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In May of 2004, I for some reason flew halfway around the world to look at videogames I wouldn't be able to play on an airplane for six or seven more months. I flew there with Chuck Franklin, playing Advance Wars on Gameboy Advance from our perfect seats in a Boeing 777 -- perfect because they were at the front of a section, with luxurious legroom for our foreign-man-legs. We were going to Los Angeles to attend E3. E3 ended up being alright. It would have sucked had it not been for the Mexican food everywhere. At E3, we got to play Nintendo DS and look at Sony PSP. I wrote a lot about it on this here website. I'd link it if -- well, the person whose house this is wasn't using the microwave at the moment, which means the slot on the power strip that powers the router has been turned off due to Shitamachi electrical power regulations.
I'm going to write some more about the DS and the PSP, right now, though. Chuck and I went to this DS event in Odaiba a little before the DS's Japanese release, and we mostly enjoyed ourselves, though maybe that was because of the wonderful harbor view. The DS was fun. We played a couple of games, like Marvelous' Harvest Moon (called Bokujo monogatari -- "Farm story" -- in Japan; did you know that? I get the impression lots of people don't know, so there you go.) and Success' Zoo Keeper. Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Meteos, a meatier, manlier, tougher, more gorgoues game than his bland, flat, overrated, underselling, historically boring Lumines for PSP, was the hit of the show, much as I want to say it was Tendou Dokutaa, a Japanese-style graphic adventure game about doctors, which uses the bottom screen as a canvas for your stylus to cut open patients' bellies. No, I can't say I like that game, which is by Spike, because when I finished waiting twenty minutes in line to play the demo, I was only greeted by a big thick Japanese man in a "Nintendo" shirt, who made a giant "X" with his arms and bellowed "ONLY CAN ENJOY IF IT READS THE JAPANESE."
Well, thanks, Buffalo Bill.
I stood there with arms akimbo, reading the Japanese dialogue on the big-screened demo aloud for five minutes, before walking away. It reads a lot like Gyakuten Saiban, which is a really good thing.
After a while, the games' charm kind of wore off on me. Harvest Moon is, to put it simply, not great because its only innovation over its cousins on different platforms is that you can "play" a sheep-shearing or cow-milking "mini-game" by rubbing your finger on the bottom screen. Or you can just ask the cow or sheep for milk or wool, and get it that way.
Hideo Kojima was telling me something about how he doesn't want to make games on the DS because it looks like a kids' toy. Then again, he says, it's a good idea. Maybe he'll be inspired to make something when some other intrepid developer decides to stop using the touch-screen as a back-of-the-box-y gimmick ("TOUCH YOUR POKEMON IN REAL-TIME!!") and instead realizes its potential as a convenient alternative input method -- for example, maybe, an RPG where the bottom screen is a command menu that is always opened.
A month after this, the PSP was released. Chuck Franklin bought one from a store that was breaking street date, and then he and I proceeded to run around Tokyo showing it off to people who were, god bless us, every one, impressed out of their heads by a videogame. That videogame was Ridge Racers, a simple, honest enough Ridge Racer game rendered coveted and godly by its portability.
I wonder what Chris Kohler thinks of it? He probably doesn't like it. I remember -- and remember well -- what transpired in the E3 press room. Chris Kohler, Wired editor Chris Baker, and myself were talking about the show when a clueless AP man with movie paleontologist's hair stumbled up to us with squinting eyes and twitchy fingers. He had no clue where the hell he was or what the hell was going on, and he's all the better a human being for it. All he knew was that the chubby man wearing a T-shirt advertising his own blog and sporting lamb chops that have been out of style since apes stopped growing hair everywhere was named "Chris Kohler," and he was writing a book about videogames. He knew he had to ask Chris Kohler what was going on that was worth reporting to the AP. He'd heard something about a handheld war -- the Sony PSP vs. the Nintendo DS, and he wasn't sure where the hell the war was being fought. Chris Kohler told him -- it was all about the press conferences. I stood there as Kohler launched into a blow-by-blow description of Nintendo PR Guy Reggie waving a DS in the air and screaming "TWO WORDS: WI-FI COMPATIBILITY!!" Kohler described the music that played, using the acronym "WWF" to describe the power with which Nintendo announced its touchy new handheld to the citizens of the world crafty enough to dupe their way into the press conference. Kohler then talked about the PSP, saying that, at the press conference, Sony "wheeled it out" tacked to a wall, and showed the "Spider-Man 2" trailer on it. He then explained how they had announced a battery life of twenty minutes, and how the screen was "tiny and ridiculous."
Well, Fuck You, Chris Kohler. People like you -- people who say you'll send me your new book, which is published now and everything, and then don't send it, even though it's probably full of the same day-old-meat-dry writing that you tried to pass off to us with that Castlevania review so nothing-ful it got rejected by fucking Animerica -- are going down. Yeah, you hear me. This is coming from one wrestler to another here -- you're going down. People like you, who buy all the Famicom Mini games on Gameboy and then sell them, complete with collector's box -- you're dinosaurs, baby. All of you.
