Some time ago, in a conference room at Kojima Productions...

Konami Rep: Hello, Kojima-san!

Hideo Kojima: Hello, person from Konami!

Konami Rep: So, how is the new Metal Gear game going?

Hideo Kojima: Oh, it's going great! I told the other team to have Raiden cut a watermelon!

Konami Rep: Oh, sounds interesting! But actually I was referring to the game you were working on personally, the one on the PSP...

Hideo Kojima: You mean Peace Walker? Oh, that's going well, too! We're ready to tell you about the setting now!

Konami Rep: That's wonderful! Tell us, then!

Hideo Kojima: Well, it's set in 1974, and stars Big Boss as he gets into founding Outer Heaven!



Konami Rep: Outer Heaven and Big Boss! Great! And how does he go about doing that?

Hideo Kojima: Person from Konami, if I told you that, it would spoil the game, especially when some nerd tries to imagine how this conversation goes on his C-blog!

Konami Rep: Point taken, Kojima-san! But what else can you tell us?

Hideo Kojima: Well, I can tell you that it's set in Costa Rica, and Big Boss sides with communist rebels against the CIA!

Konami Rep: Communist rebels against the USA? In the jungle? That sounds a little like the Vietnam war, doesn't it?

Hideo Kojima: Exactly! I'm glad you saw what I was going for. That, and the "Contras". I've also developed the ability to embed Wikipedia links into my speech!

Konami Rep: *Gasps*

Hideo Kojima: Useful, isn't it? Oh, and I can tell you about a hovering, sci-fi gunship that attacks the communist rebels, too!

Konami Rep: That sounds deadly! Almost like Apocalypse Now!



Hideo Kojima: Amazing! You've embedded video into your speech! You'll have to teach me that sometime!

Konami Rep: I will! But first, what did you think about my mentioning Apocalypse Now?

Hideo Kojima: I love it! It feels right! Just...

Konami Rep: Just what?

Hideo Kojima: It's just...the Huey helicopters you mentioned in your video...they played music when they went to attack the communists.

Konami Rep: Hmm. You have a point. Without the music it lacks impact. But what can we do? It would look trite and contrived if we used "Ride of the Valkyries" again.



Hideo Kojima: Indeed. Aha!

Konami Rep: Oh, did you come up with an idea?!

Hideo Kojima: I did! Let me make a quick phone call.

A short while later...

Hideo Kojima: Person from Konami, I'd like you to meet a person from Yamaha and Crypton Future Media.

Yamaha and Crypton Future Media Rep: Hello, person from Konami!

Konami Rep: Hello! Did you come up with some music to have the same kind of impact as "Ride of the Valkyries"?

Yamaha/Crypton Future Media/Yamaha Rep: Indeed we did. And Kojima-san taught me how to embed the video version in my speech, too! Check this out:



Yamaha/Crypton Future Media Rep: ...something like that.

Konami Rep: ...

Hideo Kojima: ...

Yamaha/Crypton Future Media Rep: ...

Konami Rep: ...can we put it in Rising, too?

And on April 28, 2010...

Surely you wonder why I wish the wrath of a thousand suns upon Mr. Gerstmann. I first direct you to this piece. It's short, read it through. If you like, you may also visit Giant Bomb's "Set Phasers to Fun" video series.

Now, thanks to that, I'm having to consider it seriously, myself. I wish you hadn't made me think about it, Jeff.

Oh Jesus Christ. Right now I'm looking at a list of upcoming releases, separating them into buy/rent/wait-for-Steam-sale columns. Checking my bills and seeing if my budget is in order. This sort of crap is why the terms "disposable income" and "impulse purchasing" were invented. Or should I say, full impulse purchasing?!

Anything else I write here about the process of talking myself out of it will be pointless, merely a copy-paste of Jeff's writeup.

It's weird that I'd never have considered this option for any other game, not on my own or without considerable pressure. That is how thoroughly the appeal of Star Trekhas compromised my judgment. To really go into why that is would read like more pale justification.

I've got nine days to decide. In the meantime I'll continue to play the beta, almost hoping it will somehow stop trying to appeal me. I'll put up this list of things with the potential to dissuade me from making this insane decision:

1. Doing my taxes
2. Checking on my health insurance
3. Final Fantasy XIV
4. Taking a deep breath.

Also, have these pictures of someone personifying the ships from the new movie.

As above, pretty much.

I had been planning to do this for months on end since I watched Macross Frontier, but things didn't really pan out.

Suffice it to say, it's awesome and you should go to Japanator and see it.

Unfortunately it's old and looks like ass. Seriously, even Ace Combat 4 looks better, and that game launched two years earlier.

Anyway, if you're hurting for your own Macross game you could try Ace Frontier for the PSP. Then again, if you're the type to hurt for a Macross, you probably know that.

Just don't play Robotech: Battlecry. Shit nearly broke my soul.

Also StarCraft.

*squee*

And alongside Bayonetta PS3 to boot. I'll be damned if it doesn't feel good to buy stuff with money you didn't know you had.



Apologies for the crap picture quality/lighting. My camera sucks.

If we scale her to my Master Chief and Darth Revan figures, Aegis is more than 7 feet tall. 7 feet of hot, doll-jointed android sexy. With rocket punch!

If you share my joy, put ya guns on for ten minutes.

I put this up on Japanator this morning, but since some of you don't go there >:(, I figured it was my duty as Dtoid's resident Sakura Wars fanboy to put it here, too.

*Plus, I haven't posted in a while so hey, why not.

