General Arcade and Retro Chat - Insert Coin -

So been reading through a few videogame books.

First up was 'The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers' which was kind of disappointing.

The writing is quite dry, it's really just transcriptions of interviews the author carried out with no real structure to it. The author also doesn't really ask great questions. He is obsessed with finding out about unfinished games which usually leads to disappointing answers. Most interviewees have bad recollections or are afraid of non disclosure agreements. There's also a lot of banal chatter left in the transcriptions, like talking about what food and drink they are having. Considering the size of the book this could be cut down. There's a good few pages devoted to what is coming up in the next volume of the series, a lot of it seems really interesting but I can read that when I get the next volume.

One massive disappointment is all the talk about the Yakuza being involved. There's tonnes of talk of this but it's all redacted by the speaker, the only exception being from the two nut jobs from Westone talking about how the programmer stood up to the Yakuza by sitting in an office with them and refusing to buy their overpriced calendars (basically the protection money) for nearly an entire day until they gave up. Volume 2 has a section dedicated to Zainsoft, a software development house notorious for being a front for the Yakuza and who used to beat their employees so hopefully this gets more exposure there.

Another annoyance is a huge part of the book is dedicated to individuals who preserve old videogames and while interesting and they do great work at their own expense there is just way too much of it especially considering the book's title says 'Game Developers'.

Still it's got some good stories and information it's just desperately in need of an editor and the transcribed interview format does it no favours. I'll pick up the second volume since some of the developers seem interesting with a lot of Squaresoft and Chunsoft employees. It mainly focuses on Japanese home computers.

Next was Hardcore Gaming 101: Sega Arcade Classics Vol. 1. It doesn't cover all Sega arcade games but the series that it does cover are covered in near exhaustive detail, even the home computer ports are touched on. As usual for HG101 articles it goes into exhaustive detail and the presentation is gorgeous with tonnes of full colour screenshots.

The next is Hardcore Gaming 101: Guide to Classic Graphic Adventures which I'm currently reading and it's an absolute beast of a book. The paper quality isn't as good as the arcade one and it's in black and white but it just covers so many games it's almost exhaustive. There's a hell of a lot of reading here for the price and it covers not just the popular ones but also some very obscure ones as well.

o1s1n wrote: »

I really didn't think very highly of The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers either. The ideas were there but as you said, it desperately needed a decent editor. The whole thing felt extremely amateurishly put together.

I felt it was worth the read myself since I was interested in some of the information that was in it but couldn't really recommend it and you do have to trawl through a lot of nonsense to get to the good stuff... which might be redacted.

I did like them talking about Victor Ireland, the man seems like a nutter

I really want to read 'I am Error' which is about the internal workings of the NES and all the graphical tricks programmers used to make games look better. The author wrote 'Racing the Beam' which was the same deal with the Atari 2600 and I thought it was excellent.