Quoted from a Department of Defense News Briefing: at an April 1997 Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy, at the University of Georgia, sponsored by former Senator Sam Nunn, U.S. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen said:
Quote:[Other terrorists] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes, remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves. So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations. It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our efforts, and that's why this is so important.
A brief pause, to recover
So let me get this straight, the people in charge of defending us from actual threats are engaged in pursuing threats with NO scientific basis (electromagnetic waves would cause this... how?) and further, are methods that are only plausible in the mind of a James Bond super villian.
Somehow, I'm not surprised. Don't worry folks, they are on the case forming a squad of people who will defend us from terrorists killing their own and sending their spirits to do us harm. These so called "ghost busters" will make sure to deal with THAT possible threat as well. We can never be too careful, after all, we have infinite resources to spend on stuff like that!
I got to test-play the new Game Boy Micro and the new version of the SP recently.
Micro first: I'm not really impressed. Yes, the image looks sharper than the SP, but this is done by making the screen smaller. Text is more difficult to read. It's cheating, frankly. And worse, it's nothing short of criminal to charge a hundred dollars for this thing. It should be no more than fifty.
It does have a headphone jack though, and the unit itself is rather neat-looking. That doesn't change the fact that it's a pointless machine.
The new SP, on the other hand, I rather liked.
It's coming in two new colors (granite and pearl blue, which I played). The significant change comes in the screen, which is now truly back-lit (the old SP's lights were from the sides). The improvement is extraordinary. I played the new Donkey Kong on this.
You remember the button on the SP which toggled the light. It no longer does this. Now, it changes the brightness. The lower setting is the one you're used to on your SP now, the side-light. The other setting is the actual backlight, and there's no comparison. When back-lit, the screen is more than twice as bright, but even more importantly, the colors are fantastically improved, and I cannot stress this enough. The old SP's colors look very drab and washed-out in comparison to the new screen. It's a huge improvement. Colors are far richer and deeper. I was absolutely amazed.
The New SP will retail for the same price as the old one, and is replacing them. The old colors are being phased out.
Also, there will be new bundles. The DS will bundle with Mario Kart DS, and the machine will be red with black racing stripes. There's another bundle with another game, but I don't remember what it is.
The Gamecube will bundle with SSBM (with a platinum machine, this bundle's already available), and another later on with the new Pokemon. Apparently, this cube is purple, and the black circle on the machine's top is replaced with a Pokemon head.
That's it. The moral is to buy the new SP if you need anything. Skip the Micro completely. The small improvement in sharpness doesn't make up for the pitiful screen size (smaller than the GBA cart).
Quote: Postcard from GDC Europe 2005:
Seeing What Sticks: Developing a Katamari Sequel
Keita Takahashi and the Prince.
Before the keynote, the defining memory of Keita Takahashi from the conference comes earlier at the Robin Hunicke’s Game Design Mash-up. While the other panelists were greeted well enough, the softly-spoken, slightly-scruffy man received open adulation from the audience which only intensified as he described his cat-peripheral-based game for Grandma idea.
It’s true: We Love Katamari.
Creator of one game, he’s become something of an icon and his popularity is in proportion to the dissatisfaction of many developers with the mainstream games industry. By creating something so obviously novel, he’s attracted to him anyone who feels similar. In other words, Katamari Damacy’s critical standing has actually become a katamari in itself, snowballing onwards, bigger, ever bigger as it picks up all the waifs and strays of the game design world.
Which leads us to this fascinating, openly personal, keynote, where Keita describes the stress and his thoughts about conceiving a sequel to a game which, as he fully admits, was never conceived to have one.
Speaking through a be-suited translator, Keita is alternates between being gleefully provocative and self-effacing. The sense of humor all too apparent in Katamari is equally noticeable here, with even the translator stopping to laugh before telling the audience what Keita actually says. Like, for example, thinking he was offered the keynote by mistake.
