You know, something tells me that Play Magazine doesn’t exist any longer

• Fusion Publishing, producers of Play and Geek Monthly, hasn’t published anything since the January Play (above)
• The last print issue I got of Geek Monthly (subscription renewed in June ‘09 or so) was way back in September; they apparently distributed their October and November issues in digital-only format while I wasn’t paying attention
• Play has recently lost two key staffers — Greg Orlando went to PlayStation: The Official Magazine, and Brady Fiechter, who was sorta the editor-in-chief, has moved on to the new EGM project
• A report on Geek’s Facebook page claims that readers are receiving notices that Fusion has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy (i.e. liquidation). I haven’t gotten my notice yet, but I certainly look forward to reading it and seeing exactly how impossible it’ll be to get a refund*

Does this mean that I’m not gonna be producing “Dave Halverson’s Greatest Hits” for 2010?

* Not like we did any such thing at PiQ, of course. But that was all out of my hands, I promise, having been laid off way beforehand! (Not that I was gonna spend my personal money to send out refunds, but…)

The Amazing Waldemar, King of All Polish Game Pirates

I spent the past few minutes reading this interview with one Waldemar Czajkowski, a man who made a living in late-era Communist Poland selling and distributing compilations of pirated Commodore 64 games.

He had a pretty spiffy small business going at the height of it, producing thousands of tapes and distributing them all over the country in his Volkswagen minivan. The operation was successful enough that he was able to buy a new car and condo with the proceeds — nothing to sniff at considering how far a zloty got you (or didn’t) at the time.

Waldemar’s biggest problem? Procuring the cassettes to meet the demand for his game compilations, no small feat in a regime that didn’t exactly smile upon people recording things by themselves:

In the first years of my business, getting any clean cassette was a real art! There was only a possibility to buy only already recorded tapes. If any of the music band from Poland during 1988-1990 period has won the Golden Plate, including the sale of cassettes, I can say that it is partly caused to me! [laughter] When I had some connections I’ve heard that in Szczecin on some street there is a shop selling haberdashery, where you could buy the cassettes! [laughter] Seriously! In the haberdashery! I went there and stood in the queue. At the counter I’ve asked for audio cassettes, thinking also, that for the moment the saleswoman will kick me out, but she came with a question: „Which ones? 60-minutes, 90-minutes long? [laughter] In such strange places I had to buy tapes for my production! When there was the possibility of placing an order in Stilon, it turned out that it was necessary to come with a lot of formalities, to write applications and wait for weeks to process the application. There were problems, for example questions like „Who are you? What is the company?”. Hence, in Stilon was really hard to order something.

Waldemar kept his C64 pirate business going until 1994, when Poland finally got around to passing modern software copyright laws. He spent a few years afterward selling legal software, but — predictably — sticking with the law led to smaller profit margins and he eventually gave it up in 1997.

Read the whole thing — it’s in kind of fractured English but is an endlessly fascinating peek into a scene people like me never had a taste of.

Takin’ off again

Sorry to jet on you again, but I’m on vacation for the rest of January, skiing in Tahoe. Above is some footage from last year.

Maybe I’ll update a bit during this time, but to be frank, I probably won’t! (I’m doing my January the Nintendo way — in hibernation, am I right, guys??!!)

In the meantime, why not review some of the PC Engine coverage I’ve generated so far, all 61 articles of it?

See you folks later!

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Cobra: Kokuryuoh no Densetsu

Cobra: Kokuryūō no Densetsu
(コブラ　黒竜王の伝説)

Maker: Hudson
Release Date: 3/31/89
Price: 5980 yen
Media: CD-ROM (78.12MB + 9 tracks)
Genre: Adventure
PC Engine FAN Score: 24.90 / 30.00
Rarity: Common

Buichi Terasawa is one of the few Japanese comic artists that you can say “moved the medium forward” and have evidence to back that statement up which doesn’t involve boobs or panty shots — although he’s drawn his quota of both.

