No, not a Mario-themed version of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer prize-winning graphic novel but rather a foam model of a NES-themed mouse created, supposedly, for a German school project.
There’s something iconic about the pairing of grey and red tones used for the NES console design, as with the beige and maroon tones used in its Japanese counterpart, the Famicom.
It’s a quality that somehow stretches beyond mere nostalgia, although that’s undoubtedly part of the aesthetic.
The Famicom is the only retro console I have out in my house, sat on a bookshelf. It is, to me, the most beautiful of the consoles, followed by the original GameBoy and SNK’s Neo-Geo, whose sleek black lines are like some kind of 1980′s supercar, a fitting comparison considering its eye-watering price tag upon release.
In the fifth minute before he is hit by a rental truck, Kenshin Kitano allows himself a slight nod at the shop assistant’s near-hysterical greeting. Eyes down, he makes his way to the back of the electronics store, around the stack of dusty peripherals for forgotten music games and idiot train simulators.
In the corner there’s a set of crumpled, tragic dance mats, all the bright plastic detritus of a long gone Japanese videogame boom.
In the fourth minute before he is hit by a rental truck, Kenshin Kitano makes a beeline for the bargain tray, entertainment platter of the student gamer. Clack, clack, clack, he flicks the cases forward in quick succession, making staccato snap decisions as their titles flit past his eyes: no, no, maybe.
Cracked jewel cases holding broken games: the forgotten work of long-gone studios. If their creators could have seen their creations then as they are now, would they have persevered in making them, he wonders? Probably. Everything and everyone ends up on a bargain tray one day or another, right? Doesn’t stop us.
In the third minute before he is hit by a rental truck, Kenshin Kitano’s fingers pause on the second to last jewel case. Tales of Destiny: a middling RPG stacked behind a misfiled two-year-old Idol CD. 200 Yen? With the sidequests he can probably draw it out to sixty hours playtime which works out at, er, nearly 20 minutes per Yen. That has to be the cheapest escapism in all of Tokyo, he congratulates himself.
In the second minute before he is hit by a rental truck, Kenshin Kitano turns the game in his hands, studying its artwork, tracing the roll of its logo’s serif with his eyes, drawing out the foreplay of the purchase as long as possible.
The boy on the front cover is a pair of blue eyes framed by a blaze of chick yellow hair, a close-up interrupted only by the steel of a long sword held against his cheek. It’s a passable cover, Kenshin Kitano thinks to himself, with the dismissive sneer of an adolescent enthusiast, before turning on his heel and taking his purchase to the counter.
The minute before he is hit by a rental truck, Kenshin Kitano steps out into the Akihabara air, game in his rucksack, a beat of small excitement in his breast. It is a gas mark 3 sort of lunchtime, the June heat intensified by loud fumes and hot noise.
It is Sunday and streams of pedestrians flow against each other along the pavements, wafted along by the barked chatter of aspiration-less middle aged salesmen holding blue megaphones against their lips. Here and there gaijin twirl on the spot, nose in map, salt flecks in a sea of pepper, searching out some obscure hobbyist store or other, no doubt. Too hot. Too many people. Time to go home.
The moment before he is hit by a rented truck, Kenshin Kitano steps out onto the crossing. Five paces in there’s he’s hit by a roar, an incredible noise. He looks up into the high-speed, wild but deliberate eyes of its driver. The man is seven years older than he, the truck seven times his size and both are aiming at him. Time slows to one frame a second. Kenshin Kitano feels no thing.
Kenshin Kitano is hit by a rental truck.
In the seventh year before Kenshin Kitano is hit by a rental truck, its driver, Tomohiro Katō, sits at the back of class doodling on the inside of his exercise book. He traces a wide eye with his HB pencil, a flick of the wrist framing it within a shock of hair. His classmate, Emiko Hoshi leans across to get a better look at the doodle. She draws Pokémon in her exercise book. Perhaps this boy does too?
Noting her mild interest in his peripheral vision, Katō lifts his left hand to form a wall, protecting his picture from her view. She mentally shrugs and turns back to face the teacher. Next to the drawing Tomohiro Katō lists some of his favourite things. Videogame: Tales of Destiny. Flower: Rose. Food: Apple. Weather: Blizzard. Word: Destiny.
In the minute after he is hit by a rented van, ghosts hover in Kenshin Kitano’s dark vision, an ebb and flow of shapes in some intangible distance, silhouetted against regular waves of alien red and blue light. More than half of himself is gone already.
The orchestra beneath the silence stills, the silence now bruised only by shapeless words. Kenshin Kitano is unsure if he’s a baby in his cot or a man on his deathbed. He inches his fingers towards where he imagines his rucksack to have fallen: they search blindly for another tale of destiny. Kenshin Kitano’s eyes sink, all becomes chick yellow, he feels the steel of a longsword on his cheek. He feels no thing.
