It's a mad world

It’s always good, at least for the ego, to have one’s opinions confirmed, or at least agreed with, by other parties. Let’s face it, I’ve made some stonking howlers on this blog over the years, but the growing trend of Japanese developers swallowing their pride and admitting the way Japanese development works is in no way competitive with that in the West mirrors my own, by now possibly tiresome, claims to the same.

This time two reports follow this rising tide of disenchantment. One is an interview with Platinum Games’ Atsushi Inaba, producer of the upcoming Madworld, as well as Okami and Viewtiful Joe. Though Madworld is not a game I am interested in, both Okami and Viewtiful Joe are astounding games with daring visual styles, so hearing him say things as

“I think that western developers are superior to those in Japan overall”

is somewhat of a shock. But he is, of course, right. Reading the rest of his interview here, it is obvious the man has his head screwed onto his shoulders. He talks of globalising the game market, the importance of IP and the fact Japanese developers need to get their act together to compete with the West. These are, by now, fairly common sense issues, but for Japan, always resistant to change and taking responsibilities, having this discussed out in the open is a positive sign that people realise there is a problem, which, in turn, is the first step to change and improvement.

The second news item comes from Square-Enix president Youichi Wada, a man whose open candour I am really beginning to respect. Earlier this month he explained the delay of Dragon Quest IX, and chalked it up to being caught off-guard by the number of bugs, apologising for the arrogance of it all. Pointing to the way debugging (QA testing, in Japanese development parlance) worked under the current system meant too many “stubborn” bugs slipped through the net. Indeed, I have found from my own experiences that no testing is done until certain parts of the team are finished with their tasks and are then moved on to bug checking. At this point it usually becomes a race between the coders trying to finish the game and fighting a sudden rising tide of bugs. As Mr. Wada explains in his comments, it might be better to test new features to some extent as and when they are being implemented, and not to just hack the whole thing together and simply fix some issues as they crop up, which is usually not the case.

As I previously wrote, and with Mr. Inaba’s own works to back it up, Japanese developers do do some things right, especially in areas of visual direction and exploring weird nooks and crannies of game design, but general development practices are now too old-fashioned and apparently uncompetitive. No longer can throwing more developers at a problem and requiring them to work weekends and nights fix every scheduling issue, and I, for one, am glad some heavy hitters in this industry are coming to terms with this and actively seeking to make changes.

Despite the reporting of such seemingly negative quotes about the Japanese development community I’d like to remind my readers that this is generally a positive thing. However much you may like Japanese games, they are facing difficulties here, and not just because of the global economic meltdown. Companies have been merging for survival for a while now, with several more to do so on the horizon, with only a few of them looking strong enough to survive; specifically, those few are mostly the ones that have committed to change and a global market. If you want to continue playing Japanese games and enjoy their cookie quirkiness, change is absolutely required, and acceptance is the first step.

Only in Japan

As I, and many more Japanese developers and publishers, lament the falling behind of Japanese games, now much harder to ignore, it behooves us to remember that Japan is not doomed; it does do certain things right and allows for games that no Western publisher, even in these indie-courting times would probably ever greenlight. Exhibit A: Noby Noby Boy.

If you haven’t played this Playstation Network exclusive yet, well, um, nothing that can be said about it would make any sense. Even watching the trailers and movies on-line can’t quite convey the utter insanity this product enjoys. Imagine a designer, possibly delirious from lack of sleep or maybe even riding the Cake horse, just throws up some ideas for the Hell of it with nobody to tap him on the shoulder to say “Excuse me, this is just ridiculous and insane, let’s not do this”; imagine also graphics that are colourful and cute but also sort of smell like 1st year Game College graduate's experimental tomfoolery. Imagine a game with no direction, challenges, goals. You are now only part-way to imagining Noby Noby Boy. Seriously, just play it for a while and enjoy – that’s really all you can do with it. Like me, you probably won’t spend weeks and weeks on this, but for $5 it’s hardly worth fretting over. At that price it easily outlasts a movie rental or purchase, so just go ahead and give it a try. Your brain will thank you for it.

Noby Noby Boy is a toy, in the purest sense of the word. We could only call it a game because it is played on a games console, but that’s about it. There are some trophies that, provided you cheat on the internet and find out what they are for, could provide some goals for you to aim at, but generally, the only function this game has is to occupy you and make you waste some time, time spent giggling, being confused, laughing, more being confused, being confounded, and possibly more giggling. If I were forced to describe the game, I mean toy, which I’d hate to do, it’d be something like: you control an extendable worm-like character that can fool about in a scene, eat stuff, poop stuff and let characters ride on his back. There is some meta-game (whatever that means) about growing long and having the Girl character grow long with you in order to reach the moon or something, but generally, it’s about faffing about.

And it’s great that such titles, alongside the gorgeous “Flower”, also on the Playstation Network, are being made. Noby Noby Boy is obviously several degrees more insane than Flower, which is simply beautiful and relaxing, but both offer a gaming experience that is quite unexpected. And if these games prove to be a success, which I not only hope they do but somehow think they will, it will show that there is a market for non-gamey games. It certainly shows Japan has an ace up its sleeve; technically it may be behind, but when it comes to mad ideas, the possibility to explore them and release them commercially, they still seems to have the upper hand.

Falling out

When it comes to video games I am a man-child who knows what he likes. I’m not interested in shooters, I’m not interested in dystopian future settings, I hate RPGs, I don’t care one jot for gore and gibs, realistic characters bore me, open world environments with little to do but travel across them are tedious. I like simple, colourful games, with fun or cute characters, some challenge but mostly just rote activity, and general glucose happiness. So why in the world am I so addicted to Fallout 3, a game which goes against every gaming sensibility I thought I had?

This is not the fist time Bethesda has made me a traitor to my own desires. I have arguably spent more time on Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion than any other game in recent memory, even though I hate your usual orcs and elves malarkey. At the time I thought it was merely because it reminded me of what I saw in my mind’s eye when playing Ultima back in those long forgotten days of my youth, such as they were. Oblivion’s pretty environments were a dream become reality, though a decade or two too late. And here they do it again, giving me a desolate post-apocalyptic wasteland for my semi-realistic character to traipse through in a tedious, repetitive grind. And I’m loving every second of it.

The sense of utter devastation as I travel through the wasteland that was Washington DC, the underground shelters, vaults, dotted around in between ruined monuments and ramshackle dwellings, the burnt out buildings that hint at a past life, burned books and furniture everywhere, the old-fashioned technology that helps me unlock doors, the rebels that scour the lands for Nuka-cola bottle caps, though slightly depressing, in a ponderous way, never before have I spent so much time exploring and surviving a believable world, each new area bringing both the joy of discovery and a sense of futility, both uplifting and depressing at once.

Combat too has grabbed me to an extent I had not anticipated; not playing it as a shooter, but each time opening up V.A.T.S. and carefully aiming my rifle at specific body parts to disable them, a system I haven’t seen executed so well since Origin’s Knights of Legend. And having a rabid dog jump at me, shooting its head off with a shotgun, and seeing its headless body fly past me carried by its initial momentum, or separating a mercenary’s head clean off his torso with a single sniper shot, may be gory as Hell, indeed much gorier than I want from my games, but is immensely satisfying. Part of this is due to the slow-motion sound and the echo my gun makes as the boom bounces around this empty landscape, and the physics applied to these dead ragdolls make the experience so visceral and demanding and somewhat exhausting, I truly get the sense I’m a survivor, protecting myself for the sake of living, rather than rampaging like a buffed-out roid-rage space marine.

