I complain a lot about Australia, but there are some great things about living here. One of them is that Australia is the home of Eminence. Eminence are a contemporary orchestra who draw the music they play from video games and anime (as opposed to Play or Video Games Live, which only draw from video games). They’ve been getting an increasing amount of exposure this year, primarily through their recent ‘Destiny’ tour. A quintet from Eminence travelled to Japan to stage a concert in Yokohama, which sold out in 12 hours. They then played a slightly different show at Otakon, which seems to have caused a bit of a splash, followed by a performance in Sydney and then finally in Melbourne. Last night I attended the Melbourne concert, and I was extremely impressed.
Archive for the 'Games' CategoryPage 2 of 2
FFXII was, without a doubt, one of my most anticipated games of 2006. In fact, when I found out that it was probably not going to get a PAL release until later in 2007, it was enough to tip me over the edge and go and get my console modded just so that I could import the US release early. Everything I was reading about it was positive - dark, compelling story, modernised battle system, graphical sophistication, polish… everything is there. It is undoubtedly a great game.
But I hate playing it.
It seems that the guys over at Revolve who are currently hard at work translating Tsukihime have finished proofing their translation. Now all that’s left is finishing their scripter which will re-insert the text into the game and some testing to make sure everything worked correctly, and we’ll be playing Tsukihime in English. Can’t wait. 
As some of you are probably aware, the expected production cost for a best-selling game in the next few years is expected to rise to at least $20 million US dollars. This is predicted to be the death knell for a lot of small developers who lack the agility to adapt to changing circumstances. One such possible change is the whole idea of Episodic Content.
While this blog is primarily about anime, I am both a gamer and a programmer, and thus the state of the games industry is one which is of interest to me. I know that many of the more hardcore anime fans are of similar persuasion.
Anyway, It’s not that long since E3, the Electronics Entertainment Expo. Of course, the big thing everyone was talking about were the new console announcements. Sony’s Playstation 3, Microsoft’s Xbox360, and Nintendo’s secretive ‘Revolution’. Now, everyone’s probably sick to the back teeth of hearing about these, so I’m not going to talk about the hardware specifically. What I’m more interested in is the philosophies which drive them. Unfortunately, I believe we may be looking at the death of games as we know them.
Continue reading ‘Next-Gen Consoles: The End of Innovation?’