First and foremost, nekofrog, or Justin Jones, has returned to write articles for GAF. We're very happy to have him back, and welcome his contributions to the site. I'm relieved that it's the first news article written by someone other than me in over a month.
Speaking of which, we're short on newsies, which is why there has been a sort of news drought on the main site. I'm unsure if drumlord is okay with me being candid like this, but I think you - our readers - deserve an explanation for this site's lack of relative content the past couple of months.
I've been trying my hardest the past couple months to bring you as much news as possible, and I know recently the amount has decreased considerably. There are plenty of newsworthy subjects to write about over the past month that I have had no other choice but to drop because I don't have time. Google Reader stacks with plenty of good articles, but as one person writing I can't do much.
This isn't my "real" job, it's a second job I volunteer for, like most of GAF's other writers. We didn't come on for the money, anyway. We do it because we have an honest, genuine passion for video games and the industry. We try to do our best providing coverage on some of the most important events, but that becomes difficult as we try to balance between this job and our real, 9-to-5 employment. I haven't even had the time to make blog posts like I usually do, though I'm unsure if that's as bad a thing as I'd like to believe.
Games I'm playing right now
There are two games that I've been playing these past couple of months: Valkyria Chronicles for the PS3 and Okami for the Nintendo Wii. Valkyria Chronicles kicks ass, and is an awesome AAA title. It's made by the people who brought you Phantasy Star and Skies of Arcadia, and its very enjoyable. Good music, excellent graphics, and lots of mechanics as a tactical rpg.
Okami on the Wii... I'm very mixed about. I like the gameplay, I like the story... I don't like the fact that I can't draw with the Wii Remote that well. Maybe it is because I need to have it recalibrated (I haven't recalibrated my Wii remote since I last brought the machine to another part of the house for a party), but it's still frustrating to have circles and lines go unread by the game.
It's games like this that make me realize that the Wii is incapable of complex controls hardcore gamers came to anticipate with the Wii. I don't think the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3 needs a successor for the next five years or so, but the Nintendo Wii... it needs an upgrade within the next two years if it wants to stay relevant.
But that's perfect material for another post, and another time. Right now, I need to catch up on Okami.
I suppose this is where I say "Home's great", but as of right now it isn't. There isn't enough in the service to justify the download quite yet. But for what it is worth, I will jot down my own experience for your reading pleasure.
Home's connection issues have stymied many people's experience of the service; I've only logged onto it twice, so I feel like getting "Error No. 603" is actually a step in the process.
After logging on the first time I was thrown into a simple tutorial for character customization and controller usage. The very first thing I noticed was that even though I have access to several articles of clothing, they only come in one color, which is a shame since most clothing in the game costs 50 cents a piece. Secondly, I don't like the facial customization feature. Although I have control over the nose, cheekbones, chin, lips, eyes, brow, and cranium size, no matter how many times I change the features I end up with (what looks like) the exact same character. I haven't used many of these custom create-a-character features, save for the one included in the Nintendo Wii. But I still feel as though that my Mii bears more semblance to me than my Home avatar.
Once done with my character customization (or lack thereof) I was placed into my "apartment", which should really be called a studio apartment with a deck. The scenery outside is pretty: an ocean view and harbor. The inside leaves a lot to be desired. You don't have a lot of furniture, and what is there is more likely found in the closeout section at the local IKEA. The same goes for the small assortment of items found in Home's mall. I actually found myself preferring the default furniture set after I saw those pathetic 70's retro "summer home" furniture collection.
I suppose what bothers me most about the furniture is that the proportions were misleading: you only see the couch, or table, or chair. You don't see the couch in correlation to your avatar, and as a result I ended up buying a "chair" that was really one-half the size I thought it was. Sure, it's only 99 cents, but a micro-transaction is a transaction nonetheless, and I feel like I was misled.
As for the mall, well that's also an issue for me. There are two levels, and both of them have identical stores, which is kind of redundant. Then again, when you are "shopping" in the store, you are just standing stagnant in the front entrance, so I suppose there is a "limited capacity" for each store and need multiple stores to handle the user-load. Selection was minimal, however, and I found myself at a loss because I thought I could find some interesting stuff to purchase for my character.
I did put down $4.99 for the Summer Home at the Home Estates store, though. Thought it would be cool. It is a nice place - much larger than the apartment, and a very different style, with two fireplaces, a view of a small ocean gulf and a monorail outside. I could have seen it in a dream before. It's really nice. If only I could find some nice furniture and appliances so I could actually use the house like a real house!
I think what also bugs me is the lack of a good interface for placing furniture. What we're doing, ultimately, is placing furniture in a room, but because I'm not actually in the room, I lack good judgment of furniture placement. A good bird's-eye-view would be awesome, as well as the ability to zoom out. And the other issue: furniture placement is buggy. Try not placing your furniture too close to your avatar, otherwise it might have a collision error and refuse to "drop into place". I mean seriously, I had to force shut down my PS3 because I could not use the PS button to exit the Home service.