He starts by describing the pre-history to Katamari. Working at Namco, looking around at what they had in development and there wasn’t anything he could bear to work on. The vast majority of games were too similar. They all seemed to be aimed at a similar demographic, and mystifying to new users. He couldn’t see what he’d get from working on any of the games.
He found his attention wandering to the Namco motto, lifted from Confucius: “Knowledge is not equal to Devotion. Devotion is not equal to joy.” That is, to know what something is isn’t the same as actually liking it, and to like it isn’t actually to enjoy it. He decided to not ignore this core message Namco and Confucius were telling him, and try and find something he believed in. Or, as he puts it: If you don’t enjoy something, you may as well be dead.
To get a flavor of the keynote, it’s probably important to note that halfway through his tale he stopped, stood up and wandered to the center of the stage where he seated a plush-doll of the Prince lead-character from Katamari before wandering back.
Fast-forward three years from the game’s conception to launch, his GDC presentation in March and now, finally, a release in Europe.
But why a sequel? The concept came as a direct reaction to sequels and “boring games”. When the idea was suggested to him by Namco, he wasn’t originally into making it.
He pauses then stresses this: “I really, really wasn’t”.
He’s aware that a sequel is actually a contradiction to his original statements. After deliberation, he eventually relented. He had lots of reasons, but he doesn’t share them as “They’ll sound like excuses”.
He also notes that “I’m not sure that someone who didn’t have the courage of their convictions should be standing here giving a keynote… but I wanted to see what London was like”.
Having decided to drink from this particularly bitter cup, he looked at what he wanted to change. The original game was constricted, based tightly on the basic idea of the game. Starting with a small katamari, you roll until you get a universe-sized ball. For the sequel, they were far less controlled, lobbing in anything which would amuse them. It’s a point which Keita returns to repeatedly: that if you’re not amused when making the game, he doesn’t believe the game will be any fun at all. Or, as he puts it memorably later in the presentation, making a game is a game too.
Since the sequel would be more diffuse, he would aim to create less of the stressful rush of the first game and a more like zen-like relaxing approach. Later in the presentation, when he demonstrates a few levels from We Love Katamari. The snowman level is a tranquil world full of sledgers, ice-skaters and a world of snow. Your task is to make the head for an enormous snowman in the center of the land. You can make your capstone as small or large as you wish before rolling it into place. This is so simple that Keita considers it may not even be a “game” at all. In the two-player mode, it’s perhaps even more pronounced, with one player rolling the head and the other the body. The level ends whenever the two press together and create the finished icy edifice. Maybe not a traditional game, yes. But in terms of atmosphere or zen-relaxation, you suspect that Keita has hit his goal.
Keita also examines the importance of packaging to him, describing how when as a child he played videogames he would pore over manuals which extended the pleasure of experience by re-living it in his mind. The lavishly illustrated Japanese manual of We Love Katamari and the playful cover of the outside of Namco building, with the design team holding up signs and a Giraffe on the roof is a world away from Inevitable Sequel VII. While Keita admits some would critique this and the game’s title as self-indulgence, he views it as an attack on the stupefying seriousness. And it’s fun. Fun for him, his team and hopefully everyone else.
We Love Katamari introduced a two-player co-op mode.
He dwells on areas and elements they hoped to get into the sequel, but proved impossible for either time or technical reasons. On the technical side, a worms-eye view of the katamari to let you understand how big you’ve managed to make the enormous bolus proved unachievable. More esoteric urges to try and make the decreasing of katamari size not be a negative, fail-state aspect in the game were equally unachievable.
His esoteric – in fact, you may suspect deliberately esoteric – approach to influences are almost telling. The never-released game "Densen", which he only has a screenshot of, which involved sliding with a coat-hanger down electric wires was one. Because, like Katamari, it turns a normal world into something strange – in his case, skyscrapers and people into material for an enormous ball. Even more obscure, a fairground water-target game where you aimed a jet at vegetable-themed targets, such as a smiling aubergine. He liked its directness and the way that water bubbles went into the stream as the time ran out and the power slackened off… especially as he suspected that was an engineering fault rather than an actual deliberate design.
