blueZhift Blog

Over the holidays my inlaws gave my wife and I a bit of a Mahjong beginner’s clinic. Several hours later, my head hurt quite a bit, but I did know how to play the game. Obviously, I’d do a much better job knowing the characters on the pieces better. So I asked my wife to compile a cheat sheet of characters for me with Cantonese pronunciations which I’ll share here. If you have Chinese language support in your browser, you’ll see these below.

Mahjong Characters 麻 雀 字

東 dung east
南 naam south
西 sai west
北 buk north
中 jung central
發 faat prosperous
白 baak white, blank
萬 maan ten thousand
一 yut one
二 yee two
三 saam three
å›› sei four
五 m (or ng) five
å…­ luk six
七 tsut seven
å…« baat eight
九 gau nine
十 sup ten

春 chun spring
夏 haa summer
秋 chau autumn
冬 dong winter

梅 mui plum blossom
蘭 laan orchid
菊 guk chrysanthemum
竹 juk bamboo

I’ve been reading Chris Kohler’s excellent book, Power Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life and I’ve almost finished Chapter 9 which covers game music and music games. Music in games has always been a big deal for me and back in the day I even ripped songs from some of my Saturn game CDs to play in the car (the Virtual Cop, Wipeout, and Nights music are my favs). One of my favorite music games was the PS1 game Parappa the Rapper. Anyway, what does this have to do with Puffy AmiYumi?

Well, I was watching last night’s show whose first episode featured Yumi singing opera (I really liked the mouth animations in this one which added to the hilarity of the episode, good show!), followed by an episode in which they literally save a farm by playing a concert. This got me to thinking that Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi would be perfect for a console game in the style of Parappa the Rapper and its sequel (there was a Parappa 2 eventually but this came out firs) Um Jammer Lammy! The stories they’ve done so far would lend themselves to a music game of this sort quite well I think. The minigames on the Cartoon Network site are okay, but this show deserves a real game. Parappa the Rapper was a big success in Japan and a little less so in the U.S. while Um Jammer Lammy did not fair so well. Both of these titles got pretty good reviews, so maybe all they really lacked for U.S. success was a really good hook. Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi has been a pretty big hit for Cartoon Network, so maybe Puffy AmiYumi is the hook that a Parappa/Lammy style game would need in this market. I hope they’ll give it a shot!

In a move that just screams monopoly, Electronic Arts has secured exclusive rights to NFL properties and players for the next 5 years. That basically means that every other football video game that used NFL players and stadiums is out of luck and essentially out of business. This all happens just as we were seeing the competition between Madden and ESPN really heat up, even leading to consumer friendly price drops!

In the end this cannot be good news for the consumer. Without competition, there’s nothing to stop EA from keeping prices high. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Madden hit $60/copy on the next generation of consoles. Now $60 for a game is not automatically out of the question if the game rates it. But given recent news about the way EA treats its employees, there is little reason to believe that there are going to be innovations that merit the higher price tag. I remember back in the early Playstation days that EA actually cancelled Madden 96 because the quality of the game wasn’t up to snuff compared to Sony’s NFL Gameday. That was during a time of intense competition before EA had secured a virtual lock on NFL football games. In the absence of real competition, I wonder if they would have cancelled?

Now in all fairness, EA also has an exclusive deal with NASCAR, which as an old Papyrus NASCAR Racing fan, did not sit too well with me. But so far EA has continued to make improvements each year. So perhaps the same will hold true for Madden as well. On the whole, game developers are a passionate lot and will do great things if the suits will just stay out of the way.

Well it looks like the Phantom party is nearly over at Infinium Labs! GamesIndustry.biz is reporting that Infinium Labs is nearly out of money and is seeking fresh financing to the tune of about $11M USD. Infinium, maker of the yet to be launched Phantom gaming console, has been the center of much controversy and even threatened a lawsuit against HardOCP over coverage that criticized Infinium’s business plan and company officers. In response, HardOCP launched its own lawsuit and won. With only about $21K USD on hand, it looks like the Phantom console, already delayed to Q2 2005, won’t ever see the light of day.

This whole Phantom episode reminds me of The Producers. In the movie two theatre producers over sell shares in their production and then set out to make the worst play ever so that it would close on opening night. That way there wouldn’t be a any profits to pay out to the shareholders. Unfortunately for them, their production of Springtime for Hitler turns out to be a wildly successful farce unraveling their plan and sending them to prison.

Now I’m not saying that that was the plan in the case of Infinium’s Phantom console! It’s just an interesting thought. I do wonder though, what will happen to all of the money invested if the Phantom never comes out. I suppose the stage will be set for write-offs and lawsuits.

As for the actual plan of downloading PC games to a consolized PC where they would self configure and install using scripts, it’s not totally crazy. It’s just that the world of PC games is too different from the world of console games. PC games tend to cater to people who know what to do with a PC and are not afraid of hours of building and tweaking to squeeze out extra performance. They also aren’t afraid to spends hundreds of dollars upgrading their boxes every year to play the latest and greatest.

Practically speaking, Infinium would be hard pressed to both keep their install scripts up to date, and upgrade the Phantom hardware for their customers. I doubt Microsoft or Sony could do this either! Not only that, these days the most popular PC games are first person shooters like Half Life 2 and Unreal Tournament and online games like World of Warcraft and Everquest. The people who are into these games are likely the very last who would ever sign up for the Phantom console service, and those who would won’t find the most popular games there. I think this is a classic no win situation.

American football is a funny game. It’s rough and tough and so are its overwhelmingly male fans, or at least they’d like to be, I think… That’s why it is with some wonder and a little cynicism that I receive stories like the Janet Jackson Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction or now the ABC Monday Night Football steamy intro ruckus. I mean come on! Most of the people watching the game actually like seeing naked women. Who are these people calling in to complain? Meanwhile ABC has apologized to the viewers and the NFL (like they really care). Come on, ABC knew this would happen. Oh me oh my, look at all of this free publicity. Oh yeah, they’re really sorry.

Now back to the fans. Every year, like clockwork, a new Madden football game is released by Electronic Arts. And every year now, it sells millions of copies. Some fans complain that it’s just last year’s game with some tweaks and new stats. I don’t really believe that myself, but if EA really wants to shake things up, maybe they should slip in some of the naughtiness we’ve been seeing around the real game like steamy intros and wardrobe malfunctions. That would spice things up a bit for the 2006 edition! Of course, I guess they would have to add a 5 second delay too.