Does pushing back during a fight really protect your health bar from damage?

It’s a fair question and one that this brave young Japanese man seeks to find an answer to by taking numerous blows to the arms, legs and head from a somewhat too-eager friend.

His reaction by the end leaves little doubt as to the answer.

Still, it’s a shame we never got to see how an Ultra outplays IRL.

One of my ambitions is to interview Yasumi Matsuno, the man and mind behind some of the greatest Japanese videogames of the past fifteen years.

Matsuno’s development studio, Quest, makers of the Ogre Battle series, was bought by Square-Enix’s founder, Hironobu Sakaguchi in the mid-1990s. The team went on to create Final Fantasy Tactics, hands down the strongest spin-off from the Japanese RPG series, Vagrant Story and, most recently, Final Fantasy XII.

Matsuno was described to me by Christophe Kagatoni, Edge magazine’s Japanese correspondent as “Sakaguchi’s golden boy”, a relationship that may have led to his untimely departure from the company.

Following the box office disaster that was Square-Enix’s CG animated movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, a foray into cinema that reportedly lost the company an estimated $94 million, Sakaguchi stepped down from his role as Executive Producer.

Many of Sakaguchi’s most prominent staff members (such as composer Nobuo Uematsu) quietly departed the company in his wake, including Matsuno, who left just as Final Fantasy XII’s development was entering its final phase, ostensibly due to ill health.

However, fans have long speculated that Matsuno was in fact pushed, the intrigue fueled in part by the backstory to one of Final Fantasy XII’s sidequests found near the end of the game. In this quest players must face off against the game’s toughest enemy, a gaint dragon known as Yiazmat, a contraction of Matsuno’s name. Montblanc, the character who assigns the task of defeating Yiazmat, explains how he and his siblings once worked for a wise master but that the dragon came and killed their leader, causing the group to disband.

Did Matsuno’s team place a crude allegorical mission in the game as a way of revealing the truth of their director’s fate, Yiazmat in the role of Square-Enix, Montblanc’s master as Matsuno? It’s impossible to know for sure and, even if an intrepid gaijin reporter were able to sit down with the man today to pick through the fading corporate politics, typical Japanese diplomacy and restraint would ensure it’s unlikely the truth would out.

Over the past few years I’ve tried to track Matsuno down a few times but he’s either declined to be interviewed or been unavailable. It doesn’t help that he’s kept details of his recent employment (if any) a secret, making conversation through the usual PR channels impossible. However, the news that Matsuno is working on the forthcoming Capcom Wii title, MadWorld, makes the chance of an interview again feasible.

Reportedly, Matsuno was brought onto the MadWorld project by his close friend Atsushi Inaba, the man behind Okami, Viewtiful Joe and underground favourite, God Hand: an awe-inspiring partnership if ever there was one. While Matsuno is only working on scenario for the game, the news is nevertheless exciting and hopefully signals this unassuming master’s return to professional game making.

Developers of casual games usually relish the chance to de-nerd the hobby on whose periphery they operate.

For example, PopCap litters its titles with unicorns and rainbows without apology. They feature characters and colours which rarely get a look-in when it comes to contemporary gaming’s brown, bloom-soaked vistas. It’s understandable. If you’re going to design a game to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, why dress it up like something that just stepped out of Forbidden Planet?

By contrast, Puzzle Quest developer Infinite Interactive celebrates geekery. The first game may have had a straightforward colour-matching mechanic at its core, but the setting was pure Dungeons and Dragons. All giant clicking spiders and pointy wizard hats, it was as nerdish and traditional a gaming scenario as you could imagine.

Galactrix is just as content to settle into orthodox geek territory, with the sort of sci-fi set-up that’s been familiar from Elite right through to Mass Effect. This time, however, it’s more difficult to call the underlying game in any way casual.

At its core Galactrix remains a matching game. Sure, you travel an entire galaxy in a hulking space ship, taking on missions (up to four at a time), mining asteroids, trading resources, hacking warp gates and recruiting crew members. However, almost every action has a gem matching minigame at its centre.

The rules are simple: create lines of three or more like-coloured gems to make them disappear. Match red, yellow or green gems to harvest energy to power your ship’s equipment; match white gems to earn experience points (‘Intel’) to level up your character; match blue gems to add energy to your ship’s shield, the buffer that protects your hull; and finally, match mines to inflict damage on your opponent. Reduce your opponent’s hull HP to zero and you win the battle. So far, so Bejeweled-in-space.