Anyway, story time:

NIS-America twitter'd that the official Sakura Wars site had been updated with new character profiles. I went, and looked up the new profiles. Surprise surprise, some of the names had been changed to sound better in English. That's common (Phoenix Wright, Trauma Center), and even preferable if done well.

But then I noticed some text shadowing those new names, text that matched the original Japanese names:




At first I thought it was just bad web design, that someone at NIS forgot to check his Photoshopping copypasta, and I tweet'd my lulz appropriately:

"@NISAmerica changed the names but not the background text. Does that mean they'll change over the language discs?

Then lo and behold, I get a DM from @NISAmerica:

"Hello Josh, Japanese voice disc will have the original character names in text! Thanks!

So, yeah. Wow.

I've never seen this happen before. Sure, there are games that have both EN and JP voice/text options, but more often than not such games get "dubtitled," meaning that the localized text used to script the dub is used for the subtitles. That usually means the word-for-word translation is less accurate, and in some cases actually adds, deletes, or alters the lines and naming conventions themselves.

It happened in Valkyria Chronicles and Odin Sphere (to good effect), and it happened in Rurouni Kenshin (to catastrophic effect), but I've never seen two separate localizations used in the same release.

It might be a side effect of Sakura Wars' dual-disc setup. There's too much voice data, especially for the Japanese version, for altered conventions to let slip. Maybe they're just that serious about making the game work in the west. I'd like to think the latter.

Also, it drives home how hard it might be to keep the game from offending Americans. I know some of you folks were disgusted at Gemini Sunrise's cowgirl accent, what more for a female African-American lawyer-slash-actress practicing from the streets of Harlem, named "Sagitta Weinberg?!

Hot damn, I hope this pays off. Also pictures.

I was lucky enough to score an early copy of the game at the recent big-screen-demo event, and after pulling a marathon run through of Uncharted 1 and proceeding straight into the sequel from there, I noticed just what the game does that makes it one of the most cinematic gameplay experiences ever.


She's voiced by the lady from Farscape. Mmmmmm

I'm trying not to slather too much fawning praise on it here, as you've probably read as much in the flood of early reviews. In terms of mechanics, Uncharted 2 is definitely NOT new. Feature-by-feature, it's barely different from the first game, save for some relatively minor-but-useful tweaks. In fact, "minor-but-useful" is a good way to describe what exactly the game has done to make for one of the best single-player experiences you'll find.

Note: Don't worry about spoilers.

What it does is make the transition from cutscene to gameplay almost seamless. That's it. That's really all it took. Again, it's not new. You saw the beginnings of it in Uncharted 1, but it's so fully realized here that I noticed how important it was in bringing the cinematic experience to a game while preserving the mechanical elements of play.

By "cinematic experience" I'm talking about the linear, cutscene-driven, arguably passive narrative format that for whatever reason is being treated as a scarlet letter by some more militant game design progressives. If nothing else, games like Uncharted 2 illustrate exactly what we have to lose should we suddenly abandon those principles in our rush to embrace self-authored, emergent, player-created blah blah blah.

One of the first times I actually saw a transition anywhere near that smooth was in Metal Gear Solid 4, right at the opening. After Snake rolls out from under a truck, the cutscene shows him rolling across the street and sidling up against the wall while Otacon suggests he find a weapon. As he steps out from cover, the camera simply pulls back, and the HUD smoothly fades, signaling that you, the player, are in control.



That only happens a few times in MGS4, but it happens all the time in Uncharted 2, making for some of the greatest "Oh shi-!" moments in any single-player campaign. It's partly a technical achievement, since graphics are finally good enough that you can't really tell between cutscene and gameplay models, but it's also a great exercise in precise timing and dramatic scripting. All of it comes together to feel as if you're really playing a movie. You get control during the bits you want to take part in (gunfights and wild stunts), while allowing the game to take the reins during bits you'd rather watch (great voice acting, dramatic interaction, and staring at Chloe).

Naughty Dog proves that level of expertise repeatedly, knowing exactly when, where, and for how long to take away control without letting on to the player that what just happened was supposed to happen. The game strings together set-piece after set-piece, but this time without the telegraphed pacing that you noticed in Uncharted 1, where you went from arena-fight-to-puzzle-to-arena-fight. Some puzzles are long, tense climbing challenges, and some fights are fast-paced, running gunfights.

You're climbing a rickety lather, when all of a sudden the rung collapses, causing it to swing to the side and throw you into a wall, immediately transferring your grip to that wall, allowing you to continue the climb up. You never really lost control, until the last second when the designers went "Whoops!" and cued the surprise, then were given control back right as you caught your breath. You're constantly thinking "Holy crap, that was a close one." You don't notice until the replay that you could have just hung on to that supposedly collapsing ledge forever, because the first time around, it really looked as if you could screw up and fall, or because guys were shooting at you at the time.

Of course, not every game is suited to maintaining that breathless pace. Complicated plots or mechanics that require mastery wouldn't be able to maintain coherence in the face of all that action, but Uncharted 2 doesn't tell a very complicated story, and makes all of its gamey nuances known in the first couple of hours. After that, it's all about keeping your attention while crazy-ass shit goes down all around you.

It isn't gaming's Citizen Kane, but it IS gaming's Indiana Jones, which is a hell of a good thing to be by itself. Well, I said I wouldn't slather too much praise on it, but it seems I just did. Oops. Anyway, I'll just end this by saying that that "It Does Everything" ad Sony cooked up hits pretty damn close to home.

P.S.: If Heavy Rain manages to make me eat my words next year, you'll know that it has been an EXTREMELY good time for linear narrative, and for games in general.