January 27, 2004

gama galaxy austrian kasparov fire weblog?

So since I last updated, Gamasutra, the online arm of Game Developer magazine, has posted the latest piece I've written for them, an interview with John Ricciardi of InterOne about Japanese/American gaming contrasts (free registration required, grr.) It talks about how you adapt American videogames to actually sell copies in Japan, and the best way to translate Japanese titles for the Western market, among other things - hopefully an interesting angle on a perennial problem.

Oh, and I got a cool email from MJ Simpson, writer of the Douglas Adams biography Hitchhiker, since it turns out Shynola's involvement in the HHGTTG movie, as I mentioned last month, hasn't really been noticed up to now, since US electronic paper-mag XLR8R isn't a place Adams-philes generally check out. So I pointed him to the specific reference and he posted about it on his excellent Douglas Adams news site, which also has prototype pictures of Marvin from the imminently in-production movie. Oh, and, if correct, I think Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent is rather wonderful, bewilderbeast-styled casting.

Meanwhile, apparently I'm big in Austria, thanks, I suspect, to Stefan Trischler, an old Mono-friend who once helped me smuggle contraband out of a party at Ars Electronica, and is now helping publicize netlabels on the ORF site (the Austrian equivalent of the BBC.) Good to see Monotonik and other, cooler netlabels get more props for giving away free music with some kind of alleged quality threshold. [EDIT:Apparently, Michael aka Artifact was responsible for the specific article, thank you!]

Final paragraph round-up: purchased Virtual Kasparov for GameBoy Advance cheaply at Costco, heh - it's actually pretty good fun playing it on a TV with the GameCube GBA adaptor, and you play through ranked opponents with personalities - I choose you, Kasparov! Otherwise, wading through Alan Moore's Voice Of The Fire for possible Slashdot book review - amazing novel, albeit with almost Tolkien-like impenetrability upfront. Oh, and did I mention that my friend Raj has a MovableType weblog hosted on this domain now, joining the ranks of the ever-marvellous Khonnor? Well, he does, so there. Anyone else want to jump aboard?

Posted by h0l211 at 11:02 PM

January 18, 2004

software beep the duckhunt doa?

Reaching the end of a fairly lazy weekend, at least in terms of leaving the house - time to do a little ffwd updating with the 'cool stuff' scrawled on this here Post-It(TM) note, don't you think?

Firstly, for fans of bleep-styled retro videogame-ish noises, there's a double treat for you. Aleksi 'Heatbeat' Eeben's music-disc for the Commodore 64, 'White Box', was released at the Alternative Party in Helsinki, and is now downloadable from his site. You can run it in emulators like Vice, and it features 32 SID-chip toting tracks, each one with 'liner notes' in the form of scrolltext from yours truly. Where, in this case, 'liner notes' refers to a load of old surreal claptrap I made up on the spot, themed loosely to the song. Here's an example scroller, for the song 'Rock 'N Roll Butterfly':

'Fluttering. Fluttering by. The butterfly flutters by, and its role is to rock. Why rock? Didn't the butterfly's parents bring it up right, that a caterpillar should always respect its elders, to stay away from the devil's music, if you flap your wings too hard you'll crash and burn? But then, butterfly was all new and running with a bad crowd, staying up late, going after the exotic, pricy nectar. Soon, his colors were faded, and his proboscis was wrinkled, but it didn't stop him. After all, the lived-in look was how to rock it, as a rock n' roll butterfly. A cat mauling. A hailstorm. A jaunt inside a schoolbus. More and more ragged. Until something happened, and it stopped being rock, and it stopped being roll, and it started being wrong, and promise gone wrong, and things unfulfilled. You can only rock and roll if you have the art, the grandeur, the legend to back it up, the butterfly realised. Otherwise, you're not rock, or roll - you're just broken for no good reason but self-destruction.'

So, uhm.. yeah - at least Aleksi was pleased with the end result, and I was flattered to be asked. The new tracks from 'White Box' are likely to be released on Monotonik in MP3 form sometime soon, alongside the music-disc itself, so watch out for that.

In the meantime, out on Monotonik now is Blasterhead's 'Killbots EP', a rather smart rave-infested beep-tastic Nintendo GameBoy-based EP from a Japanese videogame musician whose claim to fame is working on various rather risque PC hentai dating games. I spent a few months courting him to appear on Monotonik after hearing a live set of his online, and this Little Sound DJ-based EP is an intelligently bangin' use of the GB sound chip, I reckon. Check it, you might like it.

Oh, and a quick update - the software section we're working on for the Internet Archive is going decently, but probably won't be ready for a while. It'll hopefully be before Game Developer's Conference, where I'll be leading a roundtable on 'Preserving Videogame History' - hopefully we can get some good ideas and support for practical schemes going there. Looks like I may also be on a panel discussing software preservation at the next Wizards Of OS conference this June, though that's pending confirmation. But I'm itching to get something real and substantive unveiled - we'll see how things go.

