Unfortunately, we won’t be discussing whether or not we’ll ever be able to fly around on robot-dog surfboards. However, if you’re curious about that, then just go take a look at Boston Dynamic’s Big Dog and Cheetah robots. Suffice it to say, flying robot dogs seem inevitable.

Energy Weapons

The first bit of real science from the Mega Man series is, believe it or not, the Blue Bomber’s blaster. Though it might seem like pure science fiction, directed-energy weapons are in development right now, and are based on very well-accepted science.

Above: This stuff is no joke. There are laser weapons in use all the time today, and the technology is getting better all the time

They take several forms. The coolest, but perhaps least relevant type is actually a form of heat ray. It’s called the Active Denial System and was developed by the United States military as a form of perimeter control. It’s non-lethal, and it works by transferring a ray of energy directly onto a person. The effect of this is an extreme sensation of heat on the target’s skin. For obvious reasons, this wouldn’t be too useful against robots.

The US military has also developed laser cannons that can be mounted to humvees, tanks, or aircraft. They’re not very useful in a battle situation, but their use is as a missile deterrent. By directing enough laser heat onto the incoming missile, these devices can cause them to explode in midair before reaching their target.

The final version is a fascinating device that was also developed by the US military. Announced earlier this year, the HELLADS system is a weapon small enough to be carried by an individual soldier, but strong enough to shoot down an enemy aerial drone.

The only disadvantage to all of these weapons is their colossal energy requirements. However, Mega Man actually gets that right as well, as battery packs are essential in nearly all MM games.

We may not have had arm-mounted laser guns by the year 200X, but it does appear that we’ll have very efficient arm-mounted energy weapons by 20XX.

Reploids

Characters like Mega Man, Zero, Protoman etc are a type of android in the Mega Man universe called a reploid. Just like the energy weapons talked about above, we don’t exactly have these in production yet, but we’re quickly assembling many pieces of the puzzle.

Above: The ones on the left even look like Zero and some other middle-era Mega Man characters

The first thing you should see is this borderline horrifying video of a Japanese android. After viewing that you might think that a sitting, speaking robot is a long way from a running, jumping hero like Mega Man. And you’d be right, but we’ve got that under control too. For that, we refer you again to a pet project of Boston Dynamics: PETMAN. He can even do push ups!

Putting these two technologies together, there’s no reason to believe that a Mega Man-esque reploid is impossible within the 88 years we’ve got left in 20XX… in appearance and mobility, anyway. Artificial intelligence is where this gets a little hairy.

We wanted to know if it’s even theoretically possible to create an artificial intelligence that’s as capable and flexible as a human being, so we asked an AI researcher for his thoughts.

“I and most AI researchers do believe that AI systems will someday be considered self-aware,” said David Chin, professor of artificial intelligence and programming at the University of Hawaii. “This view is not without controversy, though. There are a number of prominent philosophers that consider this impossible and make strong arguments to try to prove their position. For example, one of my former mentors, John Searle, posited the ‘Chinese room’ thought experiment to argue that AI may eventually become so advanced that the AI looks intelligent to a non-expert in AI, but if you look closer, they cannot really be considered intelligent.”

Secret Volcano Lairs

This category isn’t going to go very in-depth, because it’s kind of stupid, but we just couldn’t resist the urge to talk about secret volcano lairs. In Mega Man Zero 4, there’s a location called the Aegis Volcano Base which, as its name implies, is located inside an active volcano. Not just any regular volcano, though – it’s a constantly erupting volcano that spews magma at all times.

That part isn’t so unbelievable. There are actually volcanoes on Earth that haven’t stopped erupting for thousands of years. Not in the cinematic, Tommy-Lee-Jones-battling-a-magma-river-in-downtown-LA kind of way, but there are volcanoes that spew at all times. Stromboli, for example, is a constantly erupting volcano in Italy (and also a delicious, greasy Sbarro’s menu item).

