A few weeks ago, we trekked around town trying to find a copy of Oboro Muramasa and completely failed. “Japanese games (that are not Mario or Link) don’t do well” was a reason one employee at a games store gave us. We ended up getting it online where there were still some in stock left.
So, the game’s good. Tutorials take you through the basic moves, but even without it seasoned gamers shouldn’t have a problem. Characters talk in Japanese and subtitles are available… except more information is being given in Japanese than in the English subtitle. The game’s still playable but you’ll be missing out on some aspects of the story. It’s not as if the subtitle was scrolling so damn fast they couldn’t fit more info in.
Talking of Japonesque games, here are the screenshots from Zombie in Wonderland available from 16th March on WiiWare (800points). Made by a small Spanish company, it features fairy tale characters like Dorothy (Wizard of Oz), Snow White and Momotaro (Japanese story) toting guns and blasting zombies left right and centre.
The game’s part of a series called World Game Parade, and they hope to introduce Japanese gamers to games made overseas that even they couldn’t fail to like. (Oh yeah, Japs are incredibly insular in some ways.)
Street Fighter IV is moving house, so to speak, to iPhone too. The link takes you to screenshots of eight available characters.
Kind of glad PlayStation didn’t do a Toyota this week. Not that they apologized in their press release properly. Just mentions the glitch was due to their clock thinking we had a 29th Feb this year.
Oh and Glico’s doing a series of wooden toys again. Only available with Glico Caramel packs.
I can now happily announce the book translation I’ve been working on the last few months have finished and is now available in biggerbookstores in Japan and Amazon.jp.
It’s called 小さなチーム、大きな仕事―37シグナルズ成功の法則 in the translated Japanese version. Roughly translates to “Small Team, Big Work: 37signals’ Formula for Success”. According to our contact at the publisher, they figured it best to put a positive spin on the title as Japanese people are wary of things that have even the slightest negative connotations. Oh, and 37signals, although a well-known company in the US and amongst programmers, is not so in Japan… and well, this new title kind of helps to introduce them. (And yes, technically speaking “37signals” should be pronounced “37シグナルス”. I translated them as such but apparently they’re known as “37シグナルズ” amongst the Ruby community in Japan… and so they’ve decided to go with the popular flow as opposed to the ‘right version’.)
Personally speaking, the hardest part of this work was the damned colloquials! I get the authors wanted to come off less stiff upper lip, more casual and friendly. But the sheer amount of it… And as some of you would undoubtedly know, the Japanese language (especially in the written version) has no slang. So translating all that ‘kick-ass’ vocab was stressful.
37signals’ first book Getting Real, was in comparison easier for me to translate, I can say with some conviction! Which by the way, is only available online.
The original English version is due out in the US on 9th March under the title Rework, while the UK release is reportedly 23rd March. No idea when all other translations will be available, as of yet.
Those of you who are Japanophiles, who are into Sumo wrestling, who live over there… you guys’d have generally heard about this now. Asashyoryu (朝青龍), former Yokozuna (the highest rank of sumo wrestling), has been told to retire forcefully after ‘hitting’ a layman.
Because my mum’s a great fan of his, and maybe because his determination at overcoming the conservative views of his sumo peers inspires me (going overseas in your mid-teens and surviving, let alone succeeding, is a hard thing to do), I cannot but have a slightly biased view of this news.
Asashyoryu’s a Mongolian by birth, who around ‘95/’96 went to a Japanese high school in Shikoku and studied being a professional sumo-tori. He’s been a Yokozuna several times and at one point was touted as the man behind the enlivening of the stagnant sumo scene. And he’s only 29. Quite an accolade.
From what I can find on YahooNews (Google’s not much use when it comes to Japanese news) and Twitter feeds, he was drunk and as he got into a cab after a night of carousing, hit a layman. This has been blown out of all proportion by the Japanese media who had a field day. Sure, he hit a non-professional. But then again, he’s a pro. At a sport that hits other people on a regular basis. What I’m saying is, that as the very best that the Japanese pro sumo scene could produce, he probably knew how to hit someone without injuring them.
Although that possibility apparently never occurred to the said media. They hounded him mercilessly, along with the Sumo society, a conservative bunch of old men. I’m not suggesting Asashyoryu was infallible. But, as the proud Mongolian people (who consider him a hero) claim, it’s hard to understand the decisions made by the Japanese.
Those of you who have spent time with my countrymen would know that they are a nation which is amazingly polite to your face, but behind your back, would be unutterably false and rude. And because of the American complex they have (remember, Japan was ruled by the US between 1945 and 1951), they also have a racist attitude to anyone who’s not white, or who can speak a white-man’s language fluently without being white (as I discovered to my horror aged ten).
So, the Mongolian feel their hero has been hard done by the Japanese. Some even say it’s racism. I can’t help but agree. The Sumo society elders were afraid to admit that a Mongolian (in other words, a foreigner) could be better than the Japanese at a sport that’s considered Japanese (although there’s a Mongolian version as well).
