Shenmue tomfoolery

Posted Wednesday, 7th March 2012 under Soapbox rants
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Shenmue still stands as one of the most hyped games of the last generation, and in my mind is one of the best games to come out of Sega’s stables. That doesn’t mean it’s without its faults – the English dubbing on the localised version of the game swings from acceptable to woeful. These days if I go back and play the game I normally fire it up my Japanese copy of the game – between my mediocre command of the language and having played through the game in English several times, I can normally get through it without any issues.

But as terrible as the dub was, it did give rise to some excellent memes. These are all a bit old hat, but they still make me smile, so I thought I’d share them 🙂

First up is Mega 64’s real-world interpretation of Ryo:

The next two were referred to me by one of the posters on Madman’s forums years back, so I’ve forgotten who the magic individual was. I’m generally not one for prank call entertainment, but I have a special place in my nerd heart for these two:

The best part of these is that it’s given my brother Tank and I more stupid ways to communicate with each other 😀

Now where’s Shenmue 3 Sega? The world needs it! Or at least a delightful bilingual HD remastering of Shenmue 1 and 2 to whet our appetites 😀

Response to Hyper’s Complete History of Racing Games

Posted Wednesday, 8th February 2012 under Soapbox rants
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I want to pre-empt this post with a foreword.

I continue to admire Hyper’s presence in the Australian market – it’s amazing that it continues to hit shelves each month with plenty of great content and coverage of the gaming sector and flies in the face of the downturn being experienced locally and overseas. Even in the wake of US stalwarts, our amazing piece of home-grown gaming journo goodness still comes out each month. Amazing stuff. So this post isn’t meant in any way to take a jab at the magazine, because I have a huge amount of respect and nostalgia-infused love for the publication.

I finished going through the Complete History of Racing Games special in the February 2012 issue (#220) this morning and wanted to write my thoughts on the piece. On the whole, it’s a very nice read – there was great attention paid to the early development of the genre in the arcade and at home, and I really liked the attention given to the home computers of the 80s (especially the C64!). My issues come with a lack of coverage and a bit of bias once things heat up and we hit the mid-90s.

On the arcade side, Virtua Racing was given it’s due, but Daytona was given less attention than Ridge Racer. While the latter’s important as a response to Daytona, the impact Daytona made was enormous as it arguably became the peak of racing games in the arcades, with no title that followed proving as successful. In fact, the success of Daytona was a huge boost to the Model 2 arcade platform Sega used in the mid-90s and saw it become one of the most successful arcade platforms ever, easily putting it in the same realm as the MVS and the Naomi. Namco still did well with Ridge Racer and the System 22 platform, but it is no way comparable to the magic of AM2’s accessible creation.

Another area of contention was the complete disregard to the Saturn. Multiple paragraphs are dedicated to the PSone, and that’s fine – the machine played host to some amazing output from Psygnosis, Polyphony Digital and Namco. But the only mention of the Saturn is comparing Daytona USA to Ridge Racer at launch; while the comparison is apt that the Daytona port looked several shades of rubbish, the game actually plays really well, surprisingly so (especially when played at 60hz). The Saturn also played host to an amazing port of Sega Rally, but going beyond that is a bit of an arguable stretch. Sega Touring Car had a lot of promise, but CSK ruined it with the frame rate issues, and Tantalus’ port of Manx TT didn’t do the machine any favours (though it’s still really cool that an Australian developer got the opportunity to do the port – they also handled the House of the Dead, Wipeout and Wipeout 2097 ports). Daytona USA CCE was highly anticipated, but ultimately failed to deliver in the gameplay stakes (though technically, it looked really nice).

I guess there’s nothing wrong with the amount of space dedicated to the PSone, but it does show things to be a little one-sided. Even Mario Kart 64 rated barely a mention, which I thought was a little odd.