Concluding, he admits he’s expressed a confused message of a man who’s “walking forwards while facing backwards”. He believes that silliness is essential for life, but still finds himself returning to two questions. Firstly, is it okay to go on making superfluous games forever. And secondly, because games are essentially meaningless, shouldn’t they embrace this transitory nature in a punk-rock style.
He knows games are interesting… but life is interesting. From feeling the rush of air in your face while riding a bike, to the joy of skipping or the heart-beating in your chest when you stop. These may not be particularly punk rock, but they all stimulate, and all make life worth living.
“You don’t need games to have fun,” he considers, “possibly you don’t need games at all”. He gets frustrated of his inability to communicate these simple aspects of life in a game, and stresses that all developers should remember to not think what the Next Gen can do… but what you can do with the Next Gen. The thoughts and feelings of a game are all that matters.
He concludes doubting that he’ll ever be able to put these frustrating questions aside, and promising that now he hopes to put Katamari aside and return to his first love: something new: “Suspend your expectation and wait and see what happens”.
Something in the Q&A section stands out, and seems to capture something of the psychedelic lament which ran through the keynote. Someone asks why he doesn’t play many games anymore. He answers simply: “Because there are no fun ones.”
Quote:Video Game 'Katamari Damacy' Has Fans Knitting Hats And Baking Cakes
09.21.2005
Unusual game has ignited unusual following; its sequel hits stores this week.
Katamari visits Da Vinci's "The Last Supper"
Photo: Kirsten Bole
Some say video games can drive people to violence. Others say games can be used to teach. But so far only one game is inspiring fans to knit hats, touch up Leonardo Da Vinci paintings and bake cakes: "Katamari Damacy."
A critical sensation
overshadowed and greatly outsold by the likes of "Halo 2" and "Grand Theft Auto" last year, it's a game that game makers love to discuss, one that has ignited unusual fan celebration across the Internet. And its sequel, "We Love Katamari," hits stores this week.
It's also the product of an unconventional creator who initially wanted nothing to do with making a follow-up.
With graphics as colorful as a fistful of crayons, last September's original game put players in control of a microscopic green prince tasked with rolling a sticky sphere called a Katamari across tabletops, beaches and other simplified real-world locales. Thumbtacks and seashells clung to the rolling sphere, eventually making the Katamari big enough to snag cats, dogs, criminals, superheroes, stadiums and, ultimately, islands, rainbows and clouds.
"It's a game that makes you happy while you're playing it," said fan Kirsten Bole, a musician and Web designer in Vancouver, British Columbia. "There's something sort of Zen-like and soothing about rolling around and picking up stuff."
The game embedded itself in the player's subconscious. "There's a tendency when you play the game for a long time to look around and imagine rolling things around you when you're on the street," Bole said.
"Katamari Damacy," which translates roughly to "clump of souls," was the brainchild of Keita Takahashi, 30, a Japanese sculptor who took a job a few years back at Namco, the company famous for iconic titles such as "Pac-Man" and "Tekken." Through a translator, Takahashi told MTV News that he was initially unexcited about his prospects at Namco. "Coming up with 'Katamari Damacy' was a way of avoiding projects I didn't want to work on," he said.
Takahashi played games as a child but drifted from them. He found much to dislike with current games, which took themselves oh so seriously. So Takahashi crafted "Katamari" to make people laugh. He applied an absurd story of the diminutive prince and the grumpy King of All Cosmos, who, as Takahashi puts it, "gets drunk one evening and destroys all the stars in the universe." Rolling the Katamari would create replacements for the stars.
The game didn't just look and play strangely. It sounded odd as well. Yu Miyake, who oversaw the game's music, drew inspiration from his colleague's zest for the unusual. One song of the game's quirky soundtrack simply featured Miyake humming.
