“On Tuesday, October 25, Japanese-headquartered publisher and developer Koei (Dynasty Warriors series) held its expansion launch party for its subsidiary in Toronto, Koei Canada. Though Koei’s Canadian location was established in 2001 with a focus on CG, the team has now been expanded to function as a next generation development studio, working on its first title, Fatal Inertia, for the Playstation 3 launch.

As such, Gamasutra was there to witness the opening of Koei’s expanded offices in the presence of Koei co-founder Kou Shibusawa, and talk to the developers about why a Japanese company was expanding into Canadian territory for next-generation titles, and the company’s continuing plans for Western and worldwide expansion.”

This is another reason I owe my journalistic career to Brandon Sheffield; he was supposedly just hanging out with Koei PR rep Jarik Sikat when Jarik mentioned he was heading up to Toronto for a launch party. I was called up, covered it, and the rest is history. Jarik’s actually a really nice guy, and I regret I wasn’t able to catch up with him at E3.

This is a nice little piece that can act as a short primer on Koei’s history, but also features my first interview through a translator. While my Japanese can (at times) be useful, I’ll need to get a lot better if I ever expect to ever use it in interview situations. I was actually quite anxious before this interview, but I think it turned out really well, even using a second-hand dictaphone that liked to stop recording randomly. I’ve since picked up a Sony ICD-P210, which works nicely, though Sony have naturally made sure the audio files are in the most absurd proprietary format.

“While simple java-based mobile games can be programmed quickly and without major outlay, there are hundreds of different Java-enabled phones currently available, each with wildly differing specifications: screen sizes, memory capabilities, key placements, and so forth. To take advantage of the mobile market, game developers need to be able to port their games to as many handsets as possible. Until now, this process has been extremely costly and time consuming, as you had to program each game specifically for each different handset.

This is where Tira Wireless’ Jump Product Suite steps in.”

I’m currently in Vancouver on assignment for Gamasutra, sitting in the hilariously small, weird, and useless “business centre” of the Westin Grand, and I’ve decided to finish up archiving the work I’ve done for CMP (the owners of Game Developer Magazine, Gamasutra and GameSetWatch) before any new articles start appearing, as I’ll be covering the upcoming Toronto Independent Games Conference for Gamasutra too.

I’d probably consider this article my true debut as a games journalist; admittedly it’s a rather dry review of a porting suite for mobile phone developers, but it was paid work with an established (and excellent) publication that required fact checking and proof reading! I didn’t even realize until today that the piece is listed on the cover, too. Haven’t had a true cover feature yet, but then I do suppose the majority of my work is online. This article is available as part of the downloadable digital issue of the September 2005 Game Developer Magazine, but it’s also (oddly) available in full on the Tira Wireless website.

“The last time I logged into Second Life it seemed to have more ghosts than ever.

Maybe one day I’ll be one of them.”

I thought the last column was weary, but this one takes the biscuit. Still, at least I got to write a very vague Specials reference in there.

I’d actually forgotten this got posted today until Thomas Robinson, one of the subjects of the article, mailed me to say he appreciated it, which was nice. I really liked his piece, so do check it out (if you have any interest in Second Life at all, that is.)

Coincidentally it’s “Ghost Week” on the Insert Credit forum‘s home of the wretched and the damned, “Forum Axe”. Much like the Second Life forum, you can’t see it unless you’re logged in, but in this case, that’s a really, really good thing.

“This year in London there were three companies all offering handheld games machines with a difference – they all offer to do more than be simply a games machine. Nokia, who’ve been in the business for a while now with the N-Gage, Tapwave with their Zodiac PDA, and newcomer Gizmondo, with their handheld unit simply called ‘The Gizmondo’. While Nokia actually don’t ever use the phrase, these systems can all be loosely called ‘convergence devices’, a phrase which Gizmondo and Tapwave were certainly falling over themselves to use. I don’t intend to tell you which one is best for you here, each system has a lot to offer, and each system is different.”

