COLUMN: The Gaijin Restoration - Sampaguita
["I often import games from abroad and play them. On such occasions, my imagination is sometimes stimulated more as I don't understand the language.” – Fumito Ueda, creator of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. 'The Gaijin Restoration' is a weekly examination of underappreciated Eastern games that never cross to Western shores. This week's title is Yarudora Series Vol. 3: Sampaguita from Sony. It was released in late 1998 for the PlayStation in Japan.]
The Pleasure of My Text
I’ve been hooked on interactive fiction for quite a while, and by extension adventure games. There are several of my unspellchecked text adventures haunting the net (which I won’t reveal, due to intense shame.) My bookshelf houses the Oulipo Reader, Cortazar’s Hopscotch and the excellent Twisty Little Passages, and I feel in every fiber of my being that Fahrenheit, er, I mean, The Indigo Prophecy is an excellent, evolutionary return to form, using the semantics of cinema to deepen the experience of narrative. But, my humble beginnings come from my A+ book report from the 2nd grade on Seaside Mystery, or its complete title: Choose Your Own Adventure #67: Seaside Adventure. This was the gateway drug to Infocom, to Sierra, and eventually Half-Life and beyond.
Choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA henceforth) is an interesting, not quite missing link in interactive fiction. Often pegged as juvenile, it’s true that CYOAs do often cater to the kinder-crowd, but its simplicity and influence often creep into new media. Laser discs (with a modicum of twitch), DVDs and even CDs got into the act (with special mention to a vinyl record by one Ken Nordine: Colors, which came with obfuscated directions for random access playing.) I digress; I blog. This weeks little gem from the East is Yarudora Series Vol. 3: Sampaguita. The former part of the title is a concatenation which expands and translates to “Drama that You Do.” The latter, Sampaguita, is a Sri Lankan flower. The game is an anime CYOA for the PlayStation 1. That drama and that adventure owe it all to their preceding pronouns.
Dark And Stormy Nights
The game casts you as generic, nice if a bit lonely, salary-man everyman. Walking home one dark and stormy night, the area is bristled in an eerie tension. Police patrol, the wind blows, and black puddles glower light, and an alleyway hides away a crying girl in beautiful pink dress. She has amnesia. You do the noble thing and take her home and tend to her wounds. From here on, anything can happen to cut this story short.
There are 20 bad endings, 5 normal and a scant 3 good to strive for. The whole game is animated in a queer letterbox frame, pushed to the top of the screen, and peppered with stills when the action slows down. Periodically the choices pop up, and here is where the game becomes fiendishly unfriendly for friends of imports: it randomizes the selections. You can’t map a flowchart of progression without memorizing the actual kanji, hiragana and katakana, with some options looking identical to the untrained eye. A lone walkthrough Romanizes some choices, allowing one to go syllable hunting for a good, or even a normal ending, though finding all the bad endings is by no means easy.
In-flight Entertainment
There’s a charm to the game regardless. It reminds me of watching the person to the left’s in-flight movie, with a glaring angle, crap resolution and no sound, (your PSP battery is dead, and you’ve already read this month’s Edge 4 times over) and trying to bend the movie to your will.
The plot is filled with action, snuggling, mysteries recovered, trips to arcades and a man named boy. Eventually a halo of flowers shows up, which I can only assume is the sampaguitas. Probably highly charged with mimetic energy. But to recall my cryptic and grammatically awkward mention of pronouns from above, it’s how the game handles you that is remarkable. Your choices may be few, but you only speak what you select. Your head is always cut off, or only the mouth is visible. The only time your eyes are revealed, is at the climax of the plot. And even then, your mouth is covered. This leads to interesting blocking and opens an interesting angle for those interested in inoculating the reader/viewer into the story. If any of this interests you, it seems Sony has ported it over to the PSP, so you can explore Maria’s dark past on your bullet train commute past Mt. Fuji.
[Ryan Stevens is the associate producer on the various Cinematech shows on G4TV, which showcases many of the games written about here. He's been known to do the collaborative blog thing at That's Plenty.]