Above: It’s important to remember that few volcanic eruptions look like this

There are three things that you need to know before attempting to construct a base inside this volcano. The first is that it’s pretty stupid, but it’s not impossible. Volcanologists are constantly climbing around on volcanoes (although it’s important to note that doing so often gets them killed). The second bit of news is a bit more encouraging: Constantly erupting volcanoes could possibly be the safest volcanoes to build your secret base in. The biggest danger would be your volcano blowing its top and exploding your base. Volcanoes with constant eruptions are more stable, because there’s less pressure building up that would cause it to blow its top. So if you’re forced to make a choice of what kind of volcano to build you base in… this kind isn’t too horrible.

However, the third thing you should know isn’t good news. Persistent lava flow can sometimes lead to the emptying of the magma chambers. Which can cause a collapse on part of the mountain. Even if there isn’t persistent flow, there can still be side collapses, as was the case in the enormous Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980. It’s rare, though, so it’s unlikely you’d experience a collapse in your lifetime. But if you intend to pass your base down to future generations, it’d be best to build it elsewhere.

The post The Science of Mega Man appeared first on Game News.

Box Score is a weekly column that offers a look at sports games and the athletic side of the industry from the perspective of veteran reviewer and sports fan Richard Grisham.

This is the third of a 3-part series examining how FIFA for the Vita went from conception to completion. To read Part 1, click here; Part 2 is here.

“This is where a little piece of you dies.”

So laments Matt Prior, producer of FIFA for Sony’s new Vita handheld. The final months of a game’s development cycle are when the toughest, most painful decisions are made. After a year and a half of planning, designing, building, and testing, Prior and his team must look at each other and kill one or more features they’d desperately hoped would make it into the hands of the players.

“As a producer, you want to make the best possible product you can,” explains Prior. “All producers are gamers; we’ve sat there and criticized other products, but the reality is every team is working its hardest. You have to make those sacrifices and decisions.”

Sometimes those decisions can be taken personally. Each major aspect of a game has an individual producer associated with it; cuts to that mode can make that person feel as if their work has been compromised or, even worse, eliminated altogether. No one said the business of building videogames was easy, after all. It’s a simple, cold calculation. “You’re up against time and budget,” says Prior. “That’s the most brutal, from a producer’s standpoint.”

The last few weeks of a game’s development are frantic. When things are going well, that’s when the daily builds start to reveal the essence of what it will be. “You’re up against the time limit and it’s kind of a critical phase. (That’s your) chance to put the polish on it; hopefully time allows it,” says Prior. “It’s where you do the final bit of tuning. You say ‘oh, we must do this, because it makes it better.’ The game really comes into its own that last little bit where it all gets polished.”

Then, of course, there are the bugs.

“No game in the history of gaming has ever gone out without bugs,” continues Prior. “Bugs do get shipped; they have to if you want a game on time. As a producer, your role is to make sure those bugs that are shipped aren’t detrimental to the overall quality. You hope it doesn’t really affect the consumer experience. At the end of the day, that’s the paramount thing. We want to make the best possible game.”

While Prior and his team are making the tough calls on last-minute adjustments and frantically prioritizing the issues to tackle, he’s also taking his game and putting it in the hands of the general public and press for the first time. It’s one thing to do this on a platform people are comfortable with; quite another to do so on something so different and innovative as the PlayStation Vita.

“You’d be amazed at how many thousands of ways people could hold the device; it’s one of those things you never really think of when designing it,” laughs Prior as he describes the initial ‘game-ops’ sessions with people the team invites to the studio to play-test the title. “We love watching people pick it up and hold it. Almost no one holds it the same way, so we have to kind of say ‘We’ve got to adapt to this.’”

Almost immediately, Prior and his team discovered that they’d need to provide several options for control. In particular, the presence of a rear-touch pad on the Vita presented a challenge. While FIFA takes advantage of the screen for passing and shooting, the team realized they’d need to give users the ability to toggle its use on and off – at least until the person got a handle on how to best play using the screen.

