Still working…

Still working…

Eeeee

Temporary hiatus because I got lotsa projects on deadline and my parents are visiting for two days starting tomorrow!!!

TGS Shot of the Moment

The man is saying “Ahh! The flying bed! The bed is flying through the sky again!”

Despite this, it took me four or five tries before I realized that the bed in the upper right is actually meant to be in the air. I must’ve thought that Dragon Quest VI was like Animal Crossing and you could just sort of place beds and furniture and old-time radios anywhere you wanted in town. And I’m not even at TGS, deprived of sleep and writing dozens of previews, either! What the hey, me!

TGS

It’s the most exciting (or, at least, most crowded) week in the Japan game industry, but I have been too busy doing research for a new professional project lately — that is, I’ve been playing video games all day ‘n night — to show up in Japan or even know much about what’s being shown later this week. I do know, however, that Brian Ashcraft’s katakana-speakin’ mug has shown up on at least one Japanese blog lately, a sign that he is, in fact, more “with it” than I am.

I’ve attended TGS a handful of times, and the only things I remember about it are the refreshment kiosk and all the horny amateur photographers.

Weekend Factyard: Famitsu/Famicom Tsushin

• Famitsu’s mascot is named Necky (ネッキー), which is simply kitsune (fox) backwards in Japanese syllabary. They needed a reader contest, kicked off in issue #7 (9/19/1986), to come up with this name. He is a fox because — as artist Susumu Matsushita mentioned in some interview or other — foxes say “kon kon” (コンコン) in Japanese onomatopoeia, and “kon” is the third syllable in “Famicom” (famikon).
• Like EGM until the late ’90s, early issues of Famitsu featured Cross Reviews written by the same four people every issue until approximately 1992. One of these writers, “Mariko Morishita” (森下万里子), was sort of the casual-gamer version of Sushi-X — she was an imaginary editor whose reviews were written by a variety of people, but she wrote from the perspective of the occasional girl-gamer, as opposed to Sushi’s ultra-hardcore approach (directly influenced by Famitsu reviewer TACOX). Unlike either Sushi or TACOX, Mariko only rarely gave a score below 6 to anything.
• Famitsu’s review scores used to differ pretty widely between the individual editors, but gradually the scores began to converge over time, to the point where it’s now very uncommon for the high and low scores for any game to differ by more than 2 points. This trend kicked into high gear with the introduction of the silver/gold/platinum awards for high-scoring games — a trend that was also noticeable in EGM.
• On top of every review is the publishers’ estimates of what the game’s target audience is and how long an average runthrough takes. Most publishers answer these questions on a per-game basis, but Nintendo is infamous among Famitsu readers for answering “anyone can enjoy this game” (even on titles recommended for older audiences by the CERO rating) and “[length] depends on the style of play” for every single game they release.
• Reviewers have occasionally gotten in trouble for bringing up issues that didn’t actually exist. One example: A reviewer criticized the Japanese edition of Gears of War for not having English voices, even though they’re accessible by changing the language in the 360 Dashboard. Another: The PSP version of Power Stone was praised for its game-sharing abilities, although the retail version requires one copy of the game per player. Sort of reminds me of that time EGM mentioned the nonexistent two-player mode in the Viewtiful Joe 2 review. Now who was responsible for that one…?

We will not interrupt this program

TV Tokyo, the smallest of the Kanto region’s six main broadcast networks (channel 12 on the dial), is best known overseas for broadcasting Pokémon and lots of other anime. Within Japan, though, it’s more infamous for never, ever, ever, ever pre-empting regular programming for any reason, from world events to earthquakes to alien invasions, even if every other channel on the dial has switched to emergency news broadcasts. (They do pre-empt sometimes, of course, but you could count the number of times over the past 30 years on your fingers.)

Classic examples taken from this site:

The most recent example of TV Tokyo’s lazy-bones approach to news coverage came yesterday. The current big pop-culture news story in Japan is Noriko Sakai, a well-known actress/singer who’s involved in a drug scandal. She was released from custody yesterday and held a press conference held by all of Tokyo’s TV stations…except TV Tokyo, which was too busy broadcasting a kids’ variety show tackling the topic of “excuses to give if you fart during class” (above).

