No western developed video game has taken over Japanese minds like UNDERTALE. The game has sold well on all platforms here. The cute and unique character designs are loved by many people. I saw some UNDERTALE goods in a crane machine recently.
The next step for Toby Fox’s throwback RPG is to take over the hearts and minds of non-video game players while turning his project into a series with DELTARUNE. Today JAGMO announced that they would be having an UNDERTALE Orchestra Concert Tour across Japan.
Starting September 14th, the tour will take place in six cities across Japan. Starting in Osaka on the 14th, it will then go to Hiroshima, Aichi, Fukuoka, Kumamoto, and finish off in Tokyo.
There will be three different programs so, for those who are compelled to collect them all, save your money. Starting today you can purchase tickets for the Osaka and Hiroshima shows. Tickets will be between 7,900 yen and 9,800 yen.
Use the following link to get tickets: http://w.pia.jp/t/jagmo/
Categories
Keep Dreamin’ Quantic Dreams
I got my first look at Quantic Dream’s new noir cyberpunk game Detroit: Become Human at this year’s E3. The first thing that caught my eye, like all Quantic Dream games, was how gorgeous everything in the game looks. But, more so than any other game by this studio, Detroit: Become Human has a story that is full tilt centered at me as a player. While I’m not sure if this game is full-on cyberpunk, the game looks like it takes place in a hyper-connected future Detroit that will most likely be run by the same mega-corporation who creates these androids.
I have played every Quantic Dream game and, while each one is sublime in the visuals department, they usually all have some kind of issue with plot or playability. I enjoyed Heavy Rain but, while the story had a good noir style feel to it, it felt like more than any other Quantic Dream game that it needed to be played multiple times to get the most out of the story and I wasn’t interested in playing it again after my first time. Beyond: Two Souls had some really tense moments but I thought the overall plot of the game was stupid. It always seemed like Beyond was a game that, when the studio heard the original pitch, the team members should have pipped up and asked a lot more questions about how the mechanics of soul and human are going to keep the player interested for 20-some hours.
The story of each game has interesting moments but David Cage, the lead writer on all of these games, probably wants to be a movie director and he doesn’t realize that keeping an audience’s attention for 20 plus hours is much more difficult than doing so for two hours. Hideo Kojima, another game producer who wants more than anything to be in Hollywood, at least has been working in the medium long enough to understand that longer games and franchises need to be paced in a very different way than movies.
As for now, we know that the game will feature multiple playable characters so the two characters that we know of right now, Kara and Connor, might die during a playthrough and that might be the end of their part in the story. The developers have talked about how the game will not have a “game over” screen.
Kara is a newly created android who escaped the production line and is trying to figure out her place in the world. The world of Detroit is a magnification of what it is like today; a city that has largely died because of it’s reliance on the very machines that it once created. Androids do everything in this new world and humans and androids alike are trying to figure out how we fit into this new world.
Connor, on the other side of the fight, is an android working to try and recapture those androids who have gone rouge. We see in the E3 demo that Connor tells the fugitive android that it is their job to serve. I am sure that Kara and Connor will meet at some point during the game or at least in some timeline.
The stories of robots/androids and their creators have captivated audiences for decades. It is a real issue that people need to start thinking about but I am worried about Mr. Cage’s ability to address this topic in this very fractured storytelling method that he has been curating over the last two decades in France.
I am excited to play Detroit: Become Human but I have also been excited about each and every one of Quantic Dream’s games. Much like, Peter Molyneux, I think David Cage tends to over-sell what he can actually accomplish.
Categories
PlayStation Awards 2017
I’ve been making my way through old Famitsu magazines that I’ve bought and I’m going to start translating some of the articles here.
There hasn’t been a “Double Platinum Prize” since 2011. At this year’s PlayStation Awards the gorgeous “Double Platinum Prize” and “Platinum Prize” will be awarded. Let’s see what kind of event took place.
November 30 – Shinagawa, Tokyo – At this year’s PlayStation Awards, many video game creators and people involved with the video game industry came together for this event. The PlayStation debuted in 1994 and since the following year there has been a PlayStation Awards ceremony in Japan. This is the 23rd year for this show. It’s been established that at the end of the year there will be an awards show. As always, Sony Interactive Entertainment Japan Asia wants to recognize the biggest hits for PlayStation in the region but also show off the fantastic line-up of PlayStation 4 games. The 2011 “Quadruple Platinum Prize” for Monster Hunter Portable 3rd which has become the “Double Platinum Prize” has finally returned to the stage. This year 24 games have been awarded 34 different prizes.
