Dormant SNES stalks convenience stores across Tokyo

I was in a Lawson convenience store near Tamachi the other day when I saw this:

4 years in Japan, and I never noticed these before

A SNES dashboard. Hmm.

It was a part of this beast;

Is anyone else disturbed by this?

Loppi is basically a mini Box office machine. You can buy tickets for concerts, museums, theme parks etc. there. I was buying tickets for the Gibli museum.

A quick internet search turned this up: http://www.nintendo.co.jp/nom/0011/index.html

Seems that this has been around since 2000, with 163 SNES titles available, and Gameboy games too! You ask at the till and pay per 10 minutes. I wonder if they still work? Has anyone out there had any luck? I flipped the power switch, but there was no sign of life. I didn't have time to ask the staff about it. That's my excuse, anyway.

Battlestar Galactica - MUCH better than the original series

That's right. Sticking my foot out there on this one.

Believe it or not, this is sci-fi. In the future, people wear two vests.

It's pretty good. Good enough that I watched all of series 1 (5 DVD's) in one weekend.

As a teenager, I watched StarTrek - The Next Generation almost every day after school. I wasn't a Trekkie - it was just the best thing on TV from 5-6pm.
But I'm not gonna lie to you - it's obvious that I enjoy a bit of escapism. My life is steeped in Games Workshop and video game lore. And traveling is basically escapism too.

But oddly, what makes B.G. great isn't that it's sci-fi. Its visual effects are adequate if unspectacular (though they never look cheesy), and its premise is hardly new (robots go out of control and attempt human genocide).
What makes B.G. great is that it's a human drama. It just happens to be set in space. And dang, it really sucks you in.
The producers really did a great job. They really understood the zeitgeist. Now, I'm gonna talk about the zeitgeist for a bit. Some of you may wish to switch off now.

In this era of "web 2.0", people aren't so easily wowed any more. You can't expect to just stick some futuristic gadget on TV, make it go 'bleep bloop' and then the audience are amazed. We're too wise to all that now.

Last night, Moonraker was on the TV. Somehow, I'm a Roger Moore fan. He made James Bond so camp, so debonair... it was great 80's stuff to watch. But watching it last night, for the first time in yonks... it was quite... stupid. Maybe Austin Powers really helped us all realise how ridiculous it all was. So detached from reality. The best, most memorable scene in the film is the cable-car scene with Jaws. There are no laser guns. No quasi-futuristic clothes. Just two men trying to kill each other in a tense spectacular scenario. It's a great scene.
Now don't go telling me that Sean Connery was the "correct" Bond. There are just as many problems with the smarmy, rotund Scot as any other of the Bonds. But that's a different issue.

If we fast forward to the now... the new Bond... Daniel Craig... I would say that it's the best movie containing James Bond ever . It isn't necessarily the best Bond movie (continue reading and I hope you'll catch my drift), if you consider Bond as a genre unto itself, but, if you just consider it as a film, an artistic, dramatic creation, then it blows the other Bond movies away. Bond movies should always be a product of its era. And, like Battlestar Galactica, Casino Royale is most definitely a product of (and a contributor to) the current zeitgeist.

So, what is the current Zeitgeist? I would say that it contains the basic tenants (there may be more - please enlighten me);

• The characters are human, and therefore susceptible to human weaknesses. We are vulnarable. And you can't just kidnap a girl and then the guy must put down his weapon. It goes much deeper.
• Characters have a reason for their evil actions. They cannot just be de-facto evil. To see why people become terrorists, to see people lie and cheat out of greed and a desire for power... these are human traits, and we want to see them. Think of a Ghibli anime compared to a Disney one. Thinking about the world this way can help us understand the current socio-political climate of our world. It ain't so black and white. We all have the potential to undertake malicious acts. Stories help us understand the motivation that can provoke such acts. That's why there should be no censorship, and no 'taboo' subject matter.
  
• Technology isn't a story element - it's a prop. So, find a suitable, believable prop, use it, and move on with the story. Don't dwell on it. Don't gloat over its omnipotent powers. You will look stupid in 10 years time, I guarantee you. In B.G., much of the technology actually goes backwards from our current time - phones are cluncky and have wires. That's future-proof, right there. They have circumnavigated against any possible future accusations of being outdated - genius.
• When people fight, it hurts. Body's slam against walls, blood flies, scars remain. For a while afterwards, you will be exhausted. Fighting isn't fun. Look at Bond fight. It hurts just to watch. You really believe that a guy like him would fight like that. There are no roundhouse kicks.
• Women can be tough. Men can be sexy. The two are not exclusive.
  

In a nutshell, it's about people. B.G. is basically ER in space. ER must be more than 10 years old now. It was pretty groundbreaking at the time. The notion that Doctors get tired, that Hospitals aren't super white and squeaky clean, that people die and bleed and cry...
B.G. also borrows the camera style from ER. Close-up, shaky hand cams. Faces that fill the entire screen. The B.G.'s commander (The guy in the photo above) has a really rough, pitted skin texture. You watch B.G., and you will see it. This is a tough guy. What a contrast to Captain Picard.

