by [name redacted]
BioWare consists of the most Canadian people I’ve seen in my life. I’ve heard it elsewhere, but it’s true! This is as much an underhanded compliment as it is an abject observation.
Honestly, I expected something a little different from our meeting. I wanted to talk more extensively with some of the developers, to ask about the whole process of running a company of their specific ilk. Unfortunately, we were hit with yet another dose of scheduling difficulty.
by [name redacted]
For all of the booth space and PR devoted to the new Turtles games, they’re really… not all that thrilling, at least if we go straight by the E3 build. Dom might steer you differently. Don’t believe him!
Nor should you believe Donatello, for he is far out-of-character in the E3 trailer. If anyone is to declare the game “fucking rad” under natural circumstances, it should be either Raphael (for the first of the description) or Michelangelo (for the second). For Don to act out so — well, it had to have been scripted.
I don’t know. Playing the games, I’m struck by both a general sense of competence and a sense that these games aren’t receiving quite the amount of care as Konami’s original Turtles lineup.
by [name redacted]
SVC Chaos has a nice intro.
It has a very nice intro.
It has an especially nice intro for recent-era NeoGeo productions.
It has Mister Karate in the intro.
I really don’t know what to say about the game itself, though.
by [name redacted]
Sega hasn’t had much to say, so far. Their booth space occupies about a third to a quarter of the area devoted to Sony or Nintendo. Many high-profile, recently-announced games (Dororo, Kunoichi, Shining Force) are absent. Others, like Altered Beast, are relegated to a short and uninformative video loop.
It’s entirely possible that Sega is keeping all of the interesting stuff locked up until tomorrow, the last day of the show. We’ll see, we’ll see.
by [name redacted]
Neither Vince nor I were entirely sure what we were doing in Bethesda’s private room. While I am as fond of Elder Scrolls as anyone who might be me, I’m not really as versed in Bethesda’s catalogue as I might be.
What we ended up with was a brief demonstration of a couple of the developer’s most recent projects — both licensed, both examples of why a popular license is not necessarily a bad thing in terms of game design.
We stepped in to the middle of a lengthy overview of Pirates of the Caribbean. For a game based off of a movie based off of a theme park attraction, the design is surprisingly deep.
by [name redacted]
I can’t really argue with Leon. This guy is sleek. He controls well. He’s the best brawler in the entire series. More importantly, his game is interesting.
Essentially, Lament of Innocence is the evolution of the classic Konami brawler that the new Turtles game should have been. It’s fast, tight, varied, stylish, and generally involving to play.
by [name redacted]
Although we’ve got a more in-depth interview tomorrow, I couldn’t resist myself. Almost wholly by accident, I managed to stumble into a lengthy conversation with Mr. Ben Herman, president of the newly-reformed SNK NeoGeo USA. He was unexpectedly responsive, friendly, and open to the obsessive Insert Credit style of curiosity.
In brief, here are some of the most prurient items of discussion.
by [name redacted] and tim rogers
The president of Nintendo of America is named George Harrison. Somehow I had overlooked this fact up until today. Mister Harrison revealed that Donkey Kong “will remain a lovable ape” and that Mario “will never start shooting hookers”.
More intriguing, however, is the fact that Satoru Iwata speaks English. While he still needs a translator to help with more complex ideas, Iwata nevertheless manages to express himself with some appreciable degree of competence.
The Nintendo conference was comfortable, if not particularly informative. Outside of the multiplayer Pac-Man performance and the Will Wright announcement, there wasn’t much new to see. The swag wasn’t thrilling, either; just a paper sack full of press material and a ribbed tee shirt.
Since Brandon had to be elsewhere, I was given the rare opportunity to impersonate him and infiltrate the show. As it turned out, I never even needed his ID; his business card was enough. Given that Doug got in and that he wasn’t even on the list, perhaps my nefariousness was without need. Darned if I didn’t feel like a super spy, though.
A super spy eating uncommonly delicious raspberry muffins, that is to say. The buffet was… well, you really had to be there.
by [name redacted]
Miyamoto comes from an older school of game design, from a time when we didn’t know as much as we do now — and so we didn’t know what was impossible. We also had little history, so it was up to bards like Miyamoto to create one for us.
With a handful of details, a rough outline, and his whims, Miyamoto spins tales for his audience. With every telling and every audience, his stories go down a slightly different path. No one performance is more accurate than any other; the truth is in the telling. Save the odd sequel, every Zelda game is a new beginning, with a new, yet always familiar, Link and a new Zelda. It’s getting so there are nearly as many interpretations as of Journey to the West or the legend of King Arthur. And for the same reasons.
Legends like these are ancient; they’re from a world before our linear sense of time and our concrete idea of history. Back then, the world moved in cycles. The seasons came and went; life flourished and waned — and then it began again, a little different, mostly familiar. Reality is in the moment and in that faith in the cycle.
The way that videogames age, this cycle has turned into a death spiral. Every five years there’s a new generation of players, with its own collective assumptions and its own built-in innocence to history. For each new wave of gamers, the story must be adapted and retold again.
The problem is this modern concept of progress. Whereas only a few generations ago one year was much the same as the next, technology has now placed us on a non-stop rocket train to anywhere-but-here. So our perception is warped from the speed, and so we are blinded to the cycles that used to define our reality.
Our rhythms have been broken, replaced with the dull whine of progress. The future is our salvation, while the present is a blur and the past is our collective shame. We live in a society that has invented history as a straw man for our pursuit of an illusory perfection.
Wind Waker is a game caught in an unfortunate dilema between these two world models.
by [name redacted]
Phantasy Star II, on a Game Boy. How surreal.
Here we’ve got one of the most important videogames of all time, prohibitively expensive at release for the then-new Sega Genesis. Now the game rests on a 1-1/2″ x 2-1/4″ silicon wafer, shouldered by both its predecessor and its successor. Together, the three games now go for less than thirty dollars, and are accessible anywhere you can tote your Hello-Kitty-pink Gameboy Advance.
by [name redacted]
So, a new Metroid then. How is it this game took eight years to make? You’d almost think it was designed by Nintendo.
Though I have digested only a sample of the system’s bountiful and no doubt noble bounty, I feel it safe to conclude that Metroid Fusion is so far the best game to be set loose on the Game Boy Advance.
Which is not to suggest the game is flawless. Because, well. The game is flawed.
by [name redacted]
Harmony of Dissonance is director Koji Igarashi’s attempt to rescue the Castlevania series by wresting control back from the supervision of Konami’s Kobe studios. Whereas KCEK’s Circle of the Moon was set pretty much outside established continuity, this new game is Castlevania in function as well as in form. Though maybe no better or worse a videogame its own right, Harmony is in nearly every respect a vastly superior Castlevania.