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There used to be this big blue rubber mat with a dragon in it at the Mitsuwa Plaza in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, California. It’s not there anymore. I don’t know where it went.
The rubber mat was the color of a sky-blue crayon. When you walked on it, it cushioned the bottoms of your shoes. The dragon was made of shiny plastic. He was kind of like a playground ride for kids. Only it didn’t move. It just stood there. All you could do was sit on it. I last sat on it in September of 2003.
Now it’s gone. I was back at Mitsuwa Plaza just this afternoon, escorting my good friend Final Fantasy Dog to the Disney Auditorium in Downtown LA so he could attend a Final Fantasy concert. We flew in from Tokyo just Friday morning and suffered jetlag until today; FFD awoke wanting to browse a Japanese bookstore before the concert. I took him to Mitsuwa Plaza -- formerly known as Yaohan Plaza -- thinking I’d let him in on some Asahiya action. He said he preferred Kinokuniya, and I told him no -- the Asahiya is better.
Only it’s not there anymore, either. The windows are all blocked-up with torn-up garbage bags. No sign explains where the bookstore went, or why. The whole of Mitsua Plaza has been hollowed out. I took FFD to Kinokuniya, where he bought nothing. We then went to the Mitsuwa supermarket, where, instead of CC Lemon or Kirin Afternoon Tea Lemon Tea, we bought Mug Root Beers and Whatchamacallits and sat on a bench near a garbage can outside, OSSUing middle-aged women.
“This place is like . . . just a piece of Japan for foreign tourists,” FFD observed. Maybe he was right. Yet, why is Little Tokyo dying? Where is it all going? Shouldn’t people like the three, thick, hefty game journalists in “CAPCOM” T-shirts browsing videogame strategy guides at Kinokuniya be enough to keep Little Tokyo alive? Yes? No? Maybe?
Mitsuwa is a store that sells groceries. Things like daikon radishes and Japanese squash. Anime Jungle sells resin model kits of twelve-year-old girls with big eyes. These things are opposed in function – one is something you eat, that keeps you alive, and the other is something that robs you of your money and then does nothing, except indirectly kill you. Do people need videogames, anime, and/or the merchandise related to them? Furthermore, does any of this have to be Japanese?
**
I went to the Microsoft press conference at the Shrine Auditorium. According to a sign in the basement, they held the 61st Annual Academy Awards there. I can’t be too sure. I’d have to see it for myself. I can, however, prove that they had a Microsoft press conference there today. It started at 7:30PM, and it finished at 8:51. I lit out of there when it was over, and pushed my way past many large people, and many not-large people with large hair that makes me really regret not getting that haircut last week. For that hour and many minutes, Microsoft showed videos of differing levels of inanity, and much of it was entertaining, except the parts where videogame journalists jumped to their feet in excitement to applaud pre-created visions of videogames. Before the event, the atrium of the Shrine smelled like high-octane vodka. I arrived ten minutes after the videogame journalists, meaning I missed out on martinis. I asked for a Coke, and they said they were out, though I could try another table if I really wanted one. I didn’t go to another table. I took a seat already.
Some of the games look very nice. Fable was shown in a nice, thick new video. It looks like pretty much what we thought it was going to look like, even if the animation is a little skippy. It seemed like a movie preview. The announcer said something about two people living within all of us – good and evil, villain and hero, and . . . hero and tyrant. Why they used the word “hero” twice, I don’t know. Maybe it was for dramatic effect.
Conker: Live and Uncut was shown in a video that opens as a direct “Terminator” rip-off, proving that most people still think videogames aspire to be movies. The humor – evil robotic teddy bears stomping on squirrel skulls, the “great hero” being hidden from view and then OMG revealed as Conker, who’s now smoking a cigar -- is crunchy like a bag of old potato chips. Yet the game, at its knowing-Rare early state, displays a level of animation smoothness that approaches virtuoso. It was really something pretty to behold. Hopefully I won’t fall asleep halfway through the first ten minutes of actual gameplay, this time.
Jade Empire is being billed as an action-RPG that combines fighting game mechanics with a deep storyline. As the game is made by BioWare, who have proved themselves in games with storylines, I can believe the latter idea. From the video shown, the fighting moves look convincing enough.