Another reason I am spending so much of my time in this world has probably something to do with its achievable trophies (as I am playing this on a Playstation 3). Too many games out there still have ridiculous trophy demands; spend the entire game hopping on one foot, or beat every single person in the world in an online battle within 4 hours. Fallout 3, however, has trophies designed to make you explore the wastelands, do those cool side missions you’d otherwise ignore, and collect those rare items you otherwise wouldn’t have bothered with. Sure, two bobbleheads are one-off opportunities never to be reclaimed should you miss them, a design decision I loathe with a passion. This is exactly why Bioshock never got a deeper play-through; miss a few audio dairies and you’re boned, as well as those ridiculous “play the game on the highest difficulty setting without dying” trophies no sane man with things to do would attempt. Fallout 3 rewards you with trophies for doing things that actually make the game play experience better, which is exactly how it should be. I wish designers would pay a lot more attention to the heightened experiences well-designed trophies can offer.

The question I couldn’t escape while playing this game, though, is the obvious: would this game ever sell in Japan? The answer is obviously “no”, it certainly wouldn’t. Aside from the fact the gameplay is very “foreign”, ie. not suited to your average Japanese gamer, there is also that elephant in the room: the bomb. Part of the appeal is the what-if question of what would happen, more or less, if an atomic bomb dropped on America. Japan, of course, has the answer already, though Hiroshima and Nagasaki were never plagued by super mutants and feral ghouls, as far as we know. But so much in the game surrounds the nuclear attack, from the village called Megaton to the Nuka-cola plant, that it is almost a joke. Now don’t get me wrong, I think your average liberal lefty foreigner like myself is probably far more concerned about the sensibilities of selling such a game in Japan than our average Japanese youth. Don’t forget their own proud creation, Godzilla, rampaging and destroying whole cities to the delight of the local audiences. No, the Japanese like their fantasy global or national destruction, and few younger Japanese would probably care too much about nuclear attacks forming the background of a video game; a few psychopaths aside, the difference between reality and fantasy is well understood here.

Still, one can’t help but think: Fallout 3 paints a bleak picture of humanity’s survival and corrupt governments in a barren desolate landscape filled with destruction, death and radiation. Hiroshima and Nagasaki aside, your average Japanese gamer isn’t looking for such an experience from their entertainment, I shouldn’t wonder.

And though parts of the game are rough, buggy and badly acted, Fallout 3 is already a high-point in my gaming year and I can’t wait to see what Bethesda comes out with next. Whatever it is, and however much I’ll hate it on paper, I’m sure I’ll buy it, play it and love it. Damn that confounding developer!

Make or Break

Ask any developer what they think of their marketing department and you’ll be guaranteed a flood of expletives and death threats. The common knowledge dictates that marketing departments have a disproportionate and destructive say in the design of your product; stories of interesting ideas being shot down, due to the uncertainty of their success in an unproven market, or numerous me-too design changes based on today’s best-selling competitors are the standard. Indeed，it would seem a lot of games are designed entirely to the marketing department’s wishes, so that they have a known entity to sell, rather than the onerous task of actually trying to market something new and potentially exciting. These stories are obviously vastly exaggerated, though I’m sure some have a kernel of truth to them, but it is certain that most developers view their marketing departments with hatred and scorn. Japan, thankfully, seems a different story, with sales and marketing brought in when the project is presentable, so they can learn what it is they have to sell; the way marketing is supposed to work. Either way, and however much we’d like to ignore it, marketing is possibly the most important aspect of your success. The designers may think it’s their bold new ideas, the artists their pretty pictures, the coders their bleeding edge technology and the producers their sexy, moody fashion shoots for the popular media, but all those mean nothing without the proper marketing behind it.

The crux of that last statement is, of course, proper marketing. And as an up and coming, God-willing, new independent venture, it’s something that has occupied our minds to a large extent. It has not been a direct influence on our business plan, but it is obviously something that needs to be addressed, because without it we might as well not bother.

Of the various marketing strategies, the media overkill is not something many can afford. It’d be nice to have our titles splattered across huge billboards, aired during the Superbowl and tied in with a MacDonald’s Happy Meal, but unless I travel back in time and invest heavily in Google, it’s unlikely to ever happen.

Then there is the “all publicity is good publicity” tactic, of which I am no great admirer. Abhorrent marketing campaigns like these are plenty in our industry, thinking particularly of the late Acclaim’s horrendously puerile “name your baby Turok” and “all speeding tickets paid for by us” scandals, but would include, in my book, the pushing of spokespeople like the rather obvious female pro-gaming groups, the hiring of porn stars and the disastrously sad Jade Raymond fallout. Yes, such tactics get your name splashed around, but bring with it a decent amount of loathing and bashing, not to mention nasty personal attacks that can really hurt both the person and the product. To this day John Romero has failed utterly to make me his bitch.

This interesting interview with independent developer Cliff Harris pretty much seems to hit the nail on the head.

“…if you sell games, and you don’t know which pages on your website have the lowest bounce rates, if you don’t know what the average CPC is for your ads and do A/B testing to increase the CTR…. and much more importantly, if you have no idea WTF I’m talking about, then you are quite simply losing sales to people like me, who study this stuff :D.”

Marketing is part fine art but mostly a matter of hard figure crunching. As Mr. Harris points out it’s no use spending a certain amount of money on advertising and hoping that’ll do the trick. Constant vigilance, adjusting your marketing according to short-term results and basically, spending a large amount of time and not an inconsiderable percentage of your profits on it would appear the minimum requirement, and is therefore a very important aspect of any independent venture but one that many forget about.

Our industry is a young one, and filled with gusto. Too many people still believe it’s the ideas that count, or that pouring your heart and soul into a project will result in a quality product that will sell itself. And though a passion for the job seems indispensable, it means nothing if people don’t know about it. And though it is something I have a deep personal interest in, our necessary focus on future marketing and other business strategies does distract from actual development. Starting a new business requires participants to wear many hats, but all these tasks compete with each other for time and attention, and with only so many hours in the day it’s often difficult to find a balance.

Don’t despair, though, I know more about marketing than I’ve let on. This blog is a terrible example, with badly placed GoogleAds, resulting in disastrous CTRs, equally badly placed adverts for my CafePress store, which in itself is in dire need of updating, and a readership that has been entirely built up by word of mouth. Luckily, the blog is a hobby, something for myself to satisfy my Muse, and readership, though very welcome, was always somewhat of a side issue. For a business however these sorts of things need to be ironed out and perfected. Every single dollar, or Yen rather, and every minute of time spent on marketing must be worthwhile. In the short term that is a matter of experimenting and learning from those who have gone before us, like Mr. Harris, but in the long-term it’s a constant struggle with results, CTRs, page hits, pick up rates, metrics, time, effort and money. Otherwise we might have to fall back on plan B: make a game so insensitive and abhorrent, that it will be covered on Fox News and the Daily Mail and get our names out there, and possibly land us with a jihad.
I’d prefer proper marketing, though.

Up the hill backwards

“Vacuum created by the arrival of freedom,” warbled David Bowie, “and the possibilities it seems to offer.” For all my hypocritical moaning about overtime and the drop in productivity that invariably accompanies it, I found myself to be my own worst manager. Our little indie venture is going extremely well, which is massively exciting and energising, but makes it almost impossible to switch off. Recently I have been feeling a little peaky, walking around in an aching haze, not quite realising why, until it struck me I end up working a good 10 or more hours a day, with only a lunch break some days.