“Rear shooting is off if you desire,” explains Prior. “You can’t design for everyone. There is no best practice in how to hold it even though the device has got the grooves on the back. Clearly you’re meant to hold it with your fingers bent, but very few people actually do that off the bat. We sat and looked at people and how they held it and we said ‘we’ve got to be kind of clever.’”

As Sony has begun holding events promoting the Vita (at both invite-only sessions and its Vita Social Clubs), FIFA has been one of the showcase titles. As a title with wide appeal, terrific visuals, and unique control offerings, it’s easy to see why Sony would choose to show off the power of their new handheld with such a big, deep game.

Even so, the newness of the machine, coupled with its unique rear touchscreen has many people talking. On his influential show Weekend Confirmed from January 20, host Garnett Lee voiced a combination of optimism and concern based upon his initial experience.

“I’m sort of torn,” said Lee, explaining his first go with the game and, in particular, the rear touchscreen. “You can do what you couldn’t do before in FIFA, which is shoot a low hard ball into a corner. [However,] my fingers are so long that I have a hard time holding the thing and not having them touch the back touch[screen], which defeats the purpose.”

As with any new hardware, it will take time for players to get familiar with, and ultimately comfortable using, all the features the Vita offers. FIFA has clearly been built with a tremendous amount of passion, which reflects in the conversations I’ve had with Prior. Whether or not FIFA ultimately succeeds when it’s released next month depends on many things, not least of which is the reception the Vita gets from the North American market. One thing is clear, above all: Matt Prior has poured his heart and soul into it being something to be proud of.

Richard Grisham has been obesessed with sports and video games since childhood, when he’d routinely create and track MicroLeague Baseball seasons on paper. He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and four-year old son, who he’ll soon be training to be an NFL placekicker. As a freelance journalist and writer, his work has appeared in GamesRadar, NGamer, and 1UP.

The post Box Score: Taking the leap, Part 3 appeared first on Game News.

Box Score is a weekly column that offers a look at sports games and the athletic side of the industry from the perspective of veteran reviewer and sports fan Richard Grisham.

This week’s column is the first of a three-part series examining how FIFA for the Vita went from conception to completion.

“What can we do? What can’t we do?”

These aren’t just the questions of expectant gamers waiting to get their hands on the PlayStation Vita in February. In fact, they’re the exact queries Matt Prior had for everyone around him back in August 2010. Prior had just gotten the word that he would be the producer of FIFA for Sony’s brand-new, high-tech handheld console. As the “owner” of the game, so to speak, he would be responsible for its design, production, delivery, and support. Depending on the time of day, Matt would be frantically scrambling to assemble the right team of developers and engineers to ensure his vision for the title, answering pointed questions from senior corporate executives about its potential for profitability, or trying to – literally – get his hands on the new little machine that would define his job for the next two years. All against the backdrop of delivering the world’s most popular sports game on brand new hardware at the system’s launch.

No pressure.

“We’re first out of the blocks, and we don’t know what we’re building on,” says Prior of those first few weeks of discovery. “We’re kind of the pioneers, blazing a trail. We’ve got no one to go to say ‘How did you do this on this;’ you kind of have to work it out all by yourself.”

To say developing for the Vita is unique is an understatement. On one hand, because of some high-level similarities to the overall architecture of the PS3 as well as its enviable processing power, Matt and his team did not have to completely start from scratch. “We’ve got the game, we know the game; there are some similarities at the core. All the licensing (the leagues, FIFA, the governing body itself), all of that knowledge base is applicable.”

On the other hand, there’s a staggering amount of work to determine just what FIFA will be. Prior and his team have to finalize their vision for the game, pitch that plan to senior management for approval, analyze what the makeup of the their staff will be, choose which game modes will be in the plan, schedule the development tasks, ensure the budgets make sense, and get the design documents going. After all, there’s only one launch date, and it won’t move. Prior simply has to hit it with a highly functional, beautiful game that will be devoured by an insatiable – and demanding – fanbase.

Oh, and there’s that whole “two touchscreens” thing to deal with.

