forenoon filings: September 2005

shmup studio focus no. 4: treasure

Friday, September 30, 2005

Treasure was started by a group of ex-Konami staffers, and when compared to many other companies with a similar output, it is surprising to realise just how a small their staff continue to be. This fact greatly informs the types of project that they have continued to undertake – emphasis is almost always placed on giving a highly tuned and concentrated gaming experience as opposed to the huge multi level sprawling works that many other large companies offered.

In their earlier years, many of their games grew to be highly collectible – often because many of these titles received very limited pressings. Challenging platform titles such as Alien Soldier, Guardian Heroes and Gunstar Heroes soon marked out this small startup as a team to watch.

But this team’s coding skills really became apparent in seeing how they handled the shmup genre - their greatest two titles being Radiant Silvergun for SEGA’s Saturn – which has become more famous in recent years for it’s stratospheric collector’s price tag it effortlessly gets and its follow up Ikaruga (pictured above) again for another SEGA console – the Dreamcast – which was soon ported to the GameCube.

Both games have brought very gameplay innovations to the current generation of shmups in much the same way that R-Type re-invigorated the genre in the 1980’s. Now, instead of the player being given a challenge of going for an all out high score; the method in which that score was obtained is made a key component of gameplay strategy. Both games popularised the concept of chaining and as a result getting huge score multipliers in the process.

Ironic as it may sound, this group of ex-Konami staffers were very recently handed development duties on Konami’s most well known classic shmup series Gradius V – and it is generally accepted that they have done an incredible job in updating this series into the 128bit era.

Looking forward to the new handhelds, Treasure's boss Masato Maegawa has made no secret of his preference of the DS over the PSP due to Nintendo’s machine being that much more friendly for the smaller development teams they continue to have - stratospheric budgets and huge teams aren't necessarily required. Looking at Ikaruga - and subsequent titles, you may get the impression that Treasure had scores and scores of graphic artists, sound designers and coders at their disposal, yet Maegawa-san quietly notes that a total of only twenty developers work at the company to this day!

getting remote access to your home pc

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

A handy way of controlling your home PC remotely, is by setting it up as a VNC server. Once installed this will allow to connect remotely from any defined client and have full access to your PC’s resources.

Before installing any software, it it will be worth taking time to ensure that your system is secured as part of this task will involve opening extra network ports. Microsoft provide a very comprenehsive free tool called the Baseline Security Analyzer which will check how secure your password policies are, and whether you have any uncessary background services running. Another useful security hint is to rename your Administrator account – even if someone does gain unauthorised access to your system, hiding the most powerful user by changing its name is an easy quick step that will put off most from doing any sort of damage.

Once you are happy that everything is reasonably tight, next we can install our VN server. In this instance I have used TightVNC. This software is open source, so it won’t cost anything. Configuring this software will require an intermediate knowledge of networking, but there are quite a few useful HOWTOs out there.

If you connect to the internet behind a router then you will need to take some additional steps to setup port forwarding for port 5900 and 5800 (these are the VNC defaults), (and be sure to the same on your firewall too).

Now the reason VNC is widely used and popular, is that it provides easy cross platform connectivity. In this example, the VNC client we have setup here is a Mac, but it could easily be any other type of operating system that connects.

The client software of choice that was selected is Chicken of the VNC. Now most ISPs will provide you with a dynamic IP address – so every time you connect to the internet, your IP address will change. In some cases (and usually an option that will cost extra) your ISP will have provided you with a static IP address – meaning that your IP address will always stay the same. The reason it is important to know the difference, is because the VNC client needs to connect to IP address of the VNC server you have setup. If you are unsure about finding the IP address on your VNC server PC, then navigating to sites such as whatismyip provide it quickly and easily.

shmup studio focus no. 3: konami

Friday, September 23, 2005

The third in an occasional series, Forenoon Filings will be looking at the Japanese developer: Konami.

Unlike the previous studios that have been covered, Konami is one of the few studios that has grown considerably larger since its inception and it has managed to do so by broadening its franchise portfolio. Although it now develops and publishes many well known titles (of many different genre) today, the period we are interested really spans the 8-16bit console eras during the late 1980s to mid 1990s. It was during these years that many of their well known shmups were made.

After Irem released R-Type, this really threw down the gauntlet to many other developers at the time challenging them in the method and designs they used for their similar titles. However Konami’s titles of the similar period had a very different response.

Initially they proved that they could run with Irem and make a serious shmup to challenge the might of R-Type – which seen in the release of Gradius – which added a new level of gameplay customisation with its option power up system. This continues to be a greatly popular game today and it is one that spawned many sequels. This was similarly followed by the equally challenging Salamander.