I have tried to force myself to relax on weekends, with limited success. I switch on the PC in the mornings, check my mail, read the blogs and news, and end up sneakily drawn into work. Several hours later I realise it’s past lunchtime, at which point I’ll shower and leave the house for a breather, all the while thinking hard of what I could and should be doing in that time. After lunch it’s back to the PC, to work until supper, continuing afterwards until well into the evening. This weekend I tried to relax and play some games, to little avail, and found myself behind my desk again. The workload is enormous, yet fun and exciting, and not being busy on it feels wrong. I really have to think of a better way, but in these early stages of the venture I feel too guilty and, frankly, impatient to not kill myself over it.

Beard growth has been continuing apace, if slightly disappointingly. My cheeks refuse to foster anything more than a few pubes, whereas my moustache is getting ahead of my chinbeard, making it look slightly Village People. I’ll be off to the local Donki tomorrow to try and find a cheap beard comb to tease the growth along. At this pace I won’t look at home in the 19th century until the end of the year, bah humbug!

I have also mastered a useless but highly honed new skill. Over supper we often watch the cable television Mystery Channel, a fine collection of old films and good old British serials, such as Morse, Poirot and whatnot. However, for some inadequately explained reason not all programmes are broadcast bilingually, often featuring only the Japanese dubbed audio and believe me, Poirot in Japanese loses a lot in translation. I am now an expert on figuring out if a programme is in Japanese or English before even a word is spoken, thanks to, what I now hatefully call, “the Japanese groan”. For some reason, Japanese actors, and voice-actors, always overact physical discomfort. As most mystery shows start with a murder of some kind, the first audio usually revolves around groaning, and so horrendously bad and vaguely sexual is the Japanese voice-actor’s interpretation I can identify one at a hundred yards in bad light; short sharp exclamations and plenty of them, interspersed with audible gulps and intakes of breath. “Ugghh…ahhh..(gulp) …uhhhhmmmggg…(gulp again) Gggggg.” Terrible. Why this particular phenomenon might be remains a mystery to me; possibly a cultural thing about not showing emotions whenever possible, and so your average Japanese not being fully aware what actual exclamations of pain and discomfort sound like. I haven’t a clue, but each time I hear one of those groans my irritatometer shoots up and kills any potential enjoyment I might have received from watching a Japanese Belgian detective being massively clever.

Another annoyance is the lack of decent audio to keep myself occupied through these long working days. As a commuter I had more than enough podcasts to carry me through my trip, using the BBC iPlayer radio during the day to catch up on the wireless. These days, however, I don’t seem to find enough audio to fill an entire week. I would request from my readers any decent podcasts that I can try. Personal favourites like “The Bugle”, “Collings and Herrin”, “Perfect 10”, “Answer Me This” and things like “Smodcast” offer only tiny titbits once a week. “Filmspotting”, “Skeptics’ Guide”, “Fresh Air”, “This American Life” and “Keith and the Girl” help fill the gap but I am in no way close to filling my 10 hour a day quota. I’ll gladly receive any tips for recommended listening through the comments to this post. In grateful return I’ll give you this free bit of advice: do not listen to “Stop Podcasting Yourself” when in public because guffawing openly causes people to stare and avoid you.

Overtime, schmovertime

Stories about Japan’s “work ethic” are as legendary as they are, sadly, true. Late hours and weekends are extremely common, very much to the detriment of productivity and health. It doesn’t quite matter how late you turn up for work, but if you leave before the witching hour people will tut and glare askance. If Friday afternoon you get an email saying weekend work is required, mandatory, whether your own work schedule needs it or not, and regardless of any plans you may have made, you will show up. There are ways around this, but they require determination and some amount of gamesmanship. Foreigners wanting to work in Japan can try this tried and tested method and be part of the solution rather than exacerbate the problem that blind adherence to the Way Things Are Done Round Here seems to bring about.

Requirements:
Valuable working experience
A good working attitude (during working hours)
A friendly and helpful manner
A disarmingly witty way of pointing out other people’s mistakes
A continuous repeated reassertion of how things are done “back home”
Foreign mettle
Patience
Confidence

Step 1:
Do as the Romans. When you first start your job you’ll be under a probationary contract. At this time you have little choice but to do as your colleagues. Work late, but maybe not hard, and if that is difficult for you, just come in late in the mornings. The important part is to be seen to be at the office until late and make sure you do your work properly. Wow them with how efficiently and quickly you get things done, simply by not sleeping at your desk during the day or wasting time reading manga.

Step 2
Settle. Once you pass your probationary period it will be much harder for them to get rid of you, especially if you manage to get a seishain full-time contract. Now the game begins.

Step 3
Train your colleagues. Start coming in earlier and earlier over the course of a few weeks. At the same time leave a little earlier and earlier too. The important thing is to always be at your desk when people start coming into work. You want the reputation of always being the first in. Make sure that during coffee or cigarette breaks you slip into the conversation how early you arrived. As there is never anybody there to check the truth of your claims you may exaggerate a little, but don’t push it. Any time before 9 a.m. is enough to blow the mind of most Japanese developers.

Step 4
Make sure your work is always done on time and to spec, such as there is. It’s much easier to get away with leaving “early” (meaning “on time” but earlier than anyone else) if your work for the day is done and dusted. Avoid having your work approved before you leave though, because there is no such thing as approval. Any time you show your work there will be change requests, whether justified or not. And any change request will have to be implemented NOW, regardless whether that particular task still has several months on the calendar. If a producer or director asks you to change something the implied timeline for that request is always “right now, before you even dare going home”. So check in your work, send an email to your lead and skedaddle. Alternatively, switch off, put on your coat, sling you bag over your shoulder and on your way out tell your lead the work is checked in. Never stay around long enough for feedback!

Step 5
Start making timekeeping an issue. Make sure you have plans after work, real or imagined; Japanese classes are a good one they can’t ignore. Whenever it looks like overtime is going to be creeping up on you, mention your plans. “Oh, I have to leave at 6.30 tonight, I have Japanese classes.” You are leaving “early” not because you’re foreign and lazy but because you have a life outside of work. Trust me, the assumption is you won’t have, so you have to make sure to let them know you actually do. When you’re in a meeting or being talked to by a director and leaving time is approaching, start getting fidgety, look at your watch or the wall clock obviously and nervously. When they get the hint and let you go, rush out as if it’s going out of fashion. They’ll start feeling conscious about having kept you up and hopefully even a little guilty.

Step 6
Make overtime the exception. Whenever you stay later than usual, make sure people know it’s a rare case. Over coffee sigh deeply, look at your watch and say something like “Oh, it’s already 7 p.m. Heh, late!”

Step 7
During this time it is vitally important that you’re a valued colleague. During the day always be courteous and friendly with your leads and colleagues. Always jump to the task at hand and do it properly and on time. Make sure they feel they can ask you to do anything and you’ll happily comply, just don’t ask late in the day. However, and this is the difficult part, while keeping this charming and approachable attitude, be sure to make a point of avoiding blame for mistakes. If a planner drastically changes spec or a director demands some arbitrary change that triples he workload without altering the schedule, you need to communicate you’ll do you best, but if that is what they want, and if they are sure, you can implement their changes, just not tonight. If asked why a particular task hasn’t been finished yet, apologise and say it was but their changes required a lot of reworking. Never blame people outright but always imply these kinds of things are their doing, not yours.

Step 8
Become uppity. Once you’ve established you’re a punctilious and punctual worker, driven yet strict, and a value to your company, you can let slip the Westerner. The idea of work-for-hire is still a little strange in Japan, where they favour the parchment signed in blood. Take contract issues extremely seriously. Unlike Japanese employers, don’t just sign whatever or agree to things you don’t fully understand. Ask for explanations, changes, let them know you are under contract with them and that this is a business arrangement. Once they know how seriously you take these matters, you can often get away from arbitrary overtime by simply reiterating contractual agreements. “Nah, I’m not staying late. My work doesn’t require it and my contract states I work for 8 hours a day.” Authority is scary to many Japanese, and with a reputation for strict contractual adherence they’ll often allow you to get away with this.

