• “Starring in a film in your head in which you walk the earth alone is no longer considered a valid lifestyle choice,” 50% of my friends could do with reading this. JOKE.
• “This whole situation will be backed up by the Terminator franchise.” Weird, and awesome.
• Irregular Flow. Beautiful ink.
• Spotify for mobile. Whoever makes a Spotify-style service for television is going to become the next brazillionaire.
• Bach Bach Revolution. Would have been better if they were dressed as Alucard.
The case for working with your hands. I need a skill that doesn’t involve words or the Internet. When the waters rise and the servers drown, we’re screwed.
• Why Journalists Deserve Low Pay. All about the cheery links this week, writer chums.
• Mommy the Pooh. I could look at that poor woman’s face ALL DAY.
• Fish found in boy’s penis. “It slipped into his penis while he was cleaning his aquarium” CLEANING IT WITH HIS PENIS?
“Exit the Ginza-line Gaien-Mae station at exit 3. Cross the road, turn right, go past the Family Mart and take a left. About 20 metres down the road there’s a Jewelers on your right-hand side: go down the narrow street there, and we are at the top of the stairs (sadly not the building with the Porsche in the driveway).”
This is how you get to PaRappa’s house. Or, at least, how you find the offices of NanaOn-Sha, home to the rapping cartoon dog’s creator, Masaya Matsuura.
Following the success of Matsuura’s first music game for the PlayStation, PaRappa the Rapper (which also happened to be the very first rhythm-based videogame) NanaOn-Sha swelled in size to over 70 staff.
But the managerial responsibilities of heading up such a large company did not suit this quiet creative, whose successful career as a musician demonstrated that he is happiest in the swirl of artistic endeavor, not, as his position now demanded, in the role of a be-suited manager.
As a result, today NanaOn-Sha consists of just seven staff. Their job is to develop ideas for music-based games, prototyping the concepts before forming partnerships with other developers around the world who then turn these early fruits of inspiration into rounded products (a luxury development model that’s presumably facilitated by the gigantic success of the studio’s first, genre-defining title).
I met Dewi Tanner, Matsuura’s right-hand man and a British ex-patriot while he was visiting England earlier this year pursuing one such relationship with a third-party developer. The acquaintance made, I was then able to drop in on the studio when I was next in Tokyo, pleased to meet the rest of the team and see how they work.
Offices are offices, whatever their location, but having visited a number of development studios across the world, I find it interesting to see how diverse they can be in the details. You can tell so much about the minds and ideas that inhabit a desk just by looking at the detritus on and around it.
WorkStation aims to be an intermittent feature, offering a window into the development environments of gaming studios around the world. I hope you find it interesting.
*The awesome Sunny Funny pink 7-inch vinyl wall clock is something I picked up from an obscure secondhand toy shop that week. Every time I’ve visted Japan I’ve tried to find PaRappa merchandise to no avail. Thankfully, Dewi was able to point me in the direction of this store, which sold all manner of mint condition videogame memorabilia unavailable elsewhere.
Today’s videogame instruction manuals strain at their staples, pamphlet bibles heavy with back-stories for characters you don’t yet care for and detailed explanations of control schemes that sit meaningless on the page. Perhaps then, Bit Trip Beat exists to prove that “Avoid Missing Ball For High-Score” can, even today, still be instruction enough.
Sure, Pong’s heart has been dressed anew: vibrant pinks and purples replace Atari’s venerable whitish blocks and that backdrop of mute blackness is now seasoned with stars and comets. Likewise, the tick-tock sonic rhythm of Pong’s pixel ball batting back and forth now resounds as timpani in the embellishments of an entire chip tune orchestra, ensuring Bit Trip Beat is as much music game as 8-bit table tennis match.
But the aesthetic progressions are tempered by a purity of purpose. Unlike, say Virtua Tennis 3, you don’t avoid missing the ball only to then show off with a showy curve ball, pregnant with backspin. No, you merely twist your Wii remote to control a paddle in order to knock back the pixels fired your way. Miss enough dots and its game over. Hit enough dots and the song plays on, driven by the rhythm of your successes, building to a sonic finale as thrilling as any climactic Rock Band chorus.
