedish page).

My tamagotchi, alas, died recenty after a long and happy life of 21 years.

MaciGame - Straight from Japan, this top hit with viewer counts in the Millions can now be downloaded for use in the convenience of your own home (please, not your office (but you will!)). This version is for Macintoshes; and it appears to have been translated into English already. Here are the file statistics: 

Linkname: MaciGame 1.60E Date: March 3, 1995 Uncompressed: 192 K
Filename: ftp://triton.pht.com/games/puzzle/maci-game-160.hqx

Basically, the plot of the game is to remove matching groups of like symbols. It is in colour, although you can translate it to B&W with a lot of work. With customizable symbol sets, you can pick a group suited to your tastes (and monitor size). The basic game gets as small as 9x9 and grows up to at total of 3840 pieces at a time (this fills my 13 inch monitor). So far, the highscore for this level remains blank, as it takes hours to even clear a corner of the screen. You are also allowed to choose your own board size, and watch the computer as it creates your puzzle from scratch. You can easily create your own graphics with a Paint program that can read and save PICTs, and ResEdit to insure that the Creator and File Type match the MaciGame settings. I found my copy on an old CD, but this is probably the same thing. If you find that the link above is bad, please email me and I'll send you a copy of mine. Good Luck!

Also, you may have a lot of fun if you can find a copy of MacSokoban, another game from Japan (their games are just so much better). The implementation I have is from some guy named Ingmar (I think), who is a really great Macintosh Developer. As soon as I find out where a copy lies, I will add the address here.

Well, if you've read this far you probably have an idea of who I am and what my interests are, but I still don't know anything about you. If you don't mind, send me a short message about yourself, perhaps a link to your site, and I'll know that the time which I spent preparing these pages was not in vain.

Link to index file.