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Archive for Sony Computer Entertainment

Uncharted 4 – My Review

Jun06

UnchartedCoverMockUPTitle: Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

System: PS4

Genre: Story based Climber/Shooter

Developer: Naughty Dog

Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

Date Played: May 2016

Rating: Best looking game ever made!

_

 

Of course I had to play and review Uncharted 4. It pretty much goes without saying. My collector’s edition box came on launch day and I finished it over the next week. It probably took me about 20-24 hours as I take my time and I’m very thorough. I collected about 95% of the treasures and almost all the journal entries/extra convos etc. So let’s jump into it, topic by topic:

Story 8/10 and character 9/10. The UC4 story itself is superficially generic, involving the return of Nathan Drake’s long lost brother Sam, which precipitates Nathan leaving his “retirement” and (temporarily) Elena. Nathan is thereafter thrown into pursuit of the “biggest pirate treasure in history,” an adventure that takes him to Panama, Louisiana, Italy, Scotland, Madagascar, and (largely) Captain Avery’s nearby pirate island and its requisite “lost city.” There are also a couple flashbacks to the Drake boy’s younger days. Mostly the story is an excuse for modern pirate adventures and more importantly, character development between Nathan and Sam & Elena. This development, basically constructed from constant back and forth between the (usually two) party members seamlessly accompanies nearly all of Uncharted‘s gameplay.

Elena, like my wife, lets Nathan play video games

Elena, like my wife, lets Nathan play video games

In fact, Drake is almost never alone, and for good reason. This “buddy system story telling” at Naughty Dog was born out of Jak & Daxter. The idea with Daxter was to provide the “witty repartee” to help liven up the game, an idea we basically got from Disney movies and their endless string of comedic sidekicks. They intervening 15 years has seen the concept grow in sophistication, but the core idea is the same. In UC4, the dialog is not just funny (although it often is), but genuinely character building.

UC4 isn’t as somber, emotionally wrenching, or deep as Naughty Dog’s other similar-genre hit, The Last of Us (TLOU), but the level of character interaction between Drake and his family does bring out real warmth and personality. Basically, the game lives up to being a Raiders / Die Hard type summer blockbuster. It’s kinda about the action, but really excels because you care. Please note that this depth is rarely present in video games (does Call of Duty evoke any emotion?) or even summer blockbusters where creators too often believe 40 minutes of slamming through buildings develops character.

So while UC4 is not the story/character masterpiece that is TLOU — it’s also a lot lighter hearted.

That Sam is just a bit more selfish than Nathan is telegraphed by his slightly shiftier features

That Sam is just a bit more selfish than Nathan is telegraphed by his slightly shiftier features

Voice Acting & Animation 10/10. Taking into account the current state of technology, video game character rendering just doesn’t get better than UC4. I’m sure Sony’s eventual PS5 and Naughty Dog’s eventual PS5 title will improve on it, but barring that, the characters just look and move superbly. The voice acting is really stellar too, particularly given the sometime “cheese” factor of the pirate story. The quality of the writing and delivery sell it time and time again.

The Drake brothers have very strong forearms

The Drake brothers have very strong forearms

Graphics 11/10. The elephant in the room. No, the titanosaur argentinosaurus huinculensis in the room is how gorgeous the game looks. UC4 isn’t the most stylized game ever, but for hands down gorgeous “realistic” graphics there is no better looking game yet made. It’s even better looking than Witcher 3: Blood & Wine (which is pretty gorgeous). The UC4 graphics aren’t really that naturalistic either, as the color and detail are pumped up in a sort of HDR hyper-realistic way. It’s just not that obviously stylized. My good friend Erick Pangilinan (he’s the art director!) describes it as “hyper reality but very balanced in terms of detail. Every camera shot is very directed in terms of gameplay clarity and artistic composition. Following a lighting color script was also key to tie in the mood and story beat.” The textures and lighting and everything else are just so ridiculously pretty, which because of a technique called physical base rendering allows the materials to respond to light properly, making them consistent and realistic (and therefore more awesome).

Let us not forget the amazing view distances, epic scenes, crazy mud/water/everything else type effects. Oh, and the animation, which while not 100% lifelike is about 98% — and therefore about as good as has ever been done. Plus did I mention all the insane shaders and little details. The look of the game, it’s stunning slickness, and jaw-dropping beauty actually makes it more fun to play. Seriously, even the corner of some cave is gorgeous. Frame rate is 30 hertz in Single Player. They couldn’t really squeeze this crazy look into 60 on the PS4. It doesn’t bog much, so gameplay isn’t affected. Sure it would be a little more fluid at 60, but there are a lot of uglier games that run at 30 (or less).

Yeah, that's what the game looks like

Yeah, that’s what the game looks like

Controls 9.5/10 and core mechanics. I’m a control guy. I programmed most/all of the controls for the Naughty Dog games before Uncharted 1 so I know a little bit about video game control :-). The UC4 controls are great, particularly the climbing controls. Basically, the controls break down into a couple types: Running/jumping/climbing, shooting, hand to hand, and vehicle. I’d say the basic “moving drake around” and climbing controls are 11/10. Some of the new mechanics, like the grappling hook, slides, and piton integrate spectacularly. The way in which Drake reaches for handholds and you can subtly feel them out: perfect. The shooting and “hiding” controls are maybe a 9/10, as is the driving. It all responds well and some elements like the slipping and sliding of the jeep in the mud are crazy good. Occasionally I’d pop out of stealth oddly when trying to shift positions. The hand to hand fighting is more like a 7/10. It’s fine, and the animation is gorgeous, but it doesn’t have the visceral contact quality of say, Bloodborne, where you can confidently fight multiple opponents at the same time. There is an increased emphasis on stealth gameplay, possibly coming over from TLOU. I liked hiding in the grass and quietly taking guys out, and to this UC4 adds pulling and kicking guys off ledges and out of windows. All are quite satisfying when you pull it off.

