There's an interesting article in this week's Escapist about all the stuff that happens in and around E3 that is not just games on display.
There's an interesting article in this week's Escapist about all the stuff that happens in and around E3 that is not just games on display.
My project is finally wrapping up so I decided to get an XBox 360 since I finally have some time to play games again. Living in Japan the question comes up do I get a Japan 360, an Asian 360 or a USA 360. Some games are region locked so if I get a USA 360 then I can generally only play USA versions of games. Since I live in Tokyo that means I have to play expensive import prices.
This is out all over the net but yesterday Sony Japan put up a downloadable Japanese demo of our game from the official game site. It requires the latest 2.70 version of the PSP firmware which you can download from your respective PSP sites. (USA, Japan, Europe) Simple English instructions for installing it are here.
I doubt this has anything to do with why XBox didn't do so well in Japan but "X" in Japanese means "no, bad, don't want it, wrong". "X" in Japanese is pronounced "batsu". When you mark something you either mark it with a circle "O" pronounced "maru" to mean "yes, I'll take that, correct" or with an "X" for "no, bad, wrong, don't want it". If you watch any Japanese game show you'll see them talk about "maru" and "batsu". When they show someone get the answer correct a "O" maru will appear. When they are wrong a "X" batsu will appear. If you are you with your friends and they challenge you with a question, if you guess correctly they will say "maru!" and if you guess wrong they might say "batsu!". If you lose a game they say "batsu−game". Batsu is also a kanji character, 罰, which means punishment or penalty.
I just got back from a week at the Game Developers Conference. I was fortunate enough to have my company send me which I believe is quite a privilege. I had not been since my Big Grub days in 1996 and this year it was in San Francisco which is a city I had also not been to for about 8 years so it was quite natsukashi (nostalgic).
For all your game maker wannabes here's a must read article about some of what it really takes to make a game.
I saw this post about some interesting VR videos. The two mentioned on that page, The Wave Of the Future and Super Mario, were fairly interesting. VR still has a long long way to go.
I was browsing the web, looking for inspiration. I typed in "Fantastic Voyage" into images.google.com and I found this page about a bunch video games created for a final project in a computer graphics class at Stanford. Very cool!