Although all-time great video game musician Tim Follin, whom
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Marvellously encylopedic game credits/info site
For all those out there who think we're Japanese fetishists who just have a wank everytime Hideo Kojima talks about what book he's reading now, witness our undying devotion to Jeff Minter! We'll give ourselves a good rubdown any time he does something too! The Tempest 2000/VLM/Neon/Unity creator is working on a new game for the 360. He's got the particle system going, and took some screen caps on his
>Whoops. Now I wish that when I met him at E3 2001 (I think that was the year - he was there for the Nuon), I hadn't asked him why Tempest 3000 wasn't much better than 2000. He probably felt bad. Anyway, he then went on to mention that even though Neon did really well (that's the visualization system for the 360, if you didn't know), the fact that Unity didn't come out makes him a bit nervous. Even so, cautious optimism abounds:
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Believe we've run a
["I often import games from abroad and play them. On such occasions, my imagination is sometimes stimulated more as I don't understand the language.” – Fumito Ueda, creator of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. 'The Gaijin Restoration' is
What I lack in rhythm I make up for in plucky soul. Though I adore
This is a fairly easy game to play without a firm grasp of Nihongo, though the songs are indeed in Japanese. There is a cutscene with a song rendered in English, and quite a few songs have the odd purloined word show up - Ms. Mini Hilton even starts counting in Swedish at one point, bringing chills to spines of anyone who ever saw mid-90's John Candy/Doug E. Doug vehicle
In the end, it's another music game that never came to the states. It's available and cheap. Making progress can seem random at times, but the bizarre plot and hum-along music are up to par. So, I invite you to enter the 3rd grade, eat some breakfast, slap down a ho, paint a cow, sing some karaoke (does that count as a post-modern gaming scene?) and make it to the stage to sing a stunning duet with rock god Mr.Chorking. Which is a horrible name for a rock god!
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Viewtiful Joe creators
The trouble they experienced was not that kind of development trouble where they'd decided on something difficult and now they just have to implement it, Kamiya states in the interview. It was that over and over again, they batted their heads on what to do with the title to the point of getting headaches. Nothing was resolving itself, and as their first big title, the pressure kept mounting. There were points where Inaba became furious with Kamiya and the entire team was sprawled on the floor in anguish. (As an aside, Inaba mentions that Kamiya wrote the entire scenario by himself.)
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Pepsi for Pizza!
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Is Dennis '
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Barnyard Basics

Everyone loves eBay, and on our latest trawl through the biggest marketplace of randomness in the world, we found a couple of neat game-related items. First up is a
Some fascinating trawling has been going on over at Ilya Vedrashko's 'In-Game Advertising and Advergames' weblog, where he's
Over at the Global Gaming League e-sports website, they've posted the 
Game companies often have their developers speak out on the games via websites these days, and Capcom is no different. No offence intended to these talented people, but what often surprises is how boring a high-level creator can sound.
Over at the
OK, so we're really frickin' slow on this one, but we completely missed that 1UP.com's resident lunatic
A few days ago, we linked to GamesRadar contributor Ben '222b' Turner's tip
Trying to keep the
Over at The Shifted Librarian weblog, blogger Jenny Levine has an
["I often import games from abroad and play them. On such occasions, my imagination is sometimes stimulated more as I don't understand the language.” – Fumito Ueda, creator of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. 'The Gaijin Restoration' is
This brings us to SCEI's Baito Hell 2000. The title has also been translated as 'Byte Hell 2000,' but is a reference to 'arubaito', meaning part-time work. While initially touted as the PSP Wario Ware, it's really its own beast. Wrapped in surreal menus of flatulent grim reapers, sentient mushrooms and the like, offering a variety of minigames, it lacks both the linearity and the acceleration of Wario's sweatshop. With only a handful of minigames open at the beginning, you gain money for doing these paltry tasks, which are then spent on vending machines, sickly reminiscences of Shenmue's various games of chance. Also, like Shenmue, you may want to win Outrun (a new minigame), but more often than not it's a various iconic bauble, and for a hat trick of Shenmue similarities, you seem to get these less interesting trophies as repeats fairly often and fairly early.
The best games are the ones that require you to figure out exactly what you are doing. While Wario barks out a beacon verb at the start of each game, this isn't always the case in Baito Hell 2000. The wrestling match disapproves of you winning, but pays out poorly for a devastating loss. The people here want a show. You gotta throw the match, but with finesse of a vaudevillian. As the ref counts to your defeat, the closer you approach the final countdown before escaping the double nelson means the more photographers come out to photograph this dramatic battle, and the more the crowd goes wild. In other words, it's like The Sting without the Joplin. It's these minigames that make Baito Hell a satisfying game to plod through, even if it means spending a couple of minutes putting caps onto pens.