The Double Platinum Prize (over 2 million sold) winner was Minecraft. Paddy Burns CEO of 4J Studios and Noma Yutaka senior producer at Microsoft Japan were on hand to accept.
The Platinum Prize (over 1 million sold) winners were Grand Theft Auto V, Final Fantasy XV, and Dragon Quest XI: Echos of an Elusive Age. Rockstar games general manager of Rockstar international Neil Stephen showed up for GTAV. Director of Square-Enix Tabata Hajime and producer at Square-Enix Hashimoto Shinji accepted for Final Fantasy XV. Game designer and scenario writer Hori Yuji, Square-Enix director Uchigawa Takeshi, and Square-Enix producer Okamoto Hokuto received the award for Dragon Quest XI.
The Gold Prize (over 500 thousand sold) winners were Uncharted Collection, Rainbow Six: Siege, FIFA 17, Battlefield 1, Call of Duty: Infinite Warefare, Yakuza 6, Resident Evil 7, Nioh, Nier:Automata, Horizon Zero Dawn, and FIFA 18
The PlayStation Network Awards (which are the top three sellers between Oct. 1, 2016 and Sept. 30, 2017) winners were Phantasy Star Online 2, Rainbow Six: Siege, and FIFA 17.
The PlayStation VR prize (top three sellers between the same dates above) were Resident Evil 7, Farpoint, and Summer Lesson: Allison Snow.
The Indie(s) and Developer prize (top three sellers between the same dates above) Fushigi no Gensokyo TOD Reloaded, 3on3 FreeStyle, and UNDERTALE.
The Users’ Choice prizes went to Battlefield 1, Final Fantasy XV, Resident Evil 7, Nioh, Nier:Automata, Horizon Zero Dawn, Persona 5, Ys 8: Lacrimosa of DANA, Dragon Quest XI, and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy
Categories
Unionize the World
I have been thinking a lot about unions recently. My wife and I recently joined a union in Japan to support us in a fight against our company who has refused to apply for “child-care” benefits for us. The union has had our backs while in talks with our company and it has been very helpful for us especially since we should be focusing on raising our child and working our jobs instead of trying to get benefits from the government that are rightfully guaranteed to us.
I come from a union family. Both my mother and father fought for the unionization of the their respective univerisities and they have both reaped the benefits of those fights.
Unions have been demonized in America for too long. We all know management hates the idea of unions because the organization of workers, weilding power to pressure them to fulfill the demands of the workers doesn’t usually fall in line with fulfilling the demands of the shareholders. Some workers also don’t like unions because they view them as taking hard earned money from their pockets. Others take advantage of unions by reaping the rewards of having a unions but not paying their dues to the the people who have done all the work for better pay and benefits that they and their families enjoy.
In games, since the beginning of the industry we have heard stories of developers working insane hours for the love of their job. In the days of Atari, we have documented a lot of first hand accounts of people who toiled away, empowered by cocaine and coffee to be able to finish projects for some arbitrary date assigned by their higher-ups.
Stories of Sega developers who slept at work for weeks or months to push out games were common place during the 8, 16, and 32 bit eras of gaming. While things have gotten somewhat better, Japan is still struggling with it’s overworking problem.
In Japan, just as in America, unions have lost a lot of power and because of that workers have been taken advantage of because of the loss of their power.
We have exponentially increasing inequality between the rich and the poor which is a product of the demonization of unions in the 80’s and 90‘s and an increased focus on shareholder profits above all else that helped bring down the US economy earlier this century. The middle-class is shrinking and video-game developers would very much qualify as middle-class.
Japan once had powerful teachers unions but, in Japanese culture, public workers are very much supposed to work for the public welfare. Things like strikes and fighting for more pay and better benefits (which would be paid for by taxpayers) goes against the directive to work for the public’s welfare. So, recently Japanese teachers have seen some of the worst pay-decreases and benefit cuts ever. They are expected to work long hours on weekends, unable to spend time with their own families, because they are spending time with the future generations of Japanese who will continue to kick this can down the road without change because that is the Japanese way.
I agree with Patrick Kelpek in his Waypoint article. The only way to stop this is to unionize the planet. Across the world, workers should stand up, forgo work, and fight for the hours, pay, and benefits that they think they are worth. Through a shared cause they should empower their brothers while forcing their employers to rethink shareholder focused business strategies. Workers need to demand a larger piece of the profit pie. They should sit down with their employers and try to find a place where their demands and the companies bottom line can meet to make everyone happy.