But at this time, it was noticed that many shmups of this time were very serious – both from the players who honed their skills to master them; the developers who were determined to gain market dominance and critical acclaim. But Konami’s next move was one that was not expected. They say it necessary to lighten the mood of these games somewhat.

Parodius, took the finely honed gameplay mechanics of Gradius (or Nemesis as it was known in the West), the gloomy alien design of Salamander and overlay it with myriads of cartoon characters, giant cat bosses, bird pirates – even a flying octopus! Konami’s aim in this game was to take all the best known elements of its serious titles and create a fun tongue-in-cheek version that shamelessly parodied its previous shmup achievements as well as some of its other adventure titles. Such a level of self-effacement is something that videogame developers rarely showed (let alone even admitted to) and this is a sense of fun that has hardly been captured since.

Detana! Twin Bee (pictured above), was an original IP that followed on in the vein of Taito's Rainbow Island series - which had a deliciously colourful cutesy design (sometimes dubbed a cute ‘em up). This was a game that fitted the 16-bit era wonderfully. Developers were now in charge of emerging consoles such as the PC Engine and SNES which were able to display rich ranges of colours on-screen simultaneously and even handle a greater number sprites than ever before. The vibrancy and animation evident in this game really did take the shmup genre out of the dark – and it was a game that could be seen as more of a friendly face.

Between these three games, Konami’s influence was one that would continue to inform and affect the path of the shmup well into the present era of consoles:
Gradius for its pure skill; Parodius for its sense of fun and Twin Bee for its art direction.

shmup studio focus no. 2: irem

Thursday, September 22, 2005

The second in an occasional series, Forenoon Filings will be looking at the Japanese developer: Irem.

The success of Irem has been tied in very closely to its best known shmup released in 1989 that has inspired many sequels and spin offs: R-Type (pictured above).

Vertical and horizontal shmups had been made for many years prior to this game's release, yet when this game was released it was quite revolutionary in two key ways:

Firstly, its level design ramped up the quality of presentation that many had expected of games of this genre. Each level featured am increadible amount of detail, and was astounding for their incredible set pieces: the first level's revolving pod, the second level's organic design, the mothership of the third - just to name a few. Instead of settling a for generic starry background or more cliched space settings, here was a game set in space that had a real theme echoing elements of HR Giger in its execution.

Secondly, the use of power ups had mainly been restricted to powering up the players' ship in many games pervious to this, yet here in R-Type, the 'pod' was a detachable power-up that could be mounted at either the front or rear of the ship. This added a whole new aspect of strategy that the player had to use as some level required a dextrous switching of front or back mounting of the pod.

It's success was phenomenal and many sequels followed: R-Type 2, R-Type 3, Super R-Type, R-Type Leo, R-Type Delta and most recently R-Type Final.

It may be tempting to view Irem as some sort of one-trick pony, but in recent months a runaway hit was realised with Zettai Zetsumei Toshi (sold as Disaster Report in the West) - a survival game where set in Tokyo just after an earthquake has hit. This took many critics by surprise and a sequel has been confirmed as being developed currently.

shmup studio focus no. 1: taito

The first in an occasional series, Forenoon Filings will be looking at the Japanese developer: Taito.

Like many well established development houses, Taito's history was one that started long before the era of electronic video games - in 1953.

The best known title in its history is without a doubt Space Invaders (pictured above) - a game that grew to such popularity in the arcades that it caused a shortage of coins in Japan. Although it had a simplistic concept, many of the foundations of the modern shmup were firmly laid in this game: further progress by the player increased the game speed.

But over the 1980s, Taito continued to innovate - especially in the area of character design - which can be attributed to the work to one of its lead designers Fukio Mitsuji - producing classics like Bubble Bobble, Rainbow Islands and Parasol Stars.

A number of years of lean output followed during the 32-bit era - and a number of its most notable hits were remixed and rehashed. However, in recent years (and most notably during this particular generation of console hardware) they have continued to remain a medium sized company, and developing shmups such as XII Stag, publishing Cave's Mushihimesama and Alfa System's Shikigami no Shiro as well as the upcoming Raiden III, as well as a number of rather offbeat non-shmup titles like Densha de Go.

At it's heart, Taito's focus has always been rooted in the arcades, and while this sector has been in general decline in the last decade, they have been prominent in developing new arcade system boards such as the PC derived Type X - which is gaining popularity among many Japanese arcade developers as a lower costing way of getting their games into the wider market.

Most recently, a number of remixed collections Taito Legends has been announced for the PlayStation 2, DS and PSP.

While many remember the pioneering Space Invaders - its influence is one that will be seen for many more years.

apple expo

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Over at Apple Expo – not so many surprise announcements on account of the really big new launches being handled at a separate media event previously; but the show still went on (This year the Expo moved across to a newly built hall across the road from last year’s venue at Porte de Versailles).