None of this made the game a likely hit in America. In fact, "Katamari Damacy" has only sold about 269,000 copies in the U.S. since its launch last September, according to the NPD Group, which tracks industry sales. That's a far cry from the millions racked up by Madden, Mario and Master Chief. But it fared better here than it did in Japan and was a sensation with American critics.
It also developed a cult following like few games released this decade, as the eclectic results of a Katamari Google search will attest.
Fan sites began tracking Katamari glass sculptures and Katamari costume parties, paper dolls and Play-Doh sets. At the suggestion of her husband, Bole drew the Prince rolling up the dinnerware of Leonardo Da Vinci's last supper and posted it on her blog.
In January fan Xiola Azuthra started knitting and selling hats styled after the Katamari (another fan bought one and presented it to Takahashi as a gift). The first hat fetched about $130 on eBay. But with each one taking about six hours to make, Azuthra still has 65 people on her waiting list (check it out at http://www.mad-teaparty.net).
Kris Garland, an artist in Seattle, decided to bake a Katamari cake. "I was thinking in terms of structure rather than taste," she said, noting that the spherical shape of a Katamari posed a baking challenge. Garland decided to bake two hemispheres, merge them, ice the spongy sphere and apply cupcake tops for the Katamari's signature bumps. She wound up with a five-pound cake and posted the photos online (at Flickr.com). "We were eating cake for like two weeks," she said. "Everyone I knew was like, 'Oh no, no more cake.' "
The game didn't just become a cult favorite. Its creator, Takahashi, became an industry darling, enrapturing audiences of game developers with talks about how he defied industry trends.
Suddenly celebrated for his originality, Takahashi would soon have to tackle the possibly contradictory idea of doing a sequel. He told his bosses at Namco several times that he wouldn't do one. "But it came to a point where the company was willing to release a sequel without me," he said. He discovered that the company's planned sequel seemed more like a re-release, primarily swapping Christmas graphics into the original game. "That went against everything I wanted to do with Katamari," he said. So he agreed to get involved.
This week's sequel goes beyond rolling up Christmas trees. The prince takes rolling assignment from in-game fans; he cleans up messy bedrooms, rolls up fish underwater and rolls Katamaris that are set on fire. The game also adds multiplayer: Two players can team up, each using a controller to jointly roll a single Katamari.
Takehashi hopes, of course, that his sequel can reach beyond cult-favorite status. "I realize that a lot of these sports games that big companies like EA make are very enjoyable," he said. But he hopes people will play games, like his, that allow players to do things they couldn't do in the real world. "If you want to play a sports game, why not go outside and play sports?"
Quote:The latest issue of Hardcore Gamer has a big Katamari spread, reports Kotakuite Nick C. In an interview with our favorite grumpy grump Keita Takahashi, the Namco “It Boy” reveals further about why his PS2 collects dust.
This dude cracks me up, and I do admire his honestly. The fact that Namco keeps letting this loose cannon run his mouth with the press is hilarious. I half-expect him to scream “I hate Namco” at some journo and then run off to join the circus. Namco, whatever you do, don’t gag the guy until after I bag an interview!
Here’s an excerpt from Hardcore Gamer:
HGM: Katamari Damacy has a lot of female fans in the US. When you designed the game were you trying to target female players?
KT: No, I didn’t try to appeal to any group in particular. I’m not a big gamer, so I don’t feel as though I am locked into the same design patterns as most game designers.
HGM: Why don’t you play many games?
KT: Most games are really boring.
HGM: Which games hold your interest?
KT: Lately the only game to interest me is Ico. When I was younger I used to play Dragon Quest on the Super Famicom.
Apparently, he then goes on to say he doesn’t want to limit himself to games, stating that he’s frustrated that the only interaction you have with games is the controller. “You’re just sitting there looking at the screen,” he says.
