I recently made a trip back to the country of my birth, the Philippines, for a wedding. While I was there I was told there were a lot of places to get a PSP downgraded, so I thought I'd explain the process since someone might find it interesting.
Wages in the Philippines can be very low; the minimum wage is around 5 or 6 dollars a day. Downgrading a PSP can be done in major shopping malls in Manila. Young men will solicit passers by at a sort of booth among others that sell electronics. They charge 300 pesos or so, which translates to less than 8 American dollars, so the people that do this can make a relatively decent amount of money for a fairly simple process. For comparison's sake, a cleaning at the dentist without any insurance costs about 400 pesos, and I saw signs offering haircuts for 50 pesos.
Piracy is widespread in the Philippines, so it's basically assumed that if you get a PSP, your going to pirate games. Imagine buying a new PSP game even at double the minimum wage. That could be a full weeks worth of wages just to buy God of War, so it's no surprise that people there have no qualms taking the piracy route instead of paying half a months rent to get a video game.
So at the downgrading center, which consists of basically a guy sitting at a computer and the aforementioned solicitor, there's a 3-4 page list filled with the titles of games and the file size of the game. I saw what looked like all of the releases that have come out in the U.S., and seemingly not European and Japanese releases. I asked if they had Echochrome and they seemed to have never heard of it. Installing an emulator also seemed to be possible; they said they had a GBA emulator, but when I mentioned Neo Geo they didn't know what I was talking about, so it seems if you want to put less known emulators or a homebrew app, you're on your own. Installing games costs about a $1.50 a pop, provided you have a memory card, which the attached booth was selling for the prices that were about the same as you'd find in the states. There was only one choice of firmware, though it was the latest version of a very common CFW, and they install a game free with the downgrade.
The process takes about 5-10 minutes, most of the time just transferring whatever game has been chosen to the PSP. When they're finished, they boot up the PSP in front of you and show you your firmware version in the XMB.
The big news of the purchase of Activision by Vivendi-Blizzard offers us an almost perfect prism to understand the divergent and multicolored rays that the video game industry produces, constantly and in all directions. Throughout the purchase is a crystallized image of the state of affairs. The abundance of economic and financial commentaries on the purchase has judged it as having great strategic influence as well as appreciating as logical and sensible.
The fact that an industry leader of French origins has bit into an American equivalent and threatens at the same time to dethrone the Number One of the industry Electronic Arts, also American, has certainly given some volume the French media's coverage of this story. But events of this nature have also brought to our consciousness that video games are indeed the battleground of games with huge stakes that are industrial and economic, but also cultural: one can begin to read in the chronicles of these sorts of tactics and alliances a geopolitics exactly as one could with Hollywood film.
But this affair could be the occasion to point out a great truth about this industry, which only contradict the previous statement in appearance. In essence: there are no national “leaders” in video games, which is undoubtedly a large, stateless, universal medium. The more it grows and multiplies, the more games escape the national determinisms that had brought about its origins. The question of a game's nationality is ridiculously empty when one compares it to the equivalent question asked of films (“Korean cinema”) or books (“Russian literature”). The power of the Japanese game industry, for example, is from having invented icons and a language that aren't international but "world", like the music of the same name. Similarly, the quality of a “French” studio such as Ubisoft owes everything to the intelligence of its global heritage, such as the quality of its “United Colors of Benneton” teams that compose its studios in Shanghai, Montpelier, or Montreal. Video games, its art, its business, and its culture are global: They are forming the first world government.
Don't mind me, I'm no expert, I'm just thinking out loud.
The dollar has been falling harder than Britney Spears after a binge drinking session in the last few years. 5 years ago the American Dollar and the Euro were even; now a dollar is worth 68 Euro cents . It doesn't look that ugly against the Yen, but the Dollar has lost more than 10% of its value against the Yen since July. The falling Dollar seems to be the result of the collapsing housing market and the growing national debt and trade deficit.
Now, if this pattern continues for a while and doesn't turn into a full on economic depression or global economic crisis (which could happen), what this will mean and has meant thus far is that exporting American-made products will become cheaper, and buying imported goods will be more expensive for Americans. Games developed in the United States will be cheaper to export to the rest of the world, while games developed in Japan, Europe, or Canada will have a higher development cost relative to how much they will try to sell the game for in the U.S.
