Posts Tagged ‘TGS’

Once again the Tokyo Game Show has been and gone, and for the third, and possibly final time, DoFuss visited Tokyo to bring you our impressions of the games on the floor.

Admittedly this show was originally a pre-TGS show, but all that changed when I failed to put post it in time. So after a quick chop and extra bit of extra recording we have our time travelling episode as during a single jingle we jump two weeks. Starting with the usual news and games talk we suddenly quantum leap in to TGS. With hands on (among others) Marvel vs. Capcom 3, El Shaddai, Vanquish, Valkyria Chronicles 3, Castlevania and Third Birthday, we end up with a longer show than usual, but it is packed end to end with gaming fun and discussion.

Sit back and enjoy.

This is the second part of my two-part interview with The Behemoth, developers of Alien Hominid, Castle Crashers and ‘Game 3’ (read Part 1 here). The remainder of the interview is solely with John Baez. We discus the reception of Game 3 both in the West and Japan, features of the upcoming Castle Crashers on PSN and The Behemoth’s community orientated approach to promotion.

As before the interview is edited (slightly) in the interest of clarity.

DF – Do you find Japanese players make different mistakes when they play Game 3 here?

John – No, not really. There are quite a lot of similarities. Really what we have been doing after each trade show is refining how people react to the game when they step up to a controller for the first time. Compared to a year ago it is so much better. We really like to make our game culturally neutral.

You know as hard as Alien Hominid was, you could figure it out pretty quick; move from left to right and shoot everything in your path. That was very, very quickly understood. This kind of the same thing, its about ‘How do we communicate in as few words as possible’. We have made it very icon driven. The build we have been showing here at TGS is a reflection of what we have been working on all summer. After a show we’d go home and we’d say ‘Okay, we have to move that piece here, and we have to animate this, and then we’ll get a better response’.

The difficult thing is that you uncover a problem the first day on site, and you just have to live through the four days of the show knowing that if you would have done ‘this’ and ‘this’ it would have been so much better, but you know in the long run its fine. It makes it worthwhile to come here and see that, but it is tough to see people make the same mistake over and over again. It would be okay if we could do fine-tuning on site, but there are so many moving parts in making something for each show that you would never know if you were making more bugs than you would be resolving.

DF – Talking of cultural differences has anyone accused the lead villain of being a block of tofu yet?

John – No, not yet.

DF – Really? It was the first thing I thought of when I saw it. Actually when I first saw shots it reminded me of the Phantom of the Opera, maybe because of the theatre setting I suppose.

John – Right.

DF – But when I saw it here, I guess because I am surrounded by Japan, I though ‘It’s a block of tofu… a crying block of tofu’.

John – Well you do know have the tofu, horse, refrigerator for sure, a lot of its subliminal.

DF – Its all mounted up. Will the story mode have cooperative play like your previous games?

John – We still haven’t determined if you can play the story mode or the mission mode with multiple people.

DF – So this would be the only game you’ve made where the story mode would be single player?

John – If we go down that route yeah.

DF – Is that why there is a heavy emphasis on the online team match aspect?

John – Well it has been designed from the outset as a venue to enjoy with a lot of people. Its ancient roots are the Alien Hominid PDA games. It has evolved a lot, so now there’s not a whole lot of comparison between them other than that are both platformers. Many people enjoyed playing the PDA games, and still enjoy playing them, that encouraged us to follow them as a point of exploration for our next game because we hadn’t made a strict platformer yet, and we like to do a different genre for every game that we do.

DF – Right so you’ll have another ‘departure’ for ‘Game 4’?

John – Well there would never have been a Castle Crashers if we had done Alien Hominid 2, so the idea is lets keep doing, for as long as we can. Keep doing like Treasure does and never make sequels. Just new franchise, new genre, push it as far as it goes, ship the game, start over.

You know, when you are a game developer that isn’t relying on a fixed revenue stream from a number of different titles in the same franchise, it just opens you to explore some many ideas. That’s what we are doing. Its all about having fun, exploring, and really trying to get as much out of it as we can for as long as we can.