The Wii remote is held sideways, your paddle travelling vertically up and down the left-hand side of the screen as you twist it towards and away from your body. Unlike Pong, there is no competing paddle on the right-hand side of the screen. Instead, dots come flying in from off-stage, the space background scrolling away behind as if you’re a cubist Vic Viper flying through a proto-Gradius star system. There are no buttons to press, no fussiness to cloud the truth that this videogame, like so many videogames, is entirely about making micro-muscular twitches to knock back the stream of challenges sent your way by its designer.
You can read the rest of the review over at Eurogamer here.
It’s been a quiet week here at Chewing Pixels, a counterpoint to last week’s flurry of heightened activity. Good happenings behind the curtain though some of which will hopefully take the stage next week. In the meantime, here are the Twitter farm link destinations to fix what ails ya.
• This week the number of my twitter followers matched the number of characters one is allowed to use in constructing a tweet. This announcement (‘characters = followers’) led Zen Bullets to suggest a Twitter RPG mod, whereby the number of followers always equals the number of characters available to use in a post. This would force one to start pithy, before working up to essays as you ‘levelled’. Neat.
• “2 very outgoing people under 4’0-4’2 needed to dress in costume and run amock (SP) in LA. You CANNOT be shy.” E3 lol.
• Do they do a Eurovision-type competition for the American states? Because they totally should. If I had time + money + American genes I would totally set this up.
• Where is everyone? Super sweet graphical depiction of media consumption trends from 1800-2020.
• In response to this comment here on Chewing Pixels, Mitch Krpata from the Boston Phoenix makes the shrewd observation: “I own all 3 systems” is the fanboy equivalent of “I’m not racist, but…”
• The sad tale of Connie Converse, whose mistake was to write her songs before Elvis and Dylan wrote theirs.
The best thing about E3′s epic failure as videogaming’s premier industry event in 2008 is that, in an effort to inject some much-needed spectacle, excitement and cleavage back into the proceedings, the organiser of the event, the Entertainment Software Association, has lifted the ban on booth babes and booth, er, dudes.
As well as reminding those of us who so eagerly point to the likes of Braid, Ico and Rez as worthy representatives of the medium that, in actual fact, videogames are still principally about staring at unattainable girls with low self-esteem and pretending to drive red shiny Ferraris, the reintroduction of booth babes will also provide useful employment to many of Los Angeles’ struggling actresses and call girls this summer.
But what sort of rates can a budding bikini model expect to take home after a day of being ogled at by grotesque nerds while maintaining an unflinching rictus grin? A brief survey of the Los Angeles Craig’s List listings is enlightening .
This advertisement posted in the Westside-Southbay area is offering successful Female Promo Models a flat $200 fee for a seven-hour day’s pouting (although you can no doubt quadruple that if one of **’s UK PR managers asks you back to his hotel for the evening).
You’ll need to send in a head shot and resume, although to be perfectly honest, a head shot will probably be more than enough detail. A decent WPM probably isn’t going to tip the balance in your favour when ‘reading’ for Princess Peach.
By contrast, the brusque, almost desperate plea, “Need tall, muscular male model” is offering would-be applicants a nifty 25 bucks an hour. Manage to turn in a nine-hour day, by staying behind to clear up the broken dreams of young staff writers perhaps, and you could do better than the girls.
Playing the role of “RED DRAGON” you’ll secure $275 for your talents, albeit for the somewhat lengthy shift of 9am-6pm. The extra cash is well-deserved, however, as you’ll need to splash out on your own “khakis and footwear” (quite why you need to have size 9s or lower if you’re bringing your own shoes is beyond me). Reassuringly, the company will “provide the Red Dragon costume and polo”. Whether that last bit refers to the small German Volkswagen, the aristocratic equine sport or a solitary breath-freshening mint is unclear but whichever it is, you can be assured this is going to be a hell of a game.
