Tag: Jurassic Park

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A Diamond in the Rough: On Japanese Mobile Games

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.

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Telltale’s Engine Was a Telltale Joke and a Liability

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: