News

[icycalm]

Ollie Barder, aka Cacophanus (who by the way reviewed Soukou Kihei VOTOMS for us a few months back), recently launched a new site devoted to covering mecha-themed games.


http://www.insertcredit.com/archives/002668.html

What with insert credit closing, I recently launched a separate mecha gaming specific news site called Mecha Damashii. The plan is to offer a variety of news, reviews, features and gameplay videos. We've launched with a bunch of content already, so there's plenty to keep you interested if you're mecha inclined.

http://www.mechadamashii.com/?page_id=2

About

Welcome to the wonderful world of mecha gaming, this meagre blog will attempt to be your host through the dazzling and often very confusing splendour of this misrepresented gaming genre. The name of the blog comes from the Japanese word for spirit or “tamashii” (魂), however when this is prefaced with another word the “t” is softened to a “d”, hence “damashii”. Many mecha designers in Japan refer to the spirit a certain mecha can evoke, so the title of the blog was pretty much taken from that. The site is split into four main areas of coverage; news, reviews, videos and features.

Reviews and Tamashii

Each of our reviews finishes off with what at first glance may appear to be a score out of ten. In reality, we mark our games on how close they get to the tamashii/spirit of implementing a functionally coherent interpretation of the mecha mythos. Naturally, this encompasses how well they play as games in their own right but also encapsulates something that other reviews often do not appreciate or understand; the cultural context these games are placed in. The reason for a numerical “score” is that this makes the result more easy to understand and interpret.

Note that there is no "mecha genre" as such (as he states in the first sentence of his post): there is a mecha theme -- the difference is plain simply huge (and I will be covering it extensively in an upcoming article). I am hoping the mistake was a careless slip-up, otherwise some of his reviews may suffer for it...

However that may be, Ollie knows his shit when it comes to the kinds of games he will be covering, and his blog already looks freaking awesome. All the best to him, then, and here's hoping he will allow me to eventually repost some of his reviews here on Insomnia.

[icycalm]

Wow, Ollie's been a busy man recently! I've been pestering him for months to review something, and all he gave me was a single review, and now that he has his own site he's churning them out like blog posts! Nothing like going into business for yourself to boost your productivity, I guess. Only take care, Ollie, as you could burn yourself out on this shit! I know I have -- and not just once. But anyway, so much the better then -- he should have done it sooner. Here's the site's current review index:

http://www.mechadamashii.com/?cat=4


[PS3] Gundam Senki 0081
http://www.mechadamashii.com/?p=239

[PS3] [360] Armored Core For Answer
http://www.mechadamashii.com/?p=355

[PS3] [360] Armored Core 4
http://www.mechadamashii.com/?p=78

[PS2] Armored Core Nexus
http://www.mechadamashii.com/?p=21

[PS2] Macross
http://www.mechadamashii.com/?p=112

[PS2] Tetsujin 28-go
http://www.mechadamashii.com/?p=349

[AC] [PS2] Virtual On Marz
http://www.mechadamashii.com/?p=344

[PS2] Anubis: Zone of the Enders
http://www.mechadamashii.com/?p=339

[PS2] Armored Core 3 Silent Line
http://www.mechadamashii.com/?p=326

[PS2] Armored Core 3
http://www.mechadamashii.com/?p=320

[PS2] Gundam Lost War Chronicles
http://www.mechadamashii.com/?p=103

[PS2] Zeonic Front
http://www.mechadamashii.com/?p=98

[PS2] Another Century's Episode
http://www.mechadamashii.com/?p=88

[PS2] Armored Core 2 Another Age
http://www.mechadamashii.com/?p=336

[PS2] Armored Core 2
http://www.mechadamashii.com/?p=332

[DC] Gundam Rise from the Ashes
http://www.mechadamashii.com/?p=309

[PS2] Soukou Kihei VOTOMS
http://www.mechadamashii.com/?p=227


The VOTOMS one is of course the same we have on this site, and perhaps also some of the others were reviews he wrote years back for NTSC-uk or other places (though I haven't checked to make sure -- perhaps all of them are brand-new, which I would like to be the case since he has improved a lot as a reviewer since those days). In any case, if you have even a passing interest in any of these games, the reviews are all must-read.

P.S. Tip for Ollie: You should change the blog's settings to create URLs like this: "http://www.mechadamashii.com/reviews/soukoukiheivotoms/" instead of stuff like "http://www.mechadamashii.com/?p=227". Your traffic and search engine hits will go up by a factor of 100 -- no kidding. And the same goes for regular blog posts.

[icycalm]

Another suggestion: The ratings should really appear in the index... I do not want to have to click on twenty reviews and scroll to the bottom of twenty pages to see all of the games' ratings -- I want all of them there in front of me so I can take them in at a glance. This will help me decide which reviews to read first -- an unusual rating (say a 1/10 for a game I was under the impression was awesome) will immediately attract my attention, and I will thus be directed straight to those reviews which will interest me and challenge my perceptions the most.

See how Tim does it on Action Button:

http://actionbutton.net/

[Cacophanus]

Thanks for the heads-up on those blogging tips. I've made the changes you suggested. As for the genre thing, I agree but it's one of those things where I have to partially use a misnomer to communicate something valid. It's annoying but I have to pick my topics carefully, as mecha-themed games are deeply misunderstood as it is.

Apologies for reposting the VOTOMS review though, I should have asked really. It's just the site launched pretty quickly. I hope you don't mind?

As for the remaining content, a lot of it is reprinted from older stuff I've done (though I've edited a few and will continue to do so over the coming week, more for further clarity than anything else).

I do plan on doing more reviews for Insomnia, as there are plenty of games to cover obviously.

[icycalm]

First off, there was of course no need to ask me permission to use your own review in your own blog. Nor do I want any Insomnia-exclusive reviews in the future -- you have your own site, so just post everything there from now on (except of course if the game is not mecha-themed...) What I would like is, every now and then (perhaps once a month or so), to be allowed to repost here one of your older reviews (with a link back to your site, of course). I mean, look at this:

http://insomnia.ac/reviews/playstation2 ... heivotoms/
http://www.mechadamashii.com/reviews/re ... ei-votoms/

Which page looks better?

Or this:

http://insomnia.ac/reviews/cpsystemii/marsmatrix/
http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=26270

Or this:

http://insomnia.ac/reviews/ds/gamecentercx/
http://lasergun.wordpress.com/2009/03/1 ... housenjou/

I really hate the blog and forum layouts most people are forced to use in order to get their reviews published. They are cheap and ugly, and a far cry from what we used to get from proper magazine reviews when we were younger. My layout is not exactly a substitute for a proper magazine layout, but it's certainly a big step up from what blogs and forums can provide. I spent a lot of time creating and fine-tuning it (by hand, line by line, in Notepad...) and, now that I have it exactly how I want it, I would like to be able to enjoy reading my favorite reviews in this format. Do not forget the aesthetic enjoyment a videogame review should also provide! -- just look at Famitsu's pages... That is one of the reasons I contact all these people, each of whom have their own blogs or forums, and ask permission to repost their stuff. The other reason is because of the synergistic effects of this policy -- Insomnia is now far more popular than any single of the contributing blogs (or even all of them put together, for that matter), and they are all more well-known than they would have been without Insomnia's help -- and the reason for this is partly because of this policy.

So do your thing, enjoy your cool new blog, and think through what I am saying to you. If you ever decide to allow me to repost some of your stuff, just let me know.