Other than that, fun stuff I did recently included wandering down to Surplus Computers with a fellow Slashdot editor who was in town, and finding some weird TV game called the Super Joy, which I worked out was some kinda odd Famicom in a N64 controller after I got it home, hah! Even better, it has a port on the bottom that Famicom (Japanese NES) games will fit into, so I could finally try out my NES multicart that I picked up a few months back at a garage sale - the only notable game on it is the Tengen version of Tetris, though. Oh, and on a related note, I noticed recently that the Game Music Base has archived my .MOD music from an Amiga shareware version of Tetris, though they've pretended that they're 'Arranged / Remixed tunes', when they're just completely different tunes for a Tetris clone - go figure.

Posted by h0l211 at 10:28 PM

January 10, 2004

netlabel yellow trouble cos mst capcom-commented..

It's been a little while since the last update, but luckily, plenty of inconsequence has happened. So let's talk about it.

Oh, I never mentioned the net.labels section that I organize at the Internet Archive made it to 1000 freely distributable, largely Creative Commons-licensed electronic music releases, did I? Well, it did, with the addition of the marvellous Please Do Something, including their latest release from none other than our friend Khonnor, who still makes achingly beautiful vocal idm tracks.

But on to more important matters - the media I have been doing the live+buy+consume+die actions on recently. Movie-wise, the very odd Yellowbeard was on cable somewhere - a post-Python piece of piratical whimsy for Graham Chapman, with Eric Idle and John Cleese guesting, as well as a sublime 30-second spot from Spike Milligan, and even, uhm, Cheech and Chong. Also finally caught Barry Sonnenfeld's flop Big Trouble, as adapted from a Dave Barry book, and actually pretty enjoyable in an eccentric way - but there's lots of airline lack-of-security riffing, hence its subdued release post 9/11.

Been trying to get into games - have the Xbox version of Deus Ex: Invisible War waiting to check out, but have been too busy trying out Capcom Vs. Snk 2:EO + necessary arcade stick for GameCube (maybe I'll finally get _one_ of the characters up to a decent skill level!), and getting re-re-addicted to Wario Ware Inc. for GBA, played on the big screen with the GameBoy Player for GC.

Some random links, also - a massive Comiket exhibition/cosplay event recently took place in Japan, and I just had to wander through the hundreds of costume pics, looking for quirkiest. So, without further ado - we have a little Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates Of The Caribbean (genius!), a touch of Frodo Baggins, a whole raft of Harry Potter and friends, and a most comely Mario/Luigi combo. As for random links part deux, Russian faux-lesbian, Trevor Horn-produced popstrels T.A.T.U have their own anime movie in production, right now, I discovered. Uhm... yeah.

Finally, sorry comments have gone away for now. There's been some pretty heavy spam attacks on my comments recently, from multiple IPs, too, so I think things will function better as a one-way dialog for the time being.

Posted by h0l211 at 08:10 PM

January 01, 2004

penn griffin last man turns burnout apple..

So, it's a New Year, innit? A very happy one to everyone who checks out ffwd from time to time. We had a quiet time at home, since Holly's a bit under the weather with that flu/cold thing that seems so 'en vogue' right now, aww.

Things slowed down a little around Xmas, so I was able to catch up on some TiVo - particularly enjoyed Showtime's re-running of the first season of Penn And Teller: Bullshit!, which is really a skeptical debunking documentary-style show, a little like the excellent Mythbusters, only with real-life issues like the environment or psychics, rather than goofy exploding lavatory gags. A particular highlight of P&T:BS! - a skeptical look at environmentalists, arguing that many who want to 'save the rainforests' are really pushing larger political and anti-globalist goals, or, perhaps, just turning up to salve their guilt. Not always true, obviously, but some very good points were made.

Also over the Xmas break, we wandered up to San Francisco to catch a stand-up gig by Kathy Griffin, who, despite the fact she's had a pretty weird career, middle-of-the-road sitcoms and all, is pretty much hilariously sharp when it comes to celebrity-bitching and scandalizing. We've probably seen almost everything she's ever been in, even Kathy's So-Called Reality on MTV, which was a super-short-lived bitchfest that kinda rocked if you dug reality shows - which we do, heh. Anyhow, good stuff.

Oh, and also viewed on TiVo of late was The Last Man On Earth, a somewhat overlooked, downbeat adaptation of Richard Matheson's 'I Am Legend', about a vampire plague that's wiped out the world. There's been a modern version rumored for a while, with Will Smith possibly attached, and The Omega Man was another film version, but this '60s Vincent Price-starring version, made in Italy, by the look of it, is chilling and rather beautifully underplayed.

Been playing a few of the games I got for Xmas - primarily Mario Kart: Double Dash!! for GameCube, which is, of course, excellent, and is even fun for somebody who worked on a kart racer, and might theoretically be burnt out on the genre. Also, picked up for a budget price as an online deal, the crash mode in Burnout 2: Developer's Cut for Xbox is well worth the price of entry alone... mm, car wrecks for fun and profit.

Oh, and when bneely came over to hang out and play videogames the other day, he was wearing a T-shirt from As The Apple Turns, thus alerting me to this frickin' hilarious Mac rumors site. Heck, I don't even care that much about Mac rumors, and I'm addicted to the page's sass, already.

Posted by h0l211 at 12:24 PM