Murmurs were caused on the night before, as .Mac members were informed that the whole service was going to be taken down for routine maintenance. By the next morning – at the Expo’s opening the reason for this was made apparent – as the .Mac service got a sizeable overhaul: no doubt Apple were feeling the squeeze from the likes of GMail. Now, the standard combined storage quotas have been increased from 250Mb to 1GB. Also, the new .Mac Groups feature means that the online blog, photo and schedule publishing tools were all substantially updated and made that much more intuitive to use. Lastly, one of the most useful but overlooked tools – Backup – has a major update allowing the automated setting of many backup profiles.

A few other things noticed on the show floor:

NikeID had a sizeable stand promoting its custom trainer design website. While this is not a specifically geared Mac product – they obviously realised that most Mac users are quite conscious about the design of their footwear. A number of Expo exclusive designs were on show too.

After the Adobe/Macromedia merger we were expecting a huge joint stand from this new media authoring giant – but both companies still kept their own separate areas. However, Adobe had just overgrown it’s rather limited floor space – wedged round the side of Apple. Throughout the day large crowds were attracted to their excellent Creative Suite demonstrations, but their stand area really wasn’t big enough to cope. On the other hand Macromedia had recently released a major update to their web authoring software Studio 8, yet they had a pitifully small stand (barely 2 chairs and 1 terminal) – and it was quite a job to locate. No doubt many expo attendees would have wanted to get hands-on experience and walk through demonstrations of many of Studio 8's new features. This may be found to be a disappointment from one of the world’s most highly respected web design companies.

Microsoft has always been a long time attendee at Expo – usually to promote its range of hardware peripherals and Office suite for Mac, but this year saw the addition of an Xbox 360 stand – just in time for Christmas!

One aspect of the Expo where a little more thought could have helped greatly - and this was related to the fact there were hardly any seats! This is no doubt the largest Mac user gathering in Europe – so it is safe to assume that many of the attendees will be owners of one (or more) of Apple’s portable computers. But on casting an eye round the huge hall, there always sights of people precariously balancing their PowerBooks or iBooks on their laps, while perched on a step or off the side of a conference stand. A corner of the hall with nice high backed chairs will go a long way to make portable owners feel that much more comfortable!

making firefox portable

Monday, September 12, 2005

Forenoon Filings has recently mentioned a few of the helpful plugins and extensions that are available for Firefox, but as with most advanced users - it will be the case that you will be using Firefox in more than one location and likely on more than one machine. So the problem arises of how to keep multiple copies of your browser in sync.

Doing this manually is possible, but hardly an efficient use of time - especially if you are trigger happy with installing extensions. However, a new script has been made available which is designed to be cross platform (Mac and PC currently).

What this does is it allows you to store your settings and even extension information, so this can be mounted on a portable storage device (like a USB key or even iPod). As long it is plugged into the host machine of machine of choice - you can configure Firefox to read in all your saved settings - so wherever you are, you have a customised portable version of Firefox running.

This script works with a modified version of this browser - Portable Firefox which is currently at version 1.0.6 (the lastest stable release at the moment).

another useful collaborative tool

If you ever you find yourself needing to share large number of documents, it is often the case that you may end up clogging other people mailboxes with documents, reminders and other related information.

However the online web powered sharing tool Backpack allows you to setup a free webpage to host notes documents, photos, calendars - and pretty much anything else.

The beauty of it is that (much like Flickr), you have a very specific and exact control who exactly has access to the information you make available.

A useful tool for the remote working, mobile masses.

cataloguing blogs

The number of published blogs has grown at a very fast rate - even over the last few months, so navigating, searching and finding articles of interest may prove difficult.

The standard search engines do perform satisfactorily, but having a dedicated blog search engine like Technorati (currently this site's number two search engine) certainly helps narrowing down your search result.

Similarly, You Read Me is an automated feed of the hottest posts on the web (i.e. the entries which have been linked, read and commented on the most). What is really useful is the ability to filter results by the last 12, 24, 72 hours or longer if you wish.

what's left for the apple expo?

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

The special Apple press event has finished and the updates have been rolled to the Cupertino website. So what has been announced? Were the rumours true? And what new announcements does this leave for Apple Expo in Paris two weeks from now?