DF – You have also Castle Crashers coming out on PSN soon, are you expecting that to hit bigger in Japan than the Xbox version did?

John – Well yeah, the install base is bigger but we are the number one Xbox Live Arcade game in Japan. There have been some other games in there but since launch, which was a year ago, we are told we’ve been at number one. If we aren’t at number one we are in the top three or five. That said, there are only a million, million and a half Xboxes in Japan right now. So it will be interesting to see what kind of up take we get on PSN in Japan when it launches.

DF – Will you be able to communicate over PSN with headsets?

John – I don’t know… since it doesn’t ship with one, and because nobody ever buys the peripherals, ever, period. It’s not native to PSN either, but we do tend not to, or we try not to, not to remove features. But it depends on the programmers; perhaps they will need the bandwidth to ensure the online multiplayer is the best experience. You know, as fun as it is, it does take up a certain amount of bandwidth even on the Xbox, so… and mostly what’s said over the headset is you know is ‘Your stupid’ ‘No your stupid…’

That said I cant even imagine what the install base is people with a headset. If you are going down that route then those are gamer that may not be in our fan base, they are the hardcore kind of Call of Duty players, so its less than likely they are going to be picking up our game. But you never know.
Maybe our programmers will surprise me and turn around ‘Yeah! Its been in since day one!’ and then I can come back and say, ‘Of course we support that, everyone go buy a head set!’

DF – This year you seem to have a bigger footprint on the show floor. Last year you had this little corner, but this year you have a whole area.

John – Yeah, we really used the first two days as our warm up. Like yesterday we didn’t have any fake grass at the booth, and that was something we had planned since from the Tokyo Anime Fair. That all happens at Tokyo Bigsite, not out here at Makuhari, so its much easier to get around Tokyo from there and I happened to be in a department store, lost, and I looked down and there’s Astroturf, and I though ‘My God! That’s going to be the perfect booth thing!’ And so yesterday when we arrived we spent all day walking around trying to find a place that had enough for us to do our booth. We finally found it and last night jumped into a taxi and went and bought every piece they had.

But what it really does is, the first two days, is smooth out all of that for the public days. Last year during TGS, when people showed, up it was fabulous. We did not know it there was going to be any interest. Castle Crashers had just launched and we had planed on coming out here. Then when we had our tiny little micro booth, very easy to set up, buy the TVs give them away to the translators when we are done, that kind of thing. It worked out really well.

Now this year, we are three times bigger and still short on space. And next year will be four times as big. We had so many people come by last year. They bought us their handmade fan art, from cookies to face masks to drawing. You know, we have received everything, even sculpted three-dimensional plushies, of our characters, just amazing stuff. All those people show up on Saturday and Sunday. They bring their kids and take pictures. And this year we have a whole lot of Castle Crashers posters that we will be signing.

It is a much more low key for us to be here than in the United States, because in the United States we sell our merchandise and it’s a huge headache, the money, the transactions, the whole inventory. I mean its great, because people may have to stand in line for half an hour to get our stuff but then they can kind of get it there and take it away, and that really cool. But here it’s totally different.

DF – Last year when I came I had actually just bought Castle Crashers. A friend and me played through it in a day and finished it. Then two weeks later we came here and were in awe to see you guys, the actual designers, there on the floor.

John – That’s another thing they commented on in the press here. You may have these game developers who are huge celebrities but they are never down in the trenches with regular people. You can’t walk up to a booth and shake their hands. For us it’s the interaction with the people who actually use our stuff.

We have given up on press releases and all that type of thing and totally focused on forums, blogs, just real direct contact with the people who use are stuff. If they are happy they tell their friends, and their friends tell their friends and it just goes. It seems to be going really well.

DF – It really speaks to the quality game. Well thank you very much Jon, Ill let you get over to Dan. Good luck with the new game.

John – No problem. Thank you.