And talk about jumping on the bandwagon! At the moment, the Japanese media’s all about being ‘nice’ to Asashyoryu, and publicly lamenting the future lack of his contribution to the national sport. I’m saddened by Asashyoryu’s untimely ‘retirement’ and disgusted by the falseness of my countrymen.
A futuristic cat with a 4D-pouch. If Doraemon(ドラえもん) didn’t look so scary, I’d like to have his kind hanging out with me. He is a national treasure to most Japanese, not least because like Sazae-san(サザエさん), he’s lasted so many years in the turbulent world of animation. For the fans therefore, this news that there’s an iPhone app (or 16) is good news. It’s actually 5 entertainment apps (primarily for kids and otaku adults) and 11 comic episodes. They’re all free, and has a limited download time – until 10th May. With an added perk actually: if you download all 16, you can have the effect of a Doraemon page on your iPhone, as seen in top left screenshot.
I realise the launcher says they’re working on increasing server capacity. But I can well empathise with people complaining loudly on Twitter the last day or so, saying they can’t log in at all.
Never have I been more satisfied I’m in a different time zone to the majority of players. It means I get to play some of the game and have no problem logging in.
Considering my last night’s review was based on a ‘first impression’ of sorts, I decided I’ll try the game again. Only got to try for less than a half hour actually, since it decided to boot me off the ‘busy server’ in mid-loading screen and I haven’t been able to get back in since.
I’ve also looked in on the forums and what other players are saying. Aside from a lot of angst about the servers or fanboys being optimistic, there are a few good points raised by non-fanatic players.
1) Auto-grouping for group instances. Great feature or no? Great that you can go straight into it without waiting around for an age. But wait… the server’s booted half the team off mid-battle and we’re doing the ‘dead, respawn, pummelled’ routine again. And no more players coming into battle because apparently we’ve got a full group.
2) The game is unfinished! Well of course it is. It’s a beta. But this guy’s got a point: ["to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before."
To be fair, there’s an ‘exploration area’ called Delta Voranis. Shame some of those quests are bugged beyond the telling of it. And the map… jeez, the map! It does not function as a map at all.
3) The quests are strangely boring. Go near a quest giver, press F, click, click, accept. Go to flashing console/door/item, press F (to interact), click, and you’re done. WoW-haters/rejects will always tell people that the quests are “collect this, kill this, how many of each, etc.” True. But at least they make them interesting with variety. Variety is what is sadly lacking to Star Trek Online quests.
Even Torchlight, with its strangely addictive “click, click, click, loot” pattern was more interesting. Because of the different types of things you could loot!
Oh, and apparently, variety does come into play when you’re above Lieutenant to Lt. Commander rank. If you’re lucky enough to stay logged in to level that much, that is…
4) Copy and pasted off a thread about busy servers:
“Seriously, you’ve offered the keys, now, have the servers. Period.
Otherwise, limit the number of purchases on the client side. But, don’t have a bunch of people buying software and no way to play the game.
That’s just dumb.” [according to a guy called Traim]
That’s it in a nutshell.
Sorry, my second impression of the game may have got slightly worse than my first impression. I think the game has potential, because it’s part of a huge franchise with a huge fanbase. But it needs to work on its debilitating flaws straight away or the same thing that happened to Vanguard (incidentally, a game that did have diplomacy – ST is supposed to have it, but don’t) is going to happen to this one too.
Downloaded the beta, and played it this afternoon. It’s had a lot of hype, plus it’s Star Trek. Sorry to be negative, but my gamer instinct tells me this won’t be around for long. Why? Here’s the list:
Bug1: I’m a tiny spaceship at Starfleet docking station (you’re supposed to see your character, not your ship), then I’m my own tiny character out in airless space (supposed to be ship, not character). Oh, and I can’t move.
Actually, this one was amusing. According to general chat, quite a few people found it funny.
Bug2: I want to move forward dammit, not jog on the spot! Oops, just moved several yards apparently and now I’m dead.
Sadly very inconvenient. Getting stuck in scenery was the reason we stopped playing Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes in its early days (and a host of other MMOs that have come and gone in the last 5 years). When getting stuck means you get killed, it’s not fair the first time. Second time and thereafter, you start thinking this game’s got a lot to sort out before beta finishes.
Major Problem: Scaling of diffculty is practically non-existent. No way to tell (like in so many other MMOs) whether the quest is too hard for you to solo at your level. So you blithely go in and get pummelled, death, respawn, pummelled… etc. It’s just not fun! To add insult to injury, you have a team of other players in your instance who also get pwned by these all-invincible npc mobs.
Another Problem: Respawn point. Respawning away from combat area is good. But does it have to be so damn far from where you were? After running through the same ol’ passages time and again to get back into combat (see Bug2 and above paragraph) I got bored and abandoned the quest.
