Player One Podcast

[Note: This too is a repost of an entry I did for my personal blog some years ago. One of the things I enjoyed working on the most during the time I was at EGM was the April Fools jokes. I grew up reading EGM and fondly remember things like the Simon Belmont in TMNT2: The Arcade Game for NES or Sheng Long in Street Fighter II. I'm happy to say that I was behind such memorable April Foolin's as the warehouse of Sega Neptunes, Sonic & Tails in Super Smash Bros. Melee and the Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball nude trick. But anyway, this blog entry is not about those -- it's about the one April Fool's joke that wasn't. Enjoy.]

Originally posted June 28, 2004 — I must confess that I don’t know all the details of the story I’m about to tell you about here. I wasn’t working at EGM at the time this happened. But I did catch wind of the aftermath. So I’ll tell you what I know here, and if someone else knows the rest, they can e-mail me and I’ll gladly add it (anonymously, if they’d like). Anyway, on with it:

If you’ve read EGM for any length of time you know that every April issue brings with it an April Fool’s joke. That’s just how it is. EGM…April issue…there’s a joke. But not in April 1994.

And I can almost understand it. When you’re working on a magazine, after a while the deadlines kind of mush together. Sometimes you’re usually not even cognizant of what month it is (what, it’s December already?). You’re especially not thinking of something as small and insignificant as April Fool’s Day. I mean, it’s not even a postal holiday. And in 1994 when the staff was working on the April issue, everyone forgot what month it was and that there was supposed to be a joke in there. Even the editor in chief, Ed Semrad — the guy who had been there for years and you would think would remember ‘cuz it’s tradition — forgot.

I’d like to imagine the staff was completely oblivious to it until they opened snail mail letters with people guessing what the April Fool’s joke was. “You almost had me there — those Babalities in Mortal Kombat II have got to be fake,” “Handheld Genesis? What kind of an idiot do you take me for!” or even “I believe that ad in your magazine is a joke. No company would ever call their game ‘Plok.’”

But what I do know is that upon the discovery of this royal f-up, Ed called everyone into a big meeting where he proceeded to yell at the staff for a long time. Tears were shed (by him, if I remember the story correctly), people were blamed, fingers…pointed. Evil eyes…given. It was a bad scene. But what’s done was done.

Now…the best joke would’ve been to admit that there wasn’t one; that readers had spent time looking for a joke that wasn’t there. Now that would’ve been funny. Instead, it was damage control time. A decoy was acquired — a typo on the April cover. While EGM of that vintage was often a hotbed of typos and grammatical errors on the inside, this time one had broken free and somehow worked its way onto the magazine’s front. Thank god for that li’l cock-up, eh? Thus, “STREEETS OF RAGE 3″ (with an extra “E,” ‘case you missed it) became the “joke.” In the next issue they passed it off as such, proudly pointing out the typo as if it was deliberate. A brilliant gag, huh?

If you have the May 2004 issue of EGM handy (#178, MGS3 cover), flip to page 57 and you’ll see the first public acknowledgment that this “joke” was actually just a mistake and a close-up picture of the typo. But that piece doesn’t go into too much detail. It’s such a funny story that it was one I’d tell any new staff member come April Foolin’ time.

TO BE CONTINUED….

—–

There’s more talk of EGM April Fools jokes at this Wikipedia page (btw anyone remember what the 1996 joke was? Did they forget that year too? It’s not listed here).

And when I was a guest on EGM Live (the 3/26/07 episode) we talked about April Fools jokes a bit.

Chris Johnston Electronic Gaming Monthly april fools, EGM, Electronic Gaming Monthly

[NOTE: This is a repost of a blog entry from my old personal blog.]

Originally posted June 26, 2004 — Now’s a good time to take a moment and talk about one of EGM’s mainstay characters — Sushi-X. While other people can probably tell this story better than I can from the beginning, I’ll take a stab at explaining some of what I know about this mysteriously pseudonymed character.