The fighting / shooting gameplay isn’t immensely varied. There aren’t that many enemy types. Basic mercs, armored mercs, sniper mercs, maybe a few other similar types. This ain’t like Dark Souls III with tons of highly varied fantasy monsters (I love me some fantasy monsters). So enemy variety gets a 3/10. Enemy AI is excellent though.

You can actually slide around in that mud!

You can actually slide around in that mud!

Gameplay balance. Naughty Dog describes Uncharted as a “summer blockbuster you play” and this is fairly accurate. It’s a slightly throwback Spielberg-style Indian Jones / National Treasure blockbuster at that. But the actual gameplay is divided between exploring, climbing, puzzle solving, driving, moving along the plot, and a mixed stealth & gun fighting gameplay were you beat up on clusters of mercenaries. The balance between these activities has been slightly adjusted from previous Uncharted games. The driving (boat and jeep) has been added, but the percentage of climbing seems to have been increased and shooting reduced. I really prefer climbing / exploring to fighting in this particular style, so that’s all good by me. Also, it seems that there is more “moving the plot along” stuff, by which I mean relatively trivial things you “do” (like dragging a water bucket down to the puddle to fill it up) that is needed to move along the plot. Interestingly, these tasks, as mundane as they are, do add to the verisimilitude. They almost “feel” like puzzle solving, even though the game usually tells you exactly what to do. That being said, there are half a dozen real puzzles in the game, along the lines of a more complicated Raider‘s map room. You can either “puzzle” them out or google them.

The climbing can really get complicated

The climbing can really get complicated

It’s also worth noting how this balance is different than in TLOU, which has a lot more stealth, no formal puzzles, and a much less “forgiving” hit and recovery system. TLUO also has collecting materials and crafting useful “tools” like grenades, shivs, healthpacks, etc. and a rudimentary RPG system where you can level up weapons and certain abilities. I really like collecting and “leveling”, and it gives you a reason to explore the gorgeous environments, so one of my biggest “beefs” (in the context of a fabulous game) with UC4 is the scarcity of pickups. Basically, there are the treasures, and these are pretty few and far between and often rather hidden. Naughty Dog deliberately uses this as a differentiation point from TLOU, but I miss collecting. There is also very little weapon progression in Uncharted. You grab what guns are at hand. They all kinda work. I usually take whatever has the most ammo, generally staying away from the grenade launchers and the like. There are some bigger guns toward the end like the RPG and Gatling gun, but they don’t have significant strategic use. Overall, the choice of weapon in Uncharted is far less relevant than it is in TLOU, where the varied characteristics are almost mandatory choices for different encounters. Only on a couple occasions in UC4 do you actually NEED to be using a high impact weapon (shotgun) or a sniper rifle. And there exists no choice of knife, bow etc. All stealth kills are by hand (or foot).

Interestingly, while UC4 still has levels in a dim sort of way, it pretty much eschews the whole boss concept. At most, there is one at the end. And there are big set piece levels like the truck chase, but there even the single boss isn’t exactly like Bloodborne or Dark Souls III‘s 15-20 massive traditional bosses. This isn’t a game about repeatedly dying so you can figure out a difficult series of reactions to lethal moves.

Pirates love puzzles!

Pirates love puzzles!

Sound 10/10. The sound is just seamlessly there in UC4. There is just a LOT of it, and it just sells this giant adventure as you’d expect. The music is right on style. Don’t underestimate how much work this was.

Check out the view!

Nathan likes to be “on time”

Technology 11/10. It’s easy to just say that UC4 is the best looking video game ever, and that the animation and control, and shaders are perfect (given the current state of PS4 tech). They are, but a lot of people had to work really hard to make that happen. And the kind of tech that squeezes that much performance out of the same hunk of hardware that all those other PS4 games run on is impressive — which means impressive programmers. Some Naughty Dog programmer(s) had to code all those cool rope and jeep and mud physics, allow for the ridiculous shader passes, sit there with the artists and work out the luminous shadows and lighting, blend all the different joints, wrangle the data so the load times are barely there, etc etc etc. Most PS4 games have abysmal load times! The power of current machines and engines has sometimes allowed all that vast amount of code to slip onto the perceptual back burner, but I’m sure it’s just as hairy as it was twenty years ago in the Crash Bandicoot era. Which brings up:

Holy Mickey Mouse: Castle of Illusion -- gear climbing!

Holy Mickey Mouse: Castle of Illusion — gear climbing!

Crash Bandicoot revival. Idea 12/10. Execution 9/10. Just having a bit of Crash in here was so cool and so apropos — particularly given the Indiana Jones nature of Uncharted and obvious reference of the boulder level. It also must have been a helluva lot of work. Crash‘s code and assets are incredibly complicated. I don’t even know if they emulated it or recoded it. I suspect the later as per the 1 point execution ding, which is that the “feel” is just slightly off. The game inside the game looks and sounds pretty much exactly right — except maybe for Crash’s spin which looks a little weird — but the control is just slightly funny. I even went back and popped in the real deal to check. True, this is Crash 1, and Crash 1‘s controls are significantly stiffer and harder than Crash 2 and 3 (where reworked logic and the analog stick vastly improved them), but it still feels just a tiny nitpicky bit different. [ update 6/6/16: Neil Druckmann tells me that one guy recoded the whole sequence (using the original art/sound assets). No wonder it’s just a touch different, but amazingly impressive getting it so close. ]

Multiplayer. I haven’t tried it. Not usually that into death-matches, but that’s just me. I like co-op.

Overall 9.5/10. Uncharted 4 is a spectacular game, and any PS4 owner that doesn’t play it better be the kind that only buys sports games or have a severe allergy to pirates. It’s a solid 20 hours of ridiculously high production value fun. It’s spectacularly polished. It’s the best looking video game yet made. It’s a romping good story and better than most blockbuster movies (which kinda suck these days). It’s just not quite as much a ground breaking masterpiece as TLOU which is the best “story game” made so far. Nor actually to my taste does it offer as much fantasy creeptastic evil challenging monster killing gameplay as equally masterful but less polished Bloodborne. But that last game is far more niche and I’m a dark fantasy lover, so consider me weird. UC4 is like Back to the Future in terms of its mastery: perfect execution and awesome entertainment, just not the deepest thing in the world.

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I guess he had "fear of heights" surgically removed

I guess Nathan had “fear of heights” surgically removed

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By: agavin
Comments (11)
Posted in: Games
Tagged as: Adventure game, Nathan Drake (character), Naughty Dog, Sony Computer Entertainment, Uncharted, Uncharted 4, video game review

Bloodborne – Complete

Feb12

71AEYuMzSUL._SL1248_Title: Bloodborne

System: PS4

Genre: ARPG

Developer: FromSoftware

Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

Date Played: January/February 2016

Rating: A Masterpiece

_

I few weeks ago I wrote a short article on my initial impressions of Bloodborne, and I’d like to come back to it now that I’ve defeated the game. Every boss. Every area. The whole DLC. All the side quests I could manage. The secret special double probation third ending. Now that’s on the “first play-through” (known as NG), I’m only a third through NG+ (a second harder go at it). But still, I think I know the game pretty well.

Let me put it out there, Bloodborne is the best console game I’ve played since The Last of Us, one of the best console games I’ve played in a long time, and one of the best games I’ve played since Diablo 3. It’s a masterpiece.

Perhaps my favorite thing about this game — and there a lot to love — is the setting, mythos, and lore. If you can handle it, this video gives a bit of a taste (SPOILERS ABOUND):

Besides being a great game, Bloodborne is a masterpiece of Lovecraftian horror. Many of you have probably never heard of H.P. Lovecraft, but along with Edgar Allan Poe, he is surely the most influential writer in the entire genre of horror. Enthroned in the genre not unlike J.R. Tolkien is for fantasy. Stephen King, no slouch himself, cites Lovecraft as his own greatest influence.

Bloodborne is like a love-letter to Lovecraft, reveling in a blend of “classic” (vaguely 19th and very early 20th century) influences, including in no small part Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the like. Every element of the game backs up this stylistic choice: The superb art design of world and characters both. The esoteric, cryptic, and complex mythology. The themes of forbidden knowledge explored and perverted. The creepy gorgeous music and terrifying sound effects. The influence of horrific powers from above/below/beyond. The moral ambiguity. Insanity. Dreams. Transformation and metamorphosis.

This is a dark dark game.

Art-bloodborne-screen-03It’s just so deliciously creepy and mythological. Really. Dark Souls has a cool world feel and mythology, and there is significant overlap, but Bloodborne really takes it all to the next level, elevating itself above mere video game (and it rocks in that department) to become a genuine work of art. Surely no chipper happy landscape painting, but a dark broody bloody 1911 horror novel of a game.

It’s quite twisted and disturbing too, in a very gothic fantastic way. There are a lot of awful reoccurring themes: nightmare worlds, bad births, transformations into beast-hood, sadness, tragedy. It’s often slightly Japanese in flavor, which blending with Lovecraft’s very Western horror lends it even more of a sentimental exotic twist.

The above video is a good example. The “Orphan of Kos” is a horrifically difficult boss born from the corpse of its parent — a great one, one of the Cthulhu-inspired demon-gods. It fights you with its placenta as a weapon. Yuck! This fight was so hard too. It took me probably 12 hours to master.

Bloodborne is a very boss centric game. There are a lot of them, 18 in the normal game, 5 in the DLC, and at least 15 in the Chalice dungeons. They are all hard. All different.

Nothing about this game is very obvious. There is little hand holding and there are countless secret and optional areas, bosses, weapons, etc. However, taking the time to explore them is both satisfying and makes it easier — as you’ll need their powerups. Coming late to it, the DLC served as an extra optional area to mix in with the main game. It’s extremely well done, and perhaps even harder than the primary plot. It fits in seamlessly from a style point of view.

bloodborne_the_old_hunters_V2Which brings us to more fantastic points about Bloodborne, the gameplay. The sneaking around and the combat is really quite excellent. It’s extremely difficult, and very skill oriented, particularly the many many varied bosses. But the mechanics are intensely visceral and satisfying. The combinations of feel, exceptional animation, physics/collision driven hand to hand, and amazing art and sound design all serve to enhance the effect. Every strike is satisfying.

The controls are very deep and nuanced, with a ton of variety in weapons. As a control programmer I can really appreciate the effect and tuning that went into them. At times the game appears to read your mind, allowing you to combine combos and hit multiple opponents in the same strike — but really it reads subtle indications from your joystick movements during the long attacks to guide and influence the results.

It’s difficult, and I’m not that great at the highly precise art of parrying with the guns — catching the enemy at exactly the right moment as to stun them — but subtle mechanic changes have made the combat “easier” or at least less frustrating than that in the Souls games. Probably nothing as much as the “regain system” in which you can recover lost hit points by rapid retaliation.

Image-bloodborne-c20The meta game is excellent too. At first I though it cryptic and the investments of blood echoes into levels of little apparent goal. However, I found that Bloodborne is actually a satisfyingly easy game to grind. Having trouble with a boss? Well, there are two options: read up on strategy and practice, or level up and practice — actually, you pretty much have to do both. The game doesn’t discourage a bit of grinding, and rarely makes it take that long. Plus the combat is so satisfying that even killing a room full of monsters over and over again is fun. 15 minutes of grinding will often earn you a level or two. Grinding up weapon upgrade “stones” and gems works pretty well too.

You have to choose how to invest in this game. There are only enough materials to upgrade a few weapons, so you need to choose which to use and spend both on them and on the appropriate character stats wisely.

