Hot game development studio

Not as in their title roadmap. As in HAWT.

Just saw this pic of Kojima up on Kotaku. Since when do game studios look like giant pop band ensembles? Where's my shiny silver suit!?

Book Review: Arcade Mania

Over vacation, I finished Brian Ashcraft's little gem on the Japanese arcade scene, Arcade Mania: The Turbo-charged World of Japan's Game Centers.

It's a great little book, despite a few flaws.

On the plus side, Brian gives a perspective on the less well travelled (at least by gaijin) corners of the Japanese arcade scene. Not just the story behind the well known hits from Miyamoto & Suzuki, but the story behind arcade Mahjong, the history & culture behind the sticker-picture machine craze, and more.

In addition, he makes it infinitely more colorful and readable by making it a story about people. Many western gamers have heard of Fatal1ty or other FPS players at the top of their game. In Arcade Mania, Brian introduces us to characters like Yuka Nakajima, queen of the mechanical claw games, whose prize-snatching prowess has netted her 3500 of her favorite stuffed animal and a role a consultant and celeb with the machines' manufacturers. He also introduces us to a pro Mahjong (real and video) player, a retired 2D fighter champ in his 20's, and to some figures from the Doujin software scene in Japan (think indie bands selling casettes from a car trunk, only it's game developers and it's schleping home-created boxes in Akihabara). All of this underscores just how broad a spectrum gaming covers in Japan and how differently it traverses Japanese culture compared to that of the US.

There are also some well researched bits of history behind the technical progression of sticker-booth machines, the history of companies like Sega and others, as well as the influences between genres of arcade machines.

I have two complaints about the book. Neither of which should stop you from purchasing it if the above paragraphs seem up your alley.

First, it felt like some of the latter chapters, while they were ok, weren't nearly as well researched as some of the earlier chapters, and didn't really tap the same kind of cultural vein as the other ones seemed to. In the retro gaming chapter, for example, he mentions G-Front, an Akihabara store that carries old arcade cabinet PCBs and other parts, and profiles one of the employees. He doesn't though, explain whether this is the only one of it's kind, or one of a thousand. How widespread is this retro-gaming trend? [A few years ago, Doug Church dragged me through Super Potato and a handful of other places looking for an old cartridge version of one of his games, so I'd seen that there's apparently a fair number of such stores].

The second complaint is that I really would have liked to have seen Brian wrap up with a chapter speculating on the future of Japanese arcades and arcade games. Instead the book wraps with an interesting chapter on video-game/card-game hybrids, and then leaves us hanging. Given his level of knowledge, he's in a better position than most to give us a hint or two of what might lie in the future. Then again, perhaps he's seen enough of the wacky Japanese video game scene to know that the future holds things more bizarre than he's likely to dream up.

In any case, these are minor flaws. The book is a good read for anyone interested in the Japanese game business and arcade scene, as well as games in general. Go pick it up.

Another big game, another set of reviews questioned

Games journos are calling attention to themselves again and questioning the value of game reviews that are rushed to print in order to scoop the competition.

We saw a rash of this conversation around the GTA4 release. As part of that, it was implied that the game's publisher further egged it on by incenting higher review scores by restricting allocation of pre-release copies of the game, etc.

This time around, it's reviews of Little Big Planet. The games servers were down for a while, so arguably the reviewers were reviewing the game without looking at some of it's most important features.

Kotaku discusses the topic here, once again showing that the Brians are capable of seeing the big picture & implications.

[Kotaku's serious side aside, am I the only one that thinks that their renaming Epic's Cliffy B to "Dude Huge" is one of the funniest things on the intertubes?]

Please stop pouring viagra in the fanboys' mountain dew!

I'm torn.

While I find the provocative pix over on this Kotaku post as, err, interesting as the next fellow, I'm also frustrated by the fuel this throws on the embers of the Jade Raymond fire.

The games industry & culture is still rife with a lot of sexism. It's a factor in attracting more of the fairer gender to the business, which is a factor in making games that appeal to them, etc.

[Of course, there's a difference with the Jade Raymond thing in that Jade did nothing to fan the flames so to speak, and Grace Kim arguably is inviting some of the commentary, or at least playing to the stereotype. Another difference of course is that Ms Kim was in PR, and we all know PR people are hired for their looks anyway. Ha! I kid! I kid!]

Joystiq v Kotaku

I have both Kotaku and Joystiq on the blogroll. The seem to both tackle the same type of content (humorous take on game industry news and game culture), and seem to cover most of the same news. So I guess they are competitors of sorts.

I'm not sure who beats who to the punch more often, but these days, does it matter when a 'scoop' is a lead of hours or minutes?

Lately, I've been frequenting Kotaku more. On the one hand I feel they 'chase the headline' a little more (I should come up with some hard examples to back this up later. For now call it an impression I'm left with); but on the other hand, I'm really digging their sense of humor.

So it was Kotaku up by a point for that, but today I was out running some errands and had some time to kill so I brought up both sites on my phone and found that Joystiq was very mobile-friendly formatted, while Kotaku was not. Perhaps just on windows mobile (which I'm running)? Maybe others are seeing the same?

Anyhow, score one for Joystiq, tieing it up.

I was surprised by this, give that of Kotaku's numerous Brians, at least one lives in Japan, where they likes dem lil'phones.

"we posted said email... and the internet imploded"

...Kotaku, on their posting an email from Sony's PR group, blacklisting them due to posting/commenting on rumors, and the subsequent fallout.

Sigh. Where to begin?

This post sums up the story from Kotaku's side. In short, Kotaku posted on a rumor of what may be in Phil Harrison's GDC keynote. Sony's PR freaked out, Kotaku stood their ground (way to go Brian C) and posted Sony's reaction to boot, and then the Internet imploded.

Presumably, at this point Howard Stringer got a call from Al Gore saying "leggo my Internet", and Sony backed off and apologized. The Internet is back up, and the various Brians and such at Kotaku can attend Sony's GDC functions and eat expensive puff pastries while getting dirty looks from PR guys in striped shirts.

OK, kids, what have we learned?

• Refusing to comment on rumor is moderately effective. It's neutral. Reacting to rumor this way is essentially the equivalent of posting a rehearsal of the keynote on GooTube. If I didn't feel confident it was true before, I sure do now.
• The internets & the press, *especially* the blogging press, love a good scandal. It's way bigger story than whatever your keynote is going to contain, and customers aren't going to like it.
• People at a big company can get so wound up about self-importance that things get out of perspective. The keynote will still go fine, and even if you yourself leaked what was going to be in the keynote, people would still show up to see it. Perhaps more so. Don't kid yourself. I personally doubt the value of 'the reveal' in this case. I think the keynote would get 10x coverage if they put out a press release that was 7 words long: "avatars, acheivements, more. Show up and see"

Now, PR fustercluck aside, the rumored Sony offering of 'Gamerscore + achievements + Mii's + Habbo Hotel' sounds pretty compelling. I'm looking forward to seeing it... and competing against it.

As my friend Casey once put it... "Now the dancing turns German".