“Right now, there’s nobody younger than me that I feel threatened by. I haven’t met anyone that I felt possesses the skill to surpass me in the future. I’m not over-evaluating myself. I can analytically see their weakness, their ineptitudes.”
Daigo Umehara is better at Street Fighter than you and he knows it. Fighting games always bring out the inner show-off, but his is no hollow boast. Earlier this year, the 28-year-old Japanese defeated American champion Justin Wong at the Evolution 2009 Championship to take the Street Fighter IV world title.
Daigo Umehara, it turns out, is better than everyone at Street Fighter.
This victory was just the latest in a long line of high-profile competitive achievements that Umehara (Ume, to his friends) has to his name, the most famous of which is his astonishing comeback against Wong during the 2004 Evolution loser’s bracket final. You don’t need to understand the intricacies of Street Fighter III’s parry system to appreciate that something extraordinary is happening as he bats away each of Wong’s potentially lethal attacks before taking the round with a dazzling special move of his own. The crowd’s ecstatic reaction, coupled with Umehara’s understated demeanour in the face of such deafening adulation, catapulted the clip to YouTube stardom, where it ranks amongst gaming’s most famous.
Since then, Umehara’s fame and reputation has spread through the fighting game community and beyond. He plays with unrivalled precision and grace, combining the reactions of a peak-form Muhammad Ali with the strategy of a Garry Kasparov. He is undoubtedly the greatest Street Fighter player to have played the game.
But his own understanding of his supremacy comes not from the vanity of world championship titles but rather from the measured perception of a giant. “I think, right now, I may well be at my absolute peak,” he tells me. “My reactions are probably comparable to when I was younger, but I no longer grow agitated when I’m cornered. Nothing can mentally break me anymore; I have mastered nervousness and tension. I can instantly tell opponents apart and categorise them into groups and types according to their personality and weaknesses. As I haven’t felt my physical abilities weakening yet, I think I might be at the peak of my career as a fighting gamer.”
Spoken by anyone else, this might come across as supreme arrogance. But while Umehara’s known to his fans as “The Beast” (a term he neither coined nor uses himself), his real-life persona ill-fits the nickname. This tall, handsome Japanese is altogether shy and unassuming. In contrast to his American rivals, Umehara shuns the spotlight, rarely giving interviews to the press or meeting fans.
He is a star born in the arcade scene, a dimly lit underground world filled with cigarette butts, bleeping neon lights, cathode-tan boys and the sweat of twitch competition. His digital sport has neither the glamour of boxing nor the ceremony of wrestling: there are no promoters or agents to turn talent into stars in this world. Even if there were, one feels as if Umehara’s well-mannered, nice-boy exterior would always mask the inner beast.
Umehara is near-impossible to track down. Initially, Capcom suggests I fly to Tokyo, find an arcade where he’s playing of an afternoon and sit next to him with a tape recorder. After he declines an invitation to a UK tournament and fails to show up to a meeting we schedule during this year’s Tokyo Game Show, Capcom steps in to help organise a cross-continental rendezvous, using one of Umehara’s bilingual friends as an intermediary, to put my questions to him.
His reluctance to talk to interviewers coupled with these difficult-to-reach circumstances have contributed to the enigmatic legend that is Umehara. Rumour and speculation follow his every move. When, in 2005, he took a two-year break from the fighting game scene, some fans speculated it was so he could focus his attention on his other love: pachinko. His reactions, so the story goes, are so supernaturally fast that he is able to tilt the odds in his favour far enough to earn a living from what is essentially a game of chance. In truth, Umehara works in the public welfare/health sector by day, following in the footsteps of his parents who both work at a hospital in Aomori, Japan.
“Playing games professionally is not really an option in Japan,” he explains. “If I did really want to do something with my gaming skills in the industry, I think I would have already done so by now. It’s only relatively recently that I started to receive invitations to overseas tournaments with prize money. In Japan, games are something you play for enjoyment; you don’t expect anything in return.”
You can read the rest of this featureover at Eurogamer here.
Kieron Gillen on ‘No Russian’, the controversial level from Modern Warfare 2. Pretty much the last word on the subject.
Last week the eloquent, anonymous ex-London call girl, Belle de Jour, revealed her identity. Here’s an excellent side story about a blogger who figured it all out years ago, and how he helped keep her secret from the press.
