DToid’s Tweet in response to Perez’s comments
I’m probably burning this bridge before stepping on it, and it would be unlike me to report on another sire’s beef, but this just boggles the mind to unfathomable, Jeff Gerstmann levels. Ryan Perez, then-Editor at Destructoid, made a Tweet where he questioned how much gaming personality Felicia Day has contributed. The tweet after the break.
This Week on Night-Time Listening, we went oldschool, like we always do. But we went handheld oldschool as this week, it was all about the Game Boy. First up we listened to the sounds of Final Fantasy Legend III. Then we went back to kill Dracula with Castlevania Legends. We traded cards with Pokemon Trading Card game. We saved Pauline in Donkey Kong ’94. And finally, we traveled to Goldenrod City in Pokemon G/S/C.
If you want to see the music as it goes up (and not wait every Saturday for these wrap-ups), remember to go to our new Tumblr page and follow it. Music for Night-Time Listenings goes up every weekday at 10PM
Continue reading
Amidst the absolute mess SEGA’s in right now comes word that SEGA is closing down some of its offices in Europe and Australia. The casualties in Europe are Germany, France, Spain, and Benelux. Australia is getting the axe completely. Jurgen Posts states that this is all part of SEGA’s business realignment strategy. All is not lost though, as Koch Media and 5 Star will be taking care of the territories affect by this strategy. Post does say something that makes me nervious for SEGA’s (and the industry as a whole) future. “The big IPs are becoming bigger, whether that’s FIFA, Call Of Duty or Assassin’s Creed, those titles are just becoming bigger and bigger and it’s harder and harder to break into the market with new IP.” This concerns me greatly since SEGA postponed Anarchy Reigns to 2013. Along with this, SEGA’s probably not going to do much exploration with themes, settings, and ideas.
At this point, I don’t know what to say about SEGA anymore. They have a plan, and unfortunately it looks like it might work… for them at least. It’s a shame we probably won’t get more out-there games like Space Channel 5 and ChuChu Rocket. But this problem stems from a deeper problem plaguing the industry, and I’ll get to that in the very near future.
Sega closing five European offices this year [GamesIndustry International, via Kotaku]
System: PC/Publisher: Nyu Media/Developer: Edelweiss/Players: 1/Release Date:6/29/2012It’s kind of unfortunate to see space shooters fall by the wayside after the 16bit and 32-bit days. While there were some out there that really impressed, they’ve all fallen to the niche circle. Indie hit Touhou reached a level of popularity the likes of Gradius and R-Type. Then Ikaruga brought forth a space shooter with bullet hell elements. And now, the scene is mostly quiet, with ports and remakes of Shoot ‘Em Ups hitting the download scene. Alongside that, smaller teams have developed shooters of their own, bringing over ambitious ideas quenching the thirst of old-school shmup fans, if only temporarily. However most of them never made it outside of Japan. Here’s one of the few that managed to make it out, Ether Vapor Remaster. Will this quench that thirst for a while, or are you better off drinking water? After the jump, I Breakdown Ether Vapor Remaster.
None of them actually hit you, but you get the idea.
Slowly but surely doujin localizing company Nyu Media has been rising up in fame, finding its niche nicely in the download scene. Releasing indie games from Japan that would otherwise fly over most U.S. publishers heads, Nyu Media has brought over shmup game The eXceed Collection and adventure game Cherry Tree High Comedy Club. And so a new release dawns, Ether Vapor Remaster, an enhanced port of a shmup game originally released back in 2007 in Japan. I tried the game out… and (after some futzing with my shitty-ass computer to get it to work. I’ll talk about this some other time.), I was issued a pure ass beating only an old-school game can dish out.