This trend — which started because TV Tokyo (originally an educational station) has a much smaller news staff than the other networks and continues because broadcasting content while all the other stations show wall-to-wall disaster coverage often leads to better ratings — is well-known enough that Sgt. Frog parodied its own broadcast network about it in a 2008 episode.

The common joke is that if TV Tokyo breaks into programming, then Armageddon has to be coming — which, I suppose, would make sense, because if we’re all going to die anyway, you might as well make sure you spend your quarterly budget as quickly as possible.

The Game Developer Research Institute is pretty great

I mentioned it in the past, but you should go there because there are hours of reading nestled within for the patient old-game fan. I’ve seen it get zero real attention from the game scene — maybe it has, I don’t know — but it deserves a lot.

A few exciting bits of trivia from a quick jaunt around the site’s interviews:

• Sonic Spinball was completed in a half-year-long crunch because Sega realized Sonic 3 wouldn’t make Christmas ’93. I always thought it was a great game and I have a newfound respect for it after learning this.
• Tose trying to learn how to program 3DO games is a classic example of Japan-US bureaucracy culture clashes. Also, working at Tose is not a hot idea if you like promotions, going home at night, or if you’re a lady.
• Unsurprisingly, working for the company that coded Razorsoft’s releases wasn’t so great, either.
• There was an Akira-themed title, complete with a Wolf3D-style section, in development for the Game Gear.
• There was a Road Runner-themed game in development for the Genesis in 1993 that didn’t get released because the main designer couldn’t decide whether the playable character should be Road Runner or Wile E. Coyote.
• RPG Genjin sucked. (The translation on the page is a little off; it should be more like “I played a sample ROM from Hudson, but…hmm…I think it not coming out was definitely the correct choice.”

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Motoroader

Motoroader
(モトローダー)

Maker: NCS (Masaya)
Release Date: 2/23/89
Price: 5200 yen
Media: HuCard (2 Mbit)
Genre: Sports
PC Engine FAN Score: 21.19 / 30.00

This game has a tendency to be heavily overlooked in modern times. You can’t blame people; it looks remarkably Famicom-like and seems to be over in less than an hour after you begin playing it. But this game earned its PCE FAN score (and, in fact, scored the cover of the April ’89 issue, which included a massive strategy guide covering every course in detail) because, for a pretty short time in the marketplace, it was the killer app for Multitap owners.

Simply put, Motoroader is a five-player overhead racing game. You’ve got eight courses, you’ve got five crazy futuristic race cars driving ‘em (designed, funnily enough, by Masami Ōbari, who worked on about eight billion SF and girl-service anime in the 1980s and ’90s), and that’s about it. A lot of the basic design is swiped from Sega’s 1988 arcade game Hot Rod, a slightly obscure release which I loved to bits but strangely never got ported to any console. (Activision did a few low-quality computer ports that were released in Europe only.)

The race gameplay itself is pretty simple, and once you get a grip on the outline of each track, you can pretty much beat the computer cars every time…if you were evenly matched. Parts selection between heats takes on supreme importance in this game for the plain fact that the computer is cheating harder than me when I play Monopoly. While I have no physical evidence, it seems like the computer cars have some sort of mafia deal with the auto shop and get all their parts for half price or something — you’re still bumming around with your future equivalent of a Corolla and meanwhile your opponents all have turbo and enhanced acceleration. This means nabbing 1st place in the first two or so heats is all but required; otherwise, you won’t earn the money you’ll desperately need for the upgrades that keep you competitive in the latter half of the game.

It’s not fair, no, but — as you’ll see in the video below — even the crappiest cars have half a chance at victory. In addition to optional weaponry you can install to turn your bout of Motoroading into a Mad Max death-a-rama, the game also has a helper function that automatically puts you back in the middle of the screen, without penalty, if you get scrolled off by the leader. The smart gamer deliberately lowers his speed just before everyone reaches the finish so he’ll (hopefully) get scrolled off and be carted across the line ahead of everyone else by the computer. This ProTip will make your friends hate you, but the PC Engine will see nothing wrong with it, and really, that’s what matters.

Motoroader is undoubtedly at its best as a Multitap game with as many human beings as you can round up, and for this scenario, NCS has a great deal of extra content available in the form of hidden codes. With the right button inputs, you can unlock not one, not two, but 32 extra courses — two sets of tracks that mimic real-life raceways, one 8-heat set of beginner tracks, and a “crazy” course run, including a course that is nothing but cross intersections which makes your head spin if you try to run it at any speed.