There are always a lot of options to help you get past difficult spots. The first up being to watch some strategy videos, next are to tune your “runes”, weapons, outfit, and consumables for the fight. There is a lot of variety here. With weird powerups to exploit some vulnerability in most bosses. All challenging to learn and use. The “armor” is interesting. They aren’t radically different in power, and you can often wear what looks cool (and they do look cool — and different). For particular bosses and areas you can cobble together a set as best needed, for poison resistance, or fire, or frenzy.

I also love the way the world is so dense, but all twisted about on itself. Nearly every level has a door, gate, elevator, or ladder that cuts from the beginning to the end — after you sneak around and open it. It comes to feel progressively more accessible as you open up various connections. You learn it REALLY well too, because most areas require so many careful traversals in order to master. This is a game about learning the exact way to get through difficult challenges. It’s about mastery and careful progression.

A deliberate experience to be savored.

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By: agavin
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Posted in: Games
Tagged as: ARPG, Bloodborne, Fantasy, FromSoftware, PS4, RPG, Sony Computer Entertainment, Video game

Bloodborne – Early Impressions

Jan20

71AEYuMzSUL._SL1248_Title: Bloodborne

System: PS4

Genre: ARPG

Developer: FromSoftware

Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

Date Played: January 2016

Rating: Awesome (although hard)

_

Many years back to played a couple days worth of Dark Souls, by this same developer. So when I was recently perusing some “best games of 2015” and came across the PS4 Bloodborne, a more updated take on the “mega-difficult action RPG genre” I decided to give it a try.

Although it might not be obvious, Bloodborne is really a spiritual descendant not only of those older “Souls” games (also by FromSoftware), but of Castlevania. It’s dark, gothic, and a creature hunting action roll playing game with lots of secrets.

Bloodborne-featuredLet’s talk about atmosphere. Bloodborne is Japanese Gothic, with a kind of vaguely european, vaguely 18th or 19th century vibe. Creepy cities, leather, top hats, blunderbusses, werwolves, and all that. It’s a gorgeous gorgeous kind of dark game. Excellent and moody visuals and soundscape.

At the mechanic level, Bloodborne is a sort of brawler. You fight usually two handed, with both a firearm in the left hand (generally a slow shooting blunderbuss or flintlock pistol) and a “trick weapon” in the right hand. The trick weapons switch between a smaller faster version and a bigger slower one. This switch can be done in the middle of combat. In fact, you can have two of each kind of weapon and switch those out too. Combat is careful and calculated, generally up close and personal, very visceral — not unlike a Final Fight style brawler. You dodge slow deadly blows, shoot guys to stun them, and then bash their faces in — combos abound. This refinement of the Souls hand-to-hand combat is faster and more furious. Different kinds of weapons and blows are satisfying. The monsters are varied, their animations clear and effective. A new mechanic where you can steal back lost hit points by attacking immediately after loosing them is very effective to encourage a more furious style of fight.

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But all that is this micro-mechanic. The macro mechanics (i.e. the RPG element) are brutal and different (although less evil that the Souls games). Blood echoes are xp earned by killing monsters, but you loose them all when you die. However, some nearby monster picks them up, and if you return to kill him (after killing everything up to him again), you can regain them — unless you die a second time on route. This mechanic, combined with a ridiculous scarcity of continue points means that you spend a LONG time killing the same guys over and over, learning every corner of the world. In fact, you have to kill one of the hideous bosses to get a continue, and it took me over a week to do that. Long before that I pretty much learned the ins and outs of the first area (which has a choice of two bosses).

And you can spend your blood echoes on leveling up, or weapons, or leveling your weapons, which are all great ways to get better at the game. Too bad you can’t actually spend anything until you at least see the first boss — and this is quite brutally challenging without leveling up.

Nor did the game bother to explain this, or much else about its rather oddball but well crafted macro-mechanics. Bloodborne, like the Souls games is virtually free of the burden of documentation, walk-thru, or any of those niceties for coddled modern player. Instead it relies on painful trial and error — and no small amount of walkthrough video viewing.

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It took me about a week to kill the first boss. By the time I even faced him seriously, he really wasn’t that hard, but my initial encounters at low level had been so punishing I took my time leveling and exploring. For while the monsters respawn every time you die or return to the leveling hub, rare items and “doors” are persistent. That is you can only collect an item once, and a door, once opened stays open. It is this last, since the level is folded around itself, that makes the long traversal through the level more manageable after awhile. For example, an initially locked gate near the checkpoint, when unlocked from the back allows “quick” (killing “only” 11 monster) access to the first boss.

And while one might think that slinking around killing the same monsters over and over again would be boring, the addictive rhythm to the combat and the slow progress in both leveling and skill makes it all quite rewarding — if dastardly difficult.

All ARPGs involve a grind. Diablo 3, one of my favorites, is nothing but grind. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In Diablo, you just slay slay with abandon in order to earn xp and small changes at gear upgrades. In Bloodborne, you pick your way through carefully, for the consequences of death are much sharper. Still, fundamentally you kill monsters, collect XP, and improve your character for more more monster killing. Such is the name of the game.

More thoughts to come after I progress…

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Bloodborne-3

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By: agavin
Comments (1)
Posted in: Games
Tagged as: ARPG, Bloodborne, Fantasy, FromSoftware, PS4, RPG, Sony Computer Entertainment, Video game

Crash goes to Japan – part 1

Jan11

It’s probably hard for younger gamers to recognize the position in gaming that Japan occupied from the mid eighties to the late 90s. First of all, after video games rose like a phoenix from the “great crash of ’82” (in which the classic coin-op and Atari dominated home market imploded), all major video game machines were from Japan until the arrival of the Xbox. Things were dominated by Nintendo, Sega, Nintendo, Sony, Nintendo, Sony… you get the picture.

And in the days before the home market eclipsed and destroyed the arcade, Japan completely crushed everyone else. Only the occasional US hit like Mortal Kombat even registered on the radar.