After getting his start assisting in Osamu Tezuka’s manga department during the mid-’70s, he debuted in the pages of Shonen Jump with Space Adventure Cobra, a series that’s continued on-and-off to this day in comic and anime form. (The official English name of the series changed to Cobra the Space Pirate once Terasawa switched publishers in 2008.) He was one of the first mainstream Japanese artists to bring computer graphics into manga, producing his first full-color digital comic in 1995, and he was also one of the first (in 2001) to distribute his work online. Rare among manga artists, he also participated actively in the development of both PC Engine games based on his work: this one, and Cobra II: Densetsu no Otoko, ported to the Sega CD and released in America under the name The Space Adventure in 1995.

This video has both captions and annotations. Make sure they’re both on!

All that makes it a bit surprising to discover that Cobra is classic macho-man adventure that’d be right at home in a Depression-era pulp magazine. Cobra is every bit the Golden Age space superhero, right down to that skin-tight outfit with the boots and everything. He constantly smokes a cigar (even in zero-G), he’s got a super-powerful laser gun inside his left arm, and if all his high-tech gadgetry fails him, then — oh, yeah — he’s still got enough brute strength to break out of metal restraints, all Superman-style.

Terasawa’s genius lies in the way he took this very traditional all-American superhero, ready to be packaged into an issue of Detective Comics alongside The Bat-Man and Crimson Avenger, and basically threw him into the movie Barbarella. Things like skirts and mink coats don’t exist in the Cobra universe; women are uniformly long-haired, decked out in bikini-inspired spacewear, and aching to get into Cobra’s pants as soon as possible. Considering Cobra came out during (and was heavily buoyed by) the Star Wars craze, it’s fascinating how Terasawa didn’t draw much direct inspiration from that film at all. His take on science fiction involves zero highbrow morality nor religious symbolism. It’s based around two core tenets: scoring hot chicks, and kicking ass — and in that way, it’s even more successful at providing silly escapist fantasy for men than George Lucas at his best.

Kokuryūō no Densetsu (“Legend of the Black Dragon King”) is a pretty faithful retelling of a story arc that originally ran throughout 1981 in the Shonen Jump manga. Cobra’s hitched a ride on the tourist cruise ship Queen Love at the behest of his partner, Lady Armaroid, in order to steal a ring from an ancient civilization. Along the way he gets swallowed into an enormous, self-contained garbage ship, so big that an entire human civilization exists inside; you spend most of the game trying to find a way out.

The game itself is a pretty standard menu-based adventure, one geared more toward telling a story than posing a challenge. It’s a marked improvement over No-Ri-Ko in that respect, providing a solid weekend’s worth of entertainment. The art, which Terasawa provided much of the design for himself, is pretty brilliant throughout, but the real highlight here is the voice acting. Cobra is the first game (I think) to have real actors provide voices for a video game, and the titular character is handled by the biggest of them all — the late Yasuo Yamada, the original Lupin III and essentially the guy who invented the idea of “voice actor” as a profession in Japan. Yamada voiced Cobra at Terasawa’s request in this game and its sequel, and he provides a memorable performance, delivering that perfect mix of bravado and gravel that Harrison Ford nailed for his own Star Wars scoundrel role.

Chronologically, Cobra is the first CD-ROM² System game I’d actually feel confident in recommending to others. It’s more a “digital comic” than a game (the sequel was a great deal more challenging), but it’s still a pioneering experience and a harbinger of assorted amazing things to come for the medium. It’s made me want to read a great deal more of the manga, too, and that’s a lot more than most Japanese licenses do for me these days.

How Knight Rider saved Activision (sort of)

A neat passage from an interview with Activision Blizzard head Bobby Kotick, printed in the February ‘10 Game Informer:

We had a guy in Japan who was an intern in our Japanese office. A very aggressive guy — an American who spoke Japanese. He would sell things that we didn’t actually have the rights to. The first one he did was Knight Rider. He went to one of the Japanese licensees of Nintendo and sold them the rights to make a game based on Knight Rider. We didn’t own Knight Rider! The deal he did was “You make the game, you get to publish it in Japan, and Activision gets to publish it everywhere else.” So he calls us and says “I just sold Knight Rider” — it was to Tecmo, I think [actually Pack-in-Video]. I said “How much did you sell it for?” He said “$400,000.” I said “That’s incredible, but we don’t own Knight Rider!” So we had to go get the Knight Rider rights.