Well, that's really all there is for the character and personal home customization. Reportedly, there was a lot of good stuff in the stores during the Closed Beta, so it is likely that most or all of this material will return in the coming months. Additionally, with the amount of time and money invested into Home there is no way Sony wouldn't continue to add new features and goods to the service. Expect plenty more to do at Home in the near future, and also expect another article from me on Home's community and social sprawl.
Like it says in the title: the unofficial translation to Mother 3 is complete.
The Ethical Dilemma
Actually, as an employee of Games Are Fun, I find myself in an ethical dilemma. Mother 3 is only available in Japan, so the only way to play the game is either buying the game and playing it on a Japanese GBA/DS Lite OR by doing it through a ROM.
None of us on this site condone the illegal download of copyrighted materials: music, movies, and especially video games. With games costing millions of dollars, and good studios going down the drain after betting the house on a single title, this means more now than ever. Even if I read scanlated manga, I make sure to buy physical copies to show my support for the industry.
The Case of the Little Game that Could
But then there's Mother 3. The game was released two years ago, and Nintendo of America has not even spoken a word about the game's localization, nor has the game been listed on any domestic release schedules. This is despite the fact that its predecessor - Mother 2, known outside of Japan as Earthbound - is one of the most acclaimed underground Role Playing Games of the 1990s, and one of the most sought after titles on eBay, in used game stores, and for the Virtual Console. There is enough demand for Mother 3 that it could sell reasonably well if it were brought into the United States.
But there is a lot of history behind this game. The game was was originally developed titled Mother 3, localized to Earthbound 64, in the mid-nineties for the Nintendo 64 and the now-defunct 64DiskDrive (64DD) add-on. The drive met with limited release, and even less success. Mother 3/EB64 was eventually canned and left on the wayside. It wasn't until nearly a decade later the game was brought back and developed by Brownie Brown, one of the companies made up of Squaresoft "refugees" and made famous for Magical Vacation. They, along with series creator Shigeashi Itoi, completed the game and it was released in 2006.
The return of Mother 3 can be compared to the resurrection of Duke Nukem Forever: the prodigal son had returned. But for Japan only.
Enter: Fan Translation
The fan translation of Mother 3 began two years ago - a friendly attempt at bringing the game to "the rest of us". They've declared that they'd stop once the localization of the game was announced (because there would be no need for their work). Even in the download section, Step 0 of the installation instructions reads "Purchase a copy of Mother 3 from Japan". Sadly, no announcement of its localization has come. Furthermore, the game is likely hard to find in Japan due to the overwhelming success of the DS and fading support for the GameBoy Advanced.
So here is an easily viable solution for my Mother 3 desires. What I want to do seems justifiable, but at the same time I don't like doing it. I'm not "entitled" to the game simply because I am a fan. Nintendo Co. Ltd. has the right to determine which of its games are distributed across the world. At the same time, though, I'd think many fans of Super Smash Bros. Brawl would like to know what game Lucas comes from.
The video game industry has a plethora of ideas. Ideas come at about a dime a dozen, possibly more. And it frustrates me when I hear people say "I've got ideas" for videogames, when they have no knowledge of the process that goes into video game development.
Here's an example. At last year's Game Developers Conference, I participated in a game design workshop. And one of the exercises involved a modification of an old online game called SiSSYFIGHT 3000. We had to modify it to fit a unique theme.
The first part of the exercise involved coming up with possible themes to base the modification on. We assembled into groups of six and wrote all our ideas down on sticky notes and put them all up on the wall where we'd eventually narrow it down to one idea and use that for modification of SiSSYFIGHT.
After ten minutes we had roughly 30-40 ideas together. Taking down the redundant ones, we had about 25, and involving everything from professional chefs, hotels, even trust-fund inheritors. The one we chose was the prison setting.
We had an excellent modifications and were proud of our game. It had an added complexity with the new rules we placed, and they provided lots of social commentary amongst all of us. The most fun was had when we began playtesting and witnessing all the awesome stuff we could do with the modifications.
Now I doubt any of us would have been able to do this on our own given the time constraints. I don't mean that one person could do it on his own. Given 2 hours, I'm sure a single person could work something out and test it as opposed to six. What I mean is that I don't believe a single person could have come up with the modifications to make the game as entertaining as the six of us did together. This is because everyone had a unique perspective on the topic of prisons, and I doubt one person could have come up with all those ideas based on his limited knowledge of prisons - whether fictionalized or not.