In the week after Kenshin Kitano is hit by a rental truck, Tomohiro Katō’s high-school drawing is shown on Japanese news and printed in tabloid newspapers the world over. The sketch offers a snapshot into the mind of a deranged killer, they say.
The otaku assassin! Likes roses and apples? Irrelevant. Likes RPGs? Now, that there’s proof positive of an unhealthy obsession with all of the inscrutable Eastern vices that consume the minds of our young…
In the week after Kenshin Kitano is hit by a rental truck, the Pokémon in Emiko Hoshi’s exercise book rest unseen by the media’s hungry gaze, hibernating forgotten in a sealed cardboard box in her grandparents’ attic.
The Valkyrie Profile series has always hidden its quiet inventiveness under a muted colour palette and melancholic ambiance. In part that’s due to the subject matter. The eponymous Valkyrie is, after all, the Norse personification of Death, scythe replaced by silver saber, black hooded cloak dress-changed for the blue and white gold-trimmed armour of a Scandinavian goddess.
Developer tri-Ace has traditionally cast the player in her role, tasked with ushering mortals into the afterlife, taking them into a new supernatural existence while their loved ones crumple in mourning on earth. But for this, the first DS game in the series, the roles are reversed. Players assume the role of Wylfred, a young man whose father perished on the battlefield, carried off by the Valkyrie, and whose sister died of starvation from the subsequent poverty the tragedy brought upon the family.
Wylfred is fueled by existential rage, a bloodlust that will be satisfied only with the death of Death herself. With murder in his heart he is taken under the wing of another nefarious supernatural being, who grants him control of a deadly feather, a tool that can be used to end the life of any of his comrades, each execution carrying the boy one step closer to his improbable quarry. So begins one of the darkest and most remarkable revenge tales told by a videogame.
The systems that underpin this cheerless drama are based on the Tactical RPG model, but as with the previous entries to the series, the framework is reconstructed in a way that often defies genre. Play takes place on small, gridded environments, player and AI taking turns to move their soldiers around the chess-like battlefield. However, when two warring units engage in battle, a separate combat screen is triggered, as in a conventional JRPG, where the warriors fight till their action points are depleted. The workings of the skirmish system here will be familiar to players of the earlier Valkyrie profile games. Each unit involved is mapped to a separate DS face button and, by hitting these in time you can unleash a string of attacks on your enemy. If you manage to instigate enough attacks to fill a gauge then an impressive Soul Crush move will finish off any foes still clinging to life.
You can read the rest of this review at Eurogamer here
On Monday Ars Technica reported a new study carried out by the BI Norwegian School of Management which found that those who download music illegally from P2P networks are more likely to spend money on legitimate downloads than those who do not.
Following the recent sentencing of the owners of Bit Torrent site Pirate Bay, the piece was promptly picked up as proof positive that file sharing stimulates more music sales than it strangulates, casting yet more doubts on the reasoning that saw Pirate Bay’s owners convicted.
Take that, idiot music industry, was the gleeful undertone to almost every report on the story.
It is, of course, a torch wood issue, inflaming passions on either side of the debate: the music industry who want the law adhered to in an effort to guard their livelihoods and the livelihoods of their artists, and those on the anti-DRM, open port, share-and-share-alike side, for whom the report provides justification for years of soap-boxing.
But in the rush to appropriate the evidence to a fashionable cause, journalistic rigour was forgotten.
Think about the report’s lede-friendly claim objectively for a moment. Surely the kind of people who actively share music across P2P are, by definition, highly engaged in music (and film and videogames), the kind of people who are more likely to buy music whether they pirate or not? Where is the evidence to say that the correlation between piracy and legitimate music buying is in any way causal?
In fact, not one reporter quoted directly from the study in their write-up, or bothered to call anyone of its authors for a quotation. The Norwegian paper Aftenposten, which first ran the story, did quote a member of staff from the school saying “The most surprising thing is that the proportion of paid download is so high,” but that’s a vacuous quotation that sounds very much like it was lifted from the school’s original PR release.
Indeed, there is not one example of pressing from any English language news outlet, the only other quotation to be found from an EMI boss, also printed in Afternposten, who makes the reasonable point that “[while] the consumption of music increases, revenue declines [something that] cannot be explained in any way other than that the illegal downloading [has overtaken] the legal sale of music.” Where does that fit into the study’s findings?
To clairfy, my issues with the reporting of the report are twofold:
1. A claim has been made by a Business School that filesharers buy more music than non-filesharers. This fact has then been reported without any reference to the methodology of the study and in such a way to suggest a causal link between piracy and increased music purchasing (i.e. if you become a pirate you will then start to buy more music) when, as far as I can tell, the study says no such thing.
