The people who wrote that Cross Review don’t understand anything!

So says Ryoichi Hasegawa, the former Sonic Team and Naughty Dog dude whom I think I either drank with him once or attended his GDC panel, one of the two. Maybe both.

These days he’s back at Sega as their localization manager; his latest project,  House of the Dead: Overkill, comes out 9/17 in Japan. Famitsu gave the game straight 6′s in this week’s issue (a fair bit lower than the US/European reception), and Japanese blog My Game News Flash did an informal interview with him about it.

Hasegawa: Good to meet you. Let me get one thing out of the way: The House of the Dead: Overkill, coming out next week from our company, got straight 6′s in Famitsu’s Cross Review, but please don’t believe that.

Q: Boy, that’s rough. Is the game fun?

Hasegawa: Oh, of course it is. The people who wrote that review don’t get it! The four people who reviewed it don’t get what makes it fun at all!

Q: I saw a movie of it yesterday; was Biohazard and stuff like that a pretty big influence?

Hasegawa: It’s less Bio and more just really over-the-top — not silly, but just incredible. People speak English in this game, but the dialogue’s crazy; they say “fuck” enough to make it into Guinness. You have zombies eating something under this human-meat mixer. But it still got a D rating [age 17 and up] from CERO, not a Z. We worked with Nintendo to stretch the limits of that. It definitely lives up to the “Overkill” name. So of course it’s a fun game.

Forget about the Japan game business for a moment — it’s extremely uncommon for someone in the American game industry to openly call out a magazine’s review. EA obliquely criticized OXM’s review of Dead Space in last month’s Game Informer, which looking back I’m very surprised GI’s editors allowed them to do without asking OXM for a response. In Japan such criticism is practically unheard of.

I can’t criticize Hasegawa for his frustration, but I don’t find Famitsu’s scores for Overkill outrageous out-of-hand, either. I do not really trust the mag’s cross-reviews for big-name titles any longer, but once their number scores go below 7, the reviewers are usually bringing up real and believable issues. It’s the same deal with reviews on Amazon or game forums, I suppose — you can sort of get constructive guidance from a negative review, but positive ones often seem “planted” even if they aren’t.

The bigger problem with Famitsu right now is the very obvious score inflation applied to AAA games in the past couple years. Does anyone think there’s any possible way Final Fantasy XIII won’t be awarded a 40 this winter?

Translation as a career

Hooray! The entry I did about ROM messages got linked from a lot of places, including Make Magazine’s blog, which cheers me because I love that magazine to bits.

A new reader from that link wrote in with an unrelated question:

I’m writing to ask you if you have any tips as to how to break into commercial translation.  I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Japanese language from a local university and I’m working at a Japanese company but the translation work in the company is very low-demand.

Also, I’m planning on taking the JLPT this season, Level 2, mostly for experience.  I know I could pass Level 3 but the next level is much harder overall.  Did you take the test, or do you know if it’s even relevant in the field?

I contributed to a great big article all about this subject for issue 2 or 3 of PiQ which I oughta scan in (what, is ADV gonna sue me?!!), but it’s not all that different from getting a job in game PR, or game media, or game creatin’. First you prove you can do things, and then you pass that around to people, and then those people let other people know about you, and eventually that leads to some sort of a job. No real secret to it other than that.

In terms of more concrete advice I’d say that the $100/yr I spend on American Translators Association dues and being present in their database has, so far, gotten me a lot more than $100/yr worth of work. There’s also ProZ, but I have to admit I’ve never hardcore-used that site.

As for the JLPT, it’s another line to fill the resume with but if I was the hiring editor my preoccupation would be with two things:

- Your translation samples
- Your references telling me that you submit decent work on time and are generally congenial

Some time waaaay back in 2000 I had both of those things and I am still able to afford fancy $4 beer so It Really Works!

(2000 was the year I passed level 1 of the JLPT, which is a good test of non-technical Japanese comprehension on a pretty native level. The JLPT is wonderful as a signpost for Japanese language study, but if you’re aiming for a career involving the Japanese language, you better at least comprehend enough to pass level 1. I don’t know if it’s true now like it was in 2000, but what I found was that if you think you can ace level 2, you can put in just a bit more work and probably pass level 1.)

