High/Low Monday

The low point:

Nacho Libre was no Napoleon Dynamite.

The high point: (Or relatively high, since it wasn’t THAT big a deal)

Being sat down at a table with some game coders and being introduced as “The Creators of the comic.”

Things at GameAxis were quite, but pleasant. The Editor proper is back from his trip to Norway, meaning that the Geek Index just climbed back to its normal point-of-thermometer-bursting levels. After that it was off to the publishers of the kiddie comic to discuss some plans they have for turning said comic into a small promotional game. Fortunately I didn’t have to do much other than encapsulate the comic in gamer terms for the coders. The comic still is floating in Name Limbo but I guess that will sort itself out eventually one way or the other, since the kid magazine running it wants it for their September issue, so they can’t afford to vacillate on it much.

More Comics Written

Part 6, of the now Name-In-Transition kiddie comic in the can, more of Nowhere actually written. I now have the feeling that this thing is NOT going to come in under 50 pages. Oh well…

The Progress Report

The quick n’ dirty job for an advertising firm; done.

The children’s comic; part five has been finished and part 6 has been started, meaning that I’m officially cruising into the half-way mark with it. It’s also suddenly subject to a name change, so even if I could talk about it by name (Which I can’t just yet) I don’t even know what to call it anymore. Apparently the reason the name change has suddenly come up is because it occurred to someone over at the publishers that there may be pronunciation problems for those young, undeveloped palettes that are targetted to read it.

I don’t know if this is particular to Singapore alone or if this is just a general, generic management problem, but it’s becoming abundantly clear to me that the people who are charge of making creative decisions in Singapore are, creatively, idiots.

Or at the very least, they simply do not pay any attention, nor show an interest in a product being developed for them until they are SURE that the development of said product has passed the point of no return. It’s like they mark on their production calendar the date that changes or corrections can no longer be easily made with little fuss, but are now guaranteed to be painful and potentially damaging to the project’s final outcome.

It’s not just this kiddie comic that has had me thinking this, I’ve been exposed to some other horror stories of late that have merely confirmed this theory. Like whileI found out that the show I wrote for last year while getting married, 9 Lives apparently sort crashed and burned towards the end and that was because at some point in the middle of EDITING, the broadcasters suddenly decided that it was a bad idea to have smoking appear in a local television program and so asked that all footage containing people smoking be removed. NO EXCEPTIONS.

Unfortunately since one particular episode had a main character suffer through his crisis by nervously chain smoking, so this move more or less gutted the entire episode of its “A story” which meant that the last minute edit job of cannibalizing other shots that didn’t show cigarettes rendered the episode incomprehensible. There are other stories of course, but the upshot of it is, people that commission creative projects in Singapore have a bad, bad, BAD habit of saying yes to something, letting the creative types go to town on it, and THEN change their mind only at the 3/4 mark when they can inflict maximum damage on the project. I’ve heard the mournful question again and again over the years from writers, artists, actors, you name it, but always a variation on the same theme, “Why… WHY did they say yes to it when they didn’t like it in the FIRST PLACE??!”

I guess this is their revenge on creative people for being able to do something they can’t, or something, but I keep seeing this again, and again…

Selling Out

I guess in one sense today officially qualifies as the day I sold out.

It was an otherwise mundane day with the only major activity being me going down to the production house to attend one of those pre-production meetings where everyone sits down and talks about how the show is going to go, and of course, the reality is it won’t be anything like that. But meetings make people feel good, so I can see the psychological advantage of them. The other thing was going down a street right beside my old digs from four years back, and finding out said street had turned into an informal artists’ colony of sorts, with sculptors, potters, animators, photographers and painters all buying up or renting property in the area for some strange confluence of circumstance that only they understand.

However the selling out moment came when the Wife got a phone call asking her to come down for a meeting about the children’s comic we’re working on. It turns out that for whatever reason, the publisher has decided to go ahead start cashing in on merchandising so a meeting has been set up with some coders/developers to start talking about designing a game.

So yeah, a comic I am writing is now being turned into a video game.

Of course, the reality is, it’s a cheesy kid’s comic that will never be seen outside of Singapore, and the game itself is likely going to be either some on-the-cheap flash game for a website or else a really crude, half-baked 2D arcade-mechanics-from-the-80′s affair on a CD-ROM maybe given away as a promotional item.

Still, never thought I’d see the day when something I wrote was turned into a game.

And before you even think to ask, NO, the publishers own all the rights, so we don’t see a dime of this. But then that’s Singapore for you. Creative people here are resources and little else.