People need to be more selfish and more generous at the same time. They need to think about themselves and their families, while also thinking about their fellow workers and their familes.
In brotherhood we can do anything.
Categories
I Never Played…Bully
I have been playing a lot of mobile games recently. I live in Japan and I have an hour commute to and from work everyday. I have been trying to put that time to use by delving into the mobile game scene. I’ve never really been a person who plays a lot of phone games. I love mobile games, don’t get me wrong. I have have a Game Boy since the original debuted and I have had a Nintendo portable in my bag ever since that time but, when phones started to flex their own mobile game muscles, I never really bought in. At first it was the cost associated with playing sub-par arcade ports. I didn’t have an iPhone when that marketplace took off so I missed out on a lot of the games that game out during that heyday. I have since gone back to play quite a few of them but since then free-to-play mobile games have taken over the zeitgeist and I have played quite a few of those offerings and found them to be infuriatingly similar.
My first foray into modern mobile games was the Jurassic Park builder. I kept with that one for a few months. I then moved to Pocket Planes. When I was living in Kumamoto, I remember staying in Japan one Christmas with my friend Andrew. We went out drinking nearly every night and we woke up and played Pocket Planes until the sun went down and that was basically it. I have played others. I played the Simpson’s one for a bit. I played a Final Fantasy one recently. Most recently, I played a Crazy Taxi game for a few months. Now, I am done. I would rather spend my time reading news or playing other games that have an end goal or a reason to play besides just clicking.
I haven’t given up on mobile games. I just don’t want anything to do with free-to-play stuff most of the time; especially clickers.
I speak Japanese so I’ve been trying to find games in the Japanese store to play while learning some new words. The Japanese store isn’t much better than the American app store, most of the games are terrible. Recently I’ve been playing a battle royale game called Knives Out in the West, in Japan it’s called Koyakodou. It isn’t bad. A lot of the boys at my school play it which is the reason why I downloaded it and gave it a try. After tens of hours I decided that it isn’t any better than Player Unknown: Battlegrounds on mobile and neither of those games are as good Fortnite on mobile. 
One game I did find and really enjoyed recently is a game called Odin Crown. Odin Crown is a simple MOBA. MOBAs are still a new thing for the Japanese audience which is why I gravitated towards this game. I’ve been playing a lot of Arena of Valor, which is a traditional MOBA. (It is fantastic!) Odin Crown set up the rules of playing MOBAs for a Japanese audience. I enjoyed going through their tutorial and found it easy to understand. The tutorial was presented in a single player environment which helped the player adapt to the concepts of playing a MOBA. Once I played through the tutorial, I started playing online nearly everyday on the train to school.
The art style of Odin Crown was cute and it had the free-to-play elements that make those games addictive but it had the MOBA that actually challenged the player to fight strategically and work as a team with the other players on their team.
The problem that I found, and I find this a lot with Japanese Mobile games, is that the services will shut down quicker than a Japanese cicada’s life-span. Odin Crown released earlier this year and it was shut down by July. It was available for less than six months. Now, I’m sure that this decision was made because it didn’t have the player base to support it’s continued development but that doesn’t take away the feeling that I got burned. I didn’t spend any money on the game but I did invest time in it. Time that I enjoyed.
There are tons of games out there, in Japan and all over the world, that have healthy lifespans but most of those games are trash. When a game like Odin Crown, that tries something new while also implementing the current free-to-play model and tries to bring the gospel of MOBAs to Japan, comes out and it fails, it sucks that there is nothing that I could have done to make it last. It was never localized into English so the player market was already small. It was trying to bring something new to an audience that should be all in but it didn’t quite capture the attention of that market.
I guess it’s just kind of lonely being one of the few people who played and enjoyed this game. It’s lonely being one of the only Westerners who enjoyed it as well. It’s demoralizing to think that I will need to wade back into the void to try and find another diamond in the rough.
Categories
Games Nothing Like the Sport
There has been a couple of games that have been released recently that have taken the mantle of being unrealistic sports games.
These aren’t sports simulators, they are games that use a sport that is familiar to most people and make a new kind of game that does something unique while still having a basis in the original source material.
The first title that comes to mind is Golf Story for the Switch. Golf Story is a role-playing adventure game that uses some elements of golf in its adventure game gameplay. The character hits a ball at elements or holes of the world map to complete objectives and open up more of the world. This isn’t too far from traditional RPG story-telling progression.