As far as I can remember this is the last article that I have posted on Insert Credit, because by this time I became heartily sick of coding the HTML for each page. Admittedly the job is mostly copy and pasting, but I’d had enough of it. That’s not to say it’s the last article that I’ve written for Insert Credit. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to link to a new one (but don’t hold your breath.)

This is one of the oddest and most “of it’s time” articles I’ve ever written; an feature entirely about convergence devices, namely the N-Gage, Gizmondo and the Tapwave Zodiac. Which are now all quite deceased. It’s fun to laugh at them now, but each one had their unique plus points; Stuart Campbell has covered the many positives of the N-Gage quite fully, the Tapwave was a cross between a PSP and a DS (and was simply crying out for some decent support), and the Gizmondo… Well, the Gizmondo felt really, really nice.

Special thanks must be made at this point to my good friend Alex Duin, one of the creative masterminds behind the BBC’s interesting alternate reality game Jamie Kane, for putting me up in London and accompanying me on all of my crazy adventures. The poor sod bought a Zodiac after this article. My bad!

“I just lost the game.

As a side effect, so did you.”

It’s entirely unfortunate that whenever I, you, or anybody else reads this article they lose “The Game” (and now, of course, anyone who reads this blog.) Still, if it works to spread this little viral bit of magic even further, then it makes me happy.

A short while ago I was contacted entirely randomly by someone who was trying to prove The Game exists to Wikipedia, and I’m gratified to find out the legendarily insane Wikipedia overlords now admit it does. People are even selling t-shirts, but as you can see from this article, I was not thinking of The Game back when it was cool to not think of it. That’s “not think of it”, not “not have heard of it”; there’s a crucial difference.

Anyway, this article shows the sad, confused state of London’s trade shows in 2004, with 3 different floor shows an 2 different developers conferences. ECTS was by this point little more than a hollow shell, with the Koreans the only shining light. The Korean stand at any trade show has always been one of the highlights, usually a lavishly laid out affair, but yet somehow they would never bother to make sure they were using proper English on their pamphlets, allowing hilarity to ensue. As far as anyone can tell the Korean games industry gets piles of cash from their government to take their wares across the world, but whether they’ve ever had anything to show for it is another matter.

This trip was however personally gratifying, because I got to chat to Warren Spector for a while. I found him astoundingly pleasant and interesting.

I hadn’t played Deus Ex: Invisible War by that point. A good thing, really.

“And so it was I found myself in the Waterstones on Princes Street trying to read The Birthday Party in half an hour. Which I managed. But considering that a great deal of the atmosphere of the play is (apparently) in Pinter’s use of silence, my ultra fast version kind of lost a bit of the charm. I wondered, rushing back to the Royal Museum for 12 to save the princess meet my girlfriend – is what I’ve done perhaps some metaphor for man’s need to play games? To challenge himself? To set himself tasks and quests?”

Ah, we’ve come full circle, it would feel like, if my career hadn’t continued on extensively past this, my coverage of the second Edinburgh International Games Festival. Remarkable for the gratuitous section I’ve quoted part of, in which I read a Harold Pinter play. Definitely on the wanky side of new games journalism, that. I do like my conclusion of the entire article, though, and Mark Rein is a fun guy. This piece also features the first mention of my (then still quite new) girlfriend, but they only get more regular and detailed from this point on.

I’m sad, actually, that I haven’t been able to cover the re-branded Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival for the last two years. Edinburgh is fun during the festival (though I have both bad and good memories of it) and I hope I’ll be able to visit again sometime.

“I visited Japan in February of this year, and during my stay, Asobitcity announced its closure, and Yamagiwa Soft burned to the ground.

It’s unusual, I guess, that my most concrete memories of both stores are of their pornography sections. “

I’ve been taking a short break from filling in my archive chronologically, but here’s the piece of writing which followed on from my Viewtiful Joe review in November 2003; it might seem strange that I took a gap of about 7 months between articles, but I was working through my third year of university at the time. Which sounds very noble and productive, however I did miss the first week of the second term to visit Japan.

