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Three asides, two on Threes
Apr. 6th, 2014 01:00 am- I'm playing an online clone of Threes, having gotten up only to 512, and I have to say that while it's compelling, the game of which it reminds me most is, weirdly, Secret of the Magic Crystal. It's basically about slogging through a pyramid of successive generations to get to the one uberspecimen at the end, mentally calculating how many pairs of level 1 horses/2 cards you're going to have to pair up to produce the one stallion/four-digit card you actually want. Except in Threes you can't save, and one slip-up can mean the loss of all your work. It's a mostly all right puzzle game, but it's got a lot of drudgery at the higher levels.
- I found the link to that game in a Giant Bomb article condemning the preponderance of clones of popular mobile offerings in the iPhone market, which really seems to be a futile enterprise. (Granted, the disclaimer at the end of the article indicates that the author was motivated primarily by wanting to do an office mate a solid, but still.) Look, certain markets have certain hazards - the difficulty third parties frequently encounter in making titles for modern Nintendo consoles, for example. The smartphone market attracts a lot of, well, low-information gamers. If you wanna go after the sweet smartphone money, you're gonna have to accommodate the fact that you're dealing with a market that is in great part easily duped.
- On a work note: The hardest material to translate is stuff that is carefully crafted to mean nothing at all. When I'm translating game manga or whatnot, it's easy for me to get hung up on the technobabble - nonsense calculated to provide a bridge to a certain conclusion, but still nonsense. You have to follow and reconstruct an argument that makes no actual sense, and you're devoid of a point of reference; you can't say, look up how a technobabble machine and its internal processes would work in real life, because they don't exist in real life.
The business equivalent of this is management-speak. I'm working on promo text that is just a cavalcade of optimization of quality-control best-practice improvements, turning back on itself and devouring its own tail in its doublespeak bloat, all the while communicating so very, very little. It's so hard to make anything approaching coherent text out of it.
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- I found the link to that game in a Giant Bomb article condemning the preponderance of clones of popular mobile offerings in the iPhone market, which really seems to be a futile enterprise. (Granted, the disclaimer at the end of the article indicates that the author was motivated primarily by wanting to do an office mate a solid, but still.) Look, certain markets have certain hazards - the difficulty third parties frequently encounter in making titles for modern Nintendo consoles, for example. The smartphone market attracts a lot of, well, low-information gamers. If you wanna go after the sweet smartphone money, you're gonna have to accommodate the fact that you're dealing with a market that is in great part easily duped.
- On a work note: The hardest material to translate is stuff that is carefully crafted to mean nothing at all. When I'm translating game manga or whatnot, it's easy for me to get hung up on the technobabble - nonsense calculated to provide a bridge to a certain conclusion, but still nonsense. You have to follow and reconstruct an argument that makes no actual sense, and you're devoid of a point of reference; you can't say, look up how a technobabble machine and its internal processes would work in real life, because they don't exist in real life.
The business equivalent of this is management-speak. I'm working on promo text that is just a cavalcade of optimization of quality-control best-practice improvements, turning back on itself and devouring its own tail in its doublespeak bloat, all the while communicating so very, very little. It's so hard to make anything approaching coherent text out of it.
.