Miyamoto, creator of Mario, playing Crash 1. I’m standing behind him off frame

All of this, not to mention the cool samurai/anime culture and ridiculously yummy food (see my sushi index!), made us American video game creators pretty much all Miyamoto groupies.

But on the flip side, American games, if they even made it to the land of the rising sun at all, almost always flopped.

Japanese taste is different the wisdom went. Special. Foreign games even had a special name over there (which I have no idea how to spell). These “lesser” titles were stocked in a seedy back corner of your typical Japanese game store, near the oddball porn games.

So it was with great enthusiasm and limited expectations that we approached the mutual Naughty Dog, Mark Cerny, and Sony decision that we were going to take  the Japanese market really seriously with Crash. Sony assigned two brilliant and dedicated producers to us: Shuhei Yoshida and his then assistant Shimizu (aka Tsurumi-0600). They sat in on every major planning meeting and we scheduled the whole fall for me to localize the game in exacting detail (while we were simultaneously beginning work on Crash 2!).

For the most part, Yoshida-san made things happen and Shimizu, who has literally played like every video game ever made and read like every manga, worked the details. I (with a bunch of help from the artists) had to put in the changes.

Yoshida-san front and center, Shimizu on the far left, Rio (joined the team during Crash 2) on the far right

Somehow Yoshida-san was able to maneuver the game into being not one of those funny foreign games, but an official bona fide release of Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. the first party Japanese studio. And it was to be sold and marketed pretty much like it had been made in Japan! Wow!

So to pull off this cultural masquerade Jason and I decided that Shu (as Yoshida-san was affectionately known) and Shimizu got pretty much whatever they wanted. They after all, knew the mysterious Japanese market. Which turned out to be pretty darn true. And, besides, both are really really smart and crazy hard workers (Shimizu is famous for sleeping under his desk) and so we all got along famously.

The gameplay itself wasn’t really too much of an issue. Shimizu did help us smooth out some sections and make them easier (often by adding extra continue points − opposite of Europe). But there were a lot of other changes.

The Crash 1 main titles, in Japanese

First of all, we had to translate the text. Some of this wasn’t so bad. But the main logo was a 3D object and Jason had to painstakingly create a version of the paper design the Japanese provided us — which required lots of checking from Shimizu as he doesn’t speak Japanese.

Above is the opening in Japanese.

And things got even harder (for me) with the in game text. The Playstation didn’t have a lot of video memory and we were using a medium resolution 512 pixel wide mode anyway. What little there was, we had pretty much consumed. But the Japanese language has four alphabets! One is Latin, two are similar but different looking phonetic alphabets, and the last is the giant Kanji pictographic database. Kanji would’ve been impossible, but we needed to cram the two extra phonetic sets in. Plus the characters are more intricate than the Latin alphabet and need more pixels. I can’t remember what I did to squeeze them in, but I do remember it was painful. One part I do recall was implementing the sets of letters that vary only by an extra dot or ” mark by drawing them with two sprites (hence saving video ram).

Once the font was installed we had to input the crazy looking “shift JIS” text. One of the problems in those days was that the text editors all 8-bit, unlike today were 16-bit typesets dominate. And with a European language you can usually tell if a line of text had gotten swapped or mangled, but in Japanese… and even worse, in shift JIS it just looks like a bunch of garbage characters.

So again, Shimizu had to check everything. A lot.

Our opening and closing cut scene dialog was recorded in Japanese using very high profile Japanese actors (so they told me). We replaced those audio files (using one of my automated systems of course!). There were also a good number of cases throughout the game where we had placed text in textures. The configuration screens, loading screens, load/save screens and all sorts of other ones. These all needed new versions. We collected all of these textures, shipped them out to Japan and got back Shimizu certified versions in exactly the same sizes with the Japanese text. I used and upgraded the system that I had built for the European version so that any file (texture, audio, etc) in the game could be “replaced” by a file of the same name in the same directory with a .J on the end (or a .S, .E, .F, .G, .I for various European permutations). The level packaging tool would automatically suck up the most appropriate version and shove it in the J versions of the levels. I’m not sure we left ANYTHING untranslated. Even Japanese games usually had more Engrish. Achem, English. I so remember a Castlevania with “Dlacura’s grave.”

Then the Japanese came up with this idea of having Aku Aku explain various gameplay mechanics to you when you break his boxes, much like the raspberry boxes in Super Mario World. This was a great idea, except it meant that the game was suddenly filled with about 200 extra paragraphs of text. Undecipherable text. I had to squeeze that into the levels too. More problematic was the seemingly simple fact that when a big block of text comes up on the screen the game effectively needs to pause so the player can read it. You can’t just “hit pause” but need a separate state. This simple feature caused a lot of bugs. A lot. But we stomped them out eventually.

Above you can see a walk through of the first level. A lot of the PITA localization work was in the save screens (big fun: character entry screen in three Japanese alphabets) and the various statistic screens at the end of the level. I think the Japanese allowed us to do away with the horrible password system and use memory card only.

The Japanese box and CD with its very strange Crash and Eve painting — it was nice and colorful

The Japanese also had some famous actor record a whole collection of really zany sounding grunts and noises that Crash was to make. Shimizu lovingly crafted long lists of extremely specific places in the game where exactly such and such exclamation was to be uttered. He was never one to spare either of us from a great deal of work 🙂 But his willingness to tackle any task himself, no matter how tedious, made him hard to refuse. I also had to squeeze all these extra samples into the extremely tight sound memory, mostly by downgrading the bit-rate on other sounds. This caused Mike Gollom, our awesome sound design contractor to groan and moan. “3.5k is pure butchery” he’d complain. I found this SGI tool that used a really advanced new algorithm to downgrade the sounds, they sounded twice as good at any given bit-rate than the Sony tool.

Anyway the really funny bit about these Crash sounds was the subjective feel they left us Americans with. Strange! They made Crash sound like a constipated old man. But the Japanese insisted they were perfect. I guess they were right because the game sold like crazy over there.