This technique will take some time, several months usually, but it does work as I’ve used it successfully several times. It certainly helped there weren’t many foreigners at the places I’ve worked and that I could play this game with the “weird foreigner” card, though as there is strength in numbers, the more people refuse arbitrary overtime the better and fellow foreigners are most likely to agree with your attitudes. That said, being the living example of how things can be done differently I did find several of my more daring colleagues following in my footsteps, which was immensely gratifying.

Another danger is that if your director doesn’t like you much you can be passed over for promotion or pay rises. Quality of your work isn’t as important as being seen to stay late. This is why it is so important to be likable and helpful during work hours, and to occasionally get drunk with your colleagues. You are not a bastard except when it comes to timekeeping. That said, I have enjoyed pay rises and a decent promotion within one company despite refusing to do any overtime whatsoever, so it can be done as long as your work is good enough. Sadly, you do actually need to work hard and be good at what you do; simply wanting to avoid work at all isn’t going to cut it.

Alternatively, anonymously contact the Labour Standards Office and have the weight of Japanese law fine your company and force a rigid working hours system.

VC or not VC…

That is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind so suffer the slings and arrows of creative freedoms or to take up arms with a business partner who might oppose and end them. The dirty subject of filthy lucre is one any independent must face. The question whether or not to try and find venture capital is one I have not yet found a satisfactory answer to.

The case for
I am not as arrogant as to believe it’s all about the creativity. Game development is a business and though I have some experience in that area, a knowledgeable partner from the field of business can most definitely be a very strong asset, if not requirement, even.
Having some money to fund us will relieve a lot of stress from the early stages of development. We could focus on what we need to do without worrying so much about the short-term cash issues.
Though we have a pretty strong focus, a lot of the work we are doing between us right now could be sped up tremendously by hiring one or two more experienced people. Having some office space and much needed new hardware would be really helpful too.
Preparing for venture capital means having to work out a business plan and solidify your approaches. Just doing this is helpful, if even for your own sense, so it’s something I’m working on now. If investment was never an option, it’s little but massively important things like these that could slip under the radar as we focused on development alone.

The case against
We are currently building up something with our blood, sweat and tears. Why would we hand over a chunk of that to someone simply because they have a chequebook? If we manage to work it all out without investment, everything we build will belong to us, so any value we create is one for us alone to enjoy.
Finding an investor with the right mindset is as important as it is difficult. Can we find someone who shares our softly, softly, easy, squeezy approach? The goal for investors is, after all, to get a return and a profit as soon as possible, and not so much to focus on long term growth and stability. Getting the wrong kind of business-minded person in too soon can lead us down the usual path of rapid growth, over-achievement, lacklustre product and eventual bankruptcy; that is, after all, the norm these days. We’re not in it for the riches, but simply to finally do the work the way we want to and feel ought to. We want to create a stable, profitable system where we are comfortable, not so much to create a mega-corporation so we can buy private jets (though that would be nice).
Game development is perceived as a risky business; invest tons, hope for a rare mega-hit and retire on the profits. I personally don’t think it needs to be this way. A more conservative, realistic approach to development could form a very secure, stable company with decent profits, if maybe not Croesus-level riches. We all know, however, that the world economy is a little peaky these days, and investors may not know what they want, if they want to invest at all. The blurb “invest in us; you won’t get mega-rich but you won’t get poor either!” isn’t exactly one that eases the purse-strings.
Being based in Japan may or may not work in our favour. I doubt very much we could entice any Japanese investors because, quite frankly, we are dirty foreigners. Obviously we’d either escape the country with all the investment money stowed away in burlap sacks with a dollar sign on them, or we’d squander it all on Japanese women and drugs. Foreign investors looking at Japan might have different concerns and priorities. To be honest, I have no idea if it is even possible to entice foreign money to such a venture in such an inscrutable country.

There are alternatives, of course, like personal loans and continued freelance work for extra coin. The problem with the former is that I’m personally liable and, as stated previously, a dirty foreigner. The problem with the latter is that it distracts me from what I really want to focus my attention on 24/7. I haven’t figured it all out yet, but in the meantime I’m going to pretend I’m seriously looking for investment; that way I force myself to write a solid business plan, work out business strategies and approaches and get realistic – something that cannot be a bad thing, even if I end up staying self-funded, which is honestly something I’d prefer.

But more, much more than this…

Being an independent developer is a little daunting as it gives you the freedom you’ve always craved but also the responsibility you never had. And being determined to make this work I’ve made some decisions on approaches that I feel couldn’t be done within the rigid structure of a larger studio, let alone a Japanese one. If it will all work out nicely and provide me with a stable income remains to be seen, but I have no desire to make the same mistakes I so often see in the industry; mistakes I feel that are responsible for many lackluster games and the annual Christmas company bankruptcy season. I have been very lucky to be working with someone who is, by and large, on the very same page as I am regarding many of the issues discussed below, and indeed on paper it all sounds good and dandy. The real challenge is to stick with it and make it work…

Tools, tools, tools
Somehow it is impossible to convince a studio head or director that time and money spent in advance of development can and will lead to significant savings later on. The feeling is still very much “if I am spending money now, I want something tangible for it NOW”, hence my very stressful experience with industry tools so far. How often have substandard tools slowed down the workflow tremendously? How much time have I wasted re-exporting or fixing perfectly serviceable art because something minor and foreseeable changed in the tool? Let me count the months. I have also seen work on sequels that could have been done in half the time they eventually took if only proper systems and tools were put in place during or, preferably before, the development of the previous titles.
For this reason our first project is proceeding slowly, infuriatingly slow, in fact, but for all the right reasons. By creating a toolset and pipeline that actually makes the flow of work easy, quick and comfortable future development not only on this title but next ones too will go a lot smoother and quicker. Getting a proper tool up and running, though, is no easy task and is taking a good deal of time, time, however, I think we’ll be making up for in the future.

Ambition in different areas
One major reason for the bad tools in big studio development is because each project has to be pushing some envelope, raise the bar or invent new techniques because somehow producers think that is important. Add more bloom, attach normalmaps to every surface, up the polycount on everything, add unique one-off elements in each level, etc., all the things that publishers want, regardless of the fact these more often than not don’t make the game any better. So tools are always changing drastically and can never settle, mature and be turned into something usable. Ambition is a good thing, but is best spent in other areas, like art direction, polishing, usability, playability and that all elusive fun.

Data driven
Listen to Tim Moss’s GDC speech of a few years back regarding the development of God of War. It’s eye opening, if, in retrospect, rather obvious. Data driven systems allow level design to be done by level designers, animation by the animators, etc. So far, and again, especially in Japan, each little aspect of development required at some point some programmer interaction. I make a small change in the UI, for example, I want to be able to see it and tweak it in-game, rather than request a programmer to do that for me. Tim Moss’s speech also talks about their connection between Maya and the engine, with changes exported back to and fro. It sounds, to me at least, wonderful. Using tools or scripting each development discipline should be able to do his or her own work.

Pander to the people, not my ego
There is a lot of ego in our industry; a lot of well-informed people who have their own opinions. Often this leads to interesting and creative results…but not always a success. All too often the customer is forgotten during development in favour of the designs and desires of a few planners or directors. Especially in Japan things like playtesting and market research are quite rare. As an indie it is too easy to become isolated and myopic regarding your own project and thus it is more important than ever to include as many potential customer-types to playtest and give feedback as often as possible. If people don’t like my game, I don’t get money, and I won’t be able to afford booze.