Let me tell you about the PSP, brothers and sisters. It's big and it's bad. It's a psychotic mother, brother!
. . . Okay, enough of the wrestler-talk. I'm annoying myself with that shit. Instead, let's go ahead and called the PSP the deus-ex-machina hero of 2004, and then paste you in a little writing that got cut from a magazine article:
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At a press conference for the Nokia N-Gage back at E3 2003, Nokia said, in not so many words, that their goal in making the N-Gage was to make a portable videogame system that a fat male could remove from his pocket in a public setting without fear of being laughed at by girls. Nokia's president went on cramming his foot down his throat, saying that the Nintendo Gameboy was and always had been an object of a shame. If a man removes a Nintendo Gameboy, or a Gameboy Pocket, or a Gameboy Color, a Gameboy Advance, a Gameboy Advance SP, or even an ultra-rare Gameboy Light from his jacket pocket, said the Nokia man, girls will undoubtedly begin throwing rotten eggs at him until he cries himself to death.
Nokia's goal in making the N-Gage was to make something low-key. It was to make something that a man could remove from his pocket and no one would give a damn. Girls would not throw eggs at him, or spit in his face, because they wouldn't even know he was playing a videogame. They wouldn't know anything at all. They'd think he was just looking at a phone, maybe writing a text message or an email to someone.
The N-Gage is a failure, and it always will be, as long as Nokia thinks this way. The Nokia man's words remind me of the words of the Acclaim CEO on American television, many months before Acclaim went belly-up. He was talking about a sports game. It was a baseball game, one of those really boring ones with brilliant graphics and no soul. The American TV show reporter asked him, "It looks almost like a real game, doesn't it?" The Acclaim guy said, "Yeah -- that's what we're going for. When we can make a game that a person just walking through the room thinks is a real televised event, that's when we've reached our goal." The reporter then asked, "How close are you to that goal?" The Acclaim man said "four or five years." This was last year. Acclaim is dead now. God have mercy on their souls.
A decade and five years. A decade and a half. Fifteen years. My childhood as a bespectacled youth in Washington DC, right up into the middle of my twenties as a rock guitarist/vocalist/bum in Tokyo. That's how long the Gameboy reigned as the undisputed champion of portable gaming. Tetris was the first videogame anyone ever played with a D-pad, buttons, and headphones on a bus to school. Super Mario Land was the first game a kid ever stole from another kid and was then able to play before the end of the school day. Something else -- probably F-1 Race -- was the first game to ever be snatched out of a kid's hand by a teacher, while he was playing that videogame, once teachers were clued in to what a Gameboy looked like.
Ridge Racers for PSP is the first videogame that ever made a girl give me her number right out of the blue, on the Ginza Subway Line. PSP is here. Portable gaming has grown up. My lord, why did it have to take so long?
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So for fifteen years, if one wanted to play a videogame on a train or a car trip and didn't have a powerful enough laptop, one had to put up with Nintendo and their backwards thinking. The Nintendo DS, just released ten days before the PSP in Japan, was the first iteration of Nintendo's tried-and-true portable hardware to feature four face buttons. Users have been crying out for four face buttons for, what, thirteen years now? Ever since Super Famicom was released, it must have been. They were also crying for a backlit screen for about as long.
Nintendo never gave them a backlit screen, until just now, with the DS. The DS was announced at the same E3 as the PSP was, and the PSP is probably to thank for the DS's backlight and four face buttons. Though Nintendo President Satoru Iwata was quoted as saying that he was not at all afraid of the PSP, I can't help feeling pretty sure that the very idea of the PSP alone was an influence on his decision to have the DS equipped as it is. Previous contenders to the handheld crown -- the Atari Lynx (huge), the NEC PC-Engine GT (expensive), and the Sega Game Gear (hungry), to be specific -- had featured backlit screens, though only two face buttons. These systems were not able to defeat the Gameboy, for the most part, because they didn't have enough games by Nintendo (ha!) or, most importantly, Nintendo's contract-entangled third parties. After the Game Gear's proverbial batteries died (my old, sticky, plastic unit lasts thirty-two minutes on six AAs), no one tried very seriously to defeat the Gameboy, now in its slick Pocket iteration. Sega released its Nomad, which was a portable Sega Genesis and therefore very cool; a bad LCD screen and lots of odd technical issues (touch the cartridge for a blistering freeze!) killed it quick. Bandai released its WonderSwan, WonderSwan Color, and WonderSwan Crystal, which were mostly jokes that only fans of bland anime-inspired graphic adventures found funny. SNK released the Neo-Geo Pocket, which was successful enough to inspire the Neo-Geo Pocket Color, which was not as successful as Gameboy because having only titles by SNK doesn't appeal to people who aren't non-SNK-hating SNK fans. Game Park's GP32 sports a gorgeous, non-illuminated screen, and excellent PDA capabilities, yet is just not mainstream enough to gather fans who game-makers will see as worth appealing to. It has been obvious to me, and to most of the world, for a long time, what was needed to topple the Gameboy. Yet the other technological giants seemed as reluctant to create this uber-portable as Nintendo was to give their fans four face buttons, a backlit screen, a headphone jack, and games with sound that people actually care to listen to.