The last issue I wanted to point out was the lack of time dedicated to the Dreamcast or Sega’s arcade movements post-Sega Rally. Model 3-based games such as Daytona USA 2, Scud Racer and Sega Rally 2 were part of the final wave of arcade games where the arcade visuals were unable to be matched at home. While Crazy Taxi earned a mention, it was distinctly offhand – Criterion’s Burnout series arguably owes more than a little inspiration to Crazy Taxi, so it’s a little disappointing when the latter gets a lengthy (and deserved) amount of attention despite the former’s influence and success in the arcade and at home. Also on the DC worthy of discussion are Daytona USA 2001, as it was the first game to almost nail improving on the arcade original’s visuals with almost getting the handling perfect (Daytona HD wins the prize for getting everything perfect) and Le Mans 24 Hours for bringing 24-hour racing in real-time for the DC (plus it was developed by Melbourne House and also looked very pretty). In addition, Bizarre Creations’ Project Gotham Racing is given acknowledgement, but the spiritual predecessor, Metropolis Street Racer on the DC, is given none.

Beyond this though, there’s no mention of OutRun 2/SP/2006, which brought the OutRun franchise back to life in the arcades (powered by the Chihiro board, which closely resembled the Xbox architecture) and also came to home consoles.

Now that I’ve written this little whinge out and have looking it, two things are apparent.

Number one, where I’ve decried Playstation bias in the original article, it’s clearly obvious I’m being just as bad (if not worse) with my bias towards Sega. Thus, my arguments above can be taken as tentative at best if my grand vision for the article was to have the space dedicated to the PSone retracted for Sega ramblings.

Number two, most of the above, when not defending the Saturn, has focused on arcade gaming, which in the late-90s was in serious decline; Napieralski rightly gives the reader a literary cue that discussion was naturally going to start focusing on home platforms instead of covering the last desperate sighs of the arcade sector, so the lack of coverage is definitely acceptable (and to his credit, the Initial D and Maximum Tune series’ were given mention to cap off the discussion).

So, I’ve effectively gone around in circles and have espoused in areas that probably didn’t need to be expanded in the original article. Except for maybe MSR 😉

But then again, this is the internet, where passionate discussion on unnecessarily niche topics are allowed to flourish. Thus, it’s better to look at this as purely a response rather than a criticism of the article (hence the title of the post). Accordingly, with this in mind, props to Napieralski and Hyper for giving some dedicated space covering the history of the genre, as it made for an otherwise great read 🙂

Risk management for the next generation of consoles

Posted Wednesday, 30th November 2011 under Soapbox rants
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With the Wii U hitting the market at some stage in 2012, and with Sony and Microsoft likely to announce succeeding machines at E3 next year (with launch windows around 2013/2014 if the rumour mill is any indication), it’s time to talk risk management. But not boring textbook risk management – fun console risk management.

When I talk about this concept from a console perspective, it’s probably not in a way that most expect. The way I’m approaching the application of this phrase to the gaming arms race is about how to build a console so that it is as risk-adverse as possible, and what the consequences of “bad” decisions are from a managerial perspective.

Let’s take the Wii as the first example. The Wii made Nintendo a lot of money, more money than it was probably expecting. It now makes them less money compared to the machine’s heyday. Nintendo made, from a nerdy perspective, a few errors in judgement that arguably affected the console. First up, the console was region-locked. This seems inconsequential to the average pundit, but consider this – in order to play a game you’ve purchased overseas, you need to mod your console with either a modchip, boot disc or softmod. Thus, instead of just the tinkering masses who want to get Linux on the machine and the pirates, you also have every legitimate gamer who wants the flexibility of importing games, whether the rationale be price, features or release dates. Open the machine up and temptation may come into the equation. Under Australian law, it also adds a degree of legitimacy for console modding – the ACCC is happy to weigh in on the argument and support console mods that allow imports; if said-mod also enables piracy, that’s collateral damage. The legislation was never tested post-PSone, but the principles are more difficult to argue given past precedent.

There’s also the question of global communal resourcing behind the modding effort – in the case of the Wii you have the Linux community, pirates and gamers all clamouring for a solution. If Nintendo had made the machine region-free and allowed a Linux distro from day one, you eliminate a reasonable portion of the white-hat community.

There were also a couple of other errors of judgement – Virtual Console games were always in 50hz for PAL countries. This defies logic, at least in the realm of English-speaking PAL countries where a US version would have been fine. I have outright refused to buy PAL VC games given such anti-consumer attitudes; same goes for PAL PSN by the way. Admittedly I account for 0.01% of the audience, but still – why make a stupid move?