The same posting advertises for a Japanese interpreter, although sadly you can’t apply for both roles at once. It’s author clearly states: “SPECIFY…DRAGON…OR INTERPRETER,” which also happens to be the phrase I shout through the letterbox anytime someone knocks on my front door of a dark and stormy night.
• Michelangelo’s 1st painting (age 12) goes on exhibit. Dude has almost as many talents as he has IDEAS FOR PETRIFYING DEMONS.
• Quick: someone make a web-app that auto-pixelates any photo into an 8-bit style sprite. You will be famous within the week. (If any of you do this, please let me know so I can use it).
• Square-Enix busts fan translator balls. “We have destroyed all known copies of Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes” [NOTE: This may be a hoax. Am working on it]
• Puffins: Island Adventure trailer – DS. Also: can we have a full 3D, console title in which you live the life of a bird? This is also why I probably don’t own a development studio.
• “A comeback is like a yoyo: you gonna go down, but you coming right back up… then you may end up walking the dog.” Also: Nintendo should totally get Clay Davis to appear in all their adverts
With a grand total of 311,673 gamerpoints, Xbox Live User Stallion83 has won more in-game achievements than any other player. Indeed, he’s earned the full 1000 gamerpoints for no less than 204 of the 437 games he’s played on his Xbox 360, a Herculean accomplishment of time, effort and, in a great many cases, skill. And yet, as the URL of his website, www.1milliongamerscore.com makes perfectly clear, Stallion83′s quest for numerical glory is not even halfway done.
Late last year, Armour Games released a free to play browser game titled Achievement Unlocked. The instructions read: “Who needs gameplay when you have ACHIEVEMENTS? Don’t worry about beating levels, finding ways to kill enemies, or beating the final boss… there are none. Focus solely on your ultimate destiny: doing random tasks that have nothing to do with anything. Meta-game yourself with ease! Self-satisfaction never felt so… artificial!” To date the game has received 1,156,149 plays and enjoyed countless mentions and dissections on blogs and gaming websites around the world.
You know your idea has made it when close to 1.2 million people play a parody webgame about it. Come to think of it, you know your idea has made it when Sony steals it wholesale to use in its own console’s online superstructure. Or when Blizzard builds it into the framework of the most popular MMO in history. Or when The Simpsons, that sieve of all cultural detritus worthy of satire, make it the subject of their game’s very first joke, rewarding players with an Achievement merely for pressing the start button on the menu screen for the first time.
It didn’t take long for gamers’ initial reaction to the Xbox 360′s meta-reward system to turn from uncertainty to acceptance. For many, like Stallion83, it was then just a short hop to all-consuming obsession. That we should have become so enamoured with Achievements should be no great surprise. Maintaining an indelible record of our in-game accomplishments somehow ascribes them a greater sense of purpose and worth. And, by keeping a running tally of all the points we’ve ever won, the very act of playing videogames is turned into a high-score challenge, a meta-game that plays out across our entire videogame library, not just within individual titles.
But for all the satire, every gamer knows that Achievement points, as ridiculous and vacuous as they might appear to the outsider, reveal deep truths about why we play videogames. Humans like to be told they are clever and talented and skillful and videogames are machines precision-designed to do just that very thing. They may first hurl us on to spikes, blow us up and punch us in the tits, but these setbacks only make the accomplishments all the sweeter. Master a game system and, in contrast to the fickle vagaries of real life, you will have your reward. And we have become so accustomed to having our worth as a gamer relayed by a number – a high score in Pac-Man, a character’s level in Final Fantasy, a number of kills in Halo – that simply watching a number slowly increase is often enough to convince us that what we’re doing is somehow worthwhile, perhaps even that we are somehow worthwhile.
The truth is that Achievement points are, for many, the glue that holds Microsoft’s Xbox Live service together, the reason why we buy a cross-platform game on one particular system and not the others, one’s gamerscore simultaneously a badge of bragging rights, a measure of how thoroughly we play our games and, most troubling, an irrefutable record of how we spend our days.