The way I figure it (and I’m guessing here, since he appeared in EGM before my time), the Sushi-X persona was inspired by Famitsu’s Taco-X, a reviewer often dressed as a ninja. Since EGM’s Review Crew style is a direct rip-off from Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu’s review style, this hypothesis of mine probably isn’t too far from the truth. The Sushi-X that most EGM fans know and love was the one that was a master of fighting games, hated Game Boy titles just because he could, and was often the “swing reviewer” who would pan something the other guys liked. The guy who played Sushi-X for the longest amount of time was Ken Williams. (Ken now helps run video game site vgevo.com with Trickman Terry.) Ken had been Sushi-X for a good long time before I started in 1994. And his personality was exactly that of the Sushi-X in the magazine — he loved fighting games and had a passionate disdain for anything Game Boy or that involved turn-based role-playing. When a new fighting game would come into the office he’d spend hours on it — whether it was an upright machine or something that could be plugged into the office’s Super Gun. While I was working there, Super Street Fighter II Turbo arrived and the guy went nuts on it, practicing combos, refining his technique — it was insane to watch. I never considered myself very good at fighting games, but I did get schooled by Ken a couple times. And I mean…rocked. Some of his techniques and skills would show up in the magazine as strategy guides or in special fighting game guides that EGM would publish from time to time. EGM did print a picture of Ken at one time semi-hinting that he was Sushi-X. At one of the early ’90s Consumer Electronics Shows, the Sendai booth had a Street Fighter machine set up where people could challenge a staff member. I forget which issue it was, but there is a picture of that scene in the magazine. Of course, no one figured that the white guy with the EGM jacket playing against them was Sushi. Most thought Sushi was a Japanese guy, which had never been the case.

Read more…

Chris Johnston Electronic Gaming Monthly EGM, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Sushi-x

As a reader, I’m a James Mielke fan. When the guy is covering a game or a developer that he’s interested in, he generally does a fantastic job at it. He’s truly passionate about certain games, and it comes through wonderfully in his writing. I’ll even admit that he’s far better at covering the games he likes than I probably ever was, or ever will be. I also thought that the final issues of EGM – the ones under his direction – were fabulous. He managed to inject that kind of passion and enthusiasm throughout the entire magazine, even though he liked to pat himself on the back a bit too much in his editorials.

Even on a personal level, I like the guy. Whenever I would take trips out to our San Francisco office he was always friendly and helpful, fun to be around, and just an all-around good guy.

That’s probably why, when he chose to fellate himself for about 11,000 words on his weblog, it didn’t really bother me for the most part. I rolled my eyes at a lot of it, because despite some real accomplishments during his career, it’s hard not to see the whole thing as one massive ego stroke where his apparent greatness is more than a little exaggerated.

And that leads me to my third relationship with James Mielke – as a co-worker. As a co-worker, I had a real problem with the Milkman. And normally, I’d keep that kind of feeling to myself. But two paragraphs in his recent blog post misrepresented the then-crew of EGM so badly – a group of people I love and respect – that I feel like I need to defend them (and myself) publicly.

Read more…

Greg Sewart Electronic Gaming Monthly EGM, Electronic Gaming Monthly, james mielke

In this episode of the Player One Podcast you will hear not one, not two, but FOUR people talking about the games they played this week. Once again it's CJ, Phil and Gregs Sewart and Ford, discussing games such as: Fable II, Final Fantasy III DS, Half-Life/Half-Life 2, Guitar Hero World Tour, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, Gears of War 2 and The Maw.

In addition, in this episode we announce the opening of our real website at playeronepodcast.com and the return of the Game Club -- which this time will be Banjo-Kazooie (N64). It's also available on your Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade for 1200 Microsoft points. Share your comments with us via our site or voicemail line by Feb. 6 and we'll read/play 'em during the segment on the game in that week's show.

Running time: 1:27:48




Direct MP3 download: http://media.libsyn.com/media/playerone/01...-Episode118.mp3

Chris Johnston Episodes episode, podcast

It's back—we're doing another Game Club for Episode 120 (out Feb. 9), this time on Rare's Nintendo 64 platformer, Banjo-Kazooie. Initially known by the codename "Dream," this game copped a lot of Mario 64's style, and whether or not it holds up as well as Mario 64 does to the test of time is up for debate. It was recently re-released for the Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade, and it can be yours for 1200 Microsoft space bucks ($15, but who's counting?).

Wikipedia entry on Banjo-Kazooie

And we'd be remiss if we didn't point to a YouTube video of the amazing intro to the game...

Get your stories/comments/memories of this game post to the blog/forum/email or voicemail (713-893-8069) by Friday, February 6. We'll be talking about the game in Episode #120.

Read more...

Chris Johnston Game Club banjo kazooie, game club, nintendo 64

You’ll have to forgive me as this post isn’t very game-centric. Still, it’s probably more interesting than Greg talking about racing games. Again.

I feel pretty bad right now. I had been bugging CJ for a while about getting this blog up and running on our main page with the promise of writing all sorts of entries for it. Now that it’s up, though, I haven’t added much to it. In my defense, I’ve been extremely busy with school.

This past week was my first week back at student teaching. During the first half of my credential program, I was teaching a class of fourth graders. This time, I’m in a second grade classroom. Although teaching fourth grade was fun (and definitely challenging), I have to say that I’m enjoying second grade more. The kids are simply easier to control, and they’re more eager to learn.

