Kon’Nichiwa KAIZEN Fans! Wow, a new year and a new website YES YES YES!!! The new Team KAIZEN site furthers our journey towards gaming industry dominance, and is much nicer due to its’ use of WordPress–now we can edit without dealing with pesky HTML! Oh yeah, sorry for no TKTV recently–I promise a new one is coming post-haste! Heck, it might even be live by the time this new site is, it just depends on which idea Trev and I take and work into a TKTV episode. Until then, you can check out old episodes, as well as our tech reel and Trev’s entry into the GunZ Cinema Contest on the TKTV page! Also–on our main page you may have noticed the TKTV demo reel–nice huh? Well, on to the niceness! Ryan Schneider, the PR dude at Insomniac Games (www.insomniacgames.com –creators of Spyro the Dragon, Ratchet and Clank and Resistance: Fall of Man), was nice enough to hook me up with another Insomniac employee, James Stevenson. James answers a few questions we threw his way, some relevant and others completely off the wall. So, go ahead and check it out below! Thanks to Ryan, James and the rest of Insomniac–you guys rule! Also, thanks to Mackenzie Ponech of XrucifiX Game Studio (www.xrucifix.com) for submitting our first question!

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