The game’s most obvious innovation is that the board and its pieces are hexagonal. This means pieces so can be swapped in six directions rather than Puzzle Quest’s four. Also, as Galactrix is set in space, gravity is non-existent. The direction new gems flow onto the board is based on your last move, rather than the usual top-to-bottom movement. If you slide a gem upwards to complete a set, the gap they leave will be filled by gems flowing up the board, and vice versa.

The thinking behind these innovations is sound. Match-three style games are ubiquitous and, from Zoo Keeper to Bejeweled, the mechanics remain constant. Puzzle Quest may have married them with an RPG framework to add interest, but the core remained straightforward. Galactrix, by contrast, vastly ups the number of statistical possibilities for any given board, increasing the game’s bedrock complexity.

Of course, an increase in complexity doesn’t always tally with an increase in enjoyment. Galactrix’s boards are far less readable than those of its predecessor. Whereas before you could foresee chains two or three steps in advance, this new cat’s cradle of possibilities makes earning cascades about blind chance as much as careful planning.

You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.

Joan Fontaine, lost in thought, stares at the Oscar she won for her role as Lina McLaidlaw Aysgarth in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 thriller, Suspicion.

Kid A (age 3): “Which character are you, daddy?”

Me: “I’m Akuma. The one with the, um, red hair?”

Kid A: “Which character is the other player, daddy?”

Me: “He’s Sagat, honey: the one with the blue shorts.”

In-game Announcer: “Fight!”

Kid A: “…”

Kid A: “Come on daddy: you can do it!”

30 seconds pass. Daddy doesn’t do it.

Kid A: “Dad?”

Me: “…yes?”

Kid A: “I think maybe next time you should be the one with the blue shorts.”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Video Game Critic Killed Over 7/10 Review

A white, male video game reviewer has been murdered at his home in South London.

Charlie Drummond, a 30-year-old print and web journalist, was hacked to death by between 12 and 20 members of a gaming forum New-Gef in his bedroom on Saturday morning.

According to police, his attackers had become riled at a review Drummond had written of the, at the time unreleased, videogame, Gears of Killzone 2, a product which the writer valued at 7/10 in a review printed in the Wedge Magazine two weeks ago.

A friend and fellow journalist told the BBC that Drummond’s killers had carved a 7/10 into his forehead using a DS stylus, a reference to the value judgment that apparently led to his demise.

While most of Drummond’s attackers are at large, one man, known at this point only by his online handle ‘Dutka-Fan’, handed himself in to a police station on Sunday morning. The police are yet to issue a statement, however one officer confirmed to the BBC the suspect had “not played the game in question yet”.

A discussion thread on New-Gaf, which ran to 60 pages prior to Drummond’s killing, was filled with expressions of dismay from forum members who accused the writer of “indulging [his] massive ego in an underhanded attempt at getting attention”, arguing that Drummond should “not be allowed to do things like this” and, in reference to the score he awarded the game, elliptically claiming: “This…is…a…lie.”

Such volatile discussions of unreleased videogames on the web are well-established, young men often defending products they have become heavily invested in. However, this is the first time that such anger has manifested itself as real world physical violence.

Drummond is believed to be the first videogame reviewer killed in the country, although game journalists have long lived with violence or the threat of it.

In 2008, games writer Oli Welsh received death threats for scoring the hotly anticipated Metal Gear Solid 4 an 8/10 for gaming site Eurogamer.

Likewise, Alec Meer was once threatened by a reader in response to a review of Star Wars: Empire At War claiming that he was going to “find your house, construct a giant wax statue of you outside it, and set fire to the thing”. Both men, and other writers working in the field, will no doubt take such anonymous threats more seriously in the future.

Veteran editor at Wedge Magazine, Anthony Mitt spoke of his shock at the news while praising Drummond as “brave and multi-talented”, a writer who “was never frightened to speak truth to publishers and consumers alike”.

He went on to add: “We would always encourage readers to read the content of a review, which is often useful for understanding what the reviewer thought of the product with more detail and nuance than the ten point score system allows.”

But some members of the gaming community weren’t quite so sympathetic to Drummond’s fate. One prominent PR man from a large publisher, who asked to remain anonymous, told us: “Publishers and developers have long had to live or die by their Metacritic scores. Perhaps now it’s time for game reviewers to get a taste of their own medicine.”