The manoeuvrability of your ship… now that sucks. Maybe I’m not used to it, sure. But half the time, response is so damn slow you may as well not have pressed anything. It’s the frantic button-mashing that’s getting quests done. And why oh why is it so boring to do quests? It’s not as if there’s an interesting backstory here and I’ve completed less than 10 quest chains, but I can safely let you all know if you’ve done 5, you’ve done all the variety there seems to be!
Yeah, it’s in beta stage. I get that. But they’ve got a long way to go. It needs to be a bit more bug-free to be enjoyable.
Oh and Cryptic, you guys need to check out those ’supply aid’ quests. They’re seriously bugged – undoable. In fact, all of the chat in the area was about how bugged it was, never mind quest help. (I was on there for about 4.5hours straight, and most of chat was of rumours about how Cryptic’s not going to iron out the problems before releasing it proper.)
I first came across Amanita Design back when I checked out the Polyphonic Spree site in 2005. I remembered their design and played Samorost when it came out too. They’ve now come out with another brilliant game called Machinarium.
It’s the familiar point and click with an intriguing plot. The main character you get to play with, is cautious, yet admirably daring at times… which kind of makes you fall in love with him. Most of the puzzles are great. There were only two with which I had major problems with: 1)infinite possibilities moving boxes = too many minutes spent trying to figure it…to no avail; 2)pressed the green button way too early and somehow can’t seem to reset the puzzle… so start right from beginning, again.
Actually, only two problems out of a good few hours worth of gameplay is excellent. I got into it last night and now that I’m at the tail end of my adventure with my robot, I feel kind of sad.
Oh yes, it does say Super Skills. So of course we weren’t even thinking we could emulate such glorious tactics. My husband and I are hard-core gamers. We’re fairly good at games, and we play together a lot. And we do know that for Mario games, you know you need the skills to time everything just right, or watch Mario and Luigi fall down into an abyss.
I thought we were prepared. The reviews said it was a good fun game for all the family (presumably because it’s a Mario title) so my husband felt it’d be a fun evening thing to do for us. How very wrong we were…
1) No classic controllers allowed – I prefer having those controllers as opposed to just the Wiimote. It’s prohibited.
2) Jumping off each other’s part of the game – fine, but don’t respawn us one on top of the other so there’s suddenly an unintended jump into the jaws of death.
3) Continues are infinite – so why bother giving us lives at all?
4) Why are the levels so damn hard?
Granted, we’re not used to timing our jumps to perfection, but this is ridiculous! Even Super Mario Sunshine was better than this (and that’s saying something)!
Now is this just us or has anyone else feel incredibly frustrated with this game? Just to work off this annoyance before bedtime (after all, I don’t want dreams that involve jumping onto blocks and avoiding spikes), I’m prepared to go kick some unfortunate people’s bums in PvP.
Been translating these last few weeks. 37signals’ second book “Rework” due out spring next year. The Japanese version will be published by Hayakawa Shobo. No date is set yet for that one. Because the original is written in American colloquial English, I’m having a bit of a hard time localizing some of the phrases. (I remember “Getting Real” not having nearly as much colloquial as this one does.)
These guys are responsible for this CyberBike. Added ‘controls’ have a way of disappearing into the relative unknown. It’s better that way. Anyone remember the abomination known as Virtual Boy? So can this one actually be the one that’s not going to be scoffed at?
Metal Gear Solid Peacewalker screenshots and 2D artist-demo available here.
And a new Wii control. Actually, it’s a PS3 one. Is it some kind of trend to make things that look like other brand’s equivalent? And did they not think about the confusion they might produce? And yes, compare it to the Wii Black control.
DS DoubleSys is basically a DS on iPhone/iPodTouch. Looks fairly accurate, and aside from the copyright issues, pretty joke-worthy. But North America’s taken it down off their iTunes store, or so the article tells us. Not so the Japanese store (as DS ダブルシステム), nor the English one (we just checked). Available still for £2.99.
3DDotHeroes (press blue button to get rid of the system requirements et al) will be coming out 5th November on PS3 for approx. £48 in Japan. Basically an action RPG, it feels apparently like it’s familiar to the 2D generation (think Zelda-esque). 8 bit cafe in Shinjuku had a talk yesterday by the developers. Screenshots available here.
Coming out tomorrow for 200Wii points each: Metronome and Tuner.
Of course, it just wouldn’t be summer if there were no mention of a horror game…Game with No Name: Eye (Nanashino Game) that says if you don’t complete the game within a week, you’ll die. Strangely this one’s by Square Enix – well strangely because they usually are associated with more of the fluffy bunny RPG genre. “Eye” because depending on which eye you look through, you see different things. Oh, and the official site is too Flashy for my taste with hardly an indication of where to go for more info, so have a look at screenshots and videos on the famitsu site.