Then there’s Nintendo’s lack of QC on titles and the subsequent neglect of the system by gaming enthusiasts. Yes, we’ll all jump on board the delightful Zelda train now that Skyward Sword’s out, but the emphasis on mass-market profiteering enabled a relatively short-term success for the machine. Attachment rate was low, third parties faced the dual-issues of piracy and poor sales lost amidst a swamp of shovelware and core gamers have generally let the machine gather dust. On the upside, Nintendo profited handsomely from hardware, accessories and licensing on every piece of software sold, but the focus was worringly short-term. The PS3 and XB360 hailed from the same launch window and are still performing in the marketplace due to strong software development and long-term hardware/software development (the former has had to work extra hard to get to its current place). Nintendo’s usual internally-focused attitude was it’s usual double-edged sword – a Nintendo product is made to play games by Nintendo; 3rd parties are welcome to join the ride, but ultimately they play second fiddle to first party titles. It’s no longer the 16-bit era though, and one hopes the attitude will change with the next generation.

Don’t get me wrong, I love our Wii. But a few critical flaws affected the machine. In a sensible world, the Wii U would capitalise on its apparent grab to enamour the core gamer beyond a few mature launch titles. It should also give great BC with Wii software and GCN software; unfortunately, the latter is being ignored (likely a DLC double-dip for Nintendo) and the former will only be played back at SD resolutions. Like the Chewbacca defense, this decision makes no sense. Wii games internally rendered at 1080p look stunning – Dolphin has demonstrated this. Why this isn’t done is irrational – I’d happily pay $5-$10 to buy an enhanced emulation mode off the online store assuming it gave all the nerdy love you’d expect. It’s a bad omen for a company that should be learning from its mistakes, rather than continuing to implement half-arsed measures to bring back in the bread and butter of their fanbase.

As for region-free? Not sure if anyone has discussed it, but I’d suspect not given the also-irrational moves to make DSi and 3DS titles region-locked. In a global economy, you can’t have your cake (utilise a global consumer base to promote your product) and then eat it too whilst kicking the other person in the face (creating artificial and unnecessary delays for release, engage in price-fixing between territories and locking out the option for the consumer to parallel-import titles).

Then there’s the Xbox 360. The predecessor was clearly Microsoft’s trojan horse (though the Dreamcast fanboy within suggests the Dreamcast was Microsoft effectively experimenting with the console market), so the XB360 was MS playing for keeps. Despite enormous effort to court the Japanese industry, the machine still flopped in the Land of the Rising Sun. Not that it mattered in the end – the gaming sector in Japan has effectively imploded and allowed North American development to rule the roost with a minor resurgence in the UK and EU (and a welcome one at that).

Microsoft made a couple of good moves with the XB360 – it looked less of a black brick compared to the preceeding console, had some interesting games with more contributions from Japan (especially on XBLA), didn’t kill BC as part of the console’s hardware revisions and set region-locking as an optional requirement set by the developer. It was also relatively easy to develop for and often had the best version of multiplatform games.

Unfortunately MS also paired the machine with overpriced proprietary HDDs, kept DVD (though this did have speed benefits vs BRD/HDDVD) and have absolutely terrible engineering on the insides that have resulted in the least-reliable console ever built (citation needed).

Region-locking was inconsistent – some titles were good to go, some weren’t… and unfortunately, some key titles were region locked (I’m looking at you Tales of Vesperia!). Oh, and dead DVD-ROMs meant if you tried to DIY a replacement (instead of paying through the nose for MS to do the work for you), you could get banned from XBL. There of course is little chance of MS ever supporting a Linux install, but extending the machine’s media playback abilities would have been a nice step.

With whatever succeeds the XB360, I hope MS keep BC with some options to pretty the machine up, region-locking gets moved to the side in favour of region-free, DVD finally gets moved on and users can change HDDs themselves. Oh, and it would be nice if the hardware was more reliable 😉 Doing so will ease the level of risk generated by the white-hat and grey-hat communities, which means the machine is less likely to be hacked. It also means the consumer is happier, but hey, that’s just a pleasant side-effect of making your machine less of a target 😉

So that brings us to Sony. The PS3 was on the edge of greatness with their machine from a nerd perspective (apologies for the hyperbole) – excellent BRD playback, evolving media playback, DLNA compatibility out the box, standard HDMI and optical audio sockets on the machine, excellent BC, Wifi as standard, region-free for PS3 titles and all content from PSN, Linux installs available from day 1, reasonably reliable hardware and the ability to upgrade HDDs yourself. This is amazing considering Sony’s arrogance coming into this generation as the previous market leader.