He mad yo! After hearing enough whining from Tekken fans about changes to the voices of the characters, Katsuhiro Harada took to Twitter to address these fans. It’s a long one, but the basic jist of his schooling is that he’s heard people bitch about how Namco’s changed the voice actors to much of the Tekken fighters as the installments go by. This is in part to the changes made to recording technology, equipment, and format being different from how it was 15 years ago. He uses Brian Fury and his maniacal laugh as an example of a voice they’ve reused over and over (at the request of fans who like his laugh). While his voice actor is a different one from back then, the voice file for the laughing is still the same one from Tekken 3 (Brian’s debut game). He points out that the laughing voice sounds different from his normal voice, which in turn make his voice inconsistent. But he keeps it because fans would be upset if they changed it.
He also mentions that voice actors sometimes cannot replicate the same voice over the years for many reasons, including voices changing, vocal health, retirement, or contracts/rights. He pleads with them, but sometimes they have to make due with the new blood. I say good on him that he’s stepping in to shut fans up. Some would wonder why I’m giving him the pass while others get the boot. Well, compared to them, Harada (and other veterans of the industry) have been in the business for a while and know their shit. As I always say: Be a pro before you can be a dick. You can read the tweet in its entirety on Kotaku.
Tekken Head Unleashes Twitter Tirade [Kotaku]
Wowza that’s a lot of characters! However this is only considering allies and enemies and not actually the main characters you’ll be controlling in the game. According to the Project X Zone blog (translated by Andriasang), “This figure includes allies and enemies. It does not include characters who appear exclusively in event scenes.” The blog also states that these aren’t no generic, wire-frame multi-mook melee fodder, but instead characters from many franchises of each of the three companies. Who could those characters be? We already know that Q-Bee is in as an enemy, but will she change sides?
Since Namco’s handling Smash Bros. development (along with Sakurai’s Project Sora), maybe they might want to share the crossover love and, you know, localize it for the West! Remember, there’s a fan campaign to get this game out in the West. So hop to it!
もっとも未知なる交差領域で [PXZ Blog, translated by AndriaSang, via Joystiq]
This week Night-Time Listenings moved to Tumblr, leaving Facebook for a second time after a short run. So this week we listened to two tracks from Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. Then we when one step back and listened to a selection from Advance Wars: Dual Strike. We then went further back and listened to some classic Andrew W.K. And Finally, we went even further back to Surf some Buttholes.
If you want to see the music as it goes up (and not wait every Saturday for these wrap-ups), remember to go to our new Tumblr page and follow it. Music for Night-Time Listenings goes up every weekday at 10PM
Continue reading
I Stand On My Soapbox is a series of editorials that cover more specific topics in the games industry and community. These articles are a little more extreme than normal editorials published here, and could just degenerate to outright ranting. Have fun and enjoy the show!Of all the questions people asked about the Wii U and Nintendo this past E3, this is one question that outright irked me the most. You can see it everywhere you looked that had editors and gamers talking about what was missing at Nintendo’s E3. I too wondered some things. But a new Zelda was not in my mind, nor did it ever enter my train of though when I thought about what Nintendo was lacking. And yet, there are people that wanted a new Zelda game for the Wii U. For those people, I have this to say:
Woah-ho-hooo! Now that’s one major delay if I ever saw one. If you remember a while back, SEGA delayed the Anarchy Reigns from early Summer until it could find a better date to release it. Since Japan’s going to get it as scheduled (which is still this Summer), you’d think it’d be around late Summer at least. In the initial report, SEGA didn’t specify what the new release date would be. But now they have a general date: Early 2013! Does SEGA really need to push it that far for a successful launch? Remember, SEGA delayed the game initially because it wanted to find a better time to release it — i.e. no major competition would be around. But 2013!? And the game is fully done too.
Well, at least they could use this surplus of extra time to work out any kinks and netcode issues they find in the JP release. But man, if this was any other game, I wouldn’t bat an eye. But with SEGA’s financial trouble, it sounds like something bigger’s happening in the House of Hedgehog.
SEGA’s Twitter, via Kotaku
Well that took long enough. Gamers in Australia have long awaited to get an R18 rating for videogames. For other forms of media in Australia, the R18 rating has been around. For videogames however, the highest the rating went was MA15. This was due to politicians believing that games were still for kids. But, like other governments around the world, they’re slow to catch up to changing demographics and not knowing that the common age for gamers has risen (those kids grew up after all). Since the R18 rating didn’t exist for videogames, games were either edited to meet the MA15 guidelines, banned, or simply considered for released there. Measure to pass R18 for videogames have popped up, only to be shot down at the last minute due to 1 or two members of their legislators not approving it (it has to be 100% unanimous).