Language is a barrier at times, with Angel dating sims being text heavy, but in general, it's a game one can get through using brute force and a handy hand in repetition. Not really a Wario Ware clone, I see a deeper analogy with the 
Well, not a changing of a guard, so much as an editor update, since a number of
We pretty much adore the off-handed import game commentary from the
Via
Nintendo and its various franchises are a steady predictable in Japanese supermarkets and convenience stores, with everyone from
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We've
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["I often import games from abroad and play them. On such occasions, my imagination is sometimes stimulated more as I don't understand the language.” – Fumito Ueda, creator of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. '
The Masaya Matsuura-designed Vib Ribbon embraces the vector decor for a tandem arrangement: all the graphics are being created procedurally, and the seed of that procedure is generated from music CDs the player puts in. Thus, the game has to load its entire program set into RAM, where textures and the like gobble resources like Pac-Man in a ball pit.
So, Vib Ribbon lets you put in your favorite music (or use the supplied J-pop tracks from Laugh & Beats which, at the very least, are deserving of a listen and a laugh, as their name implies), generates levels based on amplitude, bass levels, and whatnot. All of those visualizations plugins for your favorite software media player work on the same principle, and it's nothing particularly new. Atari sold, or attempted to sell, light glasses in the early 80s, and it has been
Despite my meta-critique above, Vib Ribbon is a charming game, much like Matsuura's predecessors in the Parappa The Rapper series. While the
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One-Bit To Rule Them All
Atomic Game Boy Kid
Total Tileset Terrorism
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Over at Edge Online, they've got a rather fun article
[This special GameSetWatch report about Rockstar's special NY blogger Table Tennis showdown was rushed to us by Matt '
Which is exactly what the game itself is, nothing more, nothing less. There's no superfluous nonsense, like pop music or slapped on street cred, just straightforward table tennis action. That's not to say it's drab or boring. From the get go, its intensely focused on bringing you, the player, straight and center in the thick of action, and it does so spectacularly, thanks in great part to its platform; some believe that its almost a waste to use the power of the Xbox 360 on such subject matter, but whereas all other 360 games have tried to deliver players in the midst of otherworldly, or ultra realistic visceral thrills, its crowning achievement just might in fact be simply placing the players in the shoes of someone who's means of attaining victory lies within a tiny white ball and a paddle.
In the game, much like its real-life counterpart, you basically hit the ball back and forth, though it’s more than just that of course. The key is to angle shots so the opponent can't get to the ball. Again, fairly obvious strategy to figure out. As one plays, a meter will fill up which will allow the use of more sophisticated maneuvers. But early on, I just wanted to make sure I didn't screw up therefore couldn't have cared less about performing any fancy tricks. So I ended up playing conservatively, as did Fiona, which led to a rather boring match to watch. Though the strategy worked, as I slowly pulled ahead. Near the end, I figured "what the hell" and went for a fancy move, which backfired, so I ran back to what had worked. Eventually I scored my first win. And if felt good!
It seems like
We
Over at 
Terrors of the Deep
Cthulhu fhtagn!
We like
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The Indy Gamer blog has noticed that
Via PressTheButtons, we have tragic news on
Yes, yes, we know, April Fool's Day was several millenia ago, and GSW didn't even bother pulling anything (we were going to finally run something on Halo for the Gizmondo which is actually true, but then nobody would believe it because it was run on April 1st, and... fuggedabutit!) Still, the nice folks at Shacknews have
Via the
The game starts with an odd introduction, with 3D/2D constructs that seems cel shaded and seemingly engine built, but doesn't seem to be the same rendering of the main game. I could be wrong; this could be an export from some tweaked Flash, but it honestly feels like an engine build. Why is this important? Well, in the annals of video game archeology, this could be one of the earliest cel shaded games. With a release date of 04/27/00 it beats Slap Happy Rhythm Busters, Jet Grind Radio or the domestic Wacky Races to market by a couple of months.


Some of the folks from
Over at 1UP, they have a
Most people have been shouting about Oblivion and Kingdom Hearts II recently, but a game sneaked out to U.S. retail this week that we have to point to - the
Carrying on with the game-art angle, The Little Mathletics blog continues to do some fun interviews, and the
Over at The-Inbetween.com, Mike Nowak has a
Video game peripheral company 






