User: Dutch Gun

Hmm... How about some formatting and editing?

On: We Love Katamari Review

Just for fun, I thought I'd see how this article might look with some decent formatting and an editor to clean up the rough edges...

The first Katamari Damashii game featured a song sung by a girl whose name I didn't know at the time; whose name I learned a little later by way of something inconsequential and later forgot completely. She has the charming voice of a petite Japanese girl with two beers in her stomach, singing an anime theme song at karaoke.

Yet the song she's singing, called "Lonely Rolling Star," is no cheesy anime song. When you break down the lyrics, it's kind of sad, given its poppiness. The girl sings away, like grinning and gripping a microphone with two hands. You can almost see her flashy, white, uneven teeth. The same girl sings the theme song for Namco's Japanese-only word puzzle game Mojipittan, and her voice, more than anything else, has become the first thing I think of when I hear the name of that game. "Lonely Rolling Star" was the highlight of Katamari Damashii's soundtrack.

I didn't understand this until toward the end of my playing session, when the lonely depression that game was trying to make the player aware of finally settled in. I realized that, just as this girl singing is young, so is our protagonist, now standing back and looking at the giant ball of chaos he has created and left for dead, wallowing in the middle of an unsympathetic ocean.

The first time I heard the song, I was rolling up paperclips and getting annoyed at mice; I was struck by this girl's immature, nasal singing voice, and how it reminded me of a young Nomiya Maki's early solo song "Usagi to watashi" ("The rabbit and I").

Nomiya Maki later grew up into a striking woman, both professionally and artistically. She married up-and-coming Shibuya-bound freakout DJ Yasuharu "Readymade" Konishi. Yasaharu would later remix the opening march from the film "Son of Godzilla" into what I considered consider to be "music that people will be listening to in fifty years." The two of them became known as the Pizzicato Five, and changed the landscape of Shibuya-kei music.

In the decade plus years she spent with Yasuharu Konishi, Nomiya Maki grew up, and her voice demonstrated a rich range, initially establishing my theorem that any young Japanese girl who sings enough will start to sound like a diva (of course, this theorem would later be disproven by pop star Ayumi Hamasaki, who can't perform live without the help of a very, very large computer).

Crazy how that makes such a difference, eh?

Re:That's a lot of spirit..

On: The Ugly, Dirty Story of Making a Game

Yep. The sad truth is, many small development companies don't have a happy ending like this little tale. I have to admit, a lot of negative feelings got dragged up reading this article. I was part of a small company that went bankrupt trying to pitch our game when our bread-and-butter franchise was canceled. We lasted about a year and a half (we were not funded by a parent company - just individuals). Don't kid yourself about having a great idea and publishers dumping a wheelbarrel full of cash on top of you. It's a brutal industry for small game developers...

Incorrect conclusion re: compiler settings

On: Speculation on Real Reasons Behind Apple Switch

The writer shares a tidbit that OSX is compiled with optimizations tuned for size (as opposed to optimizing for speed). He mistakenly concludes that this is to reduce the size of code bloat. However, on most modern processors, it's measurably more optimal to keep the code small for good cache coherency than to unroll loops and other "speed" increases in legacy C/C++ compilers. I can only speak from my experience in the game development industry (where performance is everything), but we *always* chose the 'optmize for speed' option, pretty much ever since on-board caches became a prevalant feature on Intel and other competitors' chips.