Someone forgot to consider the SUN when designing this wall.
The 100 best quotes from The Wire:
Veteran video game writer Susan O’Connor (Far Cry 2) on ways to advance the craft of game narrative.
Readers, meet Josiah James Parkin. Look around son. One day, all of this could be yours… (He is the reason for the sporadic updates in the past fortnight. Apols but, y’know…)
The best two Japanese action games of the year are diametrically opposed in approach. Demon’s Souls is a brooding traipse through the corridors of purgatory, fair but relentlessly unforgiving. It teaches that modern videogames have made us weak and stupid, that our gaming muscles have atrophied through the efforts of so many mollycoddling developers. Every sword strike must be carefully considered, and button-mashers are not so much ridiculed as downright abused for their lack of sophistication. The result is a tense but ponderous experience, one that demands supreme trepidation before each step taken, careful contemplation before every input made.
In Bayonetta, meanwhile, you press a button and your television implodes.
Beloved is a celestial giant with the face of a three-year-old cherub and the body of a weightlifting Buddha, who falls from heaven to cobblestone with a squelchy thwack. Standing just 20 feet from this sudden epiphany, Bayonetta smirks to the cameraman, who’s angled our viewpoint on the scene from ground level in order to fully celebrate the titular anti-heroine’s ninja Barbie physique and secretary-cum-sex-worker attire. Her wink to lens is the starter pistol for interactivity.
You rotate the left analogue stick and hit the X button on cue, and Bayonetta cartwheels into a handstand, firing the twin pistols attached to her stilettos into Beloved’s rolls of fat by clicking her heels in rapid succession. You break the sequence short with a triple jump through the air, esoteric purple wings momentarily sprouting from her arched back as you do so, before landing on Beloved’s shoulders. The camera wheels and dives around, matching the kinetic assault of Bayonetta’s body blows with dazzling movements of its own.
Finish him: an invitation to execute a Climax Attack on your wearied angelic opponent stamps onto screen. As you make the input, Bayonetta plants her feet square on the ground. Her black latex suit is absorbed into her skin, inexplicably extending the strands of her hair as it’s drawn up through her body.
Shielding what’s left of her modesty with her arms, Bayonetta flings her head backwards and her new 30-foot hair extensions assume the form of a black dragon: follicular shape shifting. It bares shadowy tooth shapes before lurching forward and down onto the cherub’s torso. You madly hammer X to fill a Megaton bonus-point gauge, each mash encouraging the beast to chew a little harder. Then, in the final moment of climax, it rips Beloved’s torso in two, dropping a crimson waterfall onto the cobblestones below like a dead weight.
Bayonetta’s hair retracts itself back into her scalp. Her clothes re-envelop her body. She pops a lollipop into her mouth and sucks twice. Lara Croft shivers. Airport massacre levels, be damned. Bayonetta eats angels with her hairdo. Let’s have a discussion about that on the Today programme.
Twice, Infinity Ward asks if you’re absolutely sure you want to see it. The scene, the fourth you’ll encounter in the most widely anticipated game of the year, could be “disturbing” or “offensive”, repeats the warning. You smile and agree that, yes, you are sure you want to see it. This is a videogame. They give them 18 certificates, but only to appease people who don’t really understand what’s going on. Sure, the images of violence and bloodshed on Modern Warfare’s battlefields can be disturbing to an onlooker, but death in a first-person shooter is a five-second setback, a micro-reincarnation designed to provide challenge and an impetus to improve, not distress.
Likewise, the crimson firework that explodes whenever bullet meets target is merely a visual cue to indicate another object removed from the shooting gallery, while the wash of blood that temporarily clouds your view when you’re wounded is just a health gauge obfuscated. The orchestra-swells and military bombast? All window dressing for what is, essentially, Space Invaders evolved. You take cover behind walls and shoot aliens. In 1978, these were line-dancing pixel clusters from outer space. In 2009 they’re Afghans. The metaphor’s changed, but the principle remains the same: avoid missing headshot for high score. A videogame. Yes, I’m sure I want to see it.
The first three missions of Modern Warfare 2 do little to change your mind. The training level, set in a desert encampment somewhere in the Middle East, is literally a shooting gallery. You race from pillar to post, refreshing muscle memory, making split-second fire/hold-fire decisions, flitting between your rifle and pistol while racing against the clock to reach the end of the assault course. Not satisfied with your score? Have another go. Shave seconds from your time by improving your speed and accuracy. The sand particles billowing in the wind, the off-duty soldiers playing basketball in the communal yard and the throb of the noonday sun are of a fidelity not seen in games before, but the systems they dress are as old as videogame time.