The next title that comes to mind is Adult Swim’s Pool Panic that was announced this past week at GDC. Pool Panic is touted as “The world’s least realistic pool simulator game” by its developers. The game has the player using pool elements to complete single player or multiplayer levels. The game looks like a puzzle game with pool elements. I think Pool Panic looks amazing and I can’t wait to play the hell out of it. Adult Swim humor with a fun pool style game.
I’m sure there are others that I could add to this article but I can’t think of any at the moment.
I would like to see more developers utilize sports in a non-traditional way like these two games above. In the same way that Zach Gage, turned the solitaire rules and chess rules on their heads and made some interesting variations on those games.
It seems like Switch is a hotbed for indie game development. It might have something to due with the fact that sales are strong and the business model of the eShop isn’t based on free games, unlike the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. I hope that these games do well for themselves and it encouages developers to do some more exploration in the area.
Allegra Frank wrote a Polygon piece about Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s latest attempt to make “trance vibration” a thing. He originally tried to bring the device to the masses with Rez’s original release on the PS2 but that didn’t fare well.
Lumines Remastered was featured at the Nintendo Nindies, their indie games booth at this year’s GDC.
The game Is the same great game that we played on the PSP and, for some of us, bought again on the Xbox 360 marketplace while that was still in it’s infancy. Even though we’ve purchased this game twice, the Switch version might be the most exciting version because of the console’s ability to do HD rumble with the Joy-Cons. Mizuguchi tasked Resonair, the developer, to use the console’s HD rumble to add “trance vibration” to their port of the game so the player can feel the game while playing it.
The player feels the game by strapping two Joy-Cons to their legs while controlling the game with another set. I hope that in the final version of the game the player will be able to strap their Joy-Cons to their legs like they want but play with a Pro Controller instead of having to buy another set of more expensive Joy-Cons.
It was Frank’s description of using the controllers that really put me over the top when it came to my desire to play this game.
It’s like going to a well-lit club where you’re the only one there, and yeah, you’re playing a video game, and that’s kind of weird, but for some reason nothing about this is pitiful — it’s a supremely chill-ass solo hang.
Nintendo definitely threw some weight behind it’s console this week with their Nindies presentation. Lumines is a game that, even though I’ve purchased it twice, I am very much looking forward to buying a third time.
For years, Telltale Games has been doing god’s work by making fun and engaging episodic stories for video game consoles, computers, cell phones, and any thing else that could run their proprietary engine. At times it seemed as though Telltale games were being ported to nearly as many devices as Doom. It says a lot that a proprietary engine would end up being malleable enough to make so many leaps to so many different consoles and across generations. But, that same engine has become a liability for the company as we saw recently when Telltale laid off a quarter of its workforce.
I have been playing Telltale games since the Sam & Max games were announced. Telltale Games preached to the masses that they were going to bring about the long desired model of episodic gaming and many were excited about the prospect of a video game that could be played like TV is consumed; in small compact bites. Episodic gaming is an idea that had been a glint in the eyes of the video game industry for years but had never really been done in a way that worked (see Half-Life and SiN Episodes).
Sam & Max finally made that dream come true for one developer. Telltale become the one company that you could count on to actually finish their episodic stories and, for those of us who had been burnt by other developers on our episodic dreams, it was a welcome form of storytelling.
Back to the Future was the first Telltale game that I played to completion near to its actual release. (I am not a person who plays games day-and-date.) I enjoyed the game immensely but I did see some issues with the engine during my play though on the PS3 at the time. While BttF had some issues, it didn’t stop me from seeing the good points of the episodic way of storytelling in games.
Back to the Future and Jurassic Park were two games that showed us how dated the Telltale engine had become and these games came out before Telltale’s massively popular The Walking Dead was berthed into the gaming conscience.
The Walking Dead came out at a perfect time for Telltale. The comic and the TV series had both become cultural touchstones and the game’s focus on player choice and accessibility made the game easy for almost any fan of the series to get into.
It was around this time that Telltale had become the darling of licensed video games within the industry. They obtained licenses for many beloved franchises; they were chosen as “the” studio to put out a cheap, assessable games for nearly any premier property. It’s almost as if Telltale games had taken over for the cheap licensed game…game of the late 90’s and early 2000’s. But, many reviewers and fans alike had started to see the cracks in the engine.