Does all this have any implications for video games? Yeh, of course. Unfortunately, they are pretty harsh ones too. In TV and movies, visual effects are an accompaniment to the actual footage. You analyse where you need CGI, and you make it.
A video game is 100% visual effects - everything has to be realised by an artist. It's a cruel twist that the resource most important to TV and film is also the easiest to aquire - real human actors. Sadly for games, they need actors, humans, too. But they have to create them from the ground up. And humans are the most complicated, detailed of all objects.
With so much focus - and resources - on the visual effects, it's very easy to forget that the goal of a video game isn't to have spectacular, eye-bleeding effects (stand up Perfect Dark Zero - now get out) - but to have great gameplay. With the new generation of consoles, the resources required to produce adequate graphics in high-definition are astounding. I really suspect that many developers will lose sight of the goal.
The second challenge comes from this rejection of form before function. If games aren't played for their graphics, what are they played for? The answer is of course, gameplay. Good ol' mysterious gameplay. Nobody knows what gameplay really is - just like we don't know what a great story is. There is no guaranteed formula. This is why we really need higher education courses that focus on this. Wake up people - games are real, they entertain millions of people, and create millions of jobs (developing, manufacturing, distributing, retailing, press, PR...). The amount of people from varied backgrounds with game-specific skills is cripplingly low. I'm talking about non-techincal skills here. Anyone can learn Maya or 3D studio Max. But how do we learn about level design? Game narrative? Character design, when we have to design the game for every individual player?
Giving people three years to think about things and experiment will make the world of difference. Currently, High-Ed game courses are of a fairly low caliber. This will surely improve over time as the mount of people qualified to teach and the quality of game related literature improves.
Many games are also important for their story and characterization. Half Life has an intriguing, character-led story. Final Fantasy 12 does not. They aren't necessities for a great game, but they sure do help to maintain your interest. Half Life is unique in that there are no cut-scenes. You never once leave the body of your avatar, Gordon Freeman. Sometimes, you walk past a door and you hear a conversation on the other side. This is an example of game designers looking at narrative from a gaming perspective rather than a film one. We are in the game - so please, don't take us out if it. It's all so wrong. In Total Warrior: Spartan, there are occasional cut-scenes where your avatar gets angry, shouts, and generally makes decisions on your behalf. This is a guy that you never really see in-game, as the camera is zoomed out in order to make the game playable (as opposed to Dynasty Warriors, where the camera is much closer - too close in fact, and you can't keep track of your enemies). This actually made me dislike the Spartan character. At the end of the day, perhaps all video game avatars should be mute, like Link, Gordon Freeman and Master Chief. As soon as some deep American voice bellows out of my body, I'm suddenly reminded that I'm in a video game.

Games are starting to get more realistic. More human. They will start to challenge our actions. Deus Ex tried it, and I think more will. When we play a game, we kill people without question. There will be games that challenge this notion. Don't let your kids out of the house, because, you know you don't want kids playing this stuff. That doesn't mean that its wrong - games have an untapped potential to be profound. I can't wait to see it.

It's no longer good enough to make a 'cool' product, market it to death and reap the rewards. In this era, consumers are smart. If something is full of crap, flawed or cynical, then you can bet your board-room-decisions arse that "the web" is gonna talk about it, and your reputation will be shredded mercilessly. In the 90's, in the decade of marketing, Playstation killed Sega's hardware division by appearing to be the 'cooler' product with guerrila advertising in night clubs and festivals. No-one realised that the Dreamcast was stuffed with great exclusive games. Fast forward 12 years, and Sony is getting murdered by bad press surrounding the PSP and PS3. They are essentially using the same marketing tactics - ads that concentrate on the 'spirit' and 'coolness' of the Playstation brand rather than the quality of the product.
In a distant land called the internet, consumers are tearing them apart in forums.
In the meantime, Nintendo releases a new, reasonably priced, innovative product. The TV commercials show people playing the game. If you make a good product, the people in the internet forums will do all the marketing you could ever need.

This is web 2.0. We won't be patronised any longer.

Pleasurable distractions, and gambits

I haven't blogged for several weeks now.
.
.
It's not that I don't have anything to write about.
It's been a very busy period. There are lots of things that I have intended to write about, but have now faded from memory.
It's just that, whenever I've had any free time, whenever Rumi isn't around, I play Final Fantasy XII.
This is the first Final Fantasy game that I've played in six years - since FFVI. The series has doubled now, so I guessed it was time for a revisit.

The reason that I haven't played any FF games in so long is quite understandable. Firstly, the games are utterly long. When you start playing, you know that you will end up parting ways with some 60+ hours of your life. That's a lot of time for an adult. Luckily, I certainly have time these days. I've put on an excellent display of restraint in the past to avoid these games, but now was a good time to cave in - media reportings suggested that this was the best FF since VII, which, having never owned the original Playstation, I kind of missed out on. Game of the year in EDGE too.