Read Part 1 of the interview.

This is part one of a two-part interview with John Baez and Dan Paladin from The Behemoth, makers of the Alien Hominid, Castle Crashers and the upcoming ‘Game 3’ (see my preview of Game 3 here). In this first part we talk about the success of Castle Crasher’s, Game 3’s development and Castle Crashers and Game 3’s influences.

The interview was conducted at this years TGS and is edited only for clarity of meaning. I have divided it into two-parts only to make it more readable.

DF – Obviously Castle Crashers is your biggest game to date, how is that doing Worldwide? I remember hearing reports of one million sales.

John – That was a million users so a million users on the leader board. I think we are at one million two hundred thousand…

Dan – …one point two five million…

John – Are we at one point two five million now?

Dan – Yes, which is awesome! I mean, nobody expected…

John – THAT

Dan – …that many people to play the game. I mean Alien Hominid did okay but this is exponentially better. I think part of is we made Castle Crashers more accessible than Alien Hominid. It doesn’t kick your butt as hard and maybe it’s the genre as well. We are not a hundred percent sure, we are just making things that we like and we are lucky enough that people agree with us that they are good.

‘Game 3’ is even more accessible, so I guess there is a trend there. There is still a good amount of challenge involved, but you understand it right away then you just have to figure out your goals. I was showing you our online multiplayer mode, but we also have a story that can be played cooperatively or alone.

DF – Can you tell me any thing about the story? I saw a theatrical style, does that play in to the story.

Dan – Yeah the theatre plays in to it. I can’t tell you the details of why it’s a theatre just yet but I can tell you that guy you see with a hat, who’s always crying, he’s the bad guy. He’s psychotic. He always has several different emotions going on and you are trying to systematically breakdown what he’s got going, which is bad stuff. But we haven’t revealed the beginnings of the story just yet, and I hope to do that soon, as I have a lot of that in place.

A lot of the game has gotten off to a great start, it is solid, so a lot of what I am doing now is polish. I am trying to figure some clarity, see how people respond at the shows, addressing things as the reveal themselves. Usually after just one day at a trade show its obvious what we need to do. WE love to take it to the trade shows and see what people think.

DF – Has the reception been different in Japan? Have people taken to it differently?

John – Partially. If they have people have stumbled upon us. Like at the Tokyo Anime Fair, where we were one of the very few video games that were there, they didn’t know who we were. All they knew was that they really liked what they saw. Once we got them in to the booth and everything it was super.

Generally we go to PAX, and Comic Con so coming here for that has been really good. It has helped us grow our fan base because there are so few western developers. I don’t think this year there are any western developers besides us. EA isn’t even here this year. We actually got a lot of press from that last year, at TGS because the only Xbox developer, from the States, in Japan. All the Japanese press would say ‘what are you doing here?’ and we would show them our game. This was right after Castle Crashers came out and they were just blown away by it.

Dan – People really seemed to love it. We first started coming out here to let people know we exist, but then we find out that they already know, so now we are just showing them what we’ve got. We know we are released worldwide but we didn’t know that everyone walking by would be familiar with what we are doing.

My favourite game ever is Japanese, River City Ransom. That whole game was my inspiration for wanting to make a beat-um-up. Most of our inspiration just comes from the entire old-school genre that we are referencing.

But what I was saying was that the new game is referencing a one of our old mini games more than platformers in general. We kind of took each element of what we had already created and it spruced up. Just like the original version of Castle Crashers was thrown out, completely thrown out and redone, Game 3 is kind of way kind of like that.

[At this point Dan had to leave for an appointment with Game Trailers leaving me with John.]

DF – Before when we were play you were talking about how in previous builds you could have four teams in Game 3 why did you cut that back?

John – Currently its two teams, and then four players on each team, but we are not sure about the final number. One of the reasons we do all these trade shows is to get the player feed back from just watching them. We have had a lot of test cases where the technology can support so many more people but the problem is the number of players on screen at one time, per team, on one console.

