Josh

BTW: Free Warhawk update coming in 24 hours YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAAY—yes, I am jacked.

Great Falls’ own KFBB was nice enough to do a story on us! The video that ran on the news is accompanied on that page with a quick write up (essentially, what was read on-air)—-so yeah uber awesomeness all your base are belong to us and such! WORLD DOMINATION BABY!

Kotaku, a blog that repeatedly proves its’ worth in reading, ran a good article http://kotaku.com/385604/how-to-bring-the-west-to-japan check it out!! Being an up-and-coming East-Meets-West studio, this is very important to us. I am currently talking to a member of the KAIZEN World Online forums (Taka) to see if he will join us as an in-house Japan relations master—and I was talking with him for weeks now and this article comes along and reminds me that it is a good move!

Both Kotaku and Penny Arcade have touched on (Kotaku more so) their feelings on Mario Kart Wii. Funny, everyone where we work was questioning my sanity–I was jacked for the game, had it paid off and picked up day one only to trade it back in within 2 hours—-Kotaku then posted an article the next day where they neatly said everything I felt. It isn’t a horrifically terrible game, just kinda close. Past Mario Karts had far superior balance and sense of speed. MK Wii you don’t feel like you are moving, boosts do NOTHING and the Blue Shell, my immortal evil nemesis, is back with a freaking fury. In Mario Kart DS (IMO the **BEST** in the series), I would get hit by a Blue Shell (for those of you who don’t know, Blue Shells target the player in 1st Place and are unavoidable, usually people in last place get them) maybe once or twice a race—twice if I was being tortured by the AI. In Wii, the average was 6 times a race. That 6 times MIGHT be bearable if the Blue Shell was the only weapon in the game that was unavoidable, but alas it is not. Now, they have added other joys like a POW block in addition to the Bullet Bill and Calamari Ink weapons from the DS incarnation, only the carry over weapons have been powered up to the degree of unrealistically insane. When I get hit, I will get hit by a Blue Shell, Ink, Pow block, 3 red shells and hit an obstacle trying to avoid all that AT THE SAME MOMENT—yes, that actually did happen. Ironically, it happened when Trevor made me play the game again, he couldn’t believe it could be **THAT** bad, his disbelief turned from not believing what he was hearing from me to not believing what he was seeing on the screen, he then totally sympathized with me. In Nintendo’s zeal to make the game more appealing to non-gamers or casual gamers (by making weapons that easily and, quite frankly, affect other players that have practiced enough to race well) they have turned Mario Kart Wii into a digital hell, Penny Arcade and Kotaku were both much nicer in saying it, but I am upset—after Mario Kart DS I have **HIGH** hopes, lots of games on the DS are very mediocre and use the DS touchscreen as a gimmick, MK DS stood above that and offered something that was worth a DS purchase on its’ own–I expected nothing short of MK Wii and was let down horribly—not to mention the motion controls sucked in it–AND I LOVE MOTION CONTROLS IN MOST GAMES!!!!!

Honestly, I am seeing that in a lot of more recent games by Miyamoto—I think he is a brilliant man but sometimes his game design theories suck–which I guess could be said about us all, but he seems to be approaching the Wii as if every person who buys it is a carbon copy of each other. Reality is this: the massive majority who buy the Wii may be casual gamers or just starting in gaming, but those people have Wii Sports, Wii Play and a MILLION other games at their disposal, what about hardcore gamers like me? It seems every hardcore game that comes to the Wii has some fatal flaw. Trev just bought Okami, a game he beat and got every secret on PS2 (he bought the Wii one for the infamous snafu over the IGN watermark being accidentally placed on the cover)—he decided to try and play it. Like Zelda, you waggle the remote to attack. While out of battle, Trev could do attacks relatively easy. In battle? I watched as Trev swung the remote around with ever increasing force (to the point I was fearing for my TV hehe!) and Amaterasu (Okami’s protagonist wolf) just stood there looking blankly at the screen as enemies took cheap shots. Granted, that wasn’t Miyamoto’s doing, but I never could have thought there would have been irritating flaws in Mario Galaxy (sometimes you have to wrestle with the controls and camera, some areas unnecessarily tough) and it is mind boggling that they could screw up Mario Kart after so many stellar MK titles!!! Then, without official Nintendo involvement, to see Okami go the way it did is heart breaking. At least Smash Bros Brawl was good hehe, and hopefully they can’t screw up WiiFIT—because I will be really mad if I drop 90 bucks on WiiFIT and it tanks like Mario Kart!!

