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Needle

Member since: Dec 14th, 2006

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For Famitsu, 428 equals 40

Nov 27th 2008 12:54PM (Joystiq Nintendo)
428 is the spiritual successor to the 1998 game Machi, and are/were text adventures that only could have been realized as video games, only using live actors and filmed on location.

In Machi ("The City"), the player follows the stories of 8 different protagonists, each pursuing their own unrelated agenda, all in parallel but all taking place in the same city of Shibuya, Tokyo. The player can read the stories, switch between characters to read, and backtrack to any point in the story at will.

Since everything is running in parallel, what one character did would often unknowingly lead another character to a dead end; For instance, one character casually locking a warehouse door would lead to another character who happened to be hiding in the warehouse to starve to death.

The player's role, as the sole overseer of all 8 protagonists, is to make each character behave so that none of them would block the progress of the others, and let the story continue on to the end of that "day". The game was essentially an intricately woven ball of narrative yarn that the player had to untangle.

Machi was massive, with the story spanning five days with over 300 major and supporting roles. Even the minor characters which you didn't control lived their own lives; Many of them would exit the story path of one character, only to walk into the story of another, often showing different sides of their personality.

Machi was regarded one of the best games ever by those who played it, but suffered profit-wise. The planned sequel was canned. In the 10 years that ensued, Chunsoft released numerous adventure games that took the parallel narrative gameplay mechanic and tweaked it in various ways.

With 428, they've come full circle and are releasing what comes closest to being a true sequel to Machi - the game even unfolds in the same city as where Machi took place.

Hell, I waited 10 years for this!

Secrets of the Tetris Grandmasters

Jul 4th 2007 10:36AM (Joystiq)
It all depends on what people perceive as features and what as annoyances. Both the designers of Tetris The Grand Master and the Tetris Guideline considered uneven piece sequences as a nuisance rather than a challenge, while some people consider it as a challenge to overcome.
Regardless, never bash a game or dictate what a game "should" do without playing it yourself! When you're playing you won't even notice it's there :D

Hori busts out arcade-style joysticks for the PS3

Dec 14th 2006 7:44AM (Engadget)
You guys should be grateful that it's NOT wireless. Wireless controllers cannot avoid input lag, however small it may be. And input lag is critical for serious arcade fighting/shmup/etc games where a single frame of lag can break the gameplay.

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