It turned out that this was going to be our little business. We’re going to sell rights of things that we could own, and the Japanese publisher will make the game, and we’ll sell it to the rest of the world. We did a lot of these. The next one he did was this old ’60s show Combat! How we got this one, I don’t know, but he got another $200,000 advance. Then, the thing that kept the company alive for the rest of the year was Shanghai. We sold Shanghai to everyone. If you had an LCD screen on your microwave at home, we sold you Shanghai! That got us through the end of 1991.

It’s a fascinating little peek into the 8-bit era of the game business — even though Kotick’s misremembering a fair bit (and GI apparently didn’t fact-check his tale). Knight Rider was actually sublicensed by Acclaim Entertainment, something that Tom Sloper (a veteran game-industry guy who worked for Activision at the time) confirmed in a GDRI interview. Maybe Kotick heard the story and confused it in his memory such that he thought he was the actual licensor; I dunno.

He is right, certainly, that Activision got heavily involved with Japanese sub-licensing in the ensuing years. But they never released a Combat! game — Kotick’s probably got that confused with Thunderbirds, a ’60s kids’ TV show and an equally oddball choice for a game license. What? There was a Combat! game? Well, set me on fire and call me Bernie! Still, that came game out in 1995, in Japan only, a fair bit after the 1991 timeframe Kotick was talking about. My apologies; I was still thinking in 8-bit terms — Thunderbirds was a 1990 game, after all.

The Tower of Druaga (Namco, June 1984)

  IN ANOTHER TIME
   IN ANOTHER WORLD...

THE BLUE CRYSTAL ROD
  KEPT THE KINGDOM IN PEACE

BUT THE EVIL DEMON DRUAGA
  HID THE ROD
   AND THE MAIDEN KI
     IN A TOWER

THE PRINCE GILGAMESH
 WEARED GOLD ARMOR
  AND ATTACKED MONSTERS
   TO HELP KI IN
    THE TOWER OF DRUAGA

The Tower of Druaga is quite possibly my favorite Namco game of all time. It introduced the concept of role-playing games to a wide Japanese audience before Dragon Quest existed; it has neat characters and audiovisuals; it’s oddly addictive; it’s a direct challenge to hardcore players from hardcore game developers.

Masanobu Endo, designer of Druaga, began working on the game as a side diversion while he was busy learning assembly language on the 6809, the chip Namco was slated to use in their arcade boards starting with Super Pac-Man. From here I’ll let Endo explain the rest, from when he answered questions publicly on 2ch in 2001:

“In order to get this game released to the public, I wanted to follow these core concepts:

So, really, the difficulty of the game didn’t affect the project getting greenlit one bit — I mean, this was a C-grade ROM swap, after all. It wasn’t going to make or break the company either way, and the fact that such an epoch-making title got created in that situation really shows how much Namco cared about the craft of video games, I feel. The only mistake, if you could call it that, is that we had planned to install the game only in Namco-owned arcades, but it wound up earning so much that we actually had to manufacture new boards to satisfy demand.”

Yes, Druaga is ridiculously difficult. No, there’s no way you could ever figure out how to get all the treasures singlehandedly. But Druaga succeeded in 1984 because it forced arcade rats to work together, writing down their discoveries in public notebooks and pooling their wits (and 100-yen coins) together to get to the end. It created a community, in other words, just like Street Fighter eventually did — one that wrote strategy guides and dojinshi in droves. In a way, Druaga solidified the concept of a “game fandom” in Japan more than any other individual game.

It’s a game I like enough that I beat it on Virtual Console Arcade back when it came out — and I figured I’d take a Japanese walkthrough of the game and annotate it for your entertainment. The video’s in 4 parts and each part should play automatically after the previous one ends. Hope you enjoy watchin’ it.

I’m an ex-employee at a porn game company; any questions?