Then you move out onto the streets of Afghanistan in the boots of one PFC Joseph Allen, 1st Battalion 75th Ranger regiment. The faded Arabic slogans daubed on the walls and the upturned supermarket trolleys under dilapidated bridges invest a foreign-correspondent air of believability into the scenario. But the unlikely hail of RPG-fire, screeching overhead jets, sub-bass thwap helicopters and balaclava-wearing hostiles ensure it’s the 10 o’clock news played through a Michael Bay filter: reality, with the contrast turned up.
In the following level, now playing as British soldier Gary Sanderson in a duo mission with the understated Soap MacTavish, you tear down a snowy mountain in Kazakhstan on an implausibly fast snowmobile, steering with your right hand, taking down enemy riders with a pistol in your left. As you finally perform a Hollywood leap across a 40-foot ice ravine, the series settles into the sort of James Bond action preposterousness of which it’s always managed to remain short.
Yeah. A videogame. I am absolutely sure that I want to see it.
The voiceover that precedes what will shortly become the most notorious scene in gaming makes it clear that your mission is a necessary one. You are a good guy, dressed as a bad guy, and while bad things are about to happen, good will out. Ding, and the lift doors unclasp. You step out onto an airport foyer, and into an entirely new idea of what constitutes an 18-certificate videogame.
You don’t have to shoot. But you do have to observe. Forced into an unbreakable stroll, your only choices are where to look and whether to stay abreast of your murderous companions as they gun down the crowds of innocents, or whether to lag behind and administer a coup de grace to the terminal’s terminally wounded. In contrast to the dry professionalism of soldiering displayed in the rest of the game, there’s an inefficient laziness to this terrorist spree. The men fire from the hip in sweeping arcs, their purpose merely to create mayhem, not to eliminate threat.
The screaming is the soundtrack to post-traumatic stress; the visuals like snuff CCTV footage lurking under some evil stone in a dark corner of the internet (albeit undermined somewhat by the curiously small palette of civilian character models being gunned down). One man who takes a shot to the stomach crawls along the ground on all fours, blood pouring from his fingers. Finish the job, watch or walk on: these are your options. The removal of player agency is at once frustrating and brilliant: through it, the limitations of the first-person-shooter’s purpose and themes are revealed. In a genre that limits you to interactions sent down the barrel of a gun, for perhaps the first time in history, Infinity Ward makes you wish for a bandage instead.
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.
“A mind is not blown, in spite of whatever Hollywood seems to teach, merely by action sequences, things exploding, thrilling planetscapes, wild bursts of speed.
“Those are good things. But a mind is blown when something you always feared but knew to be impossible turns out to be true; when the world turns out to be far vaster, far more marvelous or malevolent than you ever dreamed; when you get proof that everything is connected to everything else, that everything you know is wrong, that you are both the center of the universe and a tiny speck sailing off its nethermost edge.”
Also, while we’re on the subject, here’s one of my favourite extracts from Kavalier and Clay again, for those of you who missed it the first time around.
Keita Takahashi sits alone, six thousand miles from home, in a damp, vacant house set within the grounds of an autumn forest somewhere in the middle of England. He wears a puffer jacket, huddled next to an electric fire for warmth.
With slow, meticulous movements he wraps a length of string around the short, rounded sword he’s fashioned from a bent coat hanger. Aside from an intermittent cough, the house is otherwise empty of all noise.
Pastel sketches are spread out on the table around him, pastoral scenes, all browns, yellows and familiar yet unidentifiable rustic blurs. Clutches of green sticky notes punctuate a white board above. On each square of paper a single word is written in all-caps English. Some are verbs: “VIEW”, “RUN”, “LIE”, ROLL”. Others are nouns: “HOLE”, “TUBE”, “GRASS”, ”SLOPE”, like a checklist for creation written by a monosyllabic god.
There is no rhyme or reason to the layout. The words towards the top of the board are no more important to those at its base. They are not annotations on a ground plan map, even though Takahashi will, at some point, have to reconcile his ideas to the realities of geography and physics.