When the show actual started, J Allard took the stage in a microphone not entirely unlike an Xbox Live headset. He spoke to us with his eyes on a teleprompter. He told us we’d just watched videos of upcoming Xbox games, and he was right about that. He then showed us a video which was more than interesting. In this video, J Allard, Peter Moore, and some other guy represented Xbox, and Sony’s Kazu Hirai, Ken Kutaragi, and a guy named “Andrew” represented Sony. Yes, the Sony guys played themselves. These six men met in the Trump Tower in New York City, where Donald Trump – yes, Donald Trump as himself -- commissioned them to make the “best online game network.” It was a reality television spoof, is what it was. (See if someone’s got it for download, somewhere.) Moore and Allard said they’d make their network by talking to gamers. They did this. Allard asked a guy in a park if the system should be narrowband or broadband. This park-fellow was eating a slice of pizza. He pointed to the pizza. “You ever try sucking a pizza through a straw?” And so on, and so forth. Ken Kutaragi and Kasu Hirai had a heated argument about their own system – in the end, they agreed to make it an add-on with high specifications, because add-ons and specifications are most important. In the end, “Team Xbox” won Trump’s contest, awarded with a contract to make a massively-multiplayer online Donald Trump role-playing game. Hirai and Kutaragi then hailed a cab outside, and were beat to it by Bill Gates. Hirai then asks, “So, are we still on for Halo tonight?”
. . .
Wait. Back up a minute – this Donald Trump RPG? Is it real? Was this a formal game announcement, or a joke? I mean – why else would they have Donald Trump appear on that video? It couldn’t possibly just be for no reason, could it? I mean, Trump is a busy man. He doesn’t have time to just be fucking around with videogame PR shit. Something tells me he seriously might be helping Microsoft make a game about big business. An online game, I take it. I mean, we’ve seen games before, like Aerobiz or Wall Street Kid. Those games were Japanese, though. Could we be in for something bigger, something larger-scale, something – dare I say it -- American?
It’s an American idea, this Xbox Live. At the show tonight, I couldn’t help wondering why it’s not more insanely popular. Allard showed us the system’s new voice-mail abilities. He showed us video chat. He told us that we could, soon, download games like Dig Dug, “casual games” that can be enjoyed by “anyone.” Arcade classics, chess, checkers. They call this “Xbox Arcade.” Allard was reading all of this information off a teleprompter, bless his soul. I was starting to think that the videogame industry still, at its core, lacks rock stars who take risks for the sake of making dreams come true. I felt kind of blue. I watched the large display, studying Allard’s movement while speaking. His right hand was shaking when he talked about Xbox Live’s upcoming implementation into even PC platforms. His hand kept on shaking while he told us that Xbox Live now has close to a million subscribers, and that it’s gotten them in two years. TiVo took five years to get that many, he said. He then nervously laid down the conclusion: Xbox Live is good because it’s cheap, it comes in a convenient package (yep), it is worldwide (yawn), it is popular, and, and . . .
“It will revolutionize social entertainment.”
A big French journalist a row in front of me, one who’d stood up to applaud footage of Doom 3, probably because it has these big fat demons in it and that reminds him of “The City of Lost Children” or some shit, turned to his companion and let out a savage snicker. He then growled something in French.
I was sitting there, wondering why no one would applaud this bold-as-hell statement.
“It will revolutionize social entertainment.”
When was the last time a videogame company had such a gutsy mission statement? Sure, sure, Yu Suzuki said his Shenmue was a “gift to the children of the 21st century,” though I think he was just kidding us. He must have meant it was a gift to the children of the 21st century who watch Dragon’s Lair DVDs and still collect baseball cards. I think this Xbox Live can work. I read something about couples in different regions of the United States keeping in touch through games of MechAssault (MechAssault II, shown in video form, looks very nice, by the way, and is taglined “In 3068, all you need to do is OWN THE BATTLEFIELD”), and now this thing has voicemail and email, and soon videomail, so I’m thinking – yeah. It might be a reasonable sell to people who neither play games at all nor care to make their own webpages. People who are casual, and merely longing to communicate with people far away. Hell, if you tried hard enough, Microsoft, you could sell this to my mother in Indiana. She’s just recently lost some weight, and I’m sure she’d love the opportunity to video chat with her sisters in Pennsylvania. As Xbox Live is an internet thing, purchasable for relatively cheap (granted you have an Xbox (and a TV)), it could become the new telephone.
Of course, it’s right around that time that the prices go up, though hey. It’d be fun while it lasted.
Allard told us many other things about many other things. He was proud of something called “XNA,” which you can probably read about on IGN or somewhere, and he showed videos of two cars hitting each other. The number of exploding triangles was amazing. He talked about an MMORPG by the makers of EverQuest, and had he shown any footage, I’d be really excited, enough to remember the game’s name. This RPG was only for PCs, I take it. That’s alright with me.
