Fielding Requests!

A few things concerning my "Japanese Mythbusters" type column. I'm at the point where my personal well is dry and I need some user input to find more stuff to bust or ultimately prove true. When it comes to gaming, there are always exceptional exceptions like 78 year old Akira Kitajima who keeps his FPS gaming PC up to spec regularly plus writes Japanese language FAQs/Walkthroughs on his personal website. Hell, he's so die hard he uses an American Keyboard. Browsing his site, he seems like anything but a Japanese gamer geek, having traveled the world, played sports, etc. The stereotype being a Hikkikomori.

>Japan's entire attitude about gaming seems to be going in a look-don't-touch direction, what with Japan's own games >advancing mainly in aesthetics and storytelling and not really in gameplay.
For RPGs, sure. But for other genres? I'd hardly call anything of action and the subcategory thereof "look don't touch."  Though don't touch is a very important principle in Danmaku Hell shooters. Touch a bullet, you're dead! But I know that's not what you're talking about.

>How popular are America's NBA, MLB, NFL, and NASCAR on Japanese TV?
Baseball is pretty popular since some major Japanese aces have been imported by American teams. Matsui, Ichiro,  Daisuke, wow, I don't even like baseball but I know a few names. The rest might show up on some premium sports channel, but they're pretty much ignored in favor of home grown versions. Soccer is a close second behind baseball, and soccer hasn't caught on for squat in the USA. Really, America is a great big soccer island. I'm sure any European readers want to strangle me since I'm not calling it "football." And behind the real football according to the rest of the world is high school baseball. Yes, high school baseball gets on national TV. Arguably, sports is the ultimate war metaphor, so of course there's all kinds of unwarranted pride coursing through peoples and "their" teams.

>Could you write a post about the state of American software translation in Japan?
It's certainly on an upswing with Fallout 3, GTA4, just about every major release on 360 is getting localized to Japan. I wouldn't be surprised if the localization is done entirely in the USA. I mean translation, editing, any necessary programming or in-game artwork is all done here in the US for European releases(at least it was when I was at Lucas Arts.) Likewise, Japanese development teams are responsible for integrating English and other languages when their games get released elsewhere. For more on that specific nightmare, check JC's blog, he's had to wrestle with that far more than I have.

>I read interviews with the producers of Silent Hill and Lost Odyssey who said that one of their problems is that they >want to use cutting edge American tech like Unreal Engine 3, but that it has a ton of documentation that gets late >and poor translation into Japanese, if at all.
This is a huge problem. The overall statement of engine documentation has a lot of choice 4 letter words you can assign to it, but I'll just leave it as "poor." Unreal Engine has 1 master, namely it's creator; Epic Games.

Also, the amount of work required when you start taking an engine and deviating it from the type of game it originally was used to make, goes up exponentially as you deviate. Epic can't even adequately support star Western developers such as Bioware, so I can't even think of how poor they are to Japanese companies. Unreal killed my enjoyment of Mass Effect. Random framerate drops, random pauses to load, the scene going from a bland version of Killer 7 to realistic over the course of 3 seconds, etc. And this is Bioware. They have experience making engines like the Aurora Engine they used for the original Never Winter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic games. Bioware is a company with top tier talents working for them and they still struggle. That's telling.

Unreal relies on cutting edge hardware, which game consoles may not always keep up. I am not sure if normal mapping and all that dynamic lighting that Unreal has in their tech demo is hardware accelerated by consoles. It sure is on the PC they use to show off the tech to executive bean counters that just like the sounds of those buzzwords.

For those uncertain as to what normal mapping is, it's an "invisible" texture layer that just contains data on what the mathematical normal or "up vector" is for any given point on a model. It lets you add amazing amounts of detail to a model without actually having to sit there and actually push the polys. However, the normal map data is used by the shader so until the lighting kicks in, you won't see the detail. And yay, I just used that linear algebra I busted my brain on at the University. Woo hoo! To see how to make a really good normal map and what it can do, check this tutorial out at CGTextures. Scroll about 2/3s of the way down to see a rock texture rendered with a normal map. No modeling required. Pretty amazing tech no doubt, but it comes at a steep hardware cost.

Now, if Epic provides a complete manual, that places them miles ahead of just about every other game engine out there. A previous employer of mine used Torque Game Engine. The original version of that engine would just...die if you tried to make something other than a corridor shooter. Support consists of trolling Garage Games' forum and praying someone tried to do what you did. A lot of people are trying due to the low price and cross platform abilities that TGE boasts. Their scripting language is basically C# with some variables already set which is another very good thing going for it. C# is so easy, I've been able to use it.

Other middleware could be different. Havok's cloth physics is getting around for making character costumes behave in a life-like manner. Soul Calibur IV and Folklore use it, I'm sure there are plenty of others. Seeing how specialized this middleware is, they can really fine tune their interfaces and make their product easy to implement and properly support it.

To me, Unreal Engine on a console has become a scarlet letter/seal of disapproval and it decreases my interest in the product. I might go back and play all these Unreal engine games when I upgrade my PC when(maybe if) I move back to the USA, but by then I'm sure I'll have forgotten about them or decide not to ultimately buy them due to other PC gaming issues like DRM.

If there's one thing SquareEnix has demonstrated repeatedly in the past, it's that they know how to make something look good without bleeding edge tech.