For now, the eccentric video game designer seems happy to be playing in the abstract. Giant trails of string loop around the room, tacked to the ceiling. On some, tiny plasticine models of children hang from paperclips, swinging as trapeze artists on micro-ropes that, if ever scaled up for humans to enjoy, would defy both the laws of gravity and health and safety.
I have no idea how one goes about designing a playground but, from this random assortment of ideas and trinkets, I’m almost certain that Keita Takahashi, the enigmatic mind behind Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy, is no wiser.
“Obviously it’s my first attempt at park design, so I’m not sure what makes a good playground at the moment,” he tells me. “I’m just trying to work it out. What do you think makes a good playground?”
It’s been four years since Takahashi announced his desire to build a playground here in Nottingham, the location of the UK’s largest alternative video games conference, GameCity. Speaking at the event, in front of the gaming media, the admission caused a mild stir. Takahashi, a deeply atypical Japanese, has always been one to speak his mind, and his irritation at Namco Bandai’s turning Katamari in to a steamrolling brand was always played out in the public sphere.
Yet, while Takahashi studied sculpture at college, there was no way he could be termed an architect. Was this a cry for help aimed towards the suits at Namco Bandai? After all, he later admits to me he was only permitted to make Katamari Damacy because he refused to work on any other of the “boring” projects that were in development at the studio. Or was it a genuine yearning to return to the roots of play, to rediscover purity and innocence among the swings and roundabouts of youth?
In the clutter of the desk in front of him here, it’s clear that whatever the reason for the outburst, Takahashi was unprepared for his dream to become a reality. Last week, on the first day of Game City 2010, the organizers stood with Nottingham City Council to announce the commissioning of the playground on a small plot of land within the Woodthorpe Grange Park.
After the press conference, one of GameCity’s organizers drove Takahashi to the local art store where he filled his basket with crayons, stickers, pens, sheaths of paper and, of course, a coat hanger. Then they took a taxi to this room, and closed the door behind him.
It’s hard to shake the feeling its precisely this sort of largely directionless creativity, free from the constraints of financial targets, demographics and brand-building that has brought Takahashi to this unlikely nook on the other side of his world.
In answer to his deflected question about what I think makes a good playground, I suggest that I’ve always enjoyed a sense of progression, where one object leads to the next, giving the participant a sense of journey, like a playful assault course.
Takahashi doesn’t respond at first, mulling it over, perhaps masking a sneer. “If there’s a pattern embedded in the design of a park, the danger is always that all of the kids just end up doing the same stuff…” he murmurs.
It’s this sort of aimless approach to game design that frustrated some players and critics with regards to his most recent title, Noby Noby Boy, a game that’s difficult to articulate within the usual parameters of success and failure. And yet, this dislike of the order and rigid structure of mainstream games seems to imbue every aspect of Takahashi’s approach.
Indeed, it’s difficult to consider this strange scene as anything but a manifestation of his disillusionment with the strict framework of the wider gaming industry. I put the question to him direct.
“I think that’s true,” he agrees. “In fact, I’ve been feeling for a few years now that I’m just not suited to the games industry. Yeah, that’s certainly been an impetus for working on the playground. You’re right.”
I suggest that perhaps Takahashi’s artistic bent makes him incompatible with the Japanese studio system, that his unwillingness to compromise vision to the business side of Namco Bandai makes him a poor candidate for a commercial video game designer. “Yes,” he answers at once. Then, earnestly: “Do you have any suggestions?”
While we talk, Takahashi is constantly busy with his hands. Having wrapped the sword with string halfway up its hilt, he then discards the idea and unwinds his efforts. He speaks in low, thoughtful tones, and his relentless reflection of my questions makes this feel more like a therapy session than an interview, though I’m not sure whose benefit it’s for.
I’m astonished by his frankness. After all, our translator, a Namco Bandai employee, is also here in the role of a chaperone. Perhaps, in asking me to propose a solution to his frustrations, he is answering the question secondhand.
I collect my thoughts before suggesting that, as Japan’s games industry seems still very much based around big business, perhaps he should look abroad where he might be able to slot in more comfortably with an indie developer.
“Yes. My ideal would be to be a freelancer, working with different creatives in a far more loose structure,” he admits, smirking like I’ve passed the test. While his frankness is refreshing for a Japanese game maker, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it’s also a little petulant. Whatever his frustrations with his employer, Namco Bandai has allowed him to take 8 weeks out of the office, working on a project that they will earn nothing from, save for some mild PR. Takahashi is given a long leash. With that in mind, I ask him: why the disillusionment?
