There comes a time in the week to reflect on what got into my reporter's notebook but didn't turn into Kotaku blog posts. Shall we?
I have written all but one of the Tokyo Game Show posts I still needed to get to this week. I've had little time to report on much else. So, today, on the even of the many October New York City visits from many of gaming's biggest companies, I don't have much left in my notebook.
Here are some leftovers:
The Best Thing I Saw In Tokyo: Witness the magic in the YouTube clip above. In a toy store that Crecente, McWhertor and I visited before the start of TGS, I took many pictures of Pokemon. And then, upstairs, I found this five-minute video of Aero Spider, a toy car that drives up walls and on the ceiling. Stupendous!
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Hollywood Secrets: At TGS I covered a panel featuring top executives at Japanese gaming companies. I filed a story right as the event ended, focusing on Square-Enix chief Yoichi Wada's comments about the next gaming breakthrough involving billing. There were a bunch of asides during the panel I didn't take a lot of notes on, because they didn't seem to be newsworthy. But maybe they'd be good for a Notebook Dump?
One such statement — it may have come from Kazumi Kitaue, head of Konami Digital Entertainment — covered the accessibility of American movies. The gentleman who said this explained that, while living in the U.S., he'd realized that there are many non-English speaking people in the country who can nevertheless enjoy going to the movies.
Why?
Because Hollywood "makes entertaining films you can enjoy without even needing to speak the language." I thought this was an odd analysis, even though I understood where he said he was going with it: "To succeed globally we need to look at action games and sports games and games that can be understood globally."
(On my flight home, I watched part of the newest Fast and Furious with the sound off as I transcribed interviews I had recorded. )
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Leaving With High Hopes: I usually end my interviews by asking my interviewees if there is anything else they want to tell Kotaku. Sometimes I get good stuff out of that, but I primarily ask it to make sure the person I've been interviewing feels they've been able to express whatever they wanted to get across in the interview. Often, the responses to the question repeat things we've discussed or sum things up about a new game in the most PR-friendly way.
And sometimes, as was the case with Level 5's Yoshiaki Kusuda who discussed the 2008-in-Japan and 2010-in-the-U.S. White Knight Chronicles with me, the response is one of apology and hope: "We are so sorry that we have been keeping it from users for so much time, international users who have been looking forward to it. But over the past months we have worked very hard to incorporate all of the feedback the Japanese users gave us since the release of it in the market and we have also worked to incorporate all the requests from the U.S. users. We hope we can deliver the title.. I would like to ask for a little more patience."
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That's all I've got for the ND this week. One more semi-TGS-related piece coming next week, plus my monthly Nintendo stats report and hopefully some hands-on with games I think people will care about. Enjoy the weekend, everyone.