However, Sony made a few critical errors. BC was gimped in PAL territories from day one (despite paying an extortionate opening price for the machine), and then completely removed altogether. Media playback was successively updated up until… ~fw 2.45, and then it dropped off the radar. Wireless performance for streaming media has been lacking for a while now – again, following a firmware update a while ago, wireless streaming performance slowed down for some reason. PSN has been poorly utilised for distributing PSone games (and now selected PS2 titles), including the reappearance of poor PAL conversions on PAL PSN. PS2 BC was completely removed from the second major hardware revision (but interestingly is now back as a possible emulation layer with PS2 titles via PSN) and PSone emulation has lacked any kind of enhancements the PS3 is more than capable of.

The Big One, though, was the removal of Linux. Depending on which argument you sit with, this was the tipping point that led the collective hacking communities to proceed with breaking open the PS3. From a risk management perspective, this smacks of trouble – to use a possibly inappropriate analogy, if you go into town on a Friday night, get drunk and pick a fight you shouldn’t be surprised someone will punch you in the nose; it certainly isn’t a legitimate excuse, but partaking in that kind of behaviour certainly lacks a risk-adverse attitude.

Up until that point the PS3 was relatively robust – it wasn’t being affected by piracy in the same way the Wii, and to a lesser extent the XB360, were and broadband penetration meant distributing 25gb+ files wasn’t entirely practical. However, in the wake of removing Linux the community took the gloves off and the platform suffered as a result – both in terms of the platform’s physical integrity but also the security of the company’s entire online framework.

I’m not condoning the behaviour of the hacking community by the way, just pointing out that from a risk management perspective, in hindsight it wasn’t a sensible move.

So, lessons to learn for Sony? Keep the progressive things about the PS3 into the succeeding console – region-free playback, excellent media playback, Linux from day one, user-maintained HDD, standard media sockets (i.e. HDMI).

To the average punter, the likes of Linux support, BC, media playback and region-free gaming probably aren’t high on the list; to the core gamer though, these are important issues. More than that though, fulfilling these requirements will assist in reducing the risk associated with the platform from the hacking community. It certainly demands a very different attitude towards your end-user compared to the approach console manufacturers have traditionally taken.

Whether or not this kind of progressive attitude pays off is anyone’s guess – what’s the ROI for goodwill?

Or perhaps it’s better to phrase the question like this – what do you have to lose if you raise the ire of your consumer-base and all corners of the hacking community?

I guess time will tell.

Daytona USA – rated but not confirmed for XBLA or PSN

Posted Monday, 26th September 2011 under New old games
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I can’t take credit for this – Retro Gaming Australia reports that Daytona USA has a new listing in the OFLC’s database.

There’s no information regarding platform or much else – it’s been rated ‘G’ and Sega Australia filed the request.

It’ll be interesting to see what comes out of it – perfect Model 2 emulation internally running at 1080p with 8-player online multiplayer awesomeness? A combination of the Model 2 original plus the Model 3 successor, all running at 1080p w/online multiplayer? Perhaps a 720p (boo) HD version of the Dreamcast release of Daytona USA 2001? The advantage of the latter is that it looks nice (and would be nicer in 1080p, but previous Dreamcast ports have only been 720p), there’s network infrastructure in the source code IIRC and it has the original tracks plus plenty of extras accumulated from the various subsequent releases.

Assuming it’s a good thing, hopefully we’ll continue to see classic Sega arcade classics released via PSN/XBLA. I’d love a 1080p Sega Rally + Sega Rally 2 release, Sega Touring Car, Scud Racer… and all running at 1080p with online multiplay. And then there’s their fighting franchises – 1080p Virtua Fighter 2, Virtua Fighter 3, Fighting Vipers, Last Bronx… even Sonic The Fighters 😉

A Sega fan can dream, right?

Am I a gaming aesthete?