1 2010/01/12 18:40:23.72 ID:2oLm8F690

I’m gonna be quitting my job at the end of the month.
I got no savings and no gig next, but I wanna take some time off anyway.
Probably going right back to eroge, but…

7 2010/01/12 18:43:04.87 ID:sqeFXSaR0

What was your job?

Director, planner, that sort of thing.

9 2010/01/12 18:43:31.40 ID:VwTpnoC00

How much did you get?

About 200,000 yen/month after taxes. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love

Completely out of the blue, I received a preview build of Sakura Wars in the mail the other day. I say “completely out of the blue” because this is the first time I’ve received a preview build of anything since I got laid off from ADV in June of 2008. I honestly didn’t realize that the PR department of NIS America knew my home address. Are they spying on me??!! Wait. Maybe not. If so, they woulda known that my modded PS2 is somewhere in the closet, buried under a bunch of winter clothing, and I have too much work today to dig it out! (I have a vague memory of telling my old PR contacts to send their email blasts to an address I created for that purpose, but man, I haven’t checked it in about a year. Sorry, video-game industry.)

All I can say today about this game is that it has Gemini Sunrise in it. That’s all that needs to be said, right? Hiroi-ohji made an offhand comment half a decade ago about how this character will serve to introduce the series to overseas audiences — apparently he was looking even further ahead than I ever imagined!

The ferret gives the bubble wrap 8.2/10.

I have strong opinions about “The Ballad of Gilligan’s Isle”

Everyone knows the opening theme from Gilligan’s Island, yeah? I know the mid-’60s sitcom stopped being even a camp sensation about 15 years ago, but I’m reasonably sure the show’s bold depictions of south-seas civilization, animal life, and jungle engineering left a mark on the counterculture movement that still lingers today…right?

Just in case you need a reminder of how the song goes, here it is:

I’ve been recording some music for my game/chiptune-only MP3 player and realized that I have not one, not two, but three game-centric covers of this theme at my fingertips — two just ok, and one which hits it out of the park. I figured I’d share them with you:

- Gilligan’s Island (NES, 1990): The title screen jingle from this odd adventure. It’s not bad, but a bit short and melancholy, isn’t it? I wonder if the Japanese developers of this game actually saw the local version of the show any back in the 1960s — the Japan dub, which aired on NTV, has apparently been lost entirely, a victim of wiping. (The vid above was recreated by someone who loved the theme so much that he tape-recorded it off NTV 42 years ago.)

- Gilligan.mod: This was, believe it or not, one of the first Amiga .MOD files I ever listened to after I got a Sound Blaster Pro in 1993. I tracked down the file again a few months back and it’s been in regular rotation since. It’s catchy in that silly Euro-acid way a lot of Amiga tunes were.

- Gilligan’s Island (Williams, 1991): The pinball game, the first one from Williams/Midway to feature a dot-matrix score display. While it fared only average in arcades (only about 4100 machines were manufactured), it’s a personal favorite of mine and I always make a beeline for it at pinball expos and such.

I firmly believe that some of the best chip-generated music of the late ’80s/early ’90s was bring produced by people like Chris Granner and Jon Hey for Midway’s pinball machines and 16-bit arcade games. In fact, I’d put them right up there with any of the Japanese people working on the PCE or Genesis at the time. What they did with the Yamaha YM2151 (the same sound chip that was in Sharp’s X68000) constantly blows my mind even today…so much so, in fact, that I’ll probably devote another entry to them later.

But enough about them. Don’t want them stealing the spotlight from the crew of the SS Minnow or anything. Uh-uh.

Greatest special edition ever goes for $3400

Enemy Zero, a 1997 Sega Saturn release, was a very hard survival-horror game from Kenji Eno’s infamous WARP studio. It was arguably the first 3DCG game to have a nude scene. In Japan it also had what’s unarguably the most hilarious limited-edition box set ever made for a console title.

Only twenty of these special boxes — or should I say “special crates”? — were produced. They cost a cool 200,000 yen each, and Kenji Eno personally delivered them to each buyer himself on a flatbed truck (really).

Number 08 hit Yahoo! Auctions in Japan the other day and was sold for 300,000 yen, or about $3414.58.

What’s in this package? Let’s see:

Read the rest of this entry »