Silent Hill Homecomin’

Konami has finally gotten around to  officially canceling a Japanese release for this game.

“Due to assorted issues, the Japanese release has been canceled.
We deeply apologize.
Please look forward to future games in the series.

* This page will be removed on 10/30/2009.”

The game was released nearly a year ago in the US. Konami had the game playable at TGS ’08 and floated a June ’09 release to retailers at one point, but summer passed on by without any news. A Japanese blogger sent Konami some mail about the game on September 4, nearly 10 months after the last update to the Japan homepage, and got a reply that the game was “still under development.”

The good-but-not-great response Homecoming got in America likely has nothing to do with this. The most direct culprit would likely be CERO, which would never in a million years give even a Z rating to a game with non-optional scenes like this (warning: gory). Indirectly I suppose you could also blame Konami for (a) allowing Double Helix to not worry about CERO (b) not seeing the point in spending money censoring the game for Japan.

Silent Hill hasn’t had a Japan-developed entry since 2004, long after SH1 director Keiichiro Toyama and scriptwriter Naoko Sato moved to Sony and kicked off the SIREN series. You could argue that it was one of the first victims of the game industry’s globalization and Japan’s difficulties dealing with it.

Future Debuts WoW-Only Magazine, Possibly Redefines Print Media’s Future

http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2009/08/future_debuts_wowonly_magazine.php

I spent a lot of the evening writing this when I wasn’t busy doing translation stuff! Check it out! I really think it is the future of print mags! Not lying!

Let’s Play “NEC Product Manager”

The next game chronologically on the ol’ PC Engine release docket is Mashin Eiyūden Wataru — better known to us red-blooded U.S.Americans as good ol’ Keith Courage in Alpha Zones, the worst pack-in game ever packed-in to anything.

While playing (more like wading my way) through Wataru, I ran through a mental exercise in my mind: What, if any, better game available at the time of the TurboGrafx-16′s August 1989 launch would have been a more suitable pack-in? Well, if we’re counting the entirety of Japan, quite a lot. R-Type, for example. But that’s a 4-megabit HuCard. Let’s say that NEC wanted to keep the pack-in game to two megs to save money. What then? This is an extremely important decision, you know — the pack-in gives your audience their very first impression of the console, and it better be a good one, or else they won’t see any point in buying the thing. (Let’s ignore the fact that NEC thought Bikkuriman World was a great launch title for the Japan market.)

For reference, I’ve scanned in two relevant pages from the Sears Wishbook: Holiday 1989, which devotes five pages to the NES, three to the Genesis and Master system, four to Atari’s assorted systems (sheesh), and a single spread to the TG16. Given that Sears put out their wishbooks around October, this is a pretty good outline of what was available for the Turbo at launch. If you were NEC’s US video-game project manager, which game would you throw into the system box?

The answer’s actually pretty simple. The $59 games are all three megabits, so those get cut out immediately. That leaves Keith Courage, Victory Run, The Legendary Axe, Alien Crush, and China Warrior. Hmm. To me, the choice is between Legendary Axe and Alien Crush, and between those two I’d take Legendary Axe ‘cos it’s fast action, it’s pretty fun, it looks demonstrably better than anything the NES could manage, and it’s from a genre that has universal appeal. (I always thought it was a mistake for Atari to make Pole Position II the pack-in for the 7800. Not the greatest mistake they made with that platform, but…)

My guess is that NEC USA had a similar conversation going on internally but went with Keith Courage because their main partner Hudson, and not a third party, coded it. Life can be unfair like that sometimes. NEC made up for it with their 4-in-1 TurboDuo CD, but by then it was far too late.

(PS. What’s worse — spending $199, or $341.31 in 2008 dollars, for a TG16 with Keith Courage, or spending a total of $589, $1012.28 in ’08 dollars, for the right to play Keith Courage…and Fighting Street?)