“There are two main reasons for it, I think. Firstly, I‘m just frustrated with the industry as a whole. I can’t seem to predict where it’s going, which makes me feel uncomfortable,” he says. “Or maybe I just don’t like where I think it’s going. I’m not sure.”
“That’s probably related to my second frustration. I just can’t perceive where the fun is in recent hit video games. I see nothing in them that resonates with me and, their success leaves me feeling confused. The things I find interesting and enjoyable just aren’t reflected in the popular games of today and, I feel like there’s not much room for my voice because of that.”
Has Takahashi ever really enjoyed video games? “Certainly. I used to enjoy the Famicom era very much. In fact, at that time I was overweight because I played so many games. But I find it hard to remember the things that moved me in my childhood games. Pretty much all I think about is based on games of the moment. To be honest, right now I find the idea of working in the physical world far more exciting than working in a virtual one. I feel like having something physical makes it easier for me to communicate what I think is fun to people. There are fewer hurdles to overcome.”
It’s impossible to not detect the melancholy in Takahashi’s demeanor. I wonder if he already has regrets about the path his life has taken him. “No. No regrets at this point. Of course, I can’t predict how I’ll feel in the future…” Maybe see how the playground turns out first, I offer. He laughs a warm, rare laugh. I ask him what makes him happy at the moment. He motions to the sword in his hand and, with a smirk, says: “Finishing this.”
So happiness for Takahashi is in helping others to find happiness, I propose? “Yes. During university I grew quite bored with sculpture, and with seeing the limits of that medium. That’s what got me looking at video games, their broader horizons and possibilities. I’ve always wanted to make things that would enable people to enjoy their lives. That’s one reason I first looked to video games, to be able to make things that people could enjoy around the world. Perhaps part of this experience is in rediscovering how I can do that in video games, by revisiting the limitations of sculpture…”
It’s dusk. We pack up and leave the house in the failing light. Standing in a nearby car park, waiting for a taxi, I ask Takahashi what games, if any, he’s playing at the moment. “Er, Noby Noby Boy on iPhone. That’s it,” he says. That smirk surfaces again and I realize he takes a certain pride in his derision towards mainstream game culture. Again, he turns the question back on me.
I pull out my phone and rack my brain for indie titles I’ve played recently, hoping to somehow earn his respect in that way a detached air of superiority often demands. Rolando 2. Mr AahH!! World of Goo, I list. He repeats each game title after me with a quick nod, an acknowledgment that he’s played each one thoroughly. For a man who supposedly only plays Noby Noby Boy, he’s bang up to date.
A little annoyed by this crass one-upmanship I say: Street Fighter IV.
“Ah! Street Fighter IV?!” He looks surprised at my changing the rules of the game and ceasing to kowtow to his anti-blockbuster sensibility. We catch each others’ eye and hold the stare for a second. In that moment I see, somewhere under the facade, the chubby 12-year-old Famicom nerd.
He knows that I know. And his face crinkles into the broadest smile of the day.
An October Saturday and Stuttgart is pale with the cold. Outside the State Opera House, the city’s grand attraction, a skip sits awkward and incongruous to its surroundings. The sides are spray-painted with graffiti, a hip hop-cum-youth club pastiche probably commissioned to soften the otherwise stark utilitarian appearance of this giant iron dustbin. While the murals may obscure the rust, they do not obscure the function, which remains as it ever was: a receptacle for unwanted rubbish. Except, rather than industrial waste or the assorted debris of home movers, this skip has been put here to collect videogames: “Killerspiele”, the name given to violent games by Germany’s tabloid press.
Midway through the day, a cameraman from a local television station clambers over the skip’s side. He needs a compelling shot for the piece that will run tonight, a story about how swathes of Germany’s youths have seen the error of their hobby and brought their perilous playthings to this public burning. Crouching on its floor, he angles the camera upwards, while a young boy in a beanie and a puffer jacket leans over and hurls a copy of Grand Theft Auto in with an echoic clack.