Another weird audio difference was that five of the songs were swapped out for new ones. Josh Mancell the composer put it this way:

An 11th hour decision made by the Sony people in Japan. They felt that the boss rounds needed to sound more ‘video game-like’. The only reference they gave was music from the Main Street Electrical Parade at Disneyland. I only had a day or so to write all those themes. My favorite comment was about the original Tawna bonus round music. It roughly translated into ‘the sound of the guitar mixed with the tree imagery is too nostalgic-sounding’. I’m still scratching my head on that one.

You can find the different tracks here.

There were also a host of minor but strange modifications we needed to make. One was that a few characters originally had four fingers, which is typical of most American cartoon characters. Apparently the Japanese have a more than usual dislike of disfigured humanoids. Fingers were added (to make them the normal five). There were a whole bunch of little visual, audio, and gameplay changes Shimizu had us make to the game. Most of these I felt were neutral, different but not really better or worse, so I just trusted him and put them in. Occasionally if they were a really pain I pushed back.

Eventually, right around Thanksgiving, just in time for Jason and I to head to Japan to promote it, the Japanese version was ready!

Coming soon, I plan on a part 2 covering Japanese marketing and promotions!

If you didn’t catch it, I have a similar detailed post in the European localization of Crash.

If you liked this post, follow me at:

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Cover of the hint guide in Japan

Related posts:

  1. Crash Bandicoot – An Outsider’s Perspective (part 8)
  2. Parlez vous Crash
  3. Making Crash Bandicoot – part 5
  4. Making Crash Bandicoot – part 1
  5. Making Crash Bandicoot – part 2
By: agavin
Comments (141)
Posted in: Games
Tagged as: Atari, Crash Bandicoot, Japan, Japanese Localization, Mark Cerny, Mortal Kombat, Naughty Dog, Nintendo, pt_crash_history, Sega, Shimizu, Shuhei Yoshida, Sony, Sony Computer Entertainment, Super Mario World, Video game, Xbox

Parlez vous Crash

Jan06

In the mid to late 90s, Playstation games had three SKUs: SCUS, SCEE, and SCEJ, being respectively the US NTSC version, the European PAL version, and the Japanese NTSC version.

The American version shipped in early September 1996. We finished it in early August (manufacture took a month). From my perspective — and it’s worth noting that during the Crash period I personally did most of the localization work — the European version was finished at the same time. I’d killed myself getting it ready during July. But Europe itself liked to drag matters out with a leisurely testing schedule. I wanted it done, because until it was, I couldn’t do much else.

At Naughty Dog, we pioneered the idea of simultaneous international release. By Crash 2 and Crash 3 the same exact code, conditionalized very slightly, ran all three versions. Jak & Daxter was one of the first games where the American version included the European languages. By Jak II you could switch languages on the fly in the menu anytime. We wanted one code base, one art base, one thing to debug. We wanted it for sale simultaneously world wide. I wanted one gold master.

This goal and the tools to do it began on Crash 1, and were fairly well in place by Crash 2. The international groups weren’t quite as on board and year after year dragged out the European and Japanese editions for extra testing. As best I can tell this resulted mostly from a “this is the way it’s always been done” kind of mentality. Jason and I have never been big on that type of reasoning. Still, that personal caveat aside, even from Crash 1, Sony’s international teams did an awesome job, putting in a tremendous effort to ensure the product was really polished for each territory.

The front of the original PAL edition

Anyway, each territory had its own quirks. With the European version, they stemmed from PAL, the old European video standard. PAL actually has a slightly higher resolution and better color fidelity than NTSC (the US standard). But the kicker is that it runs at 50 hertz instead of 60. For Crash this meant that the frame rate would be 25 frames per second instead of 30.

The resolution itself wasn’t much of a problem. Crash was mostly a 3D game and it wasn’t hard to adjust the projection matrix in the engine to render the game to a different resolution. But the aspect ratio of PAL pixels is also a little different and Crash did have a certain amount of bitmap graphics like the powerups and font. The PAL frame buffers were larger and the machine had the same video RAM so increasing the resolution of the sprites was rarely an option. Generally, we just had to live with a slight aspect shift or stretch them to fit. I developed notation in the original data so that different kinds of sprites could go either way in a fairly uniform manner.

The real kicker was the frame rate. One of the reasons why the animation in Crash is so so much better than most of its contemporaries is that we stored every vertex for every frame — then compressed the living crap out of it. This meant that each segment of animation was sampled from Alias PowerAnimator at 30 fps. I modified the tools to support making a second copy of every animation where the step rate was adjusted to 25fps. The pal version used these files instead of the originals. This worked about 80% of the time.  Sometimes it became necessary to notate a particular animation segment as having a strange or custom step for PAL, or even hand code certain frames. I added special constructs to my custom language (GOOL) which made this stuff as automatic as I could.

It often came in these enlarged boxes to fit all those languages!

But the physics and collision systems also needed to adjust to the different frame rate. I had done PAL conversions for Rings of Power and Way of the Warriorand having every great programmer’s hatred for tedium had developed the notion when starting Crash that I would notate all “time and space based” units not in the traditional game programmer manner of “moves X pixels per frame” but in a kind of neutral space. Hence everything in Crash was measured in meters, seconds, and the like. I built into GOOL constructs like (meters 5) or (meters-per-second 2.5). The compiler or the runtime (depended) would convert these on the fly into the appropriate pixel per frame units.

This had a number of big advantages. First of all, even without the PAL issue, it allowed the physics (and the enemies) to move in a fairly frame rate independent way. Special functions were used to deal with velocity and acceleration which took into account the current frame’s estimated real time (based usually on how long it took the previous frame to compute and render). This meant that the code which propelled Crash in a parabolic arc as he jumped would move him further per frame if the frame rate slipped to 20 or 15 (which, unfortunately, it sometimes did). This wasn’t a perfect solution, 15 fps still played worse than 30, but it helped.