From the perspective of a developer, however, Achievements have a great many other tangible benefits. They allow game-makers to tap into the different reasons why different players play particular games, sending one group off to collect a thousand orbs, another to accumulate ten thousand kills and another still to work to become the best in the world.
Some developers employ Achievements to encourage players to use all the in-game tools available to their character, or even to explain in explicit terms how the game systems work. Many developers use Achievements to make jokes or wry commentary. Dead Rising’s ‘Zombie Genocider’, awarded for killing 54,594 zombies was drolly-trumped by Left 4 Dead, which offered ‘Zombie Genocidist’ for killing 53,595 of the undead. Almost all of Civilization Revolution’s Achievement names will be hilarious to hardcore RTS nerds (and impenetrable for the rest of us).
Of course, at their worst, Achievements seek to somehow make up for a lack of interesting in-game challenges, sending players off on empty fetch-quests and inane collect-’em-up hunts. But at their best, they inspire us to play the game in new and interesting ways, subverting the games rule-set, and, in the case of Geometry Wars’ Pacifism Achievement, even birthing new game modes in future sequels.
So we mock Achievement points because they spell out in large numbers what is so pathetic about videogames. But we also celebrate them, because, when used in funny, creative or interesting ways, they also spell out what is so compelling and wonderful about videogames. Because for every Achievement in which you have to do nothing more than play through a tutorial there’s another that subverts convention, rewarding you for skipping it instead. For every fetch quest that has you collecting dogtags for the millionth time, there’s another that makes you fight the baddy with your arms tied behind your back. And for every Achievement you earn in jest for pressing the start button, there’s another that only rewards the single best player in the world.
It’s important to point out to those of you who might be tempted to dismiss Dragonica as a super-sweet, super-colourful MapleStory clone that this is an MMORPG in which you can summon Bruce Lee to fly-kick a sheep in the tits.
You can also click your fingers to get Michael Jackson to moonwalk on a wolf, not to mention call upon a cute girl in a skimpy bathrobe to distract your enemies while you to gad about, bonking them on their heads.
Contrary to the expectations created by its title, Dragonica won’t have you summoning dragons to strike fear and fire into the hearts of your foes. Rather, you get to transform your head into a chicken because, quite frankly, after 25 years of facing identikit knock-offs of Tolkien heroes, that’s far more likely to mess with the buggers.
Dragonica’s breezy humour and fresh ambiance isn’t limited to its special move list, either. While it would be impossible to describe any single thing the game does as innovative, its concoction of diverse influences blends together to deliver an experience quite unlike any other.
At its heart, this free-to-play Korean MMO is a side-scrolling action game. The 3D, rustic world stretches back as far as the eye can see, fields of sunflowers painted in over-saturated yellows set against an OutRun-blue sky. But the pastoral draw distance is inaccessible. Instead, you’ll be moving left and right along a horizontal axis, granted just a few metres exploration into the screen to allow you to manoeuvre around bosses and obstacles. The effect is similar to that of Namco’s platformer Klonoa, or possibly LittleBigPlanet and, indeed, a generous jump move allows your character to scale platforms and explore the game’s detailed, interesting scenes in diluted platform-game style.
But this classic console-game action is nestled within the giant, groaning superstructure of a traditional MMORPG, stuffed with missions and submissions, player-versus-player, character skill trees, a complex job system and, of course, thousands upon thousands of experience points to collect. While these labyrinthine depths soon reveal their presence, developer Barunson Interactive is clearly eager to ease players in with the promise of a gentle ride.
You can read the rest of this preview over at Eurogamer here.
If you think you need a fancy studio to take a shot like this well, um, think again. The making of video below reveals how so much beauty can be found in the daylight of the mundane.
I mean, it probably helps that the dude has a camera that cost more than your education, and he no doubt spent three weeks precision-balancing levels in Aperture but still, dude’s got timing.