So pardon me when I hear of a guy like Soulja Boy claiming he wants to be a video game designer after seeing a dumb YouTube video of him playing through Braid (note: definitely not safe for work), and fear the thought of him designing a video game.
And judging from what I've heard about him in his other YouTube clips, he's got a big ego and loves his Xbox 360 and first-person shooters. Now I fear the very thought of him entering a development studio, for development or a little tour.
I've realized that game development and design is a group process, save for the few exceptions like Braid, which was developed by less than five people (we know of the original developer, but I think there was two or three more ppl).
Furthermore, I've also discovered that ideas are literally worth about pennies on the dollar: the only ones really worth their weight in gold (trick questions: ideas are abstract and have no weight, lol) are the ones that designers take the time to follow-through and implement in a game. We eliminated 39 - THIRTY-NINE - ideas from our board. And seeing as though none of my ideas were taken, I was pretty depressed at the start of this project. It was only after my ideas were included in the project and I saw the fruits of our experiment that I began enjoying the process. So if Soulja Boy and like-minded adolescents are so confident in their game skills they can make a game by dictating what they want in it, I'm afraid they're going to create shit games and dampen the video game industry.
Pardon me for my criticism of Soulja Boy. I don't listen to his work, and don't know him outside of his stupid comments on video games; I just think he's making a target out of himself, and I am taking the opportunity to use him as an example.
Being a good gamer does not equate to being a good game designer, just like watching lots of movies doesn't make you a good director (regardless of Uwe Boll's insistence).
Some of this has gotten out on the BBS, but I feel it's best if I were to spend a little bit of time on it here:
y'see, folks, way back when, I was actually considered a Pokemaniac. Not just a maniac, but one of the more well-known "Pokemon Trainers" on the internet. I captured and trained all 150 original Pokemon. and on top of that, I was one of the first people who discovered some of the techniques to raise Pokemon stats, stuff we know today as EV training.
Yeah, that makes me an incredible dork in some respects. I decided to quit it around my freshman year of high-school in order to focus on real-life stuff and non-pokemon video games. Besides, 4Kids' regular hackery on the Pokemon anime series was really depressing for me, and having seen parts of the original film in its Japanese form, I was definitely not up for any of the treatment the franchise was given in the US.
But since the beginning of the year, however, after I learned about the Global Trading System, I began changing my mind and getting more interested in buying another Pokemon game. And several years ago I bought Pokemon Colosseum for my Gamecube. Not exactly the best choice of games, but it served its purpose. Finally, around June of this year, I decided to pick up a copy of Pokemon Diamond.
To this day, I have two Celebis, two Ho-ohs, two Lugias, and I've filled my Pokedex up to 298. I'm also on the way to obtaining one each of Suicune, Entei, and Raikou (thanks to my beating Colosseum. I mean I'm moving my way through the game pretty fast...
And no, none of my rare Pokemon were hacked. How did I do it? I bought used Pokemon games. ^.^ I never really thought about it until after I bought Pokemon Emerald and Fire Red, but I thought "Hey, maybe this person has some Pokemon I could trade to my game." Thanks to that, I got a Blaziken, Rayquaza, the two Celebis, Ho-ohs and Lugias (no, they weren't hacked, they came from Pokemon Colluseum and XD), and several other rare Pokemon I'm unable to acquire in Diamond. I just finished Pokemon Red (sadly, there weren't any good Pokemon on it), and I've retrieved two Snorlax, an Articuno, a Zapdos, and a Moltres.
I mean shit, I've found tons of awesome Pokemon. The game's basic mechanics have changed so much over the past ten years that there will be enough difference between two identical Pokemon that one which is properly trained or bred, it will win the match.
So why might I be disappointed? I'm unable to train Pokemon without fighting. I want to have a way of training Pokemon out in the field or a Gym, not just by fighting Pokemon for EXP over and over again. Furthermore, I'd like the ability to let my Pokemon out of their Pokeballs and journey with them in the wild. Stuff like that would be cool, especially with Pokemon large enough to fly or ride to relatively unknown locations in the Pokemon world.
If there is ever a sequel to the DS pokemon game, I want it to feature every portion of the Pokemon realm: Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, and Sinnoh. That way, the game can last long, have lots of Pokemon, etc. Think of the possibilities!
Have you noticed something different about Games Are Fun?
In case you haven't noticed, the web-site team - myself included - has been devoting a lot of its time to adding news and reviews. We're all pretty happy with the increased oomph in the news coverage and reviews as well.
But this site does not perform as well as we'd like it to... without your contributions! Writing blogs, posting comments in news and articles, going onto the forums, all of this helps make Games Are Fun a great community. I'm proud to be a part of such a well-rounded cadre of video game enthusiasts. Everyone from fan to enthusiast to developer alike enjoys this web-site, and I hope you'll all take more time to visit.