Posted Monday, 4th July 2011 under Soapbox rants
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Jeremy Parish recently wrote about the gaming aesthete, and the post captured something I’ve been trying to articulate for a while now. For whatever reason, I seem to prefer games with a particular aesthetic quality and loathe titles that go against my irrational sense of preference. Amusingly, a portion of my taste can be summed up in UK:R’s watershed Blue Skies in Gaming campaign – out with the poo-brown, grey, boring colour schemes, and in with colour, life and vibrancy.

No more silly gangs, testosterone, “extreme”/”hardcore” drab colour schemes and other such douchebaggery. The content doesn’t have to be sunshine, lollypops and pixies, but it should be allowed to have colourful vistas and degrees of depth to its aesthetic execution.

The problem is that with the rise and rise of US development in the gaming sector (underpinned by the dramatic fall from grace we’ve seen from Japan in the last 10 years, and the EU in the 5-7 years prior to that), it’s all very vogue and chic to be an (extreme) macho douchebag mirroring something out of a Michael Bay movie (with optional 1-dimensional arse-kicking but well-endowed female sidekick), or drawl like an (extreme) urban gangster or be an (extreme) racing game with unnecessary (but extreme) back story. You then play this on your (e)x(treme)box or your slick black PS3 (with optional extreme metallic blue/red/moose controller to complement the silly Spider-man font), with trophies/achievements to add to your signature on your underground/alternative message board where you compare how awesome you are.

And with a couple of exceptions, it just doesn’t appeal to me. I prefer the classical Japanese or European approach to gaming, which allows colour and not so much testosterone to overrun the landscape. The problem is that both of these communities are not the stalwarts they once were. In the 8-bit micro and 16-bit computer days, I played more games from the EU than I can count – some were stupid bouts of pixellated testosterone, but the underlying mechanics and aesthetics were fresh and interesting. But with the move to larger teams and bigger budgets, the old models failed to adapt to the changing scenery and unfortunately a lot of talent was lost or quelled as part of larger corporate mergers.

Jump across the pond to Japan, and the quality of their arcade and console games in the 80s and 90s were unmatched and arguably the hive of some of the industry’s core creative content. Sega, Nintendo, Namco, Hudson, SNK, Capcom, Konami, Taito, Square, Enix… amazing studios that produced stunning games. But something happened between the DC/PS2/GCN/Xbox and the current generation, and the Japanese sector imploded – larger teams were required to fuel larger budgets and suddenly the shrinking local console market demanded more conservatism in game design. This meant the baby was thrown out with the bath water to accommodate the Western market (which meant the unique “Japaneseness” that made the games so appealing in the first place was often lost), or developers focused on placating niche local audiences with an abundance of moe and fan service (which are fine in moderation, but stifling when they’re pandering). To offset development costs and the changing Japanese market, the situation was further compound with the dramatic shift of development resources to handheld platforms (which I guess is fine if you prefer mobile gaming, but I prefer to play on a console). Thus you have a variety of factors that have essentially quashed Japan’s ability to compete with the West, in particular the US and Canada.

So that leaves me in an unusual position borne entirely from my own particular tastes in gaming, where I have to look a bit further than Japan for my gaming kicks. For the first time in a while I’ve been playing Western-developed games – The Darkness (developed by Starbreeze in Sweden), Mirror’s Edge (DICE, also in Sweden), Enslaved (Ninja Theory, UK) and Batman: Arkham Asylum (Rocksteady, UK)… but what’s interesting is that these have all been developed in the EU (sorry to the UK studios for lumping you in there!), which is a trend I hadn’t consciously realised until thinking about my gaming habits for this generation of consoles. This doesn’t mean I’ve neglected Japan, as I’ve also enjoyed Ninja Gaiden Sigma (Tecmo), Valkyria Chronicles (Sega WOW), Street Fighter 4 (Capcom), Yakuza 3 (Amusement Vision/Sega) and New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Nintendo EAD). What’s interesting looking at this shortlist is that some games contain some of the elements I normally don’t like about current-gen games, but they’ve done so in a way that emphasises the often intangible aesthetics that appeal to me.

In short, my gaming preferences are confused and contradictory at times, but share a commonality that points to the resultant aesthetic which entices me to play the game in question.

It also means I’m more likely to play Wonderboy in Monster World on the Sega Mega Drive than Resistance 3 or GTA4.

I think that last point sums up the entirety of this post quite succinctly. Figures 😛