Oh yeah! We got a puppy! His name is Riku (named after the anti-hero in Kingdom Hearts) and he is a Chihuahua and Pomeranian mix. Funny thing? I think both of those breeds are butt ugly and irritating. But Riku is a nice, calm dog who looks like a puppy German Shepherd! Crazy huh? We didn’t initially know his breed—just knew he looked cool then looked on the side of the bin he was in at the pet store to learn of his heritage. Our cat, Flashlite, is considering going homicidal now–even when we try to pet her or offer her cat nip she hisses at us and does the most evil face I have ever seen—I never have seen her this ticked before, even when I tried to make her dance to the Numa Numa song–hehe good times………

I am REALLY sorry for the extreme delay in the new Team KAIZEN TV–I hope we get a chance to work on it soon–hopefully this weekend—Trev and I are both in the Metal Gear Online beta (once you get pass the circus of a sign up process, it is actually quite a fun game!) so we might sneak in some footage of that for you!

Trev picked up a copy of Grand Theft Auto 4 from the other GameStop in town (collectors edition, he wanted all the goodies inside like the steel safety deposit box) so we started playing it yesterday. We hadn’t really played any of them before (just a few hours of goofing off non-storyline stuff in San Andreas a few years ago), but honestly this wasn’t a good introduction to the series. In our short play period, we ran into 2 times where the game froze for a few minutes and miraculously started going again before we pulled the plug. Also, some animations are real shoddy—sometimes the characters’ eye and mouth movements are very human, other times they look like muppets–only able to flap their jaws to talk. Also, when putting hats on in a shop, you see a close up of the character’s arm slowly move the hat up, then rocket into the ‘hat is on’ position, which makes him looked like he got possessed in the store. Almost all the mission Trev has done involve ‘drive here or taxi someone there’ and it got to the point where he said, “This is a slightly more open ended Crazy Taxi with a crime twist”—which, after watching, I agree. On top of that, GTA is supposed to be about a world where you can do kinda crazy things–but you have to keep yourself in check because you don’t know what will tick off the police (sometimes a minor traffic violation does it, other time you can kill someone right in front of a cop and they don’t care) and then one of two outcomes is nigh inevitable: you get shot until you ‘die’ and wake up in a hospital, causing an undesirable mission restart or trek across the city, or you get arrested, lose your weapons and some money as a bribe that you have no choice over. So, what you are left with is an ‘open ended’ world that isn’t as fun as it sounds on paper. Plus, several people have had weird glitches, one friend of ours can’t walk anywhere in the game because people panic and start running **WITH HER ONLY WALKING** and go stand in the street, sometimes the panicking people cause bouncers in clubs or officers to take note and she gets in trouble then without doing anything to warrant it. Other people have had sever freezing, to the point players have had to unplug their consoles from the wall to undo the freeze, this affects both versions of the game. On PS3, Rockstar’s ‘fix’ is to uninstall, then reinstall the data of the game, to install it takes roughly 10 minutes, which means your first 10 was a waste and you have to wait 10 more to see if it might work a second time. On the 360, no known fix is currently out there. To me, this reeks of a game riding on its’ own controversy and lacking serious polish. If it wasn’t called ‘Grand Theft Auto’ and didn’t have Jack Thompson hitting the streets doing free advertising for them, this game would be called by most ‘decent, but not amazing’, but since it benefits from those factors everyone is giving it 10 out of 10’s——when games with far superior gameplay and polish get less than that. I am not saying these news agencies are corrupt, but they are definitely caught up in a hype machine that has taken a game that needed a few more months of polish (especially for the collectors edition’s 90 dollar entry fee) and put it on a pedestal of herolike proportions.

Add on edit: Niko seems like a cool character and I like his emotionally scarred story, but still the glitches are bugging us—froze again.

Ha! Take that Jack Thompson!

Josh Hughes, Lead Game Designer and Co-Founder // Team KAIZEN
In Life There Is Rockstars And Cover Bands, Which One Are You?

1) Will you port your games to other platforms, if not why not?
(Or, read this as to say ‘Why are you PlayStation Exclusive’)

James Stevenson, Community Manager:We have a fantastic working relationship with Sony Computer Entertainment. We’ve been working with them for more than a decade now — and in several cases we’ve worked with the same people from essentially the first day. The relationship is also beneficial because we can tailor our technology to the PlayStation 3’s unique advantages such as the CELL-processor, allowing for better and more technically impressive games.

2) Do you have any advice for people starting up their own dev teams?