Rigid structures and trust
Even though I am taking on a lot of different roles for this project, I can’t do everything. Luckily I have found someone on the same page as I who can do all the things I can’t (and more). One thing I have always liked in the Japanese development system is the fact a single person stands at the top making all the decisions. What I didn’t like was the inability for these people to delegate. Even areas they had no expertise in didn’t escape their scrutiny and arbitrary change requests. One thing I know is very important is to work with people you can trust to make their own decisions. I do not want to have to worry about certain aspects of the development process but put that responsibility on someone with the expertise and knowledge, knowing it will get done properly. This requires finding the right people, which is hard, but there is no point in hiring someone for their skills and then to not let them use it; something that happens all too often in big studios.

Spare the rod, spoil the customer
DRM is an onerous thing indeed; personally, as a consumer, I hate it with a passion as usually it is the paying customer who enjoys all the pain (boot discs, install limitations, etc.) whereas the pirate has the better experience (NoCD patches, unlimited installations, etc.) especially as some of the more popular methods install all manner of hidden content, often interfering with or breaking drivers and whatnot. I have the greatest respect for developers who put their games out without any DRM whatsoever, however I don’t quite trust the majority of the consumers yet. But then again, I really don’t want paying, loyal customers to suffer. So what is the alternative? Reward paying customers; give away extra free content for registrations, for example. Sure, these things can and will be pirated too, you can never plug that hole a 100%, but as a consumer I know it means a lot to have your loyalty rewarded, not punished. Keeping a good and benevolent relationship with your customer is something that takes time and dedication but is something the smaller independent developer can do better than a huge faceless corporation, and is something that I think will pay dividends in the long run.

All these things are very much pie in the sky thinking, but that doesn’t mean they cannot be goals to strive for. Commercial realities will sooner or later force some changes I might not be comfortable with, and I am not stupid enough to believe these are entirely avoidable. That said, with a good mindset at the start and building up slowly but steadily towards something good is a fairly noble pursuit, even if only for my own mental wealth.

The only real problem I am facing right now, though, is work ethic. Once I had had enough of my break and loafing around the house actually became boring I got to work. However, not having colleagues surrounding me, a clock to stare at all day and, annoyingly, working on things I really enjoy has lead to some stupidly long days focused and dead to the outside world. I’ve already had a few 10 hour days without breakfast or lunch simply because I was on a roll. If I am to survive it is imperative I force myself into a more rigid working hours system. One thing at a time though.

Love and Monkeys

This most recent bout of inactivity on the blog is due to my periodic trips to one of Japan’s many hot spring areas, onsen, this time up north in Yonezawa in the southern-most part of Yamagata prefecture. This trip was strategically planned for just after the holiday season, as prices are easily half of what they are over Christmas and as most people have jobs to go to availability not a problem. Also, as a European, I like the snow and though the southern onsen are nice in their own right, I fancied something more cold, snowy and picturesque.

The trip started off at Tokyo station where a bullet train would take us up to Fukushima at which point it would split and take our half up to Yamagata. The trip to Yonezawa itself would take only two and a half hours. Travelling this route the duplicity of Japan’s climate is fairly obvious, as the first leg takes you along the Pacific side, with its brisk, clear skies and bearable temperatures, while keeping to your left snow-capped mountains behind which fast banks of clouds are pushed from the thither side. After Fukushima a sharp turn West brings you closer to the mountains and within minutes patches of ice and snow appear on the ground surrounding the tracks before the train slows down considerably to navigate the sudden valleys and foothills all covered in thick blankets of snow, deposited perilously high on either side and on the branches of the trees where they hang as improbable and gravity-defying droops of sugar icing. Suddenly the brown and dark green greyness of the Pacific-facing side of Japan is forgotten and you enter a dreamy winter landscape of blacks and whites.

Our ryoukan, as I always insist we frequent on these occasions, was a good forty-minute private van ride away from Yonezawa station, through the small village and up a winding mountain road demanding spectacular views of the valley below. Suddenly the road widens somewhat to accommodate a small smattering of buildings and hotels with pretty much nothing else; here was our destination, a fairly new ryoukan built on the ruins of its ancient ancestor burnt down a few decades ago, run by an old, distinguished gentleman and a small army of old biddies pandering to our every need.

Yonezawa is famous for several things. First, for me at least, are the wild monkeys, my favourite beast after cows and penguins. Indeed, on our initial ferry to the ryoukan we were greeted by two separate gangs of the things alongside the road. At first a small family of them were dangerously close to the edge with one of them picking at something in the middle of the asphalt. As we approached he scuttled back to his companions along the side where they looked at us annoyed and put out. The second gang of them was hanging from small branches that appeared unfit to carry their weight alongside the road, where they looked down on us with a disinterest and disdain I had previously thought only cats were capable of. Sadly, on subsequent trips, with my camera ready, they refused to be seen, so I have no photographic evidence.

Secondly, Yonezawa has an interesting history, started, as it was, by, amongst others, Naoe Kanetsugu, a defeated samurai from the neighbouring prefecture of today’s Niigata. His helmet carries the kanji symbol for “love” (“Ai”), which is shown on posters and merchandise everywhere, and he also happens to be the subject of a new historical drama on Japanese television, of which many posters were strewn around the town too. More beloved than him, though, was Yozan, a Tokyo (Edo) born and bred daimyo who married into the power structure of Yonezawa. He is best remembered for building up the area during a time of great poverty and famine by introducing several new foodstuffs and crafts to the area. Any travelers there will see much of the otaka poppo, a bird (usually eagle) statue carved of wood. To both these people the small center of Yonezawa has a new museum, bereft of any English-language texts or pamphlets, and several shrines and temples where once their castle stood.

The third claim to fame is Yonezawa beef, as famous nationally as Kobe beef and equal to or greater in quality to it, depending on whom you listen to. It is indeed wonderful meat, soft and tender in ways I cannot describe on-line for fear of my florid language mucking up your average pervert’s Google searches. It is one to remember, for your amateur gamesman, the next time some unenlightened bore extols the virtues of Kobe beef. “It is indeed nice, if a little popular, but cannot hold a candle, as you know, to the rarer and much more prized Yonezawa variations.” The dinners at the ryoukan obviously revolved heavily around this product. The first night was a sukiyaki meal with a huge plate of this beef, as well as vegetables and a huge variety of side-dishes. You cook the meat and vegetables yourself in a heated dish at your table in a tasty mixture of water and sauces, before dipping it in a bowl of raw egg. It is an absolute delight and more than a little filling. The second night we had shabu-shabu, the same ingredients basically, but this time dipped in a pan of boiling water, hence the onomatopoeic name. After mere seconds the beef is boiled after which you can dip it in a choice of sauces, my favourite by far the sesame one. This meal too was accompanied by the usual dishes of pickles, sushi, salads, potato dishes, miso soup and sweet red beans covered with flecks of your actual gold.

The ryoukan was chosen for its two private baths alongside the usual public and gender-separated ones. Still being too British for public nudity we alternated between the two private baths available at any time without booking. One was your usual small room with a single shower to clean yourself with before your dip. The water there was, I am not alone in saying, too hot for comfort. After you managed to tease yourself in it was mere minutes before you turned pink and light-headed with an uncomfortable tingling sensations in your extremities, all of them. The second bath was altogether more pleasant, situated in a small shack, half open to the snowy outside, but lacked a shower, leaving us to wash ourselves old-fashioned style with hand-buckets dipped in the bath itself.

