The cream tea

..Heres the next bit of poke-ken’s tireless interview with Phil Mein....

To get a better taste of how Crony is making up Suxlikethesis would be down the local Dixons. This is where a dozen or so programming has-beens reside. There is not a game demo in sight-this is as Phil Mein is at pains to point out, purely a mass media attraction centre. This is where coders are given freedom to push the Play Stay 2 in seemingly pointless directions, so long as the end result is capable of making bystanders coo pathetically for no game related reason. The team’s backgrounds are as sad as their wardrobes, ranging from ex-mortal Kombat programmers to one whom has a CV, which boasts CGI work on Tron. (The movie, not the game - Phil mein reminds us at this point that it’s all about graphics, not gameplay)

Phil Mein believes that few other pure graphic enhancement only labs exist in the world. The unit, which has been assembled after Crony could not expand on the original Play Stay’s mass media factor, offers up the kind of management created atmosphere that sends him (Phil), spinning off into new realms of lies and bollocks.

Phil Mein: Other examples of Suxlikethesis would be in a game that uses natural environments. The human brain through the eyes (not the third), is good at recognising repetition patterns and as every gamer knows, identical trees and bushes spoils every game. I mean just look at Sega Rally 1, when I saw that all the trees looked the same, I threw the game away!!!!! Also, even though game development time is generally being shortened, I would like trees and so on being created via complex algorithms instead of simple scanning. It’s just adds sooooo much more to a game, doesn’t?

Poke-ken: ...hmmm[thinks to himself that P.H. seems like a hot poker up the arse loving person]....But if the bricks in a dungeon are being generated in this fashion, does this not mean that if you leave a location and then return to it, then the bricks are going to look different than they did before?

Phil Mein: I don’t understand what you mean, but does it make any difference to the gaming experience?.... wait abit [mutters to george] ...ic...never mind about that, next question. Poke-ken: so the "seed" stays the same?

Phil Mein: .....ehhhhh??? ..My semen????... ?????

Poke-ken: Sky???

Phil Mein: ???... [Looks as confused as an American watching an EP of Monty Python].... You mean the sky in games??? Did you see the flock of birds in Ridge Racer 5?!!! That blew me away! It maade the game!!!! So that’s basically what Suxlikethesis is about, adding superfluous details to con the punters into parting their cash, Wicked or what!

Poke-ken: How does the emotionally depressed engine tie in with this?

Phil Mein: The emotionally depressed engine is Suxlikethesis!- that’s what it is, but don’t say that to it openly or it gets emotional and violent. Ken K. san got bitten in the testicles when he said that his original Play Stay was powerful. Its ability to elicit an emotional reaction from the player is based upon being totally incompetent in delivering a gaming experience, because we’re not talking about games here, but an entertainment experience. I’ll show you some stuff, which is certainly not based on games, but the emotionally depressed engine has the ability to imbue a product with the hooks that allow it to sell millions of copies. Therefore moving toward the movies and books industry and further away from the gaming industry.

Poke-ken: Can you elaborate?

Phil Mein: Well, as we are moving towards the movie industry, we are trying to put an emotive plot and storyline into our products. We are not going to figure it out tomorrow or even in the near future. [poke-ken interrupts - ...what were FF7/8 then? Dog Shit?...]... Well yes dog shit, but also those 2 products still had abit of gameplay, which we are trying to get away from.... [Phil touches his ears nervously] televisions?? Did I hear you say televisions??? Yes you did!! Anyway remind to link the Play Stay 2 back to it after ok!

Poke-ken: Aren’t you slightly concerned that there are still many developers out there who appear to struggle with the transmogrification model, let alone asking to work on the Suxlikethesis-driven games?

Phil Mein: No I’m not, even if no one gets it, we will pretend that it has been used. I think that there are 2 interesting parallels in what what happened in 1994, when Play Stay came out, and the present. Within 1 month of the 1994 launch, we said that we had jumped from 2D to 3D successfully, even though we were only producing pseudo 3D games. To be honest, the original Play Stay never really made it (a true 3D game). As every management/PR person knows, we perfected the idea that even if a game should never have been made in 3D, adding those letters 3D to the end of the title meant an awful lot from a marketing point of view. With the Play Stay 2, we haven’t changed the rule set so fundamentally. Everything is still about trying to jump from 2D to 3D. I think we shall call this improvement an evolution, or even the frothing masses will be able to see that we have not improved that much over other platforms.

Poke-ken: There’s no getting away from the fact that the Play Stay 2 had probably the best prelaunch hype of any console, and then the games appeared and there was a sense of disappointment. Maybe it was more of a subtle upgrade than the revolution the revolution that some expected.

Phil Mein: Yes, but I think you’ll see it happen [taps on the fancy graph], in about 8 years time. This means that what we’ve seen on the Play Stay 2 so far, is as good as it gets. Also, I think that there are a few things that are going to start happening in the next few months with regard to well... more jagged edges.....

..Next time read Phil Mein totally side step the jagged edge issue.