posts by jay
jay

Reggie asks who should make Nintendo games

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Your favorite band wants to know who you think should compose their next album. No, that’s too obvious, try this. Your favorite author wants to know who you think should write his next book.

Reggie has asked Kotaku readers who Nintendo should collaborate with next, implying the Metroid Team Ninja project won’t be the last time Nintendo brings in outside help. The problem with calling in third parties is apparently not obvious to everyone, as fans filled forums with names like Blizzard, Team Ico, Square, Treasure and so on.

Mario games aren’t great because of the Mushroom Kingdom and Zelda games aren’t great because of Hyrule. All the themes, plots, artwork and music may add to these series but they are not fundamentally what they are about. No, Mario and Zelda games are great because one of the best developers on the planet spends three years designing each new entry. →  The happiest post on Earth.

Review – Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon

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Underneath every game’s artwork, sound effects and voice acting lies a set of core mechanics. All the extra stuff, the facade if you will, exists to enhance the mechanics and design of a game. I tend to value the facade less than the other half of the dichotomy because there are many examples of bad games with brilliant coats of paint and few if any examples of bad games with amazing design. Even so, the difference a little bit of well mixed paint can make is hard to overestimate.

Ico and Zelda are very similar games with very different facades. The former focuses on giving the play rules context and emotional resonance while the latter indulges in playful variations of its mechanics while mostly ignoring the artistry that sits atop them. →  Read Danger!

March game avalanche

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Looking through the list of recently released and upcoming March titles makes me think about sacrifice. Which games will I skip, which developers do I want to support with full price upfront, and on which days of the week will I eat Ramen? This isn’t a consumer product site like say IGN, who I recently notice house an inordinate number of game previews and features all obviously in an attempt at hyping and selling games, so I rarely discuss upcoming releases. Speaking to a few friends, however, I realized many of the games I am excited about are pretty low profile.

I thought of Pat’s old article on whose responsibility it was that we have heard of a game and then realized that quite frequently, within my small group of friends, it’s my responsibility. →  50 Cent: Readproof

Creativity oozes from every pore of Bioshock 2

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If you’ve been following Bioshock 2 at all you have probably seen the pics of the new Game Informer cover. Following the same logic that created Poochie the Dog (the animal hierarchy goes mouse, cat, dog…), the BS team has created the Big Sister. I could speculate about how creatively bankrupt the design seems but really it’s the least of the problems of Bioshock 2.

As far as I can tell, Bioshock 2 is an admission that games are not art, or at least that Bioshock was not art. Despite the short and underwhelming ending, the setting, atmosphere, plot twists and most importantly, ideology of Bioshock made it an amazing game. Announcing a sequel to a completed story arc indicates that the team is somewhat unaware of why their game was good (or that their publisher gave them clear orders). →  Hey, hey, hey, it’s time to make some crazy reading!

eBay + Japanese Games = Financial Ruin

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I was recently banned from a forum I frequently frequent for a matter I’d rather not discuss in detail (suffice to say playing devil’s advocate on matters of morality can be quite dangerous). After looking through a handful of other gaming forums and being disappointed because the big ones are full of stupid people and the good ones have new posts at a rate of one every three days, I found myself on eBay.

It had been months since I’d won any auctions and years since my brief and costly bidding war addiction. After randomly skimming through pages of games I found the links to my saved sellers. This was a mistake because it led me to yamatoku, purveyor of extremely cheap Japanese retro games. Winning six of his auctions in two weeks and reading through hundreds of listings, I was struck with how many Japanese titles I have never even heard of. →  Katamari Damaread

How should game collections be reviewed?

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If every game ever made were on a single disc, would that compilation deserve a “10” just based on volume? Would it make more sense to average the reviews of all the games and use that as the compilations official review score? Should points be deducted from the score for every game the reviewer already owns? And if this every-game game came out again in five years, should its past availability negate any value it would otherwise offer the consumer?

These are the questions I have been pondering as I look through the reviews for Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection. Many bring up the fact that much of the collection has been released multiple times in multiple formats. Something seems faulty about criticizing the quality of a game on the basis of its distribution. →  Romance of the Three Articles IV: Post of Fire

Review – My Japanese Coach

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I have no idea how to review a language learning game before I’ve learned the language. Stay tuned for my full review of My Japanese Coach sometime in the next seven years. For now, though, I can address some of the valid and not so valid complaints people have had about the game.

The most flagrant problem is Ubisoft published a Japanese game that teaches you the wrong stroke order for some kana and kanji. Writing characters and syllables in the correct stroke order is (I am told) crucial in Japanese and it’s embarrassing that this game doesn’t get them all right. There are under 100 syllable symbols in Japanese and My Japanese Coach teaches at least five incorrectly. I can understand teaching kanji incorrectly, there are thousands of them and they’re complex, but after a few weeks of using an actual textbook, I could write all of the kana correctly. →  Xenoblade Articles X

Now on Virtual Console: My childhood

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This Monday the Virtual Console got its first batch of Commodore 64 titles (in the states). Though I haven’t played the released games, it was a momentous occasion for me because the C64 was home to my first gaming experiences. While the other kids were playing their Nintendos, I was learning run “*” ,8,1 (only with the shortcut of “u” plus the shift key that yielded some bizarre symbol I don’t remember).

The majority of American gamers likely haven’t even touched a Commodore so VC sales will probably be pretty slow. Honestly, I’m not sure they deserve to be brisk – most of the titles I remember were fun at the time but seem archaic and shallow now. Still, I feel a responsibility to present a list of favorites just in case the planets align and Nintendo releases good C64 games and you happen to find yourself with five bucks to burn. →  Densha de Read! Shinkansen

News We Care About Update

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Why Ensemble Closed
Once designer at Ensemble Studios, Bruce Shelley explained what went wrong at the DICE 09 conference. He kept it overly civilized and focused on what they should have done differently internally. Things like working on games in different genres and not expanding too quickly made his list, though he forgot to mention “Don’t be owned by a giant evil corporation.”

It must have taken an abundance of self control to not simply declare Microsoft the sole problem Ensemble faced. The studio created some of the best received and selling strategy games in the industry and sold millions of games. Despite being profitable, they were apparently not profitable enough for Microsoft to keep open. Just when I thought I was beginning to understand economics…

Single Player Games on their Deathbed
David Perry is more famous for saying controversial things than making good games. →  The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Read

An ode to a fallen memory card

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In a spontaneous fit of impatience and retardation, I recently reformatted my GameCube memory card. Tales of Symphonia, which I picked up after not having played in two years, insisted the card was corrupt and needed to be wiped clean first by the GameCube’s internal mechanism, then by being throw into a wall. Instead of thinking it through and realizing I’d just been playing Metroid Prime and it saved fine and fearing I’d lose my 30 hours of Symphonia-ing, I hit “Sure, erase all of my saved games, it’s not like I put any time or effort into them” then practiced my pitching for 15 minutes.

The bad news is it was for naught as I had no clue what I needed to do next in Symphonia. After reading all of the back story (nice feature by the way) and then wandering and sailing and giant monster riding around the map for an hour I gave up knowing it was just as well. →  Michigan: Article from Hell