Yonezawa being a small rural community the sight of a foreigner was still something for the ryoukan’s old biddies to get excited about. They did their best to find me a yukata that fit, an impossible task, sadly, which was followed by bemused and astounded exclamations of regret and worry that I’d catch a cold as half of my ankles remained exposed. There was a lot of questioning; whether I could eat Japanese food, if I could eat natto (no way!), whether everything was comfortable for me and, though I thought I could escape it, where my country was. All these questions aimed at my wife, of course, even though I answered them in Japanese. At times like these I regret to say I find myself regressing into foreign tourist mode, mumbling along, being pampered and held in awe and refusing to even try to speak Japanese properly. Sometimes it’s quite nice not having to pretend to be a local, and as us foreigners usually get great treatment from rural locals, considering we are tourists and not residents, I let it wash over me, which includes getting free hand-outs at shops and cups of green tea here and there.

Other notable occasions were our walk from the center’s one museum to the station, where we were on a quest to find a nice place to have lunch and cursing how rural Japan isn’t as convenient as downtown Tokyo, like the big city snobs we are, and getting a ride back to the hotel sharing the van with new customers for the night, a duo of giggly Tokyo girls with outrageous fake nails and, by Jehovah, sparkly wellington boots. The presence of these loud, young fleshpots made our octogenarian driver a little more talkative and boastful, the dirty sod, not just filling them in on the historical details of the area but also his own woes and heroic deeds of surviving 40 meter snowfalls over one winter.

As we left, snow started lightly with the promise of an extra 40 cm of the stuff over the weekend. Tokyo has seen some drizzly snow that very night but it was rainy a dreary when we arrived back in our cold and humble abode. As I love the occasional onsen dip I’m sure I’ll have another before too long, but there is no denying they feel extra pleasant in the winter, when the icy cold outside is offset by the wonderful natural heat of the water and the cosy tatami rooms and futons, and copious amounts of unhealthy snacks and alcohol. They do say northern Japan has the better onsen, due to there being more volcanoes there, and from the few I’ve experienced I’d say this is true.

Though the trip is somewhat long and tedious, and the area rural and empty, it is a trip I can recommend to anyone, not only for the wonderful, wonderful beef but the scenery, friendly locals, hot springs and the ability to walk around in a yukata without feeling too much like a foreign idiot, but possibly mostly because it is sometimes very good to get away from Tokyo for a bit.

PS: Any readers about to form a glam-goth punk-rock band can use the name “Love and Monkeys” with my compliments.

2009, the year in preview

If you'll indulge me for a moment I'd like to commit to the paper screen some of my plans for the coming year, if only to have them as a permanent reminder floating around the internet for me to look back on in shame 12 months hence. As much as 2008 was not as much an annus horribilis as an annus nihilis, with absolutely nothing happening that would cement my place in future history, this year is going to be a year of change and, for the first time in my life, achievements, no matter how personal and insignificant.

1. Revamp Japanmanship
The site is due a restructuring and redesign, with F.A.Q.s and significantly informative posts, few though they are, clearly indicated for the newcomer with a dream of working in Japan. Visually I just need a change and much as I loathe faffing about in CSS I'll get round to it sooner rather than later. I also need to go through the old comments and delete the dozens of spam messages, and possibly integrate some kind of verification system, although ease of commenting is a high priority for me. I personally usually don’t comment on blogs that require a lengthy process or a log in before I’m allowed to. There will also be new and hopefully hilarious merchandise, and as I'm too cheap to pay for a premium Cafepress shop it'll mean recycling some of the older wares, so now is the time to buy them if you still want them. There should also be some new focus on gamesmanship in Japan, a sadly ignored art these days.

2. Pad out my writing portfolio
This not only means getting significantly ahead in writing my magnum opus, a daring and challenging novel that plums the depth of humanity and the readers’ tolerance, but also branch out into print media of sorts, maybe online media too. Editors take note of my email address if you want your publication to benefit from some badly informed yet deeply ingrained opinion on irrelevant matters!

3. Do the indie thing proper
Work on my first indie project has been plodding along for a while now, but 2009 is the year it's going to get organised, with self-imposed milestones and a harsh work ethic. I might start writing about its progress at some point, but that would also rely on my shadowy secret partner in this venture. I can at least write about the trials and tribulations of setting up a limited liability and all that encompasses in Japan. I've had the good fortune to meet several delightful gaijin over here who have gone through the process, whom I plan to bury under an endless siege of questions and advice. Prepare for thrilling stories of form fillings in, taxes and lawyers.

4. Health and efficiency
Though I have no short-term plans to curb my tobacco and caffeine intake, I do plan to limit my drinking to the pleasurable, rather than the excessive, and cut out as much snacking and unhealthy foods as possible. I do not only need to lose a few pounds, but could do with the extra energy a healthy lifestyle imparts on you. I will have a lot of work to do, mostly seated, so looking after this temple of mine is going to be important.
With this comes my continued though as yet rather pusillanimous quest for beard growth. With the luxury of being able to hole up at home for days on end I can experiment with facial hair without much fuss. The goal is to go for an Old Dutch or Hollywoodian, possibly a Franz-Josef, yet the patchy nature of the growth so far, let alone the itchiness of it all, has meant that after several days I've gone for the complete shave (Jon Dyers is a God amongst men!). One of these days I'll manage something more substantial, which will then lead to my dream of being a pipe-smoker. Hopefully by then top hats and cloaks will be back in fashion too.

5. Learning Japanese
Well, I do of course already speak Japanese as well as your average drunken salaryman, but the writing is still a problem, the reading too. In these long years in Japan it has become clear there are no plans at all for the government to scrap kanji, so it would appear I have no other choice but to study the damn things. Long discussion about kanji in personal names, all taking place on the palm of the hand, and hours-long quiz shows on terrestrial television about the more obtuse variations are apparently not enough to dissuade the Japanese away and into the welcoming arms of the Western alphabet. Damn and blast!

6. Damn trophies
Get more PS3 trophies. I don’t know what it is about them, but they speak directly to the OCD in me and am currently well on my way to my 2nd platinum. This is rather curious as I have never completed any Xbox360 game with 100% of achievements. I guess Sony has dumbed them down enough for even someone like me to achieve the goals, which makes it all the more enticing.

The second day of the year has already been a bad start with both a full shave and a period of relative hung-over inactivity. The month is long, though, and young so things can only go up from here.

All the best for the new year, dear readers. I hope it will at least be an interesting one!

2008 Japanmanship Awards Listpost

It's that time of year when all websites and blogs do a list-post regarding the most fantastic, disappointing, rubbish, sexy, stupid, numerical, pusillanimous, retarded, hyperbolic games of the year and as I've been behind my posting for a while, due to being rather busy doing other things, I thought I'd bash out a quickie listing my personal gaming highlights of 2008, combined with a little mention of what I am looking forward to most in the coming year of the cow. The awards I'm dishing out today are the "Japanmanship Nugatories", recipients of which get exactly nothing other than a mention on a middling-to-irrelevant blog.

Retail Game of the Year - Little Big Planet

I have had some fun times playing many of the astoundingly great games we've been fortunate enough to buy this and the previous year, and I have been pleasantly surprised by a lot of them. There definitely seems to have been a jump in quality, which in my estimation occurred somewhere midway 2007, after which a lot of triple-A games have been, well, fantastic. No game in recent memory, however, has given me more delight and enjoyment as Media Molecule's Little Big Planet, causing me to lay awake at night dreaming up all the contraptions I wanted to make in its excellent editor. And though it had a few teething problems at first, now the servers all seem to be running smooth and players have begun to understand and use the true power of the creation tools we are beginning to see user-generated levels that can easily match the developers' own in creativity. With a continued dripfeed of new costumes and now new content I suspect I'll be playing this game well into 2009 and possibly beyond. I urge everyone to play until the contentious level-sorting clicks in your brain after which it's smooth sailing for many many hilarious and creative months. And Stephen Fry, of course, bonus points.
Visit the official website here.