“From a game design standpoint, you have to work out what you want to do with the Vita and what makes it unique,” explains Prior. “How can that be adapted to FIFA? We wanted to do a lot of controls around the touchscreen. We didn’t just want to make gimmicky touchscreen features; we wanted to create features that affected the game at a core level.”

“We saw the touchscreen and how it gives you the ability to point and press exactly where you want to go,” he continues. “We thought, ‘How could we address some of the more frustrating things about FIFA?’ We play FIFA a lot in the office, and there’s rarely a game that goes past where someone doesn’t scream ‘NOT THAT GUY!’ when they make a pass. The reason for that is you’re kind of at the mercy of the AI; you might be looking at the player on screen and trying to make a pass, but the AI, just because of its limitations, might assume you wanted [a different] pass. With the touchscreen, you press on the screen, and there’s no ambiguity.”

Building an all-new – and significantly more intuitive – way to shoot on goal was another obvious opportunity once the team laid their eyes on the Vita’s back-touch mechanism. “It clicked straight away, almost,” chuckled Prior. “The physical dimensions of the Vita lent itself very well to football in the sense that the (back touchscreen) looks like a goal.”

Dreaming up new and different ways to control FIFA is one thing; determining exactly how many different ways to play is quite another.

“We wanted to make sure this is a full and complete experience,” Prior says with conviction. “We’ve seen time and time again launch titles on new hardware come out very lightweight, kind of tech demos. FIFA represents the biggest and most complex game we’ve ever made for a handheld.” His goal was to ensure that all of the major game modes a FIFA player would expect would be represented, including Be A Pro, Tournaments and all the major leagues and players, Career Mode, and online play.

Unfortunately, as Prior analyzed the development schedules of the PS3 FIFA 12 and his own game, he realized that the team wouldn’t have the technical bandwidth to link the two titles (hence the decision to not assign a “12” designation in the name) and share the experience between the PS3 and Vita. It’s not because of a lack of desire, according to Prior; there are only so many things that can be done in a short amount of time. “That’s one for the future for sure,” he says. “It’s kind of a no-brainer, and the framework is there.”

Amid all this, Prior is excited and upbeat, bursting with pride at the chance to deliver a potential system-seller on Day One. “It’s a challenge and an honor,” he says. “FIFA’s one of the biggest games in the world.”

NEXT WEEK: Development starts, and the “a-ha!” moments begin…

Richard Grisham has been obesessed with sports and video games since childhood, when he’d routinely create and track MicroLeague Baseball seasons on paper. He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and four-year old son, who he’ll soon be training to be an NFL placekicker. As a freelance journalist and writer, his work has appeared in GamesRadar, NGamer, and 1UP.

The post BOX SCORE: Taking the leap, Part 1 appeared first on Game News.

Box Score is a weekly column that offers a look at sports games and the athletic side of the industry from the perspective of veteran reviewer and sports fan Richard Grisham.

“Look, Daddy, I made a Portal level!”

My four-year-old son excitedly pulled me into his playroom to show off his handiwork. Strewn on the floor was a mish-mash of Legos, blocks, and marbles. To an outside observer, it would simply look like the result of an afternoon at play, but to us it was obviously a puzzle inspired by Portal 2, the sublime videogame from Valve Software.

“Look, Daddy, there’s the box, the button, and the door!”

My wife walked over and smiled. “He’s his father’s son, all right.”

Becoming a Dad is a wonderful, terrifying and life-altering experience. It forces you examine everything, make tough choices and sacrifice. While it’s well down on the list of items of importance, the issue of how, when, and even if video games should be a part of that equation is a polarizing issue. More than a few people have let me know they think games should have no part in a young child’s life.

But I’m a gamer; I have been since I can remember. What’s more, I love sports, and sports videogames have been the center of my entertainment world from their earliest incarnation. Now they even help pay the bills. I didn’t plan out how my son would be introduced to games, but I knew it would happen one way or another.

“It’s kind of by default,” says ESPN’s Gus Ramsey, a father of three boys whose background – a passion for sports and games – is similar to mine. “I’d play, and they’d see me, then they’d hop on the chair and say, ‘What’s this?’ First they watch, then sooner or later, they want a shot at it.”