Thr R18 rating for videogames will take effect January 1, 2013. So rejoice Aussie Gamers! You earned it!
Gamers get adults-only R18+ classification [news.com.au, via Kotaku]
Ever since the reveal of the Wii U last year (and further info this year), I was thinking of what kinds of games would be a good fit for the Wii U and the Tablet Controller (called the Gamepad). After seeing what some of those games were doing with the tablet, I recalled one of those demos doing something akin to showing a bigger picture on the TV and showing a zoomed-in shot on the Gamepad’s screen. Then it hit me: Why not make a make a new Silent Scope game?
At first I thought it would be cool to bring back the ol’ series to TWF, and to have it posted in the place that started it all: Facebook. However, I faced a harsh reality. It wasn’t guaranteed that I’d be there to post the music on Facebook. Either I was busy making an article, watching something, or even sleeping. There would be days were there would be no music and I’d have to make it up, as evidenced by my complaining on the wrap-up articles. With Tumblr, I can schedule posts to go up their own, much like I can do here on the WordPress platform. This is the one thing I wish Facebook had, but doesn’t. So starting on Monday, all Night-Time Listening posts will be on our Tumblr page, with weekend wrap-ups continuing here.
Speaking of which, welcome our new Tumblr page. Since we at The Wired Fish want to spread out to as many social platforms as possible, we’ll be starting our trek on Tumblr. It will function similarly to our main site with most articles auto-posting there. But, like Night-Time Listening, we might put up extra stuff that you’ll only see there. So if you have a Tumblr, be sure to follow us there and spread the word!
Reading that title might give you a jolt, and rightly so. The First Person Shooter is the most popular genre this generation, and for Shigeru Miyamoto to want to make one almost goes beyond the philosophy (we think) that he’s established for himself (and probably the entire company). But you know what, this is Miyamoto. Someone can give him a crumpled piece of paper and he’d make a game out of it. All joking aside, in an interview with Kotaku, he states that he would make an FPS that would focus more on exploring the environment, the situation, and the weapon in your hand, and how enemies would react. “Having that 3D space that in theory you are in and being able to look around and explore that—particularly being able to do that in conjunction with another person—is very interesting,” he says, highlighting the exploration advantage that FPS can have (but are woefully underutilized).
Much of what he says can be seen in the Metroid Prime games, which emphasized exploration over action (though that was present, more so in Prime 3). The Elder Scrolls games also come to mind. But probably the one game that really took advantage of the environment was Mirror’s Edge, and it does almost what Metroid Prime does — albeit in a more linear fashion — when it comes to exploration. It’s virtually a platformer. Heck, one of the achievements is an homage to one of Miyamoto’s biggest creations. If Miyamoto wants to make an FPS, let the man make one. Heck, let DICE give him Mirror’s Edge!
…Yes I really want another Mirror’s Edge game.
The Creator of Mario and Zelda Wants to Make a First-Person Shooter [Kotaku]
Okay then, I’ll have to backpeddle on this one a bit. There was only one song two weeks ago and nothing this past week since we were all busy with E3. So to make up for that, I’m going to do a Two Week Special. Basically, I’ll be posting 10 songs here, which is two weeks worth of music. And I’ll be taking a from each of my Top 10 favorite games of all time (As of this year. It changes sometimes). Also, the songs selected are not what I consider the best songs of each game, they’re just randomly chosen. So hit that jump and get listening.
Remember to like our Facebook page to get updates from TWF, and to see the music posted without waiting for these wrap-ups. We now have a Tumblr too if you prefer to get your updates Tumbld to you…. I’m sorry. That was a terrible pun. I’ll go in the corner an sulk with a dunce cap on.
Continue reading
The Wired Fish Network 