However, the local office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights deplored the murder and called on the authorities to identify those responsible and bring them to justice.

“This tragedy should galvanise those responsible for protection of media freedom to take the necessary action to ensure the security of game reviewers,” said Vera Bingotits. “Every person should feel free to score anything whatever they like without fear for their safety,” she said, before giving our reporter a 6/10 for punctuation and dress sense.

The game in question, Gears of Killzone 2, entered the all format gaming charts last week at number 1. This week, however, it had dropped out of the charts altogether, superseded by a raft of fresh releases.

The New-Gaf thread about the game had also lost its head of steam, some posters adding comments such as, “Drummond might have actually been right about this one LOL”, “The zeitgeist has left the building: please move along now” and, “Tits or GTFO.”

Drummond is survived by his Nintendog and a pretty badass PC.

This column first appeared on GameSetWatch yesterday. read this and the other Chewing Pixels GSW columns here.

With sales approaching 1.3 million units, this handheld remake of Dragon Quest V was the third best-selling Nintendo DS title in Japan last year, and the seventh highest-selling videogame on any system in the country. For the Japanese, this game represents one of the most significant remakes in recent years, so great is the sense of nostalgia and reverence the nation holds for its most-beloved RPG series.

But outside of its native home, Dragon Quest V doesn’t have the same cultural cachet. No national holidays have been proclaimed in its name and its release this week will be met without much fanfare or expectation. It’s not surprising. Neither the Super Famicom original nor the PlayStation 2 update of this game have been seen outside of Japan, so there isn’t any latent sentimentality for Square Enix to bank or draw on.

But to ignore Dragon Quest V is to overlook a significant link in the medium’s chain of development: a title whose monster-hunting core directly begat Pokémon, and whose fairytale story is one of the RPG genre’s most compelling, even if it is also one of its most straightforward. The game tells the vivid tale of a man’s progression through life from the moment of his mysterious birth, through boyhood and adolescence, right up to the point at which he chooses a bride and starts his own family.

Along the way there is heartbreak and tragedy, laughter and love. Each chapter of the game focuses on a different stage of your hero’s life, and each one brings with it a different social problem that needs solving while offering more clues to the overarching quest: the search for an identity and the truth of your character’s origins.

The story is down-to-earth, closer to an unfussy fairytale than a grand Tolkien epic, but it certainly dances with cliché at numerous points along the way. There are no sub-plots to speak of, just a linear story that moves from A to B to C to Denouement. As ever, this lack of narrative complexity is offset by the winning charm of Yujii Hori’s storytelling and, thanks to some gentle twists on convention, the quest remains compelling over its relatively brief 20-odd hours.

Read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.

Wimbledon Tennis Lettings specialises in providing players with accomodation while they’re competing in the well-known annual lawn tennis championship held in South London.

Recently the company hired Wildwood Creative to rebrand their website and produce some information leaflets to promote their services.

The agency used the above photograph throughout the campaign, a striking image of a woman mid-serve, Wiimote in hand. It seems that Wii Sports’ cultural cachet is such that it’s able to be used in marketing targeted specifically at professional tennis players.

The shot echoes Nintendo’s own advertising campaigns, focusing not on what’s happening in the game but rather looking out of the screen onto the player, humanising the experience in a way videogame adverts always struggle to do.

Also note that, while Nintendo’s advertisments feature good-looking but essentially everyman families enjoying a not-too-strenuous play session, this model is in the middle of a jump that only a badass athlete could execute. I think this helps reinforce the message that Wimbledon Tennis Lettings’ services are only for the elite, a visual distinction that informs the prospective client that they’re different and special.

“So, what do you think of it then?”

I’m standing behind the Street Fighter IV cabinet at ATEI, the UK’s only amusement arcade exhibition. Around the machine loiters a group of twentysomethings, all of whom invented or lied about the names of companies they work for in order to gain access to this supposedly industry-only exhibition. They lied because of this game and this game alone.

We’re playing winner-stays-on. The kid on the right, Akuma, is on a seventeen-win streak. He’s wearing a single, fingerless leather glove on his right hand, presumably to absorb the sweat that comes from being a champion. It is super-dramatic.

The young man I’m standing with turns to answer my question. He looks me in the eye and says: “Dude. This game is the second coming. The actual second coming.”

