Headline RePLAY – 4.13.12

Today on Headline RePLAY: A fifth-grader’s wish to share his love of videogames with his blind grandmother, another Capcom misspelling and Keiji Inafune agrees that modern Japanese games “suck.”  


10-year-old Dylan Viale had a dilemma: he loved videogames and wanted to share his passion with his grandmother, except she is blind. Dylan’s solution was to design a video game that could be played by her that he later called Quacky’s Quest.

“[Dylan] wanted to figure out a way that he could share his love of video games with her,” Dino Viale, Dylan’s father told Kotaku. “He thought, ‘How can I create something she can enjoy?”

Dylan tackled the problem by downloading a free version of a game design program called GameMaker, ran through its tutorials, learned design concepts and ultimately created a game about an oddly-shaped duck, a Golden Egg and a dark maze.

Quacky’s Quest’s design was simple and ingenious: navigate through a series of dark mazes with sound cues to signal whether the player is heading in the right direction, the wrong way or just bumping into walls.

“Sound was the greatest tool for [Dylan’s] grandmother to navigate through the game. He had to figure out how to associate each move through the maze with sound cues for whether you were doing something correctly or incorrectly,” said Dino.

After a month of development, Dylan decided to enter Quacky’s Quest into the Hidden Valley Elementary School science fair.

He won first place.

For more on this heartwarming and inspiring story, check out the full article on Kotaku via the source link below.

|Source: Kotaku


Capcom’s inability to spellcheck has struck again, despite its admission on how “embarrassing” it was, this time with a pre-order marketing banner for Resident Evil 6 that spelled ‘mercenaries’ as ‘mercHenaries.’

It was spotted by Twitter user cvxfreak, who has posted a screenshot.  

Capcom was quick to discover the issue and has since then fixed the error.

|Source: @cvxfreak

Recently, Fez creator Phil Fish caused quite a stir when he declared that Japanese games “just suck” at this year’s GDC. Keiji Inafune embraced the criticism and called it a “necessary” message for Japanese developers.

“There was a Canadian guy who appeared in a documentary film and did a Q&A afterwards,” Inafune recalled. “And a Japanese person asked what he thought of Japanese games, and he said he thought they sucked. That’s what’s necessary.

“It’s very severe, but very honest,” Inafune told Wired. “Unless Japanese people feel embarrassed from the experience of getting harsh comments, saying [new games] could have been better is not an opinion they would take seriously.

“When they’re embarrassed and they feel obliged to change, it would make a difference.”

|Source: Wired

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