For software publishing this can be a pretty big deal, since most of the budget into making a video game usually occurs in the same country as a publisher. If Nintendo sells a million copies of a game in the states and gets $50 million in revenue, which comes out to about 5.5 billion yen today. A few months ago, it would have been 6.1 billion. This is money that doesn't go into the publishers pocket, doesn't go into developing new games, doesn't go into promoting games, and doesn't go into hiring new staff, or if the company isn't doing so well, keeping the staff you already have. This is even worse for European publishers. If Ubisoft develops a game from their studios in the Paris suburbs and sells a million here in the states, they get €34 million instead of the €50 million they would have got 5 years ago.
This equation is probably a little simplified in this age of global media consolidation, with EA having a stake in Ubisoft and Vivendi eating Activision, Blizzard, and Sierra, but I think it will have an effect on the publishers, especially American and European ones. American publishers get extra revenue from selling games abroad and European ones get less from selling to the important American market. Japanese publisher will also get less from selling to the American market, but the impact will be smaller because Japan seems to be less reliant on the U.S. gaming market than Europe.
Of the big three hardware companies, Microsoft seems to be the greatest benefactor here. With apparently the largest proportion of American publishers and developers in their stable, the publishers for those companies will benefit from this situation and will have more money to develop games. I doubt this will help them get a much of a foothold in Japan, but in the USA, Canada, and Europe this can work to their advantage.
Well, there were probably much more important things to write related to the falling dollar, but this is a video game site, so here we are.
An article about Lord of Vermilion, translated from GameKult in France, a little lukewarm off the presses. What I didn't get is how this is a game meant for adults. Screenshots at their site:
After its success at the arcade with Japanese school kids with Battle Quest Monsters: Battle Road, Square Enix is preparing to venture into Japanese arcades with a game intended for adults, and under its own label. Lord of Vermillion will be considered a card game, here in a heroic fantasy style. Stated objective: ride the wave of success of this genre of games and take a piece of the pie, generating money both from the arcade cabinet and the collection-based activities that follow. For the occasion, Square Enix is bringing in nine illustrators for the design of the cards, among them the very famous Yositaka Amano (Final Fantasy), as well as Akihiko Yoshida (Final Fantasy XII), and even Yûsuke Naora (The Last Remnant), in order to guarantee, to some extent, popularity among the brand's fans. The game will offer a single player mode for toughening up while winning cards each game, and a network mode for facing other players in the archipelago. The release date for Lord of Vermilion hasn't been set yet, but the game will soon be entering a public beta phase, with several “location tests” organized between December 6-17 in a handful of Japanese arcades. Given the state of the arcade in this country, we can't expect this game to enter our territory, unless there's an eventual console adaptation, which isn't in the works for the time being.
Shin Yokohoma, about an hour by train from Tokyo, is where we have been given an appointment by the developers of the Artoon studio for an exclusive interview with Naoto Oshima, the President of Artoon, famous for having drawn with his own hands that most famous of hedgehogs, Sonic, several years ago with Sega. This is in fact the first time that Artoon has welcomed foreign press to their studios and so it's with great honor that we ate and spoke with this funny, lively, and very pleasant man, just to get an inside look at this developer's studio that's riding a wave of popularity at the moment. Blinx: The Time Sweeper on the Xbox, Yoshi's Island DS on the Nintendo DS, and finally Blue Dragon on the Xbox 360 (certainly their biggest project with Mistwalker) are some examples of games developed by Artoon, notably published under Microsoft and Nintendo. We'll also talk about the return of Blue Dragon on the Nintendo DS, though the subject (still in the rumor stage) remains top secret for the moment.
Interview with Naoto Oshima, President of Artoon Studio
JeuxFrance: Thank you for having have at your Shin Yokohama studios for this interview. First, what do you feel when you see the Sonic character, of which you are the original designer, showing up in games such as Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, or Super Smash Bros. Brawl?
Naoto Oshima (Artoon): [Laughs] Ah, my feelings about Sonic? It's been a while...Sonic...I gave him life, then he grew up, and thanks to the intervention of numerous other people, he has evolved. I truly have the impression of having raised him as my child, and so I feel a bit like a parent in relation to Sonic. “My kid's all grown up!”, I could say [laughs].
Why did you decide to leave Sega's Sonic Team and create Artoon, your own development studio?
Mainly because I wanted to be free to do what I really wanted to. You know, when you stopped working on something, it's because there are things about it that you don't like, and one day it blows up inside, and you decide to go over to another thing.
Maybe it was to develop games that you wanted to create?