Downloadable Game of the Year - World of Goo

It has been an excellent year for download and independent games, a trend I hope and fully expect to be continued into the next year. From the excellent PixelJunk Eden, the retrogaming fanservice of MegaMan and the Bionic Commando remake to astounding development achievements like Castle Crashers my digital wallet has been under attack egregiously, which, seeing as I have a hole in my hand already when it comes to money, let alone digital magic money, has meant some months of living close to the button. One title that stands out for me, though, is 2D Boy's excellent World of Goo. It has an excellent aesthetic, a smooth yet unforgiving learning curve and offers probably the best physics-based puzzle gameplay since forever. Little touches like OCD targets and your own tower to compare to other players' are the icing on the cake. On top of that there is a lot of personal sycophancy involved too. Once employees at a large corporate game studio the 2D Boy boys went for it for themselves and, in my view, succeeded. They had a dream and went for it, and that is inspiring. The fact they created an excellent title like World of Goo in the process is both hatefully jealousy-inducing and laudable. Everybody go buy it and support their next title.
Visit the 2D Boy website here.

Timesink of the Year - Pic Pic

Counting pure hours lost on a single game 505 Games' Pic Pic for the Nintendo DS beats the rest by several man-months worth. Whenever I had some time to fill, be it loafing around listening to podcasts, battling my fiber intake issues on the toilet, waiting for the wife to get ready to go out or experimenting with not shaving to see how long it would take before the fluff gets too itchy and annoying (2 days) Pic Pic was always there. At its base a simple package it offers three different types of drawing-related puzzle games; one a simple maze game, which hasn't gotten much playtime from me yet, one a difficult to explain yet easy to understand game where you connect numbers on a grid, by far my favourite, and a third more complicated one where you draw or clear blocks in a 3 by 3 grid surrounding a number. Each puzzle type comes with an astounding 400 puzzles, ranging from the small and easy to the huge and intricate, offering the perfect five to fifteen minute play to fill the gaps in much the same way ice cream does after a particularly heavy meal. Any DS owner who claims to like puzzle games has no excuse not to own this one.
Read Eurogamer's fawning review of it here.

Free Indie Game of the Year - Dyson

Imagine an engaging, beautiful and deep strategy game for free! Well, you don't have to because there is Dyson, a procedurally generated RTS of sorts in which you, the player, tries to colonise an asteroid belt. The controls and rules are as simple as can be yet offer surprising depths of strategy and engagement. Though still in development, the title is already robust and enjoyable and I urge any broke or tight-fisted strategy gamer to check it out.
Download Dyson here.

Console of the Year - Playstation 3

Being a slightly regretful owner of all three of the current-gen systems, I base this vote entirely on which console I've spent the most time playing. With the XBox360 having died on me several times this year I have lost all confidence in it and though I occasionally buy some XBLA games, I have stopped buying retail games because I can never be sure I can play them at any given time. The Wii, though exciting, new and shiny, with perfect usability and several fun games, I found is hardly ever used anymore. I only switch it on to stop that annoying blue light flashing in my peripheral vision when watching television. My problems with it are twofold. Mostly it is the lack of games that personally interest me, with the big Nintendo titles cleared and lacking replay value. Secondly, it lacks an achievement/trophy system which I have found myself totally addicted to on the other consoles, actually playing and replaying games often just for the points. Which leaves the embattled Playstation 3. It's undeniably a decent bit of kit, especially my early release one, with its multitude of USB ports and PS2 compatibility and of course a Blu-Ray drive. It has several, though obviously not enough, excellent games on it, including my personal game of the year above. Its on-line store is slowly filling out. Which is why I am so annoyed by Sony for basically fucking up the marketing (and pricing) so badly. Every time a Sony executive opens his mouth and lets forth a stream of obvious nonsense a kitten dies somewhere, for I think the PS3 is worthy of more success than Sony has been able to muster.

Most Over-hyped Game of the Year - Metal Gear Solid 4

It's hard to think of any hyperbole not heaped upon Metal Gear Solid 4, and though it is obviously an accomplished game made by a huge team of remarkably talented people, it did turn out to be the most ridiculous, badly paced and tedious experiences of the year until Sony released Playstation Home. From the terrible writing, the badly cut cut-scenes and gameplay that tried to be a Jack of all trades but ended up nothing in particular, the weird technical choices, including lengthy installs and loading screens that required a button-press to move away from, the game just fell flat for me on every aspect. It causes me no end of annoyance when people praise the story and writing in this game as it is so obviously of the level of your average 14 year old fanboy with too much time on his hands. The secret of writing is to cut away as much as you can and still have the story make sense, yet during the development of Metal Gear Solid 4 it seems they kept every tiny scrap of paper anyone ever made a scribble on and threw it on the pile. You may think it was a great game, but, frankly, you're wrong.

Blog of the Year - Brainy Gamer

This might be a little contentious, as Michael Abbott's, the author of the Brainy Gamer blog, views and my own differ remarkably on most, if not all levels. He engages in over-analysis of games, throws around names of filmmakers and artist as if their work is comparable to video games and promotes many other bloggers with the same stances. Which is exactly why he deserves a mention. His blog posts are almost always of a high quality and well thought out, he is turning into a spokesperson, of sorts, of the gaming blogging community and spends a lot of obvious effort and time in producing sporadic podcasts. The fact I disagree with him so much makes it more interesting to read for me, as it usually engages my brain and makes me consider, sometimes, though not often, reconsider my own views. In a medium filled with bile and hatred as well as fanboyish flamboyance, The Brainy Gamer sits comfortably in an important and overlooked niche of thoughtful, well-written and optimistic navel-gazing. Usually when I strongly disagree with certain bloggers, I simply stop reading them, yet Mr. Abbott keeps me coming back. One day I might be able to break his spirit, but it's more likely he will end up breaking mine.
Brainy up your game here.

Most Anticipated of 2009 - Cletus Clay

I am a sucker for interesting visual styles. I am also a sucker for old-fashioned arcade platforming and shooting games. So when I first heard about Cletus Clay, a claymation old-fashioned arcade shooting game, well, my brain imploded. Coming from the nimble fingers of Anthony Flack of Platypus fame and a small band of co-developers I have nothing but high hopes that my personal gaming proclivities will be satisfied when the title finally makes it out. Whether that will be 2009 is still in question, but I will certainly spend the next year keeping a close eye on the game. This is exactly the kind of weird shit that publishers shy away from yet can flourish in the bustling and growing world of independent development.
Read about Cletus Clay development here.

Personal Gaming Moment of the Year

Reaching the end of level platform in Little Big Planet while playing with three of my mates and trying to obscure the winner from view by standing in front of him and generally being a dick, followed by running around his pod like a child on a sugar-rush and pulling people around and jumping, all the while tears of childish joy streaming from my face as I laughed like an idiot for five solid minutes. I have not had such simple child-like enjoyment of a game for decades and reminded me exactly what games are supposed to be: just plain fun.

After 2007 it was hard to imagine a repeat of the many great games we had, yet 2008 did a remarkable job at it. Global recession be damned, I hope 2009 will continue this upward trend of excellence in gaming in both the commercial and independent fields. I finally have the sense that gaming has "grown up", meaning it has solidified into a real, immensely diverse quality medium rather than a bedroom tits and guns distraction for single geeky teens with acne.

Not going Home

Sony, in their continued efforts to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory, has just recently released their version of an on-line community for the PS3, Playstation Home, to the wider public as, possibly, the least anticipated piece of software in the history of time wasting. I was unlucky enough to have been invited to participate in the closed Beta a while back and have already had my fill of Home, to the extent that failure to connect to the servers on the day the Beta became open to everybody I deleted the application and freed up another 4 Gigabytes of "reserved space" on my harddisk.

