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The Making of the First JRPG: Black Onyx
Next-Gen publishes a “Making of” feature I wrote recently for Edge Magazine. It concerns a game that few westerners have heard of, Black Onyx, a title of gigantic significance as the first game to introduce the RPG to Japanese consumers. The game’s creator, Henk Rogers (also the man who discovered Tetris) reminisces on the challenges ...
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Ratatouille: How the Critics were Won
It’s unlikely anyone would have predicted that Pixar’s Ratatouille would end up the highest scoring film of 2007 on aggregate score site Metacritic. In a strong year for critically-acclaimed titles it’s extraordinary that a resolutely mainstream, animated film about a rat who learns how to cook could top heavyweight contenders like No Country For Old ...
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How to Tell a Story?
Despite the fact the two terms are often used interchangeably, ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ are two separate things. A story is, in the strict sense, a string of events reduced to its bare bones. It’s: ‘character A goes to location 1 – character A falls in love with character B – character A finds out character ...
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FAO: People Intending to Write Apocalypse Fiction
Get to it. You have, at best, twenty years before your work becomes obsolete. What use a terrible vision of the future when the terror’s already come to pass? “Maybe they’ll synthesise food. I don’t know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tescos, in the form of Quorn. ...