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泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌 _ FPS! FPS! I wanna play FPS!

泥中蟠龍 's Game 愛歌 [A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]   FPS! FPS! I wanna play FPS!   Today I have a confession to make. I have a very serious Stereoblindness. As you probably know, it is the inability to see in 3D using stereo vision. Even though it is generally caused by differences between a signal received by the optic nerve and the body, people in the gaming industry usually make fun of them saying that it's too boorish. The reason why I tell the truth is that I cannot play First-person shooter (FPS) video games despite a video game expert. After just 10-minutes playing, I feel sick and heavily dizzy. There was an only one FPS that I had finished it. It is a legendary First-person shooter Xbox video game Halo: Combat Evolved which was released in 2001. In those days FPS-style console games had a very small market share compared to the PC platform. I believe that the biggest reason — of course, there would be other reas...

泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌 _ Maximilien Ringelmann or Synergy effect

泥中蟠龍 's Game 愛歌 [A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]   Maximilien Ringelmann or Synergy effect   We usually say that we expect the synergy effect when we do something together between groups or individual members. The term synergy is derived from the Greek word for synergos meaning "working together". Synergy — synergistic effect — , as defined in Cambridge dictionary, is "the combined power of a group of things when they are working together that is greater than the total power achieved by each working separately“. But can we have all the good things from working together? Isn't there the worst possibility? You can easily see many loveless couples around you although they wanted to create a happy family with their partner before they were married. If the cooperation between the two produces good results all the time, there are no marriages ended in divorce. Maximilien Ringelmann, a French agricultural engine...

泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌 _ Every flood has its ebb

泥中蟠龍 's Game 愛歌 [A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]   Every flood has its ebb   A domestic animation which I invested in was released at the end of last year. Being received positive reactions from the preview, I had high hopes for the children's animation aimed at Christmas and year-end. But it disappeared with a poor score of 30,000 audiences. The animation, which major local film distributor invested in and distributed, was expected to attract 300,000 moviegoers. I think that the biggest reason for the miserable failure at the box office, of course, there could have been many different causes, is the distributing agency's insincere stance; The distributor might think otherwise. There were very little theaters for the film in less than a week and I could barely find it in cinemas in Christmas season against its original plan. There were too many losses for some mobile games which came out last year due to a publisher...

泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌 _ What is the key factor of games success?

泥中蟠龍 's Game 愛歌 [A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]     What is the key factor of games success?     An epic science fiction film Interstellar has surpassed the 10-million-audience mark getting huge popularity since another Hollywood blockbuster Avatar recorded over 10 million viewers in 2009, except animation Frozen in late 2014. The Christopher Nolan movie shows many fundamental of modern physics to explain the abstract concept of the study and audiences can see signs of the director's effort in it. I'd like to talk about not modern physics itself but chaos theory which has popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. In the chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. This is another story. Recently I've ever had a conversation about k...

泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌 _ A Unique and distinctive video game

泥中蟠龍 's Game 愛歌 [A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]   A Unique and distinctive video game   Recently I participated in a video game-related event named investment market. In spite of the high-sounding title, through this event, investees introduce a game which is in the making and create a vision to raise money and investors listen to a presentation and see the displays to look for better investment destinations. However, the question comes to mind whenever I attend this type of event is what the difference between a new game and existing ones is although every developer emphasizes distinction and uniqueness of the game. Some of them don't even talk about 'fun' which is the most important factor in the game.   "This product is small and light and easy to carry around. Also, it looks good with a pretty shape. Men and women of all ages can easily use it. Consumers can buy it throughout the country." ...

泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌 _ A legend of mecha design talks about pets

泥中蟠龍 's Game 愛歌 [A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]   A legend of mecha design talks about pets   It has already been one year since I have written this column. Looking back the past year, a topic related to the article, which I wrote by this time last year, came into my mind. It was about a new challenge. I'm a venture capitalist who specializes in video game investment. But the game is not the only one I invest in. Today I want to talk about other content. Recently the domestic gaming industry thrives on stereotyped themes of games. The materials are like you've heard of them somewhere: fantasy, monster, magic, knight, evocation, auto-battle, etc. If a player reads an introduction of a game without image, it's even hard for the gamer to recognize whether he/she played it before or not. I'm a fan of Shōji Kawamori, a Japanese anime creator. His new theater anime Animal Detective Kiruminzoo, which is about ...

泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌 _ Video game development and investment

泥中蟠龍 's Game 愛歌 [A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]   Video game development and investment   I have mainly written about domestic video game developers hoping that they will be able to commercially successful with a good-quality game. But, it may sound like an excuse, I'd like to make harsh comments for game makers this time. Recently I went to a conference-like meeting for content producers and developers. There were a large number of manufacturers and content providers complaining about investors. In short, the complaints can be summed up in four ways. Firstly getting investment is no different from taking out loans with high-interest rates due to overly conservative investment conditions. Secondly, in spite of detailed explanations, investors cannot well understand a good point of the content because they lack the ability to evaluate it. Thirdly investment firms mostly refuse to invest in new content whose sales performan...