Toluu

GameSetWatch

The RePlay Files: A Trip To The 1986 JAMMA Arcade Game Show, Part 1Today

[Continuing a series that started last year with a classic Rampage announcement and Atari interview, 'The RePlay Files' is back, reprinting archival highlights of (pictured) seminal arcade/amusement trade journal RePlay Magazine, with the kind permission of the magazine's creators - check out their website for info about subscriptions, news, and the contents of the latest issue.

This final officially-approved extract (before we have to go and renegotiate with them, so yell if you like this stuff!) is a pretty amazingly early look at the Japanese arcade game scene. Specifically, it's an account of RePlay publisher Eddie Adlum's trip to the 1986 JAMMA show, which introduced games like Out Run to the world. It's a long travelogue with many pictures, so we'll be running it over multiple weeks - here's the first one.]

Introduction - West Meets East

RePlay's Publisher Eddie Adlum finally "broke the ice" and made his very first visit to Japan. The occasion was the Oct. 7-8 [1986] JAMM

GameSetLinks: Indie, Indie, IndieToday

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

Time to return, in the wake of the IGF announcement, and oddly enough, this set of GameSetLinks is dominated by various random thoughts about independent video games and the wonderful world of them that we live in - including IGN coverage and a massive IndieGamer thread.

Also hanging out in here - Game-ism on Prince Of Persia, plus a new iPhone developer is birthed from High Moon, and the ever-avuncular and awesome LucasArts veteran Hal Barwood gets interviewed by the ACG folks.

Combine harvester:

IGN: Independent's Day Vol. 15: Mad Science
Some good delving through the IGF entries here, in this excellent indie column which is somewhat buried on IGN's site.

Hal Barwood - Finite Arts - Interview - Adventure Classic Gaming
Looking forward to checking out the English version of Mata Hari, since it's very LucasArts homage-y.

The end of indie? - Indiegamer Developer Discussion Boards

Interview: Capcom's Nakai On Remaking Dead Rising For WiiYesterday

[A migration from Xbox 360 to Wii is not only uncommon, but deceptively complex, especially for a title like Capcom's Dead Rising. Producer Minoru Nakai talks with Gamasutra's Christian Nutt about the process, from reducing polygon counts by hand to adjusting the game's mechanics to make it more approachable to casual players.]

Originally released for the Xbox 360 in August 2006, Dead Rising has players taking on the role of photojournalist Frank West as he fights off zombies and rescues survivors in a shopping mall infested with the undead.

A Wii version, titled Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop, is due this February, using a modified version of the Resident Evil 4 Wii engine (itself a modified version of the RE4 GameCube engine), instead of Capcom's in-house MT Framework engine used for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC titles.

With the different engine and the system's hardware limitations, Chop Till You Drop now features an RE4-styled over-the-shoulder perspective -- but also loses the original's photography feature and offers less onscreen enemies, according to initial previews.

To find out more about the changes to Dead Rising on its journey to the Wii, as well as Capcom's process for the migration, we talked with producer Mino

GDC 2009 Reveals Localization Summit SpecificsYesterday

[As Think Services continues to publish news on GDC 2009 events, we'll be mentioning them here on GameSetWatch as well - this new Summit is somewhat of an important one because localization is still tremendously tricky to get right, both technically and culturally.]

The organizers of the inaugural Localization Summit at the 2009 Game Developers Conference have announced initial speakers and sessions for the innovative two-day localization summit, including a keynote from Electronic Arts VP Jaime Gine and notables from BioWare, Sega, Babel, and more.

The GDC Localization Summit will take place on March 23rd and 24th, 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco as part of Game Developers Conference 2009. Englobe’s Tom Edwards and Roehampton University’s Miguel A. Bernal-Merino are the Summit's principal advisors.

The recently confirmed keynote for the Summit will be 'Localization: The Pathway to Truly Global Game Development' from Jaime Gine, VP of International Development Services at Electronic Arts.

Gine runs EA's worldwide localization efforts, including the company's Multilingual European D

Postmortem: (I Fell In Love With) The Majesty of Colors'Yesterday

[Game designer and GameSetWatch columnist Gregory Weir recent released web-based abstract Flash game (I Fell In Love With) The Majesty of Colors' to acclaim, and over 700,000 gameplay sessions thus far -- and in this article he analyzes the genesis and outcome of the intriguing project.]

"Last night I dreamed I was an immense beast, floating in darkness. I knew nothing of the surface world until I fell in love with the majesty of colors."

(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors is a pixel-horror Flash game that puts the player behind the tentacles of a titanic, writhing sea creature. It’s a tale of love, loss, and balloons with five different endings. In this postmortem, I'll discuss the inspiration for the game, how the design developed, and what the sponsorship process was like.

Design Underpinnings

"The Majesty of Colors" has its origins in a sketch and a title. I'd been playing around with a few ideas for my next game, and TIGSource's