Nintendo has probably had rough schematics of the PSP on file since a little before the original PlayStation's launch. These schematics were, as of ten years ago, mere speculations. Nintendo probably called it the "Enemy's Portable System." The EPS, according to Nintendo, would no doubt have four face buttons and a large, backlit screen. It would be able to handle newfangled 3D and it would run CD-based games. It would be huge and sleek and grown-up looking. Adults would buy it for themselves, and children would cry until their parents let them play. Nintendo feared this portable system the way a samurai fears death -- that is to say, they feared it without fearing it at all. Nintendo ex-president Hiroshi Yamauchi once put it best, of the Xbox: "Microsoft knows nothing about games; Nintendo is the yokozuna. You don't challenge the yokozuna to sumo wrestling if you want to win." Though the Xbox still remains something of a joke in Japan, given Yamauchi's record for saying wacky things that place Nintendo in the position of God of the games world, we can imagine he was talking about anything else -- the original PlayStation, the PSP, any game that features graphics and sound, any controller that features a D-pad.
In May of 2004, the world saw the PSP, live, at E3, running promotional videos for "Spider-Man 2" and otherwise looking very slick. Some were skeptical of its battery life. Sony had said nothing about the battery, at this point, was the problem. Most every portable that challenged Nintendo and failed had had a battery life of less than two hours. Some of those portables required six to eight AA batteries. There is probably an entire landfill somewhere on earth devoted to batteries from all of those portables. Some people on the internet, around the time of PSP's announcement, made the conclusion that all previous portable contenders failed because of their batteries, and that PSP would fail, too, if its battery was not strong.
Was the whole world mad? Was I the only one would could see it? What the world really needed was a Gameboy-killing portable system, that much was known. Yet what the system should look and feel like was eluding everyone who thinks with yen-signs for irises. I was able to, when Sony announced they were working on a portable system at E3 2003, think with my heart, and imagine a portable system with a luxurious wide screen, an analog stick, brilliant, PlayStation2-quality graphics, and a shiny black casing. That turned out to be, mostly, what the PSP is. Maybe I'm a business genius, I don't know.
So yes, the PSP represents a genius business move in that it is a portable videogame system that, for the first time in the history of portable videogame systems, people who play portable videogames are able to look at it and know, deep down, "This is totally better than Gameboy." Sure, sure, the Game Gear was in color, and back-lit. Still, its games were lacking, and its resolution was horribly fuzzy. WonderSwan Crystal is actually more powerful than the Gameboy Advance. You'd never know, however, unless you bothered to play one of the three games that use the technology to its fullest. (Warning: all three of those games suck.) With the PSP, there's no question from the start that it is better than anything with "Gameboy" in the name. This is coming from a guy who has many fond memories of the Gameboy. This is coming from a guy whose favorite hobby for the past two weeks has been using a Nintendo DS to Pictochat with strange youngsters on the train. I know the PSP is hot, because people won't stop looking at it on the train. For the first time in my life, more than ten people have talked to me out of nowhere on a train in Tokyo. The PSP pushes them to say something. "Wow. That's a PSP, huh?" Or simply, "Wow, that looks nice." Or, even more simply, "Wow -- is that a videogame?"
When a girl on the train greeted me with that line -- "Wow, is that a videogame?" -- I froze. Are girls even supposed to say things like that? I was baffled. I looked dead ahead at my reflection in the glassy black windows. My hair was in good shape. I'd actually bothered to comb it and style it in the morning. I had had a television appearance in the afternoon, was why. Maybe I looked good today? Who knew?
"Yeah, it's a videogame."
"Wow. It looks really fast."
"You like videogames?"
Her reply came without hesitation: "No." Then she hesitated. "I mean -- no, I don't play them. It's just -- well. You know. It looks really interesting. I'd like to try some time."
I couldn't help thinking of Acclaim, at this point. Acclaim, who made sports games with the "goal" in mind being to trick a passerby into thinking the game was a televised event. What's the point of such a goal? If a bloke exiting the bathroom with an issue of Play in hand looks up and sees his mate playing a game of football on the telly [this Britishism added for the hell of it] and asks "Who's winning?" if he gets the reply "Oh, dude, this is totally a videogame, man!" he's just going to shrug it off. He's going to feel lied to.