1,539,100 gold coins. That’s the amount of money my Albion property portfolio accrued in rent from the moment I last switched off Fable II, having completed its first DLC release, Knothole Island, to the moment I sat down to play this, its second. It was deposited as a lump sum, having accumulated in even amounts every hour for the past four months while I was away.
I mention this fact not as a boast (although you should check the hell out of these kickass solid gold trainers) but rather as evidence that innovative systems designed to draw players back into a game in the short term can present unforeseen problems over the long term. In See the Future, every bag of gold coins in a hidden treasure chest and every ruby gemstone my trusty dog sniffs out is worthless: time and distance already made me a millionaire.
While Knothole Island was pieced together in a matter of weeks by a team weary from the crunch of delivering the main game, the time leading up to this second add-on has evidently been used to regroup, refocus and decide where Fable II’s future lies. Unlike the first add-on, See the Future presents three distinct, small mini-adventures as oppose to a single medium-sized one, each one tied to a different mysterious trinket on sale from a newly-installed Bowerstone market trader, Mungo.
The first object Mungo sells you is a cursed snowglobe that whisks you away to a black and white village drained of all colour and inhabited only by ghosts and the ghosts of ghosts. Just as your job was to restore balance and order to Knothole Island by solving its small-town politics-cum-weather problems, so you must restore colour and life to this more esoteric community. However, in contrast to Knothole Island’s yarn, the story surrounding the snowglobe village’s misfortune is told in whispers of dialogue, and half-clues scrawled in dusty diaries: it is mystery piled upon mystery and the resolution, when it comes, is both fleeting and unsatisfactory.
In essence, the mission consists of two small dungeons, one underground, accessed via a well, the other inside a haunted house. Both locations are inhabited by a new kind of enemy, a Tron-like apparition, which comes in three varieties, colour-coded as being susceptible to one of your three types of attack: melee, ranged or magical. There are no bosses to defeat here; you simply follow Fable 2′s sparkly breadcrumb trail, and kill everything on sight while keeping a lookout for collectables along the way. Once colour is restored to the village there are a couple of secrets to tie up but, otherwise, there’s nothing to stop you leaving the snowglobe forever.
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.
“Exit the Ginza-line Gaien-Mae station at exit 3. Cross the road, turn right, go past the Family Mart and take a left. About 20 metres down the road there’s a Jewelers on your right-hand side: go down the narrow street there, and we are at the top of the stairs (sadly not the building with the Porsche in the driveway).”
Today’s videogame instruction manuals strain at their staples, pamphlet bibles heavy with back-stories for characters you don’t yet care for and detailed explanations of control schemes that sit meaningless on the page. Perhaps then, Bit Trip Beat exists to prove that “Avoid Missing Ball For High-Score” can, even today, still be instruction enough.
x 5000
The best thing about E3′s epic failure as videogaming’s premier industry event in 2008 is that, in an effort to inject some much-needed spectacle, excitement and cleavage back into the proceedings, the organiser of the event, the Entertainment Software Association, has lifted the ban on booth babes and booth, er, dudes. 
With a grand total of 311,673 gamerpoints, Xbox Live User Stallion83 has won more in-game achievements than any other player. Indeed, he’s earned the full 1000 gamerpoints for no less than 204 of the 437 games he’s played on his Xbox 360, a Herculean accomplishment of time, effort and, in a great many cases, skill. And yet, as the URL of his website, 
It’s important to point out to those of you who might be tempted to dismiss Dragonica as a super-sweet, super-colourful MapleStory clone that this is an MMORPG in which you can summon Bruce Lee to fly-kick a sheep in the tits. 
1,539,100 gold coins. That’s the amount of money my Albion property portfolio accrued in rent from the moment I last switched off Fable II, having completed its first DLC release, Knothole Island, to the moment I sat down to play this, its second. It was deposited as a lump sum, having accumulated in even amounts every hour for the past four months while I was away. 