What makes this game so compelling? Sure, level grinding is kind of fun, but it's much less of a chore than in other RPG's. One part of this is the beautiful visuals and emotive music - I could spend hours in the Ozmore plains - but FFXII also has several areas of true innovation, which is refreshing to see from a franchise which is in it's twelfth installment.
The most noticeable is in the new combat system - gone are the frustrating random battles, replaced by a more fluid natural live system, which is also much better to look at.
But the innovation that has truly impressed me are the 'licensing' and 'gambit' systems. The developers have basically taken some standard RPG aspects... and then they make you pay for them! Yes, you actually have to use your in-game money to buy AI commands for your team members! Whilst it may sound like a cynical move, it is actually a move of genius that empowers the gamer - instead of just waiting for your character to level up until you can use a new weapon, you are now in control. You choose the direction of your characters development. And as for AI, in previous RPG's, there were always three styles - you could either painstakingly enter every individual command for each command like in existing FF games, memorize a large range of keyboard shortcuts like in Neverwinter Nights, or you could allow the CPU to control them for you like in Secret of Mana. In FFXII, by making you pay for the 'gambits' (basically AI commands), you are getting a gradual trickle, which stops you from getting flooded. The level of control and involvement is phenomenal.
Switching to the new live-action style, I imagine that the developers were faced with a difficult design decision. How do you keep the action flowing without either overloading the player, or grinding the game to a crawl with constant menu interaction? The answer, of course, is AI. The developers made a brave decision - to give the common gamer the ability to make low-level programming decisions (eg, IF hit_points<30% THEN cast cure). Making the players invest in the gambits, by making them slowly available throughout the game, and presenting them in a way that is both fun and easy to understand... this, I believe is game design innovation at its best. Finding an entertaining solution to a boring/complicated problem. The beauty of FFXII is that you may not be realising it, but you are actually just programming a database. It's Microsoft Access with glorious, shining bells. Hopefully they can tinker it a little for the next FF - personally, I think that the Gambits are too cheap, and the ones that you really need aren't available soon enough (MP<7p, please, I'm sick of casting charge after every battle!). They should make these available but make them real expensive - make players realise that this will be as valuable as, say, the next sword.
My main criticism of the game is that, except for Balthier, the characters are... boring as hell. And practically indistinguishable from each other. I'm pretty tired of playing brave boys in action games. Give me a real man!!

Anyway, I've wasted enough time typing. I have another 30 hours or so of FFXII to go.
Purest joy.

Getting ready for Wii

This week, I got paid quite a bit more than I was expecting by a couple of my agencies, just two days before the release of the Nintendo Wii... a sign? Of course it is! I came to Japan to experience things like this, so why not :-P

Anyways. Started off pretty well, got to Yodobashi Akihabara at 7:30pm, and saw a sign that says that the queue starts at 8pm. There weren't too many people around, apart from some obligatory homeless dudes out to make a quick buck:



There didn't seem to be any of the madness and humming throngs that accompanied the PS3 launch, for various valid reasons (lower retail price, more units available). So, I went and, sniff, parted company with my little-used Gamecube, for a paltry 15 pounds... oh well... with Gamecube playback functionality built into the Wii, the console is pretty much obsolete, so I was happy to get anything for it.

So, I went for dinner with gaming friends Tim and Rudy, bog standard family-restaurant fare, in the ubiquitous restaurant 'Gusto', our typical haunt. The waiter was even more patronising than usual, repeating our order to us 3 times, and... get this... speaking to us in CASUAL Japanese! The horror! Damn his unorthodoxy!

We returned to the Yodobashi store at about 10:30 to get in line... but were greeted with silence, and this sign:


Egads! Why, cruel fate, must you cheat me of my most cherished Wii?
Instead of having people line up all night, they gave out tickets to those in line (much like the ones you get when you go to the deli counter in the supermarket), and told everyone to go home. Then you could just get some sleep and come back at 7am, no fuss, no pushing and screaming like at the PS3 launch.
Our grand plan for the day was to go to the Premiere of Casino Royale in the glorious Roppongi hills cinema, and then line up and get a Wii. Things were not quite going to plan.

Luckily, the story has a happy ending. AKihabara is just 15 minutes walk from Ueno, where there is also a Yodobashi store, albeit much smaller. So I got a ticket! Lucky! It actually worked out quite well - Ueno is closer to my home, and there were hundreds less people in line, meaning that we won't have to wait as long to get the goods come morning...
Happy days.


Well, needless to say, the rest of the day was pent in child-like glee. Nothing quite beats the ceremonial unwrapping of a new console (for the record, the Wii is immaculately parceled).

A taste of Wii

Sorry, I couldn't resist the Wii gag... I'm sure that I'm not the only one...

Well, anyhows, me and the Rumster went down to the National Exposition centre in Chiba last weekend for Nintendo's 'Experience Wii' weekend. And, I must say, we had lots of fun. Lots.
It was good to see that, compared to the Tokyo Game Show, it was well lit, and the crowd was much more diverse (less geeks, more families).
Is this the start of genuine family gaming? That's clearly the aim of Wii Sports, and I challenge anyone to play Wii golf and not have fun. Even the serious salaryman above is smiling(almost)! Me, I can't wait to play Trauma Centre (a surgery simulator).