Two minutes later, glove-boy loses to a New Challenger. The place erupts with cheers, fast dampened as we remember we’re supposed to be here to assess whether or not to lay down the GBP 12,000 asking price for two of these machines, not to partake in an impromptu tournament.

Five months earlier, I’m sat in a Tokyo restaurant talking with staff members from Square Enix. One man is lamenting the fact that his best friend at the developer recently left to work at Capcom.

“He’s gone to help out with Street Fighter IV, of course,” he says, sadly. “I am so unbelievably jealous.” Here is a man who builds JRPGs for a living, the very antithesis of the fast-paced competitive beat-’em-up.

Earlier that week, I’m holed up in an arcade in Shinjuku. It’s packed with competitors trying out the game, everyone from young teenagers to middle-aged salarymen on a lunch break: a demographic spread that exemplifies Street Fighter IV’s unusually broad appeal. They came for this game, and this game alone. That whole week, there is something in the Tokyo air, a whisper on the breeze: Street Fighter is back.

So before we even get to today, the week of the game’s console release, Capcom has achieved the unthinkable. While it would be too generous to suggest that this game is reviving an ailing arcade industry, there’s no doubt that the deep-rooted passions of a whole generation of players who played Street Fighter II at school have been rekindled. And alongside these returning prodigals, Street Fighter IV has managed to create a buzz amongst younger gamers, too.

It’s no fluke. Every facet of this game has been meticulously planned, weighed and refined into a sort of Street Fighter concentrate, the bewitching essence of the series. There’s the iconography: Ken’s crimson Gi and Chun-Li’s flowing white hair ribbons; the world map that flashes up between every bout, showing you which country you’re heading off to for the next fight; and the remixed classic Street Fighter II melodies that soundtrack key battles. These visual and sonic touchstones reveal the game’s aim – to modernise the series’ most famous and best-loved entry.

The result is the very best re-imagining of classic videogaming yet seen, no less than the definitive Street Fighter, a game which makes the previous entries in the series seem like mere echoes. The character designs, popped into polygons for the first time since the mediocre EX spin-offs, at last feel at home in 3D. In the animation and the detailed and dynamic facial expressions, Capcom captures Chun-Li’s fluid grace, Ken’s ballsy American disposition, Ryu’s hard-hitting but dour demeanour and Dan’s hopeless fanboyism with a new clarity. These are the characters as they were always meant to be seen – at an unerring 60 frames per second, the camera tilting and shifting to provide dramatic angles, time slowing to fully capture every eye-popping combo and Ultra finishing move.

But while it may be a treat for the eyes, it is in the hands that Street Fighter IV reveals itself to be a bona-fide classic. It goes back to basics, in particular reducing the defensive game to an honest block and the new and straightforward Focus attacks that replace Street Fighter III’s demanding parries (which, while good for marvelling at on YouTube, were a barrier to entry for most players).

Triggered by holding down the medium kick and punch buttons simultaneously, the Focus attack puts your character in a power-up state, during which it can absorb a single hit from an opponent without taking damage. Releasing the buttons triggers a reversal move that can then be linked into a chain of other attacks. The simplicity of execution means even beginners can introduce it into their games, with experts’ emphasis placed on when and how it’s used.

Special moves, as ever, are triggered by moving the joystick in a motion that apes the on-screen move. With generous input windows, even the trickiest of moves can now be mastered within a short space of time. Combined with the wide frame windows for combination attacks, it’s now far easier to execute two- and three-hit attacks in quick succession.

In this way the game finds the best balance of accessibility and challenge yet seen in the series. You no longer worry about whether you’ll be able to pull off the move you want to at the moment you intend, but rather when best to pull it off, a distinction that narrows the gap between beginner and expert play. Focus cancels, dizzying cross-ups and technicals are still there for the elite, but their mastery is required only for the masters. Everyone else is welcome once more.

You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.

Created for UK hip-hop station Choice FM by the Agency BBDO, it’s a simple idea executed with elegance. The result is one of the most affecting television advertisements I’ve seen in recent times.

The upload appears elsewhere on YouTube where American tempers flare in the comments about the political overtones for such an ad. In the UK, where the ad airs, I think the message is wholly devoid of political charge: it merely voices a common hope that young black Londoners (Choice FM’s core listenership) stop killing one another.

I think that’s an interesting distinction when taking into account our very different gun laws.