The ipod mini flash: This rumour turned out to be quite accurate - being named the ipod nano, although not many people expected it to look so similar to the existing range. It small though - so very small. Check the stream from Apple and be amazed how it fits in the change pocket of a pair of Levi's! The decision to change the storage medium from a hard drive to flash memory means that the thickness (or rather thinness) is its main selling point. Initial impressions suggest that Apple will have some work to tidy up their range as we now have considerable overlap between the memory sizes of the shuffle and nano (the iPod mini being effectively retired).

iTunes phone: The Motorola ROKR is official, but of all three major announcements, we think that this is the one that could potentially cause Apple most reputational problems. While they have paired with US network Cingular and the handest is manufactured by Motorola - we have a large departure from Apple's usual insistence on total control of both hardware and software manufacture. As noted previously, the mobile phone will be the next big media battleground, so it was inevitable that iTunes would need to get some sort of presence to hold its market share, but Forenoon Filings does wonder if this aim will hurt the Apple user experience reputation by closely pairing the delivery of their product - with what seems to be - a handset that differs greatly from a typical Apple product. One area that this product seems to have the edge, will be the ease of syncing music to and from the desktop - something that is painfully difficult on the Sony Ericsson platform currently (notably the W800i - well for Mac users anyway). It will be telling to see how various network partners perform in different countries - and how that affects peoples' perception of iTunes mobiles.

iTunes 5: Well this may not garner so many headlines, but there is a new feature (which we at Forenoon Filings have been lobbying for in the feedback reports over at Apple): Nested playlists - it is now possible to group playlist into folders, so this adds a greater level of organisation (currently the Forenoon Filings iPod has scores of playlists which are kept in order by prefixes in their titles - e.g. 5*, ALBUMS, ARTIST, FORGOT, UNPLAYED). Enhancements to the shuffle feature have also been included - giving you greater control of how to define the shuffle behaviour.

get greasemonkeyed

Sometimes when browsing various websites, you may been left wishing that there was button to do a certain action or a way of changing the look or behaviour of certain sections.

If this describes your browsing experience, then go and install Greasemonkey – which is a Firefox extension. This enables you to install scripts within your browser to amend and tweaks many well known websites such as Amazon, Delicious, eBay, Flickr, Google and many more – the aim being that you will be able to customise their behaviour and appearance to your own preferences.

The community of scripts is growing fast – a similar tagging system that Flickr uses has been implemented to help categorise and organise them.

What examples of scripts can be used and installed? For example on eBay, you change add a Refresh Item link to each auction page; or on Flickr you could add the ability to sort your subscribed groups by title - the full range and variety is really too large to list here.

The nature of most of these changes (when considered in isolation) are quite small, but once integrated into your browser – they will become an indispensable part of your browsing experience.

will voip soon be branded?

Friday, September 02, 2005

Skype has been around for a long time introducing users to the joys of free calls over IP, and it has been the choice for early adopters of this technology. But as with all emergent technologies, it is only a matter of time until the big boys started to muscle in.

Over recent months, a lot of the traditional telecomms providers have been opting for providing hardware solutions to VOIP i.e. providing dedicated handsets and microphones etc.

However, with the advent of Google Talk, it seems that the competition for dominating the VOIP software market is accelerating even more. It won't be too long before we'll see an MSN branded VOIP client?

exporting apple's address book

Thursday, September 01, 2005

Forenoon Filings recently took delivery of its first GMail address but in a bid to get in line other email accounts, it required a quick and easy method of porting the address book contacts over.

Manually keying multiple entries really is something that should never be considered, yet a glaring omission exists in Apple's Address Book application - the ability to export the whole book as a CSV file (which makes for quick and easy imports from almost any other email or messaging client). Although the option is there for exporting individual entries, this is not something that is very appealing - expecially when your total entires heads north of twenty.

There are a number of Applescript options that can be used, but perhaps one of the most user friendly (and free) applications is the Address Book Exporter. It just does what it says!

august round up

What with August being the holiday month, post rate has taken a nosedive.

Stories of note that have surfaced over the last few weeks include:

- Taking pictures and videos with your mobile doesn't seem to be enough these days. It seems that various manufacturers are trying to slipstream in Apple's wake. Sony have introduced their Walkman phone the w800i. Satellite radio phones are fast being lined up next!

- Large numbers of wildly varying rumours regarding next month's Apple Expo. iPhone, flash iPod minis, silver cased 5G iPods, video iPod patents, new versions of iChat are just naming a few (ThinkSecret has been tracking each of these). But lets stick to the sensible: a 40GB iPod with a single platter drive which would shave off 5mm its thickness. This doesn't sound like much but if your iPod's home is your jeans' pocket, then you certainly will be thankful you've lost extra thickness!

- The PSP has launched in UK. And the UMD range is considerably larger than expected. How long before the second (and even third) wave of software hits? The best import title name goes to Winning Eleven 9: Ubiquitous Evolution - even though this will get renamed to the duller sounding Pro Evolution 5 on its European release.

- Direct retail seems to be big battleground for a lot of tech manufacturers. After Nintendo and Apple, why not the big M?

- Google continues it's quest for world domination with GoogleTalk (at least on the desktop). And it works with my favourite IM client too! Adium