And it really paid off with the PAL conversion. The hard work — and it was incredibly tedious — really only took me about five days. After running all the automatic convertors and debugging those I had to go through the entire game and check every single level, every creature, every behavior of every creature or object and make sure it stilled played and looked okay in PAL. If it didn’t I had to play with the numbers, or in the worst case add some special “if PAL do it a little differently” clauses to the GOOL code.

But this was in a world where most American games just played 16% more sluggishly in Europe and most European games 16% fast in America.

Crash played great in both — and looked great in both. The Euro version actually even looked a little better (higher resolution and better color) although the feel at 25hz was slightly inferior. But we didn’t invent the TV standard.

The final tricky bit with localization was the language(s). Crash 1 didn’t really have any voice (which was to become a huge deal in later games). But it did have some text.

This is Crash 2, which is the only picture I could find, but Crash 1 was similar, just with the C1 title page

In typical programmer fashion, I invented another system for this. All of the text was generated by literal strings in the GOOL code, and since I controlled the compiler, I added a feature where a mapping file could be created for each language specifying the English text and the equivalent phrases in each of our five languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian). I changed the way strings were handled to index into a table and to have five files on disk for the string buffer. This is typical now, but was very unusual then. Even on Crash 1 you could change the language on the fly. But Europe made me put the toggle only at the main menu because they didn’t want to have to test for weird bugs that came up when you switched languages in the middle of a level.

I systemized all of this stuff by having the tools and the game itself both have separate notions of: video rate (NTSC, PAL), territory (which country’s disc it actually was), and language. This separated the concept of language from territory, opening up the possibility of foreign languages in the American versions (which didn’t happen until Jak 1 for logistical and legal reasons).

As requests came in from Europe to do peculiar and territory specific things like “make the game harder because European gamers like a challenge” (after Crash 1 we refused to acknowledge this “truism”) I modified the tools to allow territory specific overrides in the files that controlled the game data. For example, CONTINUE_POINT_64_32 in the jungle level, “hide in europe.” While I’m not sure the frustrated Euro gamer appreciated it, the system did make serving the producer’s requests easier.

In any case, the Euro version of Crash was lavished with the same attention to detail with which we did everything, and Sony Europe did the same. This was one (if not the) first product for which the whole international organization was behind and where they controlled the worldwide rights. Each Sony territory really pulled out all the stops in supporting and promoting the game as “made here.” It was highly localized, not just the game itself but each little country in Europe doing its own advertising and marketing campaign. Even the Irish filmed their own ads with Irish accented actors. Traditionally game players were highly “nationalistic” with, for example, French games selling better in France. The attention paid by both us and at all levels of the Sony infrastructure to selling a worldwide product aimed specifically at each and every consumer group really paid off.

The game sold like wildfire everywhere. Although we had certain champion territories like France and Australia (Crash’s virtual birthplace) who really poured on the love.

The story continues with Crash goes to Japan!

If you liked this post, follow me at:

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Yes, Crash really took to the old country.

Related posts:

  1. Crash Bandicoot – An Outsider’s Perspective (part 8)
  2. Making Crash Bandicoot – part 5
  3. Making Crash Bandicoot – part 6
  4. Making Crash Bandicoot – part 1
  5. Making Crash Bandicoot – part 3
By: agavin
Comments (51)
Posted in: Games
Tagged as: Crash Bandicoot, Europe, Games, Localization, Naughty Dog, NTSC, PAL, PAL region, pt_crash_history, SCEE, Sony Computer Entertainment, United States

Crash Bandicoot – An Outsider’s Perspective (part 8)

Feb16

This is part of a now lengthy series of posts on the making of Crash Bandicoot. Click here for the PREVIOUS or for the FIRST POST .

After Naughty Dog Jason and I joined forces with another game industry veteran, Jason Kay (collectively Jason R & K are known as “the Jasons”). He was at Activision at the time of the Crash launch and offers his outside perspective.

Although I would not meet Andy and Jason until after Crash 3 was released, the time around the launch of Crash Bandicoot was a fascinating time in the game business, and I believe that the launch of Crash, which was so far ahead of every other game of its generation in every aspect – technical achievement, production values, sound/music, design and balancing – caused everyone I knew in the business to rethink the games they were working on.

Warhawk: One of the best looking early PS1 games

It seems hard to imagine given the broad scope of games today — Console Games costing $50+ million, Social Games on Facebook with 100 Million monthly average users, gesture controlled games, $.99 games on iPhone – how troubled the industry was before the release of Crash, which heralded the rebirth of console games after a dormant period and ushered in the era of the mega-blockbuster game we know today. In the year that Crash Bandicoott released, only 74 Million games were sold across all platforms in the US – of which Crash accounted for nearly 5% of all games sold in the US. By 2010 – more than 200 Million games were sold, with the number one title, Call of Duty: Black Ops selling “only” 12 million copies in the US – about 6% of the total market. In some ways, adjusted for scale, Crash was as big then as Call of Duty is today.

Twisted Metal – Another of the better early PS1 games

After the incredible success of Super Mario World and Sonic the Hedgehog, the game business was really in the doldrums and it had a been a boatload of fail for the so-called “rebirth of the console”. Sega had released a series of “not-quite-next-gen” peripherals for the incumbent Sega Genesis system (including the 32x and the truly awful Sega CD), and made vague promises about “forward compatibility” with their still-secret 32 bit 3D Saturn console. When the Saturn finally shipped, it was referred to by many people as “Two lies in One”, since it was neither compatible with any previous Sega hardware, and nor was it capable of doing much 3D. Sega further compounded their previous two mistakes by giving the console exclusively to then-dominant retailer Toys “R” US, pissing of the rest of the retail community and pretty much assuring that console, and eventually Sega’s, demise in the hardware business.