JS: Start with a prototype or by modding a current game. As you’re working on it, you may want to check out our R&D page on www.insomniacgames.com. We feature a lot of articles that could be helpful to you about various things we have worked on, and include some code snippets. There are plenty of engines out there that you can use and create mods from. The folks that created Portal originally did it as a mod and they were all hired by Valve to create the full game. Mods are definitely one fast way to gain recognition. The other way would be to create a prototype for your game. You can do this in something like XNA, or these can even be things like Flash games. Check out ThatGameCompany’s flOw for example, started as a flash game, and they ended up with a multi-title deal with Sony for PlayStation Network games.

3) Be honest, who would win in a fight–Ratchet or Nathan Hale?

JS: Hard to say, Ratchet would probably turn Hale into a dancing penguin, but the regenerative abilities and the bullseye might be too much for Ratchet to handle.

4) A lot of people in the general public seem to support an idea of a console war between the Wii, PS3 and 360. What do you think of that?

JS: People are always interested in controversy and seeing what’s best, picking a winner, etc. We don’t really concern ourselves with “the console wars” too much because we prefer to stick to making great games. That’s what we do best. We do keep an active eye on the games market though.

5) This somewhat ties in to number 1, but what are the big things that make you guys look at one console or platform over the rest when choosing to develop a game?

JS: Really we haven’t considered other platforms for our game, but a studio may want to consider the audience on the platform, the attach rates, competition, what the publisher is looking for, etc.

6) Both Ratchet and Nathan Hale betray a lot of emotion in their facial animations, do you think there is differences (positive or negative) that you experience in regards to public reaction when you make games with characters that deal with emotions some consider ‘non-masculine’?

JS: We don’t think there is any downside. In fact, most people were quite interested in the endings to both games and keep emailing us to find out what happens next. So if anything, those facial reactions probably help sell those moments more effectively and make them more believable for players.

All right! That ends this new blog post! We hope that this is the start of a tradition and we will be able to post similar questions to other interesting people (hey, everyone wants to know all the celebs’ opinions on who would win in a Ratchet VS Nathan Hale throwdown!) so watch this spot hehe! Thanks and cya soon everyone!

Josh

When Josh was in kindergarden, his teacher prescribed video games for him to help with his hand-eye coordination. Like those who experiment with illegal substances, Josh was immediately hooked. Only a few short years later (while still in grade school), Josh informed his mother that he knew his life was going to involve game development. In middle school, Josh was crying his eyes out to the infamous “Aerith Death Scene” in Final Fantasy 7; amazed by how a fantasy story could have a real effect on human emotion, Josh knew from that point on that he wanted to be a writer.

While a high school junior, Josh joined the XrucifiX game studio (then named “Two Guys Software”) and helped pen the basic plotline and characters for their first game, “Eternal War Shadows of Light”; that game received much praise in the independent, Christian-video game circles and was even featured in such news outlets as the Wall Street Journal. While helping XrucifiX with their second title, Josh left on friendly terms to start Team KAIZEN along with his brother, Trevor. While still In High School, Josh wrote for the school paper and garnered several State and National accolades for articles ranging from his monthly Game Review column to social issues examining opinions and views.

In his spare time Josh plays video games, writes story-lines and song lyrics, enjoys getting into discussions involving history and religion, and playing hackey-sack. ]]> http://www.teamkaizengames.com/meettheteam/josh-hughes/feed/ http://www.teamkaizengames.com/meettheteam/trevor-hughes/ http://www.teamkaizengames.com/meettheteam/trevor-hughes/#comments Fri, 04 Jan 2008 04:30:48 +0000 James Scharmack http://testsite.teamkaizengames.com/meettheteam/trevor-hughes/  

Name:	Trevor Hughes
Location:	Great Falls, Montana
Position:	Co-Founder, Concept Art
Favorite Game(s):	Shattered Soul

In 1989, God said “Let there be light!” but his computer crashed and all of a sudden Trevor was born; a collection of top scientists soon after released a report that blames this computer crash for Trevor’s odd behaivor. Everything from getting hit in the sweet spot with a skateboard (accident), overextending his knee (accident), and getting his tongue hit by a fan (not an accident)–Trevor is indeed one of the reasons that a video camera is a handy thing to have!

When he was in middle school, Trevor was diagnosed with Chronic Renal Insufficiency (Kidney Failure) and had to have several operations (including one enabling him to urinate out of his navel) and is currently waiting for a transplant (Doctors say it will happen within the next 2- years). Trevor has been called by many “the perfect combination of insanity and inspiration”. ]]> http://www.teamkaizengames.com/meettheteam/trevor-hughes/feed/