Portable Media Whore

Didn’t much of anything today; an aborted weekly game of Monster Hunter Freedom in multi-player was balanced off by some last minute work for a rush job that someone wanted, and so while I spent my time typing away at the keyboard, I took advantage of the desk jockey time to abuse my latest purchase; I finally got a 1 Gig memory stick duo for my PSP.

So while I’m coming pretty late to this particular party, the 1 Gig now frees me to seriously abuse the storage space of my PSP and consequently vast amounts of pointless video and music have made their way to my little black brick. I now have the first episode of the poorly animated Jim Lee’s WildCATs sitting in my videos, along with an episode of Speed Racer some cheesy free music videos available on the PSP site, and a bunch of video game music from some of my faovrite RPGs like Suikoden III and Kingdom Hearts. At some point I’ll have to get around to putting some actual MUSIC on there, like Tori Amos and Sarah MacLachlan, but in the meantime, I have officially graduated to one of those annoying people who brings a complete, portable media system that allows me to watch videos, listen to tune-age or actually play games. Of course, the cool part is, The Wife being an artist, she makes me custom wallpaper for my PSP desktop that no one else has. May not seem like much but in Limited Collector Edition Rarity Is Good Singapore, this is a sign of Xtreme 133tne55.

Oh, and earlier today I was told that the BBC story has already been run, meaning that now the hardest of the hardcore geeks will call me out for being an ignorant bastard; I blame the fact that I didn’t know I was going to be interviewed and thus had little time to think about it, but in fact, it’s NOT TRUE that the PS3 will be the most expensive console ever produced. That honor goes to Trip Hawkin’s 3DO, the first true CD-ROM console which debuted in 1993 for the astounding price of $699 American. A close second is the SNK Neo-Geo (Which, to be fair, was basically an arcade machine gutted into a plastic case) which sold for $649 American in 1990.

Aunty Beeb Ropes Me In

For those of you that do not have a constant and almost psychotic admiration for all things British constantly surrounding you because you don’t live on a tropical island the British failed to protect during WWII (Thus somehow earning the eternal loyalty and envy of said island’s residents, to the point where they desperately wish they were British and even try to fake the accent, something to this day I STILL don’t understand), “Aunty Beeb” is a term of endearment those whacky British use to refer to the BBC, better known as the British Broacasting Corporation.

Having missed out on my Editor getting skewered for TV as a result of yesterday’s encounter with Saurophobia, imagine my surprise when the same editor said “BBC is coming in today at three, but I’ll be out at a meeting, try and keep them occupied until I get back.”

This, I figured, I could do.

However, a little later, he dug out the Playstation 2 and cables and asked me to hook the thing up to the LCD widescreen sitting on the gaming table. He also said we needed a two-player game to show on it. When I asked why, he said, “Because they need to shoot a couple of people playing games.”

Unfortunately, the only two player game we had that could run on the PS2 was the ancient Metal Slug (By ancient, I mean it was a side-scrolling 2D shooter in the same vein as Contra, and not looking much prettier) and so we had to make do with that. It’s at this point that I the first alarm bells started ringing and I asked, “Okay, so if they need two people, then you’re playing and who else?”

Of course, it was me.

I sighed, but I figured what the hell, it’s only B-Roll, it’s not like it counts for anything. However, because the alarm bells would not stop ringing, I went up to him later and asked, point blank, “Okay, so YOU as editor, that is to say, the face of the magazine who should do all PR stuff are talking, right? YOU. ME, as a writer, who is just a faceless cog in the machine and supposed to be a piece of background stay out of this, right? I don’t have to say anything?”

And he just grinned and said something to the effect of “We’ll just do whatever we have to.”

So of course at that moment I pretty knew I was screwed.

When the BBC people did arrive, I sat down with one of the interns and we played the archaic Metal Slug for the camera. However, when the interviewer, some Chinese chick with an American accent (Though I’m still not sure whether it was legit or not) asked “Who will I be interviewing?”

My editor of course pointed at me, and said, “Him.”

To which I replied, “WHAT? SINCE WHEN?!?”

And he just did one of those pish-posh motions with his hand as if I’d said “I’m not sure I want to eat this candy,” as opposed to “I’m not sure I WANT TO BE INTERVIEWED BY THE FUCKING BBC…”

However the deed was done, and so I got suited up with the clip mike, sat down on a stool so as to prevent nervous fidgeting and then asked a bunch of questions (I can already see the BBC titles now when my image pops up; under my name it’ll read “Game Journalist”) about my opinion on the Playstation 3 and whether they will continue to dominate the console industry the way they have the last 2 generations.