Shortly after the visit I wrote at least one article about the trip, but they never really amounted to much more than “What I Did On My Holidays, by Mathew Kumar, age 22 and 2 months” so I shelved (and have subsequently lost) them, but they turned into the first page of this review. This is probably one of those articles that people would refer to as “new games journalism”, because the definition of NGJ is trapped somewhere between Kieron Gillen’s “gaming discussed as personal experience” and Tim Rogers’ “personal experience as a framework for discussing gaming”. This is the latter; I use my personal experience of playing Taisen Hot Gimmick in an arcade in Harajuku to explain the rules of Mahjong, before writing a fairly straightforward review on the second page.

I like this piece – it’s was written confidently and covers a genre that is given next to no coverage in English. I haven’t played Mahjong in ages (my set weighs an ton, so I didn’t bring it with me to Toronto) and I’ve wanted to review one of the many Mahjong titles for DS for quite a while (the Mario branded Yakuman DS, perhaps), but sadly I don’t really have the money for such frivolities.

This article is a good example of why I started this workblog, too – the Insert Credit archives are so broken not one of my articles after the Viewtiful Joe review are actually linked to on an easily accessible page!

Every week I’m going to round up the posts I’ve done across the week for Torontoist that I think are worth remembering. As in an average week this is only going to be my Film Friday, I’m just going title the posts on this workblog this way. Even though this week was more exciting than most, with the Toronto International Film Festival holding its final press conference in Nathan Phillips Square on Tuesday.

Nathan Phillips Square is the concrete park in front of Toronto’s architecturally interesting city hall building. Apparently it’s instrumental to the climax of Resident Evil: Apocalypse, but I haven’t seen it. Someone also once told me that the old mayor had a cardboard cut out of himself that used to sit in his office chair when he was out, but I have no idea if that’s true either. The square is usually of most interest for the wide range of crazy people that hang out there, and some nice junk food stands (people say it’s the best poutine in the city). My long time personal favorite of the crazies, the guy who stood at the edge of the square with a gang of rats and a couple of ferrets that’d charge you to have your picture taken with him has sadly been absent this summer. I hope he’s okay!

Tuesday:
Toronto International Film Festival 2006: The Only Thing Anyone Cares About
“Brad Pitt is coming.”

Toronto International Film Festival 2006: Everything Announced
Full coverage of the press conference. Written speedily, but (I hope) amusingly and informatively.

The interesting thing about writing coverage or summaries for a film festival where they announce hundreds of films is how transparently your personal interests are shown. Here it’s blatantly obvious I don’t really rate the Gala films, but I practically wet myself over the Bollywood discussion and Zidane: Un Portrait Du XXIéme Siécle.

Friday:
Film Friday: Billy Zane Was in a Film Called Invincible, You Know.
“If we follow the ‘Snakes on a Plane’ style of naming, this [Invincible] would be called “Mark Wahlberg is an Unlikely Hero in the Seventies” – which would be the third in a series, then (following Boogie Nights and Rockstar.)”

I have to admit, this joke was basically stolen from my girlfriend, but it’s not like we weren’t all thinking it, am I right?

The secret of any writer’s jokes, I bet, is they’re all ripped off of things they’ve said or heard in the pub. Where else could inspiration come from?

A short and rather boring post, more for my personal archives than general interest, as I’ll have to send this to TIFFG post-festival anyway: All of the posts I’ve written so far on the Toronto International Film Festival 2006.

March 9: Toronto International Film Festival 2006 Opening Gala Announced: R U Still Inuit?
This is a good one, though. How many people could shoehorn a reference to Mogwai into the title of a post about the Toronto International Film Festival Opening Gala?

June 28: Toronto International Film Festival 2006: Twenty-Six Titles Announced

August 18: Toronto International Film Festival 2006: African and African-Diaspora Titles Announced

I’ll get back to talking about video games soon enough, loyal fans!

I’ve been writing the Film Friday column at Torontoist since December 9th, apparently, which means there are a good 8 months of weekly film columns now lining the birdcage of the internet. What this also means that it would be madness, or rather maddeningly tedious, for me to link every single column I’ve written here. Even though I did start this website to be a complete document of my work. Thankfully Torontoist actually has a full list of all of my posts available, so if you wanted to trawl through my written history there without gaps you can.