But in reality, I could already have done it with Sega, that wasn't the problem. The “Sega” at that time was in pretty bad shape.
So what then was the genesis of the Artoon project? Why did you create your own company?
Rather than follow the idea according to which a company has to always be creating new games, in large quantities, my idea was that it's ultimately preferable to work on a small scale, creating one game at a time, so that it will turn out even better. It's really to this end that I created Artoon. In Japan, in the world of animation for example, the greatest creator is without any doubt Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli. You've certainly realized that that studio works by taking it's time, and creates in the end few animes but puts lots of energy and resources to conceive them, that's the difference, and it's in that spirit that I've created Artoon, to become a sort of Ghibli for video games.
In passing, what's your favorite Ghibli film? Were also big Ghibli fans, their films are very well-known in France.
[Laughs] Definitely Laputa: Castle in the Sky.
Today, as a developer and creator of video games, what amount of artistic freedom do you have when working with the publishers?
I thought I'd become free by creating my own development studio, but in reality, it doesn't happen like that. There's not always agreement between what the publishers want us to develop for them, and what we, at Artoon, actually want to make. So effectively, we aren't free considering this point of view.
How is your relationship with the publishers? Are you the ones who come up with projects for them? Which are your projects, or to ask it the other way, is it more often the publishers that come and ask you to develop their game. If you bring a project to a developer, for example, do you still remain free to continue developing this project as you feel is best, or does the publisher set limits?
In practical terms, I've always wanted to create games with a more realistic feel, with a realism approaching that of film. But up to now, we haven't done a bad job with “cartoon-style” games as you know, and as a result, many publishers bring us projects for “cartoon-style” projects, since we're now “known” for this type of production. I'm not saying that I don't like this style, quite the contrary, but it's a way to explain to you the limitations we can have compared with what we'd like to do in this field.
I'll be more specific: for example, in the case of Blinx: The Time Sweeper, did you bring them the character and the game? Is this your brainchild, and did Microsoft then endorse its creation, or is it the other way around. Was Microsoft the one who came to ask you to create a game with a cat that goes back in time?
In the case of Blinx: The Time Sweeper, Microsoft came to visit us and basically said: we would like you to think about a character who could be Microsoft's Mario, a mascot like Sonic is for Sega. Further than this proposition for the project, we were free to do what we wanted, so we were the ones who came up with the Blinx character and the concept that came with him. Then Microsoft accepted the game that we presented them with, and that's how it happened.
Apart from Blinx: The Time Sweeper, have you often had this freedom to make the game as you imagine it? Or was this a special case?
In reality...the concept is often the most difficult thing to get the publishers to accept. Once the concept is accepted, the publishers, for the most part, doesn't worry about the details, and we are therefore quite free as far as the development of the game is concerned. But you now, up to now, Artoon has created a lot of pretty strange games. I'm going to show you, for example [Naoto Oshima gets and shows a poster of the game Ghost Vibration], here you can see that it's a game about ghosts that come out of the wall [Naoto Oshima mimes ghosts coming out of the wall!].
And then, there's Pinobee, a game with a robot-bee, created with the famous Pinocchio as our model. In this game, the play can write a diary. When the player does good deeds, the diary will tell good stories. And vice-versa, if the player does bad deess, our hero Pinobee will become a heartless villain, and the story will take a dark turn. In Blinx: The Time Sweeper, which we've talked about, the player can control time. There's also Vampire Rain, another game with ghosts, which we've been wanting to make, comparable to Japanese horror movies. So you see, we always make slightly peculiar games, each of which has its own distinctive properties, some people ill say that we make interesting games, and others who don't know what to make of them! [Laughs]
What's your favorite stage of development when making a video game?
It's in the beginning, when we have to think about what we could make, the phase where we research ideas.
What was it like with the Blue Dragon project for the Xbox 360, for example? Did Mr. Sakaguchi pass by your studios to see how the project was coming along?
Sakaguchi-san is a true creative person. He's an incredible person. Yes, he comes by often, especially toward the end of the project, we work hand in hand.
It looks like composer Nobuo Uematsu handled the game's music, have you had the chance to work directly with him as well?
Yes, in effect, Uematsu-san has also come a great many times to Artoon, mainly to discuss and to consult with us, since in order to make his music, he needs all of his equipment, which is in his own studio.
Completing the "Dream Team" for Blue Dragon was Akira Toriyama, who worked on the character design. Was it difficult for you as the president of Artoon studio, to coordinate all of these talented people for the same project?