Though I'm weary of jumping on the Home hate bandwagon now roaring out of control over many a gaming website and forum, though believe me, I hate it, I am more annoyed at Sony for making me distrust my instincts. Am I, possibly, too out of touch with the wider gaming audience? I remember Will Wright pulled this trick on me before with The Sims. Early teaser trailers had be guffawing and shaking my head in disbelief. No way, I thought, could this be anything other than a disaster. Who in their right minds would play this horseshit? And as sales figures and my own subsequent addiction to the Sims has proven, my instincts can be drastically wrong sometimes and, having learned my lesson, I vowed never to jump to conclusions on new, wacky, unproven ideas.

Home, though, isn't unproven as an idea. The massive success of other on-line virtual communities has been a floating dollar sign for many a marketing executive with especially titles as Second Life raking in piles of cash and becoming cultural phenomena. The fact Home had to happen seems almost a given. And on paper Home seems awesome. A free piece of software that will add a Mii/Avatar function to your Sony ID, a home room to decorate as you see fit, special game-related items and rooms to become available over time, it seems a fantastic little gift from Sony to its users.

"Seems" obviously being the operative word there. In reality it is a cumbersome and slow piece of software that is a barely disguised excuse to hoist micropaid contents on a strangely suspecting userbase. With plenty of quick downloads of videos and trailers already, Home's slow streaming non-full-screen movie theater seems to add several layers of uselessness to an already smooth process. Very limited avatar creation options makes Home's zombie-like characters take a distant third place after my Nintendo Mii and Microsoft's Avatars. It's strange that the most simplistic looking of the three, the Mii, turns out to be the most powerful, with my Mii being a dead ringer for my own handsome self, my Avatar looking like a Barbie version of me and my Home avatar looking like an emaciated skater-version of Marky Mark, like pretty much seventy percent of my fellow Home users.

Technical issues too make Home an embarassment rather than a showcase for PS3 power, of which I know it has a lot. From the wonky avatar to the massive tedium of load-times, which really seem inexcusable, to the static and fuzzy scenery outside my bachelor pad. Queues for games in the game center too seem ridiculous, and having to boot up the beta for Namco Museum to play two levels of Dig Dug, only to be awarded a small Dig Dug doll to decorate my home with doesn't seem worth the 10 minute wait. Original arcade games available are nothing more than sub-standard on-line Flash type games. The choice of furniture and apartments extremely limited with more available for extortionate micropayments - trust Sony to turn micropayments into extortion. And as I am not in the slightest bit interested in seeing my Marky Mark me watch a poster for an upcoming game, there simply is no reason for me to endure Home.

But am I, are all of us bitching about Home online, wrong? To me Second Life sounds like torture, yet it is immensely popular. Does Joe Public care about these technical issues, or are they simply happy to inhabit a virtual word where they can pick up fat, middle-aged guys pretending to be 14 year old girls?

A case could be made that due to the PS3's high price the bulk of its users are possibly informed hardcore gamers, whom are all too enlightened to swallow this bullshit. But one could also assume that software like Home could be effectively used to market at the more casual gamer, just an extra little carrot for the "soft-core" crowd, bringing in new users and helping shift units. I'm sure the latter is already happening as, as I mentioned above, the idea of Home sounds pretty good on paper and in marketing blurbs; it's only when you get your hands on it that you realise it's not all it's cracked up to be.

However much I personally think Home is a waste of effort, time, money and opportunity, I think I'll shy away from proclaiming its failure until we have some hard figures to peruse. I have a nagging feeling that possibly Sony could surprise us. Well, maybe not Sony but PS3 users. In a sense I kind of hope they do because I am tired of all the PS3-bashing, even though Sony has, in its disastrous attempts to keep hold of its PS2 lead into the next generation, deserved every bit of scorn it has been subjected to. The Playstation 3 is an awesome piece of hardware, and more and more excellent games are being released. I want it to do better than it is, and the only things stopping that right now are Sony, its executives and their marketing. And possibly Home. One step forward, two steps back?

Not my cup of tea

I'm no great fan of games journalism but I'll admit it has been getting a little better over time. For example, the days a reviewer who openly hates a certain genre of game writing a review of a game in that genre and panning it are, generally, over. What I have noticed, though, is that it's becoming quite common for games trying something different and being criticised for it for not doing it "right", meaning the way the reviewer was expecting it. The same reviewers, mind you, who usually harp on about innovation. The reviewers who think they are part of quality control and game design and think their input is a necessary requirement to make a game good.

Three titles that have received this treatment recently in various dark corners of the internet and pod-sphere, which, I'll admit, are three titles I personally am a great fan of, are Mirror's Edge, Little Big Planet and Biohazard 5. And some of the reactions have me stumped.

In Mirror's Edge, for example, the player, through her parcour adventures, may pick up a gun or two. It was obviously a design decision to handle this a certain way, namely that it interferes with the running and jumping, which is what the game is about after all. So you can pick up a gun, yes, you can use it, yes, but really you should be thinking on your feet, literally. Grab, fire, drop and run. Aside from the fact this is a refreshing approach in the usually gun-porn heavy FPS genre, I like it for forcing the player to stick to the game's main control scheme. Yet, if some reviewers are to be believed, if you show a gun in a game, the game has to function as a full-blown FPS in the Call of Duty sense of the word. They moan that the intentional gimping of the controls is a tease, a broken design. Every game with guns, they imply, has to work as a perfect FPS shooting game, or else!

Biohazard too suffers from this reviewers' myopia. The game makes it impossible to run and shoot at the same time, which, as it did in Biohazard 4, causes some tense, intense moments where you sweat it out, cornered by a horde of zombies all coming at you with pickaxes and chainsaws. Every bullet you fire requires you to stand still and aim carefully, much like you would in real life incidentally. Yet people seem to complain you can't run and shoot at the same time, that when aiming the camera moves slower and that you can't strafe. In short, they complain it isn't Call of Duty or any other fast-action run-and-gun FPS.

Little Big Planet too has seen some controversy over their Z-jumping where, in an essentially 2D game the player is automatically put into one of three levels of depth. Now to be honest I too was a little disoriented by this. But a few levels in it just clicks and it doesn't become a problem anymore (except in a few badly designed levels floating out there). There are certain rules for the level-sorting and they make perfect sense, and once you wrap your head around it and don't fight it it works beautifully. But as it is essentially a 2D game experience people complain it isn't 2D enough and that this weird 3rd dimension to the levels with its automatic jumping around is a total game-breaker.

Of course there are plenty of people who, like me, love the games above and click nicely with the control schemes. But a small, often vocal minority seems to think doing something different it a bad thing. What is the harm in thinking something just is not your cup of tea? Personally I hated the early entries in the Biohazard series, mostly because of the controls. I didn't criticise them for doing it wrong, I didn't expect them to do it differently, I just didn't like it and hence didn't play the games. Only when Biohazard 4 came around did I give the series another go and I was hooked. (For non-Japanese Xbox360 users, by the way, the demo for Biohazard 5 is utterly awesome; it's Biohazard 4, basically, with a little plus alpha.)

The way Mirror's Edge designed its weapons use, Biohazard its limited moving and firing capabilities and Little Big Planet its 2.5 level sorting are uncommon, yes, and they might need some time to get used to. Some people might just plain not like it. But so what? It works for some. Don't demand a game to be more like what it isn't, open your mind or simply don't play it; just play the shooters and 2D platformers that conform to your expectations and leave the rest of us to enjoy something different.