The Halo 2 demo was impressive. It was live, and it was of multiplayer. A human marine soldier and a Covenant trooper faced off in a match reminiscent of what happens when my brother plugs in two controllers and messes around in Blood Gulch for two hours without shooting anything. Except a few things got shot – the Warthog vehicle, for example, now has hubcaps that pop off. You can shoot of its mirrors. You can shoot its front, caving it in, and messing up its steering. The tour of the “Zanzibar” fortress level revealed simple complexity to rival Half-Life’s Team Fortress in terms of ingenuity. I rather like it. I look forward to playing it online against people I don’t hate.
Oh, and Halo 2 has a release date, now. You see, early on in the show, J. Allard was having a video chat with Peter Moore and Jenny McCarthy (yes, that Jenny McCarthy – don’t ask me how she got in there) about the new features on Xbox Live (fun fact: it seems that Allard’s Xbox Live handle is “Hiro Protagonist”). At this time, Moore was quite oddly receiving a tattoo on his arm. He revealed this tattoo, in a move that reminds me of something last year, and that tattoo said: November 9th, 2004. So there it is. He said, before he revealed his upper arm, that the release date was “set in something more than stone.” This can be viewed as either an unintentional cleverism, an intentional one, or just plain not clever at all.
Well, here, I set it in more than stone, and in more than Peter Moore’s arm-flesh – I set it in insertcredit.com: Halo 2 will be released on November 9th, 2004. So there you go.
SPOILER ALERT
In the end, Peter Moore debuted a game called Forza Motorsports. he says this game will be the right compliment to Project Gotham Racing 2. PGR2 is a street-racing game; Forza (that’s Italian for “force”) will be a “fully customizable” racing game. That is – it’s one more like Gran Turismo than anything else. Except this game seems to be one-upping even Gran Turismo -- you can customize the ever-loving hell out of your car. You can add sick spoilers and decals and hubcaps and all that stuff. The spoilers are worth mentioning. There seem to be millions of them, some of them made of chrome. The announcer says you can customize the car until it is not only yours -- it is you. I kind of like this idea. Kind of.
Forza’s biggest punch in the gut to Gran Turismo comes in the form of car-damage. Yes, your car can be damaged. Is this a big deal? You might be asking that, because our readers typically don’t play those sporty games. Well, let me tell you – yes, it is a big deal. When Sony’s Polyphony Digital made the original Gran Turismo, they couldn’t get the rights to put in half the cars they wanted to put it. Manufacturers like Mercedes-Benz and Ford laughed at the idea – no, you can’t put our cars in a videogame! they snorted, like it should have been obvious. When the game was released and featured in Car and Driver magazine, Polyphony’s phone rang off the hook. Car manufacturers all wanted their games in the next installment. And so, Gran Turismo 2 contained 500 cars, compared to the original’s 60. With Gran Turismo 3, the producers had to reject certain cars. Even so – they were always prohibited from portraying the cars in damaged states. It’d be bad for the images of the companies, they say. Yet now, Microsoft has managed to make a racing game with billions of damageable cars. How they did it, I don’t know. Though I guess it has something to do with how they got Donald Trump to appear in their little promo video – or how they finally courted EA Sports over to Xbox Live.
Yes, EA Sports is coming to Xbox Live. Starting this summer, you’ll be able to play new EA Sports games on Xbox Live. I find this interesting. Sony had made a promise with EA a while back about keeping the online play exclusive to PlayStation2; now that promise is sawed and broken, probably with the blade of lots of money.
What disturbs me most about this new EA deal, however, is not that the new Golden Eye: Rogue Agent game is not at all a sequel to Rare’s earlier genius work – it’s a spin-off, most-likely-lackluster EA James Bondish game meant to ensnare the parents who bought Goldeneye for their kids on Nintendo 64 – it’s the presence of Muhammed Ali, the greatest boxer of all-time. Yes, Ali was at this press conference. Why he was there, I don’t know. He emerged from backstage with a gaggle of athletes – a professional basketball player, a college basketball player, a soccer player, a hockey player, and the Rams’ Marshall Faulk, a football player. These athletes stood behind a Microsoft guy and an EA guy while they smirked about “It’s a great thing you guys finally caught the ball!” “It’s a great thing you finally threw it!” At one point, the camera perched right in front of the state obstructing my natural view OH my goD turned to Ali. He was reaching into his left slack pocket for something red. His right hand was shaking furiously. He pulled the red thing – maybe a handkerchief? – out halfway before the camera shifted away from him. I tried to get a good look at the stage, to see Ali’s handkerchief. I couldn’t see it. The camera was in my way. Every journalist was standing, applauding Ali, either because they dig his history, they respect his current sad state of illness, or they’re just really looking forward to Fight Night 2005 on Xbox.
