• 1Oct 09

  Tokyo Game Show 2009 - Lasting Impressions

  Recently, I was lucky enough to win a competition on this site, for which one part of the prize was a new (and totally awesome) Sony Ericsson Satio, and the other part was a trip to Japan, to visit the 2009 Tokyo Game Show. It was an amazing experience, and something that I wouldn't have been able to attend otherwise.

  A part of the deal for getting a free trip was that GameSpot asked me to write a blog about my experiences at, and thoughts about, the game show. Even though there was obviously going to be a language barrier, it was still an incredibly interesting, and engaging event, and you can read about some of the games, and aspects of the show, that grabbed my attention (for better or worse) below.

  I'm now back from Japan, and I've had some time to recuperate, so it's back to the blog. Although there are a lot of things I still want to write about, I wanted to quickly to summarise some of my lasting impressions of the show.

  Although there was obviously going to be a lot that made an impression on me, I think that one of the things which was most apparent to me upon arriving, and which in hindsight I should have been obvious, is that this really is a Japanese show. Although there are a lot of Japanese who can speak some English, and there were certainly a lot of Western booths around, for the most part all the presentations, demos, and signage was in Japanese. I don't mean to sound disingenuous, but when the bulk of games you play are in English, there can be something a little uncanny about finding yourself completely surrounded by games in which the best you can hope for is to grab a few words here and there, or to follow the action on a purely visual level.

  But when I say that the games were Japanese, I don't just mean to convey that they were in another language. A lot of the time what made the games seem stranger or more alien wasn't just the language, but the face that they often seemed to be of a completely different variety, and perhaps developed from an entirely different perspective than that which we're used to playing.

  Even though there are a lot of Japanese games that get released outside of Japan, the number of games that actually get localised and released is never going to be as high as those which don't.

  A big part of this, again, comes back to the language thing. Or more exactly, is a matter of economics brought about by the difference in language. Generally speaking, compared to the cost of translating some of the other media that come out of Japan, such as movies, animation, or comics, the cost of localising a game can be quite high. So, the effort, and amount of sales it can take to re-coop that kind of expenditure often means it just doesn't make business sense to bring a game out for Western release.

  Of course, it's not as though there aren't plenty of manga that won't be translated because the perceived target audience is too small to warrant the effort! But, all things being equal, it's just one of those facts of life that, unless you can speak and read Japanese, there are simply a lot of games you're not going to be able to experience.

  And so, it can be doubly strange seeing games that, from the outside at least, seem to be the interactive equivalent of a shoujo anime. Firstly because the language makes it difficult to follow what's happening, and then again because we're just not used to seeing this genre of game.

  I suppose this is what this trip really made clear to me in a way that previously I had only really been aware of at an intellectual level: that there really are some huge differences between the Western and Eastern markets, and that like everything else, this is going to hold true for games, too. Although there are a lot of shared tastes, and similar aesthetic ideals, the differences in culture and lifestyle between, say, Australia and Japan, are such that these places are inevitably going to produce different people, and in doing so different types of games.

  I think that this was definitely one of the best experiences I took away from the game show. The sheer amount of diversity in the way the Japanese conceive, develop, advertise, and play games means that I really believe it's possible to walk away from TGS having witnessed something which it may simply not be possible to recreate at a more Western-centric show like E3. Even if E3 is packed full of Japanese games, it's something like trying to get the feel for China by taking a walk through China town.

  When it boils down to it, more than any single game, or event, it was this particular sensation which was for me was the most defining, and enjoyable feature of this event. The partially indefinable, but also totally unmistakable Japanese nature of the show, which for me at least, in many ways not only defined the show, but was a reflection of the country itself.

  • Posted Oct 1, 2009 4:41 pm PT
  • Category: Games
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• 28Sep 09

  Shooter

  One of the games I had the pleasure of playing at TGS 2009 was Shooter (Pixel Junk). I'd seen demo reels of this game running previously, so I was already quite keen to give it a go.

  The nice thing about this game is that, even though on the surface of it, it looks like a clever little implementation of a liquid physics engine, underneath the technical bravado there's actually a really fun, well implemented game. In Shooter, you (and potentially somebody else) fly a small ship through a series of underground caverns. The caverns are filled with a mix of lava, and water. Although most of the cavern walls are solid, some of them can be destroyed, which provides a mechanism for moving the lava or water around each level.

  If lava touches water, it turns into destructible stone. If you touch the lava, you die. That's the basic premise, and it doesn't get much more complicated than that. But what is nice is that rather than having these nifty particle physics operating as a backdrop to the game itself, Pixel Junk has managed to make the interaction between the lava, water and stone a core component of the player's interaction. For example, in the short demo that I played, there was a small section where you needed to get water to flood a section filled with lava, so that you could get past without burning to death.

  Another nice thing about this game is that everything seems to work the way you would expect it to. Sure, there are little things, like the water seems to run a little slow on screen if you're observing, but once you're actually playing the game, everything has a really nice, natural feel to it.

  After playing the demo, I came back a little while later and had the pleasure of meeting Dylan Cuthbert, the president of Q-games, and thus owner of Pixel Junk.

  Amongst other things, he mentioned that their bit Generations games (originally for GBA) are going to be coming out in European markets as ArtStyle: DigiDrive for the DSi. This is really good news, as these small, single purpose games are perfectly suited for the downloadable market, and deserve to be made available for the newer portable and the broader market.

  

  Dylan Cuthbert, President of Q-Games

  • Posted Sep 28, 2009 8:57 am PT
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• 28Sep 09

  Red Steel 2

  Apart from gathering that you play as some kind of a ninja cowboy from space, all I could focus on while I watched somebody hack into the playable demo of Red Steel 2 (Ubisoft), was that the protagonist was yelling "Yeah! Get Some!" at a rate of something close to every single millisecond that the game was running.

  And then I got to see the ad campaign for this game, which was an entirely different kind of torture. Similar to the first game, which was also used as a spring board for the Wii, and which showcased some idiot flailing madly around his lounge room, Ubisoft have evidently decided that the best way to advertise Red Steel 2 is to show people just how much of a dick you can look like when you play it. Made worse by hiring the worst kind of actor possible to play the part – the kind who lives in the forest with wolves at pets, and who also has the kind of stubble that you can only get by periodically trimming your beard with one of those special attachments designed specifically to give you a five o'clock shadow.

  Asides from having been written by the people who scripted Duke Nukem, and having an ad campaign that looks as though it was conceived by Gilette, the actual game itself looks pretty cool. Certainly the people who were playing the hands-on demo looked like they were digging it. And, even if you do look like a dick playing it, you're almost guaranteed to look like less of a dick than the guy in the ad, for which you can also be thankful.

  

  So long as you don't wear a Rabbid mask on the back of your head you should be fine

  • Posted Sep 28, 2009 8:24 am PT
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