While I wait to hear more about E3 (note: MSNBC says Nintendo is kicking ass, Sony is playing defense and that XBox is sucking ass) I thought I'd mention what's in the arcades here in Japan.

Ripping off Pokemon Snap, Namco has released Photo Battle. It's a game very much like Pokemon Snap where your goal is to take as good a picture as possible. The difference is that instead of using a gamepad they have fullsize model Minolta cameras connected to the machine.

According to this article Sony and AOL are putting AOL on the Playstation 2.

I wonder if this is a good thing or not? I suppose it's inevitable but is their really a match between people that want to access AOL through a box on their TV and people that want to buy a Sony Playstation? I guess the point is the new features will be added. They claim some games will support it. Does that mean multi−player support through AOL? It will be interesting to see how it works out though because I suspect that in order for it to be useful you'd have to shell out the money for the hard drive option and the keyboard and maybe even the mouse which also means you'd need a place to put the mouse.

What's up with that? Is it a joke? When did it happen? I only check about once a month. Is this old news?

Some company introduced an excersize machine here in Japan that connects to your playstation. It comes with software that has several games that require you to excersize. It appears to also have diet tracking software and is presented in a very cute and attractive format for the Japanese market. You can pick from several different characters etc.

For those of you that don't know what Densha De Go! is it's a Japanese train simulation game. The point being you drive a train. It was hugely popular here in Japan. That's probably because trains are such a huge part of Japanese life. Well, Microsoft Japan is now taking on the king with Microsoft Train Simulator.

I've never played any of them. I assume that the hard part is keeping to the schedule and attempting to stop the train correctly at the platform without missing the platform and without making all the passengers fall over. Certainly you don't have to steer the train.

I noticed today at Sakuraya that Sony is pushing their DSC−P1 digital still camera along with PS2 software called Picture Paradise. You plug your camera into the USB port of the PS2 and then you can edit and print your images.

Also it appears you can and use your face in several playstation games. Some of them work by letting you load up a picture of your face and then you mark your eyes and mouth so that the game can try to fit your face to the model (or your model to the face).

Today I saw a video showing off the first(?) PS2 web browser. No idea on the details. It's not by Sony and you'd think that Sony would want to control that as much as possible.

I couldn't find pictures of the modem online but it basically looked like a sqaure cigar with a short cable to plug into a USB port and a RJ−?? socket on the opposite end.

So after playing Mario Advanced for another 20 minutes I figured out what Nintendo is thinking I think. 😊 They are counting on the fact that Mario 2 is from 1988 and that therefore almost none of their main audience, boys 8 to 14, have ever played Mario 2. It's not a bad idea I suppose. It's one of the best jump and bounce side scrollers. The biggest problem I see is the press has played it before so it may get bad reviews.

They added a bunch of digitized voiced to the characters too. They are pretty poor. They are all in English so I'm assuming they are not going to change them for their target audience but some of them are pretty awful.

Aquarium screen savers have been around forever and every year they get more elaborate.  The latest is a fully 3D fish tank.  Although there are others that have 3D fish on 2D backgrounds this one is fully 3D so the camera actually swims around the fish tank following the fish.

Sony is selling a printer and digital photo editing software for the PS2. You can check it out here