Ramsey’s sons have all grown to love games. A lifelong baseball devotee, Ramsey has been particularly struck by the influence two specific video games have had on his middle son’s passion for the sport.

“He liked baseball – at five or six, we played wiffle ball and went to Mets games at Shea Stadium – but what the videogames did for him is increase his understanding of the game,” Ramsey said. “Backyard Baseball is great for kids because it’s simple, but the rules of the game still apply. You learn about force outs and tagging up, things like that. With MLB The Show, he learned about the teams and the players. I remember my father visiting when he was 6, and asking him to name all the teams; he was rattling them all off because of the game.

“We go in the backyard to play wiffle ball, and I can’t just pick up the ball to pitch,” Ramsey said. “Every player had to be announced and have a walk-up song because that was in the game. He would not have gotten that from just sitting there and watching the Mets. I think there’s great value in that.”

MLB The Show is a beautiful, immersive game, but it’s also incredibly difficult. I asked Mr. Ramsey about that – and it shined a light on yet another lesson that the game teaches.

“I put everything on rookie level, and the biggest thing I try to tell him is, don’t throw a fastball down the middle every pitch,” he said. “So he learned that, too. You have to go up and down, in and out, slider and curve, just like they do in the big leagues.”

All those lessons translate onto the real-life diamond as well.

“He plays baseball in the summer and fall, and for his age group every year there’s always a handful of kids who get it more than others,” Mr. Ramsey recounted. “I talk to other dads, and they’ve told me the same thing: kids learn the game from playing the videogames. There’s a runner on first, they pick up the grounder, they look to throw it to second, because they know. Meanwhile, other kids are just staring at the clouds.”

Over time, videogames have become a centralizing mechanism of collaboration and competition for his busy family – a common ground where he and his 12-, nine- and almost-four-year-old boys all have a blast. Wrestling games in particular get the Ramsey clan in a boisterous mood.

“I always kid them that there’s no videogame I can’t master,” he laughs. “Someday they’ll be able to beat me in, say, basketball, but I’ll always be able to beat them in video games. We got WWE All-Stars, and they’re down there for hours practicing the moves, then say ‘Dad, come on, let’s play!’ I’m trying to figure it out, and they’re drop-kicking me and smashing me into turnbuckles. My three-year old holds the controller, thinking he’s playing, then walks around the house singing all the guys’ entrance music.”

Around the Grisham household, my son and I have a weeknight routine. Every night before bed, we’ll hang out for half an hour in our “man cave” (my upstairs office). Because of what I do, I’ll usually be playing a sports game, but occasionally I venture into other genres. Earlier this year, I was goofing around with Portal 2, and my son instantly loved the characters. He’d go everywhere talking like Wheatley and the sing-song turrets he called “lasers.” He begged me every day to play more. Naturally, I had to be very careful around these lethal, bullet-slinging robots, because I’m not trying to expose him to heavy machine guns just yet. He’s got his whole life to absorb violence in media.

Over the course of the next few months, his life was seemingly centered around his idea of what Portal was. He’d build Portal levels with his Legos, any stick he grabbed was a “thing that makes holes”, and he loved to have me grab a marble and speak in a Wheatley-inspired English accent. His Halloween costume was a handmade Atlas (because they don’t exactly sell Portal costumes in stores). Thanks to the great people at ThinkGeek.com, we were even able to buy him a Turret and Wheatley for Christmas. These will be a massive hit.

Portal isn’t a sports game, but the fact that we’ve bonded over it thrills me. Life is magical for my boy right now, and we’re absolutely best buddies. Things change over time, though, and he’ll be a teenager one day; we’ll inevitably butt heads over things like school and driving and the other trials life will throw at us. My hope is that no matter what else might be going on, we’ll always be able to sit down and play a game together, having fun in spite of any difficulties – and I’m pretty sure Gus Ramsey feels the same way. Anything that brings fathers and sons together is a good thing in my book, and no one can degrade that.