Thinking of Acclaim made me think of Nokia. They wanted to make a portable gaming system that was not at all obtuse, not at all eye-catching. They wanted to make a portable gaming system that looked, tasted, and smelled like nothing. They ended up making a system that also means nothing. It has no guts, no teeth. If their goal was to make a game system that doesn't appeal to any part of anyone, what's the point? It can lead only to failure.
Nintendo's grace, and the reason they will continue to exist for a long time, lies in that they do sometimes stupid things boldly, with little fear for anything. Their games end up, more often than not, in the sticky hands of stereotypical children with cowlicks and red-with-candy-goo faces. A Nintendo fan doesn't mind that his game makes him look like a dweeb or a child; he merely loves the game. I can respect these kinds of gamers more than I am willing to let on; for one thing, I am this kind of gamer. I honestly was more interested in Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow than in the Chinese ski-rock-girl sitting next to me on a bench at an airport in Korea. I'm that kind of guy. Yet, now, to be approached on a train, while playing a PSP, by a person who would have, before, had no reason to talk to me? It has taken a long, measured series of business calculations by some large third party for me to arrive at this junction in my life. It has all been Sony's doing. Merry Christmas. God bless us, every one. Et cetera.
"You can -- play it right now, if you want."
"I have to get off the train now. Maybe -- you can call me later?"
She was very nervous about something. The PSP -- or my good looks -- had struck her with awe.
It's true that Sony does not exactly consider the PSP the final word. It is merely their entrance into the world of portable gaming. It is their first statement of how serious they are regarding their ownership of your in-transit leisure time. As such, it's a hell of an entrance. Girls seem to love it. Guys seem to love the fact that girls love it. Adults want one. Children want two. Those who complain of Sony's attempts to make the PSP more of a "portable multimedia device" need only glance at it while Ridge Racers runs at top speed to know that it is, first and foremost, a videogame platform. On the side, it's a damned sexy, coveted piece of product.
I was carrying mine through Shinjuku on the night of the launch, a few hours before Ken Kutaragi's opening speech. During that speech, he'd say, when asked by a reporter from Famitsu if he had "any fears" regarding the launch, "My only fear was that someone would hijack a truck full of PSPs" The question was positioned to elicit a word about the Nintendo DS. Kutaragi is too clever, I take it, to speak ill of his rival. To Kutaragi, says a good friend of mine at Sony, PSP versus DS is not an issue. His "rival" is some unseen thing that has yet to materialize. At the moment, with regards to the DS, he is like a young samurai, crying silent tears as he readies to cut his kneeling, elder opponent's head off.
On that magic walk through Shinjuku, together with my friends Chuck Franklin and BT Amazawa, we got stopped by two girls and a guy exiting a bar. One of the girls ended up so impressed with Minna no Golf that she gave me a hug that lasted forty-odd seconds. She smelled like peach-flavored alcohol. The guy shook my hand for ten seconds. The other girl fell asleep standing up, then woke up to ask us what time it was and where we got the PSP.
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Back in May, I got only a small inkling of how much the PSP would rock. Playing actual games on it at Tokyo Game Show was something of a revelation. Playing actual Ridge Racers on a train was a larger revelation. It was a revelation of the "I can play games like this in a place like . . . this" variety.
This fine website's own Eric-Jon Waugh finds the PSP unnecessary. He's written about it on the site forum; he says that Sony is missing "the point." I don't know. I have to disagree with him there. I've played the thing on a train, is why I have to disagree. Waugh has not played it on a train. If he were to play it on a train, he'd see.
He says that PSP misses the point because, among other things, it's . . . powerful. Is he implying that people shouldn't play high-powered games in a public setting? I suppose he is. I don't know, though. I just don't know nothing when it comes to criticizing the PSP. I can only think of good things. Having played Falcom's Legend of Heroes on the damn thing is more than enough to give me a stiffy of anticipation, to send my froth demanding for the future of this kind of game while not in possession of a television. It's enough to almost make one think that portable gaming is the future of gaming. Just as a thirty-inch television is huge as a hundred-foot movie screen when you're sitting close enough, the PSP's five inches are nothing to sneeze at.
Or sneeze on. Chuck Franklin protects the hell out of his PSP. And he's normally a bit of a careless guy when it comes to throwing and dropping things. Either the PSP's plastic is especially stain-happy, or the damn thing is so sexy that the tiniest smudge looks like a capital crime.
Best game for DS: Goes to Nintendogs. I talked with the producer of it back in November; you'll be pleased to know that he promised -- promised me he'd answer my request, and put some Welsh corgis in there. (Okay, actually, Meteos is the best game I've played on the thing; I just wanted a reason to mention my Tuffy.)
Oh, the internet is back on. Here's that E3 article.
[next: june]
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