After telling my master teacher (the slightly goofy term us student teacher use for the “real” teacher whose classroom we’re in) about my previous job as a game reviewer, she suggested that later on I bring in some of my old issues of GameNOW to show the kids, and that I teach a lesson that has the kids writing their own game review.  I’m thinking that once the lesson is over, I’ll collect the kids’ articles, toss some screenshots in there, and turn them into a mini-magazine for the class.

When I told my master teacher about my game producing job at Backbone, she told me to bring in some of the games that I made to show the class (the edutainment titles, of course…I’ll probably leave the poker game I worked on at home). I told her that I could easily tie the games in to a lesson about teamwork and cooperation since so many people must work together to make a game. She liked the idea and expanded on it by saying that we could actually have the class design a game. With different students coming up with characters, plot, artwork, etc.

My master teacher is pretty cool.

In addition to my student teaching every weekday, I’m also attending my regular classes in the evening. On top of that, I’m also in the middle of finishing the second and third parts of a massive four part assessment program that California has just instituted for its new teachers. I’ve heard that becoming a teacher in some states is actually pretty easy, but they really run you through the ringer out here. It’s very stressful/exhausting.

So if you don’t see a lot of posts from me, it’s probably because I’m doing homework. On a more positive note, I finally got an HDTV this weekend. I’ll talk a bit more about that on the next episode of the podcast (#118). It’s nice to be able to put those Blu-rays I’ve been buying to good use.

Phil Theobald School

As I write this, the green flag has just dropped on the Rolex 24 hour race at Daytona, and thus, on the 2009 racing season. I caught a few of these American Grand Am (or Le Mans, whichever) races last year, and the drivers usually put on a really good show. I’m going to make sure to catch a few more of those this season.

Anyway, there is a gaming bent to this post. The 24 at Daytona reminded me about a great racing game from a generation ago – Test Drive Le Mans on the Dreamcast, and the PlayStation 2 re-release, Le Mans 24 Hours.

I remember first hearing about the game back during my EGM days, and thinking Infogrames (the French publisher that eventually became the new Atari) was completely nuts. NASCAR and F1 are generally the only licensed racing leagues you can hope to release to any sort of success. But basing an entire game on a single, 24 hour race? How could that possibly work out?

Well, that’s not totally true. Test Drive Le Mans was really a series of championship seasons across various, licensed tracks, along with the ability to run the 24 hours of Le Mans if you so desired. And yes, the option to run the real-time, 24 hour race was in there.

And it was designed really well, too. With a full day and night cycle, as well as the option for random weather changes, the whole thing felt very authentic. Plus you could save your game every time you pitted, which made the whole thing quite manageable.

The key thing to note, though, is that the game was just a hell of a lot of fun to play. The graphics were great for the time, with some very impressive lighting and that shiny, metallic look a lot of us came to expect from Dreamcast racers. They don’t hold up incredibly well today, but the game still has a pretty unique look.

The reason I remember this game so well, though, is because it was awarded EGM’s Racing Game of the Year back in 2000 (I think that was the year, anyway). That and it seemed like the cornerstone of a series of quite enjoyable racers to come out of Infogrames. While they never had an amazing reputation, a lot of racing fans were really well-served by Infogrames and some of their developers over the previous generation. Places like Melbourne House, Ratbag, and Monster Games in particular. The publisher released great, grass-roots style racing games that covered World of Outlaws Sprint cars, dirt-track stock car racing, great rally racing, and even NASCAR. Even destruction derby style racing (along with figure 8 racing and all that sort of stuff) was well served by Test Drive: Eve of Destruction.

So if you’re a racing fan, you could do worse than looking up some of Infogrames’ stuff on the PlayStation 2.

Greg Sewart Video Games dreamcast, playstation 2, racing, test drive

[NOTE: This is a repost of an entry I originally wrote for my personal blog, which is horribly outdated and is not even worth going to anymore (oh god, the layout...it's like I was blogging in 1998 and using Lynx to browse the Internets). I'm going to move those entries over here piece-by-piece and at some point close down the other site. I'll probably post an entry from there every day or two. And this is the first of those! Enjoy!]

Originally posted June 24, 2004 — It was ten years ago this month that I was first hired at Sendai Publishing Group to work on Electronic Gaming Monthly.