This game is pretty common in Japan nowadays; presumably once Bomberman came out, that became the choice for most Multitap owners. It proved popular enough to spawn two sequels, however, the last of which was a 1992 Super CD-ROM release.

Can you “buy” Famitsu?

Well, you can’t buy Cross Review scores, but you can certainly buy a lot of the magazine’s preview real estate for your games if you have the bux, as Enterbrain’s “Special Advertisement Project” (a document on their business-account page, which also features the rate cards for all their mags) for August ’09 explains.

For 6.5 million yen (just over $70k), you can purchase a 9-page “bump tie-up” affixed to the mag, replete with an opener and eight pages of advertorial devoted to up to 4 titles. That’s pretty expensive for one go, but more reasonable is the 2.8-million-yen ($30k) “exclusive scoop gatefold,” a three-page advertorial preview with three-page fold-out advertisement stuck on afterward. Least expensive — and most popular, I guess — is a regular old two-page scoop spread for 1.5 million ($16k). Both it and the $30k gatefold are reserved for new game announcements only and are limited to a single title.

Considering that the two-page scoop is actually cheaper than a lot of Famitsu’s “real” advertising space (they charge 1.1 million yen for a full-color page and 2.75 million yen for the inside-front-cover spread), I’m sure a lot of companies go the advertorial route with Famitsu, which prints (and has always printed) very few traditional advertising pages compared to mags in the West.

I should note that advertorial like this — which isn’t expressly labeled “Advertising” in some way, like it is in America — is status-quo in a lot of Japanese enthusiast press. I haven’t actually talked to anyone from Enterbrain since my GamePro days, but they had some sort of advertorial service going since at least back then, in ’02 or so. Newtype always had a bit of unannounced advertorial in each issue (something that occasionally gave us trouble in the Newtype USA days because advertorials couldn’t be translated and printed in our mag), and while it was usually pretty obvious if an article in Newtype was paid for, it’s much less so in Famitsu, usually. They do a good job at making all their previews equally flashy and eye-catching. I’d love to talk to their art designers sometime.

I should also note that I’ve never heard of a US magazine that actually let publishers pay money for more preview space. Not money. Publishers will wheedle media in any ethical way possible for coverage, of course, because that’s their job, but they’d never offer money — it’s too juicy a secret to keep under wraps, and it would damage the reputation of both sides when the cat came out of the bag.

In Japan, though, the relationship between games and game media is — and has always been — very incestuous like this.

Famitsu’s still a great mag, though.

(PS: The PDF mentions on the bottom that all potential games to be covered “must be assessed by the editor-in-chief,” which means that I sadly can’t buy 6 pages of Famitsu to talk about Super Family Gelande.)

Black Tiger (Capcom, August 1987)

Part 2 Part 3 Nicovideo account req’d. How to get one. Click the “…” balloon on the bottom to turn off scrolly comments.

One of the two games that inspired SonSon II, which I covered last week. Yep, again.

For a 1987 arcade game, this one has a great deal of RPG elements. The setting is pure, hard, manly fantasy, with you bashing up enemies and opening treasure chests and all of those stereotypically RPG-y things. You can also buy weapons, armor and medicine at shops, something that it seemed like every video game in 1987 fell over themselves to implement somehow.

Remarkably, Black Dragon (the Japanese name for Black Tiger) and Sega’s Wonder Boy in Monster Land hit Japanese arcades on the same month, sharing a lot of the same RPG/action fusion elements. Sega’s game is a fair bit cutesier than this one, though, the game that served as the foundation for later titles like Magic Sword and the D&D series.

SonSon featured a few hidden characters, but Black Tiger is packed to the gills with ‘em — cows, Yashichi (and its cousin Sakichi), “Pow,” bamboo sprouts, barrels, dragonflies, the main character from Sidearms, and so on and so on and so on. There’s also a hidden octopus, which (rare for Capcom titles) made an appearance in this game and this game only. See if you can find it in the videos!

The music of Black Tiger is another Tamayo Kawamoto work — a very interesting soundtrack, one that takes a common theme and produces variations on it as you go through the levels. Very movie-like for 1987.