2. The press has reported the story without talking to the source, referencing the source in any detail whatsoever or questioning the source. In such a contentious area, where the methodology behind any study’s findings should be rigorously checked (as with the videogame violence studies, where so many bodies have a vested interest), this is frustrating.
The result is the global news recycling of a half-truth, one whose spread and popularity was fuelled by fashion and timing, not truth or usefulness, clouding the clarity of voices in this important debate yet further with meaningless echoes.
Most gamers will be skeptical of any claims that this kind of technology might change interactive entertainment in any meaningful way. After all, virtual reality has always been a term synonymous with grand but ultimately vacuous promise.
But even if it is yet another a tech demo gimmick, the evidence that this test subject’s brain has been comprehensively fooled into believing it’s entered another world is fun to watch.
Shame it’s a world from a crusty, five-year-old PC game but still, the potential for loading in Fallout 3′s Wasteland or GoW’s planet Sera is clear.
Send in a Brumak and let’s see how the dude’s knees wobble then…
Also: If I’d have been the one with controller I’d have totally messed with the guy a whole lot more.
“You wanna fly?”.
“For sure!”.
“Tough shit! You,my friend, are going to POGO.” *BOING* *BOING* “Kapow onto the railing!”, “Schwizzim into the well”, “And phwup down to THE VERY CENTRE OF THE EARTH.”
Our hobby is full of forgotten worlds. Cities whose streets and structures were once as familiar to us as New York to a Brooklyn cabbie, in time become as slippery to recollection as last month’s dreams.
Hills and valleys and forests previously understood as pieces of geography, defining landmarks en route to Rabanastre or the Imperial City, soon become no more than context-less clumps of polygon and texture. It is almost every game-world’s fate to be forgotten, sunk as archaeological remains in the overburdened memory of the seasoned, universe-hopping gamer.
For many explorers, however, Phantasy Star Online, the Dreamcast’s electric blue blueprint for all console-based multiplayer RPG space quests, is gone but never forgotten. The memories of fighting with friends and strangers for the first time through its purplish corridors and crimson caves remain so vivid we could retrace our virtual steps blindfolded. SEGA may have switched off the servers, but this world will always have its players, those Hunters and Rangers and Force who roam its turf by memory alone. As such it seemed certain that PSO’s next-gen follow up, Phantasy Star Universe, would be a surefire hit.
Perhaps it was World of Warcraft’s fault. Perhaps it was the sheer petrifying range of choice for the contemporary MMORPG player, or perhaps we mistook the fact PSO was the first and only console-based game of its sort for the illusion that it was the best. Either way, PSU failed to ignite the passions of gamers, its labyrinthine corridors walked by just a hardcore few after the first influx of prospective immigrants left unconvinced of its merits.
But Phantasy Star Universe nevertheless did a great many things well. For those players who could look past the idiotic decision to isolate its single-player and online campaigns (where progress in one had no bearing on the other) and its reliance on subscription-locked disc-shipped content, there were a clutch of neat ideas and elegant tweaks. These built upon and even improved the PSO template in some regards, especially with regard to matchmaking, the job of forming and maintaining a party of likeminded questers.
You can read the rest of the review over at Eurogamer here.
I saw this picture on the photoblog This Isn’t Happiness, and presumed it was a set of weighing scales that lets you know whether your weight is closer to that of the waif-like multimillion dollar heiress or the baguette-strewn European land mass.
However, following the image back to its source reveals it’s actually a device that mointors news and search results for “paris hilton” and “paris france” in real time, displaying which one turns up more frequently.
Anyway, my misinterpretation (whose function I kinda prefer) got me thinking of other binary readout criteria that could be used on a set of weighing scales.
I set Kei Houraku’s YouTube video, ‘goomba’s lifetime’, to Radiohead’s ‘You and Whose Army’. That is all.
(Actually, I did think about adding a scratch record sound effect and killing the track at the moment Mario appears on screen but the resolute chorus, even in the face of comprehensive defeat on the Goomba’s part (er, spoilers), has a majestic sense of stoical defiance about it…).
“IRASSHAIMASE!”
The Valkyrie Profile series has always hidden its quiet inventiveness under a muted colour palette and melancholic ambiance. In part that’s due to the subject matter. The eponymous Valkyrie is, after all, the Norse personification of Death, scythe replaced by silver saber, black hooded cloak dress-changed for the blue and white gold-trimmed armour of a Scandinavian goddess. 
On Monday 
Our hobby is full of forgotten worlds. Cities whose streets and structures were once as familiar to us as New York to a Brooklyn cabbie, in time become as slippery to recollection as last month’s dreams.