Certainly, this was a uniting of these people who are famous in the world of video games, but this wasn't a problem in terms of management, on the contrary. Actually, everything began with the scenario that Sakaguchi-san had introduced. A team spirit was very important for him as well. There are certainly cases where Toriyama-San gave his opinion on what he saw as the less interesting parts of the scenario, for example. Sakaguchi-San always takes into account this sort of input from his colleagues. This often happens between creative people, there's a mutual trust and respect between them. And from our side too, when we suggest things, Sakaguchi-san listens to them attentively and takes it into account, in this sense, the working relations on Blue Dragon have really been very good.
You are a Japanese developer who works together with American, European, and Japanese publishers. Which ones are the most pleasant to work with?
First of all, it's very different according to where the publisher comes from. Microsoft is very different from Nintendo, for example. It's hard to say which one is better to work with, I'd simply say that they both have their positive sides. But you know, with Nintendo, they're incredible! You could say that all their employees have the qualities of a director. It's like the video gaming elite [Laughs].
Which console do you think has the biggest potential today?
I can't answer that. I love them all! My clients are Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony, how do you expect me to answer that question? [Laughs]
And as a player, what game are you playing at the moment?
Wii Sports [Laughs].
I'm noticing that now, many games that revolve around sports are being announced for the Wii (notably golf games). What do you think of this trend?
You know, I thought the same thing with the DS at first, there was a period with a lot of “non-games”, or easy games, but afterwards, numerous games that were more varied and classic-style came out as well, and I think that the same thing is happening with the Wii.
What do you think of the Casual Gaming phenomenon in general?
You know, in Japan, the number of children has greatly decreased compared to 10 years ago. If the video game market didn't adapt itself to this demographic change, it would have been destined for an inevitable decline. Moreover, in Japan, more than 90% of elementary school age children play video games. But when they get to middle school or high school, many of them stop playing, and so we find ourselves with a vast majority of adults who no longer play. To attract them, or rather to bring back this population of ex-players, Nintendo and others now create these so-called “casual games”. These aren't made for people who have never played, but rather for adults who played when they were children, to bring them back to video games, even in adulthood.
Are you more a Brain Training or a Final Fantasy person?
I like “real games”, with emotions (laughs].
Any last words for the readers of Jeux France?
At Artoon, even if I don't think that we have yet reached the level of the greatest developers, we make enormous efforts to make quality games, we work passionately, and we want to continue to create games that we like for players who have played and have liked our games. Therefore, I would like to say to our players to continue to support us, and to await our future games.
Thank you very much. We wish you good luck, and we are very honored to meet you today. Domo arigato gozaimashita.
You can call me Glenn.
I'm old school, man. Some of my favorites:
Strategy: Civilization series, Battle for Wesnoth, Warcraft II, RoTK series
Action/Platform: Katamari Damacy, Dynasty Warriors Series
RPG: Chrono Trigger, Xenogears
Sports: NBA 2K series
FPS: Deus Ex
Rhythm: DDR series (yeah, I said it)
Other stuff from back in the day: point & click adventures like Gabriel Knight, Sam & Max, Quest for Glory series. Doom & Wolfenstein. Sonic the Hedgehog, Streets of Rage, Super Mario 3, Mario Kart. The first thing in my house that played games was a Commodore 64. Giana Sisters was good times. First and only online-RPG I've played at length was The Fates of Twinion on the iMagination network. Never been a fan of Metroid or Zelda. Don't ask me why, I don't know.
Other interests:
Playing guitar and listening to music, singing (rock, folk, jazz, electro, french old school and nouvelle chanson, bossa nova and Brazilian popular music, plus many other styles)
Movie watchin': Films by Bergman, Kurosawa, Jean-Luc Godard, Hayao Miyazaki, Kubrick, Satoshi Kon, Jeunet & Caro. Stuff like A History of Violence, Serial Experiments Lain, Before Sunrise/Sunset, Inland Empire.
Book readin': Some fave novels are 100 Years of Solitude, Steppenwolf, Lolita, The Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison), Midnights Children, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Comix: Blankets, Maus, Persepolis, Y: The Last Man. Others: Guns, Germs, & Steel; Down and Out in Paris and London
Scrabble
Basketball
I want to use this blog to make translations into English from French game sites or mainstream press articles about video games. Maybe the occasional review or opinion or something like that.
Destructoid is an independently-run publication forged by our love of video games and the gaming community's need of accountable enthusiast press living the dream since March 16, 2006
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