When I was originally hired at Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) I had just turned 17, and it was the summer of 1994, between my junior and senior years of high school. I’d been doing a fanzine called Paradox for about three-four years before that and had sent copies of it to EGM in the hopes that one day, they’d give me a job. During the ‘zine days, I’d talked on and off with Sendai’s then-grand pooba Steve Harris about the magazine and the game industry — though really, I was a wide-eyed kid with a passion for games and mediocre writing ability that wanted a job. So when he offered me one, I was ecstatic. All that blood, sweat, and tears doing a ‘zine with some friends at my own expense had finally paid off. My starting “Associate Editor” salary was $16,000/year — not bad for a high-schooler still living with his parents.

I remember my first day, and my first assignment, vividly. At the time, EGM2 had just started up and both magazines had a single staff. Because it was the last day of a deadline, I was told that my first duty would be to help out with the Quartermann column for the premiere issue of EGM2. I thought, “great. I get to pow-wow with Q-Mann, talk rumors; this will be great.” But as a longtime EGM fan I was ill-prepared for what I found out a few seconds later: THERE WAS NO QUARTERMANN (dun dun dunnnnn!) There was in the beginning; one person wrote Q-Mann (and apparently got an awful lot of his information from the staff of a certain west coast game store that would later start its own magazine) every month for a couple years and that was that. But the “old” Q-Mann didn’t have time to do it anymore, so it was up to various members of the staff to pick up the reigns. And because I was the newbie, it was my turn to do it. I was given a sheet of paper with some minor (read: crap) rumors on it and was told to write Gaming Gossip as my first assignment. To me this whole thing came as a shocking revelation. Here it was, my first day working at the North Pole and I find out that there is no Santa Claus–or rather, that I am Santa Claus. Read more…

Chris Johnston Electronic Gaming Monthly EGM

My participation in the annual NHL tournament at the office was a success. A success in that I managed to make the playoffs and not make a total fool of myself. OK…so I didn’t make it past the first round. But I got into the post-season in fine style, with a game-winning goal in the final minute of the final match of the season, which vaulted me into one of the final wild-card slots.

Damn I’m good.

You know, Skip Pfister recently cited NHL 09 as his game of the year on an episode of Rebel FM. And he was right to do so. What a fantastic game all around. No way I would have guessed a few years ago that EA’s franchise would ever surpass the 2K series, let alone be the best overall sports game on the year.

Of course, NASCAR 09 is a close second. But you all knew that, right?

Speaking of which, the new season is set to start in a few weeks. It’ll be interesting to see if they can maintain a full field of cars for all 36 races. Unlike most pro sports, racing is almost entirely sponsor-driven, and given this economy, things are not looking good.

That’s all I can think of for my first post. I promise something more interesting in the coming months.

Greg Sewart Video Games nhl 09

The whole Netflix Instant Watch streaming on Xbox 360 thing got me thinking. What if Microsoft (or Sony, let’s not be too platform-biased here…but Microsoft’d probably be the company to do it) teamed up with XM/Sirius satellite radio, or leveraged their Zune Pass service and music libraries to basically provide you with streaming tunes or other audio programming to listen to while you played as a custom soundtrack?

I already often stream music from my iTunes library to my 360, especially when playing something like Geometry Wars 2 or Pac-Man CE, or an RPG where I’m level-grinding and I can just zone out, but it’s an inelegant solution. Prior to the removal of DRM on iTunes-purchased songs I’d end up only being able to play like half the music in some of my playlists over the 360. Plus, the music player interface in the 360′s Dash is clunky when streaming; since I have about 8,100 tracks in my iTunes library it’s be confined to playlists or sit there and scroll through artists/song lists while waiting for the Dashboard to refresh after every page-down instead of getting back to playing video games.

The benefit to adding XM/Sirius streaming or a Zune Pass “radio” option to the mix would be an infinite playlist of commercial-free music. Switching stations — especially if given the option to customize the menu for your favorites — would be a lot easier than navigating a list of 1,000 different artists in my iTunes library. And hell, Microsoft could even have a channel where they played game music or bits of marketing from Major Nelson (doesn’t he already have a Sirius show anyway, btw?). I’d be more likely to listen to that than I would looking at Major’s Minute on the Dashboard.

Now what to charge? Honestly, such a streaming service would be a nice value-add to the ever-dwindling benefits of being an Xbox Live Gold subscriber, where we’re getting hit with plenty more ads but less actual content for our yearly dollars. But it’s Microsoft, and though it’d be nice I don’t see “free” happening. So what would I pay for that kind of infinite playlist? Since I already subscribe to XM, it’d be nice if it worked like Netflix and I could just get it over the 360 for free, then those that don’t have a satellite receiver able to get it for a small fee. Or, offer a limited channel lineup free with XBL Gold but an expanded lineup for a few bucks a month extra.

So, good idea or bad idea? Hit me up in the comments or vote in the poll.

Chris Johnston Video Games