Richard Grisham has been obesessed with sports and video games since childhood, when he’d routinely create and track MicroLeague Baseball seasons on paper. He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and four-year old son, who he’ll soon be training to be an NFL placekicker. As a freelance journalist and writer, his work has appeared in GamesRadar, NGamer, and 1UP.

The post Box Score: A family affair appeared first on Game News.

High Horse is a rotating opinion column in which GamesRadar editors and guest writers are invited to express their personal thoughts on games, the people who play them and the industry at large.

This is going to sound horribly arrogant, but bear with me: Games rarely challenge me intellectually.

Wow, that was really pretentious, wasn’t it? Well, unfortunately, it’s kind of true. Other than thinking a bit too hard about my next turn of Civilization V, I rarely spend a whole lot of time pondering the effects of what I’m doing in-game. And even then, my mind is being used for strategy, not for changing my perception of the world, which one could argue is the purpose of art.

I yearn for a game that floors me with its message. Yet my two favorite games of this generation, Left 4 Dead 2 and Super Meat Boy, are enormously simple. The goal of each is essentially the same: You start at one point and it’s your goal to get to another. Their rules are simple: Stay alive long enough to do so. They’re also both really quite difficult, particularly if Left 4 Dead 2 is played on its higher difficulties.

What I’ve realized is that I have a great affinity for difficult games. Please don’t take that as some sort of boast. I’m really quite terrible at games – just ask anyone on my friend’s list. I certainly haven’t completed all of the Left 4 Dead 2 campaigns on Realism mode, nor all the Dark World levels in Super Meat Boy.

I’d love to say that I keep coming back to these games simply because I haven’t done everything there is to do in them and be done with it, but I think it’s an indicator of something a bit deeper than that. I keep putting down games that attempt deeper, more powerful narratives in favor of two of the most sparsely narrated games of this generation. But here’s the thing: Could the difficulty of these titles be the depth I’m looking for?

When coupled with their lack of explicit narrative elements, could that toughness be what I’m looking for? Could struggling through a particularly difficult combination of Special Infected be akin to a dense section of Finnegan’s Wake? More importantly, can it teach us something about ourselves, about the human condition, in the same manner?

No, I don’t think that these games hold anywhere near the life-altering importance of some of Joyce’s more powerful works. But I do think that the way games treat difficulty could be a step in the right direction. Just as Joyce’s writing requires a working knowledge of literature and its tropes and intricacies to understand, difficult games require a literacy of game mechanics. You have to know what you’re doing in order to complete some of the more difficult sections.

The concept of game literacy is an important one. If a developer assumes that the player has prior knowledge of the way games operate, they need not spend time teaching them the basics. Instead, they can focus on utilizing the already established mechanics to give the player the experience that they’re trying to get across.

This is all fairly vague and obtuse, so let’s bring it back to the games. In Left 4 Dead 2, players are supposed to feel a constant state of panic as they’re being chased by the undead horde. On the more difficult settings, that fear is palpable. You can hear it over your headphones, evidenced by your buddy’s shrieks of terror and frequent spurts of laughter. It’s a struggle for survival, and it definitely feels like one. Sure, if you fail to reach the next safe house, you’re just respawned right away, but the possibility of success is present until the final moments.

Super Meat Boy has much the same feeling. Each failure teaches the player something new about the way the game works. It teaches them something new about the way platformers work. Sometimes, it even teaches them where their limits are. It’s not a terribly deep message, but it certainly implies that these techniques could be used to imbue games with meaning through their frustrations. Each time a player dies, they’re forced to examine the game a bit more deeply. It’s inevitable that a profound understanding of the game will be discovered.

So, really, those annoying “hardcore” gamers who constantly complain about how easy modern games have become are on the right path. They’re just complaining for the wrong reasons. Games aren’t getting worse because they’re losing their hardcore edge; they’re simply trying to figure out how to utilize difficulty for the purposes of furthering the experience. Left 4 Dead 2 and Super Meat Boy hint toward what’s possible when a developer is willing to make design decisions that are congruous with their games’ difficulty.