Quote:A robotic treasure hunter has laid claim to the find of the century, on the very archipelago that inspired the novel Robinson Crusoe. The robot, called "Arturito" or "Little Arthur", is said to have discovered the 18th-century buried treasure on the island of Robinson Crusoe - named after the book. The island lies 660 kilometres from the coast of Chile in South America.
A Scottish sailor called Alexander Selkirk was marooned on the island in 1704. His story inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe, which was published in 1719.
The Chilean company responsible for developing Arturito, Wagner Technologies, announced at the weekend that the robot had found the booty by probing 15 metres below ground. The company plans to start excavating in a matter of days, as soon as permits can be obtained.
Gold ingots
According to legend, a fabulous treasure haul was buried on the island in 1715 by Spanish sailor Juan Esteban Ubilla-Echeverria. The bounty is said to have been discovered a few years later by British sailor Cornelius Webb, who reburied it on another part of the island.
By some estimates the haul would include 800 barrels of gold ingots, silver pieces, gems and other riches worth up to $10 billion. Naturally, the promise of such fabulous wealth has attracted scores or treasure hunters to the island in the past.
"The biggest treasure in history has been located," Fernando Uribe-Etxeverria, a lawyer working for Wagner Technologies told AFP News. And the announcement has already sparked a dispute over who could claim the treasure, with the Chilean government suggesting it would have full rights.
Wagner Technologies could not be reached for comment, but the robot Arturito has previously helped Chilean police locate buried weapons using ground-penetrating radar. GPR, or georadar, locates subsurface objects or structures by emitting microwave-frequency electromagnetic radiation and measuring the reflected signal, which is then represented as a two or three dimensional image.
Subsurface objects
Adam Booth an expert in GPR archaeology at the University of Leeds, UK, says it would be necessary to use a low-frequency signal to search at 15 metres' depth. But this would decrease the resolution of the signal, he says. It would be "very, very difficult", to distinguish between different metals so far down, Booth told New Scientist.
But Booth says further details could be gleaned by using other techniques in combination with GPR, such as magnetometry, which measures disturbances to the Earth's magnetic field.
Robert Richardson, a robotics expert at the University of Manchester, UK, says a robot could feasibly hunt for treasure, but believes a human controller would be crucial. "It is difficult to interpret GPR images, requiring a trained operator," he says. "It sounds more of a mobile sensing platform than a robot."
Marvin Pitney of US company Subsurface Radar Solutions agrees that it can be tricky to identify sub-surface objects accurately. "It takes years of practice," he says. "But once you get really good at interpreting images you can tell the difference between metals and plastic."
Quote:Jaffray Picks Sony to Win, But Lead for 360
New hardware estimates from analysts at Piper Jaffray have picked the Xbox 360 to maintain a lead over PS3 in the US market through 2008 but ultimate victory for Sony. Also, hard drive equipped PSPs are tipped for mid-2006.
ImageToday's report from Piper Jaffray has a number of optimistic figures. Overall hardware unit sales are predicted to grow 30% from 2006 to 2011. Most of that growth will be in handheld hardware, which has been tipped to grow 45% over the next cycle.
Software growth is predicted to go from $7.0 billion in 2005 to $10.0 billion in 2008. The analysts say that the sector as a whole should outperform broader market indices.
The introduction of PS3 and Revolution in the US is pegged to be late 2006 with Sony introducing the rumored HD equipped PSP (presumably to tap into the iPod market) in mid-2006.
Hardware market share for the next cycle is predicted to eventually be 45%-50% for Sony, Microsoft at 35%-40% and Nintendo with 15%. That said, through 2008, Xbox 360 is predicted to be the market leader.
Children of Mana for DS, and Mana 4 (4? It's the fifth title, I guess Legend of Mana is a sidestory and not a main-series Mana game...) for unspecified platform(s). Children of Mana looks great, classic 2d Mana look... not much there of Mana 4, but it looks 3d. No idea what platform it's for though...
![[Image: seiken6gx9ow.jpg]](http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/4408/seiken6gx9ow.jpg)