Where was I? Oh yes. Thanks to the untiring dedication of a team of Mother 3 fans over nearly two years, there is hope for us deficient in the Japanese language skills. This week, the Mother 3 fan translation has been released and, through some voodoo trickery (to me at least), you can now play through the game in English. The download and instructions on ways to play can be found on the Mother 3 Fan Translation site.

This is absolutely motivating me to learn how to do fancy things to carts and ROMs and such that I never imagined tackling so I can play this on my Nintendo DS (or my Game Boy Advance SP).

Not to be overlooked, Starmen.net has compiled and will publish a high quality companion to Mother 3. You can pre-order now, but the book won’t be ship until around early January they say.

My first purchases were at the Yodobashi Camera store right by Osaka Station and my hotel and included Mother 1 & 2 and Archaic Sealed Heat — which I just found out will likely be released in North America soon. Drat!

I also spotted the ultra nice gametech cases that I had been coveting for quite some time and found a pattern I liked. Somebody import them please!

In my last full day in Tokyo — and in Japan for that matter — dcharlie from NeoGAF was nice enough to take me around to Akihabara for some video game browsing which lead to video game shopping. I didn’t go looking for anything in particular and didn’t even expect to pick anything up. I know, I must have been out of my mind to think that. It all started after spotting a copy of the not-so-great yet limited Club Nintendo copy of “Game & Watch Collection. That reminded me of the Bit Generations series for Game Boy Advance which Nintendo released in 2006. After about 5 stores, we found one that sold five of the seven games at the bargain price of ¥500. I had no luck finding dotstream or Orbital unfortuntely. I’ll have to find a way to complete that collection at some point. We noticed that it does seem like a lot of the stores are starting to pare down their GBA stock quite a bit.

The rest were fairly random purchases during the walking around (Raiden Fighters Aces, OneeChanbara VorteX and a cheap copy of Senko No Ronde Rev. X — which came to the US as WarTech). Sad thing is, I don’t have a Japanese Xbox 360, just figured I would get one eventually. I think…