I think these possibilities are really what draw me to the simpler, yet more difficult titles from this generation. They’re games made for the game-literate. You really have to know the conventions of the medium to be any good at them. And that’s valuable.

Often, the most important art of the media age has been the least accessible, and requires knowledge of the form to be fully appreciated. Why not games? Let games be hard to get into, let them open themselves up to players slowly. Force players to really think about them. Let’s get rough and tumble.

The post High Horse: Get literate appeared first on Game News.

Plus Alpha is a weekly column that explores life in Japan from the perspective of American expatriate and game-industry veteran Jarik Sikat. Having worked in numerous areas of the game industry since 1994, Sikat relocated to Japan in 2010.

OK. I’m going to admit it. There’s a little secret I’m going to share. But let’s just keep this between you and me, and the rest of the Internet. OK. Here goes: Everything I knew about Japan was wrong. Yeah, there… I said it.

To be quite honest, you’re not the first one to hear this. A few months ago Gary Steinman, GamesRadar’s editor in chief, sent me an e-mail asking if I was interested in writing about Japan. Before agreeing to write this column, I made the very same confession to Gary. “Are you sure you want me to write a column about Japan for you?” I initially asked, because, well …

My story isn’t that much different from other expats who’ve relocated to Japan, but hear me out anyway.

Having worked in the games industry for just over 12 years, I’ve spent most of my career with Japanese game companies. I was fortunate enough to visit Japan twice a year. This was back when Tokyo Game Show was held during both the spring and autumn. Along with my Tokyo-based colleagues, we’d meet with local developers and evaluate their titles for possible release in North America. It was a great way to see Japan in a way one typically wouldn’t see as a tourist.

I read manga, watched countless hours of anime (subbed, not dubbed!) and Japanese movies, subscribed to various Japanese magazines, read numerous (Ninja) books, tried and failed numerous times to learn how to speak the language, listened to J-pop, and went through a whole Visual kei phase, just to cite a few examples.

For heaven’s sake, back when Japan’s first crane-game boom hit, I was a game counselor for a company that had a legitimate (but thankfully never realized) plan on the books to build an arcade machine where the object of the game was to catch and win “flying panties.” Yes. Real panties. All things considered, I thought I had at least some grasp of what I was getting into before moving here.

During one of my last days of work in the U.S., I was cautioned by a co-worker who himself had recently repatriated to the United States with his family after over fifteen-odd years of doing videogame localization in Japan. If anyone would know, it would be him. Shaking his finger, he said, “It’s one thing to visit, but it’s a completely different thing to live there.”

“I absolutely get what you’re talking about,” I sincerely nodded. You could have cut my hubris with a knife.

Now, we won’t get into specifics (at least not yet, because it’s just too embarrassing and they’re far too painful to relive), but after about a little over a year and a half of living in Yokohama, I eventually came to the realization that everything I knew or believed about Japan was just… just plain wrong! I swore to myself I would never tell a soul.

One week later, Gary sends me an email.

With that out of the way, it’s safe to say that, with the exception of what my day-to-day life here is like, I won’t profess to know or understand much about Japan. This column won’t be about that particular journey, as that’s been well-documented by far more capable writers. Instead, I’ll try to offer a peek at what it’s like to live here, from the unique perspective of a (recently humbled) US expat gaming-industry veteran.

In Japan, the phrase Plus Alpha is used to describe a bonus, “something extra” or “above and beyond.” As in, “here’s your share of the profit, plus alpha.” What we plan to do here in Plus Alpha are some fun things that – although they don’t involve catching “flying panties” – are for the most part things we can do (and get away with) in Japan and nowhere else. So I’m pretty sure Ninjas will be involved, too.

Jarik Sikat has worked in the videogame industry in areas ranging from localization and product development to public relations and marketing. As a freelance journalist and writer, his work has appeared in PlayStation: The Official Magazine, Official Xbox Magazine and Newtype USA.

The post Plus Alpha: Everything I ever knew about Japan was wrong appeared first on Game News.