Wipeout – at the time it looked (and sounded) good

The PlayStation had shipped in Fall of 1995, but the initial onslaught of games all looked vaguely similar to Wipeout – since no one believed that it was possible to stream data directly from the PS1 CD-Drive, games were laboriously unpacking single levels into the PS1’s paltry 2 MB of ram (+ 1 meg vram and 0.5 meg sound ram), and then playing regular CD (“redbook”) audio back in a loop while the level played. So most games (including the games we had in development at Activision and were evaluating from third parties) all looked and played in a somewhat uninspiring fashion.

When Crash first released, I was a producer at then-upstart publisher Activision – now one of the incumbent powerhouses in the game business that everyone loves to hate – but at that time, Activision was a tiny company that had recently avoided imminent demise with the success of MechWarrior 2, which was enjoying some success as one of the first true-3D based simulations for the hardcore PC game market. To put in perspective how small Activision was at that time, full year revenues were $86.6 Million in 1996, versus over $4.45 Billion in 2010, a jump of nearly 50x.

MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat DOS Front Cover

Jeffrey Zwelling, a friend of a friend who had started in the game business around the same I did, worked at Crystal Dynamics as a producer on Gex. Jeffrey was the first person I knew to hear about Crash, and he tipped me off that something big was afoot right before E3 in 1996. Jeff was based in Silicon Valley, and a lot of the former Naughty Dogs (and also Mark Cerny) had formerly worked at Crystal, so his intel was excellent. He kept warning me ominously that “something big” was coming, and while he didn’t know exactly “what” it was, but it was being referred to by people who’d seen as a “Sonic Killer”, “Sony’s Mario”, and “the next mascot game”.

As soon as people got a glimpse of the game at E3 1996, the conspiracy mongering began and the volume on the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt meter went to 11. In the pre-Internet absence of meaningful information stood a huge host of wild rumors and speculation. People “in the know” theorized that Naughty Dog had access to secret PlayStation specifications/registers/technical manuals that were only printed in Japanese and resided inside some sort of locked vault at Sony Computer Entertainment Japan. Numerous devs declared the Naughty Dog demo was “faked” in some way, running on a high-powered SGI Workstation hidden behind the curtain at Sony’s booth. That rumor seems in hindsight to have been a conflation of the fact that that the Nintendo 64 console, Code-Named “Project Reality” was in fact very similar to a Silicon Graphics Indigo Workstation and the Crash team was in fact writing and designing the game on Silicon Graphics workstations.

Tomb Raider – Crash contemporary, and great game. But the graphics…

Everyone in the business knew how “Sega had done what NintenDONT” and that they had trounced Nintendo with M-Rated games and better titles in the 16 bit Era, and most of the bets were that Nintendo was going to come roaring back to the #1 spot with the N64. Fortunately for Nintendo, Sega’s hardware was underpowered and underwhelming and Nintendo’s N64 shipped a year later than the Playstation 1. With all the focus on many people’s attention on this looming battle, and the dismissive claims that what Naughty Dog was showing was “impossible”, most people underestimated both the PlayStation and Naughty Dog’s Crash Bandicoot.

Since no one that I knew had actually gotten a chance to play Crash at the show – the crowds were packed around the game – I fully expected that my unboxing of Crash 1 would be highly anti-climatic. I remember that Mitch Lasky (my then boss, later founder of Jamdat and now a partner at Benchmark) and I had made our regular lunch ritual of visiting Electronics Boutique [ ANDY NOTE: at Naughty Dog this was affectionately known as Electronic Buttock ] (now GameStop) at the Westside Pavilion and picked up a copy of the game. We took the game back to our PS1 in the 7th Floor Conference Room at Activision, pressed start, and the rest was history. As the camera focused on Crash’s shoes, panned up as he warped in, I literally just about sh*t a brick. Most of the programmers we had talked to who were pitching games to us claimed that it was “impossible” to get more than 300-600 polygons on screen and maintain even a decent framerate. Most of the games of that era, a la Quake, had used a highly compressed color palette (primarily brown/gray in the case of Quake) to keep the total texture memory low. It seemed like every game was going to have blocky, ugly characters and a lot of muted colors, and most of the games released on the PS1 would in fact meet those criteria.

Mario 64 – Bright, pretty, 3D, not so detailed, but the only real contender — but on a different machine

Yet in front of us, Andy and Jason and the rest of the Crash team showed us that when you eliminate the impossible, only the improbable remains. Right before my eyes was a beautiful, colorful world with what seemed like thousands of polys (Andy later told that Crash 1 did in fact have over 1800 polygons per frame, and Crash 2 cracked 3,100 polys per frame – a far cry from what we had been told was “a faked demo” by numerous other PS1 development teams). The music was playful, curious and fun. The sound effects were luscious and the overall game experience felt, for the first time ever, like being a character in a classic Warner Brothers cartoon. Although I didn’t understand how the Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (discussed in part 6) actually worked, I was truly amazed that it was the first game everyone I knew who played games loved to play. There was none of the frustration of being stuck on one spot for days, no simply turning the game off never to play it again – everyone who played it seemed to play it from start to finish.

For us, it meant that we immediately raised our standards on things we were looking at. Games that had seemed really well done as prototypes a few weeks before now seemed ungainly, ugly, and crude. Crash made everyone in the game business “up their game.” And game players of the world were better off for it.

These posts continue with PART 9 HERE.

If you liked this post, follow me at:

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Detailed and Colorful – but most important fun

Certainly varied

Sorry for the lousy screen shots!

Related posts:

  1. Making Crash Bandicoot – part 1
  2. Making Crash Bandicoot – part 6
  3. Making Crash Bandicoot – part 2
  4. Making Crash Bandicoot – part 5
  5. Crash Bandicoot as a Startup (part 7)
By: agavin
Comments (29)
Posted in: Games
Tagged as: Activision, Andy Gavin, Crash Bandicoot, Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped, Crystal Dynamics, game, GameStop, Jason Kay, Jason Rubin, Naughty Dog, Playstation, pt_crash_history, Sega, Sony Computer Entertainment, Super Mario World, Video game
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