Patrick Klepek, for me one of the ultimate Telltale reviewers, has bemoaned the Telltale engine for quite a while now while still enjoying parts of nearly all of their games. He wrote an article on Waypoint back in April concerning the issues he saw with the engine while he was playing through Guardians of the Galaxy.
Telltale’s history of hobbled tech goes back a ways, too. A source told me that even as the company was riding the success of The Walking Dead, their engine didn’t have a physics system. (Telltale has their own proprietary technology, it doesn’t use Unity, Unreal, or something else off the shelf.) If a designer came up with a scene requiring a ball to roll across the floor, or a book to fall off a shelf, it had to done by hand, an enormous time and resource commitment.
It’s my understanding that little has changed since, but Telltale didn’t respond to my request for comment.
Patrick was one of the early reviewers of The Walking Dead that was excited for the series and the innovative style of storytelling that Telltale was implementing with The Walking Dead series and how it has changed the way their games tell a story.
Telltale itself announced that Batman: The Telltale Series would feature a heavily updated version of its engine but even this doesn’t seem to have solved the issues for Telltale because as the Gamasutra article that announced the layoff informed,
Additionally, the company says the restructuring will be used as a way to shift the technology it uses for its own internal projects, saying that it aims to move over “to more proven technologies that will fast-track innovation in its core products.”
It is good that the company is moving on to new and “more proven technologies” but it is always sad when so many people lose their jobs. If Telltale had implemented these changes earlier could they have saved some of these jobs? Will these changes make for better more easily produced games? Who knows.
I’m glad Telltale Games is finally moving on from their old engine which provided some pretty good licensed titles and even some interesting original content. Hopefully they can get back to putting out quality stories without the technology getting in the way.
You can watch my play through of The Walking Dead: Season One Episode Three and Four here:
Waypoint had an interview with Lorne Lanning late last year. I read the interview at the time but after reading it again the things that Lorne said really resonated with me. His talk about us being the powerless in a society where corporations and greed are the most virtuous qualities for people. It’s good to see that some game creators are thinking about non-traditional heroes; the Everyman.
I liked Abe’s Odyssey when I was young. I’m not going to lie and say that I ever beat it. It was a difficult game and my OCD to complete everything in a game was really challenged by that game because I always wanted to collect all the Mukodons.
It’s nice to see a game producer call out games like Call of Duty and other war games where the main objective is to just murder people without much thought in the world. Of course those games have a story mode and sometimes that story mode challenges us to think but at the end of the day those games are really selling war which America doesn’t really need any help selling.
I feel compelled to give the Abe’s Odyssey franchise another go. It would be a shame to only listen to the message of the game and not experience it myself.
Categories
Nostalgia For Sale
After purchasing a few games on the GOG sale last week, Steam has started up its Summer Sale to entice me into buying a few more games that I probably won’t ever play past tonight. Buying games for me is an addiction and I might need help but, for now, I think I’m just happy that I can catch up with some old favorites and catch up on some games that I have never played before.
I ended up buying Crysis and Star Wars: Dark Forces last week during the GOG sale. Dark Forces got me nostalgic for old Quake engine games so this week I ended up buying Quake 1 and Quake 2 from Steam. I was never much of a PC gamer because my dad, a photographer, always bought Macs and they weren’t meant for gaming, or at least that is what he always told me. I also picked up Abzu and Half-Life 1 during the Steam sale.
I just played about an hour of Quake 1 and it is still fun to be in those old environments. The gameplay is pretty solid and it doesn’t look terrible on my gaming rig. I tried to bump up the frame rate but it didn’t work so I started searching around the Steam forums for tips and it surprised me that people are still really into Quake. People mod that game to make it look presentable on newer PCs, some even have taken to making old mods work on new machines, and I got stuck on one topic reading about how to make the official soundtrack from Nine Inch Nails work on modern machines that don’t use CD audio.
Suffice it to say, Quake is still very much loved by people and that makes me really happy as a person who loves games. I am heartened by the fact that so many people out there are doing the work to make games like this playable for chumps like me who have no desire to put in the leg work. I wish companies would set aside funds to keep their old projects alive or, at least, allow the community to do so without fear of litigious consequences.
Even if I don’t ever play my Steam version of Quake again, I’m happy that I was transported back to junior high once more. I’m happy that I found a copy of the soundtrack and put that in for 20 minutes. I’m glad that the internet is still open enough for me to be able to recreate my past for a few minutes. It seems like with the way things are going things might not always be this easy.