Because camera has to zoom out to the size of furthest distance apart that two people are [there is no split screen]. So if you have a big level, and lots of people you end up with lots of tiny little characters and it’s not that fun. So we have been working, for about a year actually, and just slowly working back to the optimum number of players per game, which is looking about eight or twelve.

It’s a little bit difficult I guess because on the Xbox you can have four people on the same console, in the same room. So the four people there are possibly at a disadvantage, possibly at an advantage versus four guys all playing on their own systems. It has been a real challenge to find that balance between them.

Originally it was tempting to say like, ‘lets do a thirty-two player game’, and you know it was like the technology totally supports it, and it was like ‘man, this really sucks’, coz it really did, it really was not fun.

DF – Although still similar the art style in Game 3 has changed from your previous games, what is the evolution there?

John – It’s defiantly much richer than the previous games. It revolves around the theatre and there is a desire to have more of a feeling of wealth. Where Alien Hominid was really basic and Castle Crashers started to develop a different, more defined colour palette, Game 3 took another step; lots of gold, lots of bling, lots of shiny things.

Then you can see how it’s all rendered. There is much more of an emphasis on the primary parts of a level so you can see how everything works. For example you have a block sitting next to another block, and another block, and another block… where as Alien, well both Alien and Castle, every single background was individually rendered.

DF – I guess you kind of have an excuse this time too, with the theatre setting.

John – Right, yeah, its all kind of playing out in this big proscenium.

DF – I was going to say the difference in colour palette, kind of reminded me of the difference between like a box of chocolates and a box of… candy.

John – Yeah, that’s kind of exactly where it is, kind of tasty and substantial.

Continue on to Part 2 of the interview.

Thinking back to last year’s Tokyo Game Show I recall the excitement I felt as I queued in the rain waiting to go in. The expectant crowd and I anticipating the moment the doors would open so we could enter the three huge halls that comprised the Makuhari Messe exhibition center. Everyone in line was doing the same thing; contemplating what we wanted to see when we finally got in.

By comparison this years event had decidedly less of the energy I felt in the crowd the previous year. I was still excited about going to the show but more of the rush came from being able attend the industry days. Reduced foot traffic would mean access to more games and my appointments would enable me to get time with developers rather than just being patronized by the (cute) booth staff.

Entering the floor bore out my predictions. It was quieter, as demonstrated by the fact within an hour I had played more games than I managed in a whole day the previous year, but somehow it was also less exciting. Perhaps the thrill of the open floor was muted by the realization that there were few titles I was interested in. None of the big titles I wanted to see where on the floor, and the games that were had distinctly less buzz than those at the ’08 show.

Both Resident Evil 5 and Street Fighter 4 had been present in 2008. These were franchises that shaped the way I look at games, the two games from my youth that I remember most fondly. Their presence alone had had me agitated with excitement at the prospect of seeing what Capcom had planed for my cherished memories. By contrast the ’09 line up was filled with series that I acknowledge are top tier (such Final Fantasy XIII) but held none of the nostalgic impact for me.

Another contributing factor to my comparative indifference to the show resulted from the lack off publishers present. I wasn’t aware before the show how few of the big western developers made the trip to Japan, but when many of the years big releases are the properties of companies like EA and Activision their absence becomes painfully evident.

It wasn’t just western publishers who had deemed not to attend either. I don’t know whether it was an economic reason or a lack of product, but a number of the larger Japanese companies were also missing in action. SNK was among these notable absentees. Last year had the company present in full force with a huge display for King of Fighters 12 that occupied much of the entrance hall, but their nonattendance this year saw their floor space filled with mobile phone game developers. Tecmo and Koei’s merging this year also resulted in a reduced floor presence as the two huge areas they had previously occupied were now reduced to one.