[I ♥ The PC Engine] PC Engine FAN

I’ll be mentioning this magazine at least once in nearly every I ♥ The PC Engine entry, so I should probably go into depth on it a little more.

PC Engine FAN was the longest-lasting magazine in Japan exclusively dedicated to NEC systems, beating out rival mags Gekkan PC Engine (Shogakukan) and Marukatsu PC Engine (Kadokawa Shoten) to the market by a month in late 1988. Published by Tokuma Shoten, the mag started out as a separate department of Family Computer Magazine, Tokuma’s flagship console publication; the “FAN” name was also used by sister titles MSX FAN and Mega Drive FAN.

Most of PC Engine FAN’s covers were either drawn or designed by Akemi Takada, an artist and illustrator who’s best known overseas for her contributions to the Patlabor anime series. Takada began her run by drawing original compositions based on whatever hot game was being discussed inside, but after 1993 the magazine created Mana, a sort of anime-girl mascot, and made her the main subject of most covers. Near the end of the mag’s run, Tokuma released a CD-ROM that had hi-res versions of all the covers that featured Mana, along with a few audio tracks of her singing. (That’s her up there, dressed as Chun Li, in mid-’93.)

Gekkan and Marukatsu folded with their respective January 1994 issues, making FAN and Dengeki PC Engine the entirety of the PCE-specific marketplace. Dengeki renamed itself to Dengeki G’s Engine (currently Dengeki G’s Magazine) in 1996 and became a multiplatform mag devoted to “girl games,” but FAN couldn’t do this since Tokuma already had a gal-game mag, Virtual IDOL, in its lineup. In the end, both PC Engine FAN and MSX FAN became targeted primarily toward amateur software developers for their final years, although that trend didn’t last long — PC Engine FAN closed up with its October 1996 issue, with two specials released late on in ’97.

A lot of the PCE’s history in Japan is intertwined with PCE FAN. Kazuhiro Ochi drew a Cosmic Fantasy manga in it for a year or so. The magazine sold a second pressing of Magical Chase via mail-order after the original publisher went bankrupt almost immediately after releasing the shooter classic. And so on.

A PCE game’s “PC Engine FAN Score” in my entries is the average score for the game as rated by readers who sent in scores to the magazine. The score’s out of 30 and divided into six fields, from character design to “addictiveness” (netchuudo) and value for money. I have these average scores for most, but not all, of the PCE library, and while PCE FAN’s readers had a tendency to rate gal-games high and the more obscure, obtuse releases lower, it’s still a reasonably accurate guide to what’s good and crap in the PCE library. Generally speaking, if a game’s PCE FAN score is over 20.00 then it’s very solid; if it’s over 25.00 then it’s a vital part of any PCE owner’s collection.

3D Deathchase

This is page 8 of issue one (February ’84) of Crash, the first really “modern” video game magazine, and it happens to be the very first review they ever printed. Naturally, it’s for 3D Deathchase, a late-’83 game that ZX Spectrum fans hold in such high regard that Your Sinclair called it the “best Speccy game ever” in a 1992 feature. I can sorta dig it. Certainly it’s the best game reviewed in this issue, and it’s a classic example of the pre-Atari-shock “play forever” action genre — gradually increasing challenge, simple rules, just enough visual splendor to keep your attention, a just-one-more-game addiction level (98%, if this review’s to be believed) that’s out of sight. Yes, even today. It’s particularly amazing because it’s only 16K long; if you were too cheap for a 48K Speccy model in ’83, no worries.

Apparently 3D Deathchase is set in the year 2501. North America is lookin’ pretty good, huh?

This review pretty well exemplifies how Crash handled reviews for the first few years — description of the game, then two or three paragraphs with criticism from different reviewers. At this point, Roger Kean, Oliver Frey, and Matthew Uffindell were the entire editorial team. I don’t know how they did it.

You can also see how the review gives you a very quick outline of how to control the game. They never said this outright (and I think denied it when called out on it in a letter several months after), but I’m sure this was meant to be a service for readers who got their Speccy games exclusively from copied C-60 tapes passed around during lunch break.