Originally titled “The Week in Film” for reasons I can’t quite remember (a title that only lasted two weeks before we went with the far snappier “Film Friday”) the column is very far from unique, as it’s directly inspired from my time spent reading Londonist (despite not living in London) and their Friday Film News column. I like to think mine is a little bit better, but it’s roughly the same template – cover the week’s new releases, referring to what other journalists have said about the films because you probably haven’t seen them yourself. I tend to rely on Toronto’s free alternative newsweeklies Eye Weekly and Now Magazine when I want to quote someone else’s opinion, which I do less and less these days thanks to a better relationship with local PR more “late press screenings” than ever before and the fact that I like to have loud opinions about things I don’t know anything about.

Because Toronto has a thriving independent cinema scene (or at least it did, until they shut down 3 of the indies in June) and there are about seven hundred thousand different film festivals on at any point during the year, I like to make sure the column spotlights the films that are on outside the multiplex, and I think that does differentiate our column from the London one. Here’s ten of the best.

December 9th, 2005: “The Week in Film: Gorillas in the Midst”
My first column, and I set the tone by calling King Kong “Peter Jackson’s forthcoming ape-ic (epic)”.

I owe a lot to Mr. Biffo.

January 13th, 2006: “Film Fridays: Love The Passenger with all Reg Hartt”
The first of the (far too) few times I’ve mentioned Reg Hartt and his Cineforum. A Toronto legend, he’s a crazy old guy who runs a cinema out of his house, and you can’t fail but see his posters up everywhere, offering everything from “Kid Dracula” (he shows Nosferatu and plays Kid A and OK Computer over the top) to “The Sex and Violence Film Festival”. The anecdote I tell at the end of the column isn’t made up.

January 27, 2006: “Film Fridays: Vivre Les French Films”
“Also opening this week … Big Momma’s House 2. The print advertising for this claims ‘The Mother of All Comedies is back’, which is, I guess, akin to the way that Iraqis call the first Gulf War ‘The Mother of All Battles’, because Big Momma’s House was a global tragedy that scarred the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, and definitely didn’t need a sequel.”

April 7, 2006: “Film Fridays: Take the Lead Steel Cable”
“The core concept of this film [Take the Lead] is so terrifically uninspired, so fundamentally disgusting, that Torontoist honestly feels that the studio executives and everyone else involved in the project should be taken out into the street and beaten about the legs with steel cables so they can never dance again.

Or walk.”

May 5, 2006: “Film Friday: SCOOP! TOM CRUISE BREATHES AIR, USES LEGS TO WALK”
The pre-Mission Impossible III coverage was unbearable by this point.

June 2, 2006: “Film Friday: Al Gore invents internet, stops paying attention”
In which I accuse Al Gore of illegally downloading South Park.

June 9, 2006: “Film Friday: A Bad Omen for Film This Month, But Who Cars? (Groan)”
“Torontoist has very indistinct memories (and has just wasted like, an hour googling in an attempt to find) of an old short which featured a cute little car who wanted to be a race car, against his father’s (some kind of a truck, I think) wishes. He gets the operation, crashes, and then gets put back together in his father’s image.”

Does anyone know what this cartoon was? It’s still driving me crazy.

July 7, 2006: “Film Friday: Bill and Ted and Its Sequel Were Brilliant, But That’s No Excuse.”
On Keanu Reeves: “We don’t wish him dead, or anything, but we sure would like to beat him around the face with a bag full of door knobs till he’s too disfigured to be a bankable star.”

August 11, 2006: “Film Friday: Every Week, There is a Column, which DEFINES A GENERATION.”
I may hate the movie executives behind Step Up even more than I hate the ones behind Take the Lead.

August 18, 2006: “Film Friday: Bad Cop, Worse Cop”
My most recent Film Friday! Includes a review of Canadian buddy cop flick Bon Cop, Bad Cop, plus a short rant about those Mac ads.

Oh man I hate those Mac ads!