To compound feeling of a lack of ‘AAA’ titles, many of this year’s big releases have been rated ‘Z’ by CERO Japan’s governing classifications body. Under this rating the games in stores are segregated from other games and put out of reach of under twenty-one year olds. At the show this translated to them being hidden from view in darken rooms. Thus it was only on my second day that I realized a number of games I wanted to see were present. Left 4 Dead 2, God of War 3 and Heavy Rain all remained hidden from view, making them hard to find if you explicitly go searching for them. This ended up being quite costly to my coverage because games that weren’t immediately self-evident I assumed were casualties of the diminished developer presence.

It may seem like I was unimpressed by my TGS ’09 experiences, but despite the lack of energy it remained a fascinating weekend. I got to see, and more importantly play, lots of fantastic games.

The highlights for me remain the time I spent with Q-Games, Capcom and The Behemoth (expect a transcription of my interview with them soon). Each of these companies had knowledgeable representatives (PR or developers) on hand who were happy to answer all my questions, rather than just bustle me through their booth. While they were obviously there to promote their games it didn’t dilute the feeling that these were companies confident in their products and happy to push it to the community.

In the end I was lucky enough to actually see the majority I wanted to. I did miss Okami Den and Valkiria Chronicles 2 but for the two days I was there I think I got to see about as much as I could have hoped to while leaving myself time to cover what I saw in a timely fashion.

If truth were told I was almost at breaking point through out my two days at the show. Existing the first day on three hours sleep and without food, I ran from 5am on Friday until 4am Saturday when I finally decided (after writing up eight articles) that I should try and sleep before my 8am alarm for the following day. The second day I was in two minds about even attending, remembering my success (or lack there of) on the previous year’s open days. Unfortunately one site I was writing for had requested photos of booth babes and coz-players (not something I am comfortable with) and as there were no coz-players on the industry day I had to make the return trip. As I took the pictures I reasoned that I was skillfully hiding hide myself among the crowds of Japanese otaku trying to get up skirt shots, making me feel less self conscious. I wasn’t of course, I am nearly two meters tall with red hair, but it made me feel a little less perverted as I took my surreptitious photos.

It was also nice to see the larger crowd on the public day, as while the industry days expedites coverage, the enthused visitors create an excitement around the event that is infectious. Sadly though it was immediately apparent that the audience was significantly diminished from that of ’08. Even accounting for the extra space created from the reduced developers attendance the halls felt empty (or at least as empty as any where can feel with around sixty one thousand people in a room).

It transpires that the crowd was in fact some ten thousand fewer on the first public day this year, almost solely accounting for the dip in overall attendance. Honestly I don’t know what to attribute these reduced numbers to. Initially I assumed it would be linked to the amount of coverage the games on show have already received, combined with the fact that for anyone who had attended one of the other recent previous events, such as E3, PAX or Game Com, would have already seen the demos on offer. This certainly seemed to be the feeling among foreign games press who made the journey to Japan to cover the event only to be met by the same games that they had seen less than a month previously at PAX. But the missing ten thousand people would nearly all be Japanese consumers, almost all of whom would not have attended the overseas events.

So perhaps the reduced numbers were related to the reduced number of developers and big name games at the show. The 2008 show was full of big name Japanese titles; Final Fantasy XIII, Kingdom Hearts games, Resident Evil, Street Fighter and King of Fighters were all on so and some time from release. 2009 only really saw Final Fantasy XIII and Metal Gear Solid still flying the flag for the big Japanese franchises. With the Metal Gear demo hitting the internet almost simultaneously with the show opening and Final Fantasy XIII just around the corner, gamers were probably more eager to save their entry fee and train fair (over ¥30,000 in the end for me) and put it towards buying the games rather than queuing to play them.

I finally gave up on the show at about 3pm on the Saturday. Having only had time to see two games in the length queues I decided my time would be better spent typing up previews for the fourteen games I had already seen rather than joining the two and a half hour line for a play of Heavy Rain. So I headed home along with my crushing headache, probably a result of sleep deprivation. It was a different and far more productive experience than 2008, but it remained expensive, tiring and something I am glad I don’t have to do too often.