Of course, I talked too much, and she frequently had to ask me not to give Tolstoy-esque analyses and keep it to 20 second soundbites, so after a half-hour of interviewing me, I’m pretty sure the only she’ll go with is one of my final soundbites where I said, “Basically Nintendo and Microsoft have positioned themselves as Toyota and BMW. Sony has become Ferrari or Porsche, strictly for aficianados and connoiseurs who don’t care about price.”

I was also told I can probably be expected to be contacted again in November to get an “industry expert’s post-launch analysis” of the Playstation 3 after it comes out.

Which will be a problem since I won’t be able to freakin’ AFFORD a PS3 for at least 6 months to a year, so I dunno how they expect me to speak knowledgeably about it when I probably won’t actually touch one ’till 2008…

Saurophobia

Probably better recognized by more colloqiual “Lizard-O-Phobia”.

I was actually looking forward to watching my editor get skewered today on TV. A local station that’s been promoting cartoons called Animax had decided to do a program concentrating what is undoubtedly a segment of their viewer population, gamers. Since there are only three gaming magazines in Singapore and only two of those are actually legitimate, GameAxis was selected to front the “Gaming Journalism” in Singapore section.

Unfortunatley I got a call from the Wife, in hysterics because one of the cats, Uno had finally given into her baser instincts and was toying with a very tiny lizard. The Wife is pretty much almost text book phobic when it comes to lizards, especially small ones. So watching our cat bat around a baby lizard, but refuse to eat it, then toss it around in the air some more in some sadistic game drove the Wife to the bed (Uno was doing all this at the bedroom door) and kept her there where she couldn’t move.

I got the call just as the TV people were arriving (strangely enough, they’re with the same company that’s hiring me on for the new TV series project) and was playing host while my editor arrived from whatever meeting/schmooze thing it is that editors do that I am thankful I don’t have to do. The Wife was more or less screaming and crying and it was pretty hard to actually understand what she was saying at first, but once I got it, I waited until the editor arrived and then told him that I needed to go home, which he let me do.

Upon arriving home I saw the following things. 1) Tiny dead lizard at the entry to the bedroom, almost entirely intact, only a bit of tail missing. 2) Uno the cat sitting a short distance away from said dead lizard, alternately staring at it, then me, as if to say “I BRING YOU THIS OFFERING, MIGHTY ONE, PLEASE ACCEPT YOUR HUMBLE SERVANT’S PITIFUL SACRIFICE FOR THE BOUNTIES YOU HAVE BESTOWED UPON ME!” 3) The Wife, in upright foetal position, hugging onto a pillow.

Oh well, so much for a quiet day…

Available

So it turns out that the TV show is on after all. I’m definitely not at liberty to talk about it now that I’m officially signed on, but I can say it’s not drama, it’s another documentary/Reality-TV type show. After I told them that I wouldn’t be able to do any ground/field work I guess they discussed it amongst themselves and decided to get someone else to actually do that.

I got a call this afternoon asking if I’d still be interested in writing if the research aspect weren’t my jurisidiction and since that was really the only barrier stopping me, I said “Yes.” I guess it’s nice that they actually went out of their way to see if I could write for them, but then I suspect that it’s a matter of A) They had no one else available and B) Of the people potentially available, they might have been untried, unknown variables. Since I’ve worked with them satisfactorily over the years, I guess they must have decided that since they know I can write and do it reasonably fast, at least by hiring me on this, they’d have Peace Of Mind Insurance in that they could tell themselves “at least we don’t have to worry about the writing now.

So. I am on. Whee, free bonus money. Maybe I can put this towards a vacation or a Wii…

Sunday, Boring Sunday

All I did was write comics, scripts, hang out with the Wife, play Monster Hunter Freedom and, for whatever reason, get seized with an inexplicable urge to watch Kung Pow again.

Geek Giddiness

So Peter Cullen has been announced as the voice actor for Optimus Prime in the new live action Transformers movie coming out next year.

This is a big deal for me–and other geeks, I’m sure–as this was THE SAME GOD DAMNED GUY THAT VOICED OPTIMUS PRIME ORIGINALLY!

Whoo. One shall stand, one shall fall. You’ve got the touch. You’ve got the POW-WEEEEEEEER.

[Cue wailing guitar]