I don’t understand what Muhammed Ali was doing here. That’s what I’m trying to say. Some press conferences have musical numbers. Some don’t. Some have G-list celebrities like Jenny McCarthy come in and describe products with white smiles. They just don’t do it like this – have an absolute genius former athlete with no need for money (he is, I believe, enlightened beyond money by this point) stand behind two grunting businessmen for three minutes while they discuss sales figures and pat each other on the proverbial ass. I thought – Marshall Faulk, there, if I’m not mistaken, once asked John Madden during a television interview if he wouldn’t make his “next year”’s game avatar “a little faster.” Faulk is a gamer; during the off-season, I take it attending an event like E3 is something he’d do for fun. Him and Gary Coleman alike. When asked, he was probably easy to convince to be pulled into the Microsoft press conference. Ali, though, really – how the hell did he get there? And why? Was he necessary?
And then they said, “Goodnight, everyone,” and Ali was gone behind the curtain. I lit out of the auditorium, toppling journalists so I could get back over to my friend’s place and write this.
During the press conference, not a single big game shown was Japanese, outside of the more-popular-in-America-anyway Dead or Alive Ultimate, which, while looking very pretty, is probably not something I’ll be interested in. It’s a 3D fighting game, and as you fight, the backgrounds change a whole hell of a lot, and give you a headache. They even have elephant legs to throw other characters into. You can broadside a giraffe with a thrown character, causing a most uproarious event. Still, it doesn’t grab me. Microsoft weren’t preaching to the Japanese here, anyway. They were showing us things that Americans wanted, and they were doing this in America. I ran into Amusement Vision’s Toshihiro Nagoshi in the lobby on the way in, and he was drinking a martini and talking about something that wasn’t videogames. I wondered why he was there. I kept thinking there’d be some big announcement. There wasn’t.
In Japan at this moment, the Xbox is not doing well. To put it lightly, that is. The Toys R Us in Ikebukuro Sunshine City was, just recently, selling Xbox controllers for 300 yen each. That’s about $3 US. They were selling many games for the same price. They had many of them left, for many weeks. A new system, with Halo and Crimson Skies 2 packed in, as well as a DVD remote, a year of Xbox Live, and an extra controller, retails for under $190. Guaranteed hit games – few and far between as they are – such as Ninja Gaiden retail for close to $100. I wonder if Microsoft cares at this point? I wonder if they really need Japan? Does anyone?
In the little arcade in Little Tokyo’s rotting Mitsuwa Plaza, I saw three French game journalists watching a fourth French game journalist who was beating the hell out of a Taiko no Tatsujin machine. He was beating that drum with absolutely no rhythm. He was beating it with the biggest grin on his face. He was also beating the wrong drum. He’d put the credit into the second-player slot. He was supposed to be beating the drum on the right. It took him until near the end of the song to switch over to the other drum. One of his buddies had to look at the screen, and tell him, hey, you’re not doing anything in the game; you’re just listening to music and hitting a drum that makes no sound.
I wonder – people from France, when in America, take such sick joy in Japanese games. When will a Japanese person in Europe chance upon an Xbox and get lost in an American game like Halo? Even so, is that what it’s really going to take? The explanation “The Japanese don’t play first-person shooters” is a lazy cop-out. I want to know something else. Is it going to take a revolution in social entertainment? Is this revolution needed? If it is, it must touch the Americans as well; inevitably, it must perhaps touch the Americans more strongly than anyone else. This means the first-person shooters continue. This means Microsoft keeps spending money; this means Microsoft, intent to stay, does not and will not back out of the race with Sony, who will also not back out. This means that the one-console world remains a myth for now.
Halo 2 is a fearsome weapon indeed. Is it strong enough, however, to change the world?
Microsoft: your gusto mostly impresses me. I am looking forward to your future.
SURPRISE OF THE SHOW: There’s this game called Star Wars: Republic Commando. It’s a first-person shooter set in the early part of the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic universe. I mean – that part of Knights of the Old Republic that didn’t look like “Star Wars” at all. All of the fighting characters wear shiny armor. The monsters don’t look like “Star Wars.” The “Star Wars” theme just seems to be there so that the designers have the rights to make some wacky space-adventure with lots of shooting of shit. I am very intrigued by it. Call it the most defamiliarized “Star Wars” game ever.
Full-Spectrum Warrior is excellent-looking, and you should all buy it.
OH YES, for those who just scrolled to the bottom, here it is, you screws: OUTRUN2 WAS SHOWN IN VIDEO FORM YES THAT MEANS IT’S COMING TO XBOX THIS YEAR YES IT’S CONFIRMED.
The end.
tim rogers
knows
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