The cameraman captures the premeditated moment from this particular angle because any other would reveal the truth of the situation: the skip is otherwise empty. By the end of the day, that sealed copy of San Andreas will be joined by Def Jam: Fight for New York, OpenArena and Small Soldiers, a sorry clutch of ageing titles that represent the full extent of German gamers’ ambivalence to this most uncomfortable stunt. For gamers around the world, it’s difficult not to feel a sharp sense of schadenfreude. But there’s a story behind every story. And the story behind the skip is a tragedy.
At 9:30am on March 12, 2009, a 17-year-old ex-student of Albertville Secondary School in Winnenden walked back through the school doors he left a year earlier. Tim Kretschmer shot nine students and three teachers with a 9mm Beretta semi-automatic pistol, before fleeing the scene, carjacking a vehicle and finally taking his own life during a standoff with police outside of a Volkswagen dealership. Hardy Schober was the father of one of the eight schoolgirls shot dead at point blank range during the rampage. As part of his grieving process he founded the Aktionsbündnis Amoklauf Winnenden, a support group for those affected by the Winnenden shooting.
The skip? Hardy Schober put it there.
“Videogames are almost reflexively made a scapegoat after every school shooting.” Olaf Wolters is the CEO of USK. The German equivalent of the BBFC, this is the organization responsible for choosing the age rating for every videogame released in Germany. If the Winneden killer’s rampage was inspired by a videogame, then it was a videogame that Wolters or his staff had already played to completion, and rated accordingly. Wolters knows his scapegoats by name.
“The reason for that probably lies in the fact that tragedy demands an answer to the question of how such a thing could have happened,” he continues. “But it is not a question that’s easily answered. And this leaves a great helplessness behind. Against this backdrop videogames provide an easy answer, a focal point onto which blame and responsibility can be heaped.” So while the Stuttgart skip remains almost literally empty, it nevertheless overflows with metaphor, a holding pen for scapegoats, real or imagined, to help Germany make sense of the senselessness.
Except that, in the case of Winnenden, there are more relevant scapegoats than Small Soldiers. Tim Kretschmer was the son of a marksman who kept 15 weapons and 4500 bullets of live ammunition in the family home. The gun that was used in the shootings was held in his parent’s bedroom, rather than locked up in a safe. Tim Kretschmer may have played Far Cry, but then, in 2009, would it not be stranger for a 17-year-old boy to not play videogames? In terms of the mix of ingredients that went into informing Kretschmer’s deadly decision, Killerspiele were at most a light seasoning upon layers of sociopathic alienation and unhappy circumstance.
You can read the full article iover at Eurogamer here
Friday night was One Night Left, the chiptune club night organised by award-winning radio show, One Life Left, to mark the almost-end of Nottingham’s GameCity conference.
The show was headlined by Sabrepulse and Syphus, two incredibly lovely and eloquent 8-bit music nerds, who also led an insightful (and terrifying) compositional masterclass earlier in the afternoon.
It was a special night, spent with friends, dancing and having the best of times. After the proper acts finished around midnight, a few of us DJ’d. Here are the songs I played, for those who couldn’t be there.
Our time was cut a little short, so I only played a few of these, and generally shorter mixes that I’d prepared for the night. But here are the full tracks of everything I would have played nevertheless. It’s a mixture of chiptune and original compositions from games. If you don’t like one thing, then don’t panic: perhaps you’ll like the next thing.
Opening with the Rusko remix of the Bionic Commando theme was pretty much a life highlight. Thanks to Mike Nowak for the hott tip. While I’m mentioning Mike, go listen to his chiptune-related dubstep mix. It’s quite brilliant.
Ok, ready up.
Bionic Commando Theme – Rusko Dubstep remix
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TimeLord – No Question?
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Universal Dance – Laugh and Beats
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Baby, baby!! – Masaya Matsuura
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Chop Chop Master Onion’s Rap – Masaya Matsuura
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Supersonic – She
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Snake Eater – Joker
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Gifted – N.A.S.A. (Steve Aoki remix)
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“A mind is not blown, in spite of whatever Hollywood seems to teach, merely by action sequences, things exploding, thrilling planetscapes, wild bursts of speed. 
Keita Takahashi sits alone, six thousand miles from home, in a damp, vacant house set within the grounds of an autumn forest somewhere in the middle of England. He wears a puffer jacket, huddled next to an electric fire for warmth.
Friday night was One Night Left, the chiptune club night organised by award-winning radio show, One Life Left, to mark the almost-end of Nottingham’s GameCity conference. 
