“I felt this anger against the entire industry. You’re all just making the same old shit”.
“What are you talking about? Are you trying to insinuate that I flooded a hotel room? That’s outrageous!” bellows Hifumi Kouno, in pseudo-offence that gives way to raucous laughter which infects everyone in the room. We’re at the Nude Maker office in Tokyo, interviewing the likeable rogue responsible for Steel Battalion on Xbox. A couple of weeks earlier, we’d interviewed the game’s script translator, Shinsaku Ohara, who had told us about this alleged hotel incident. We’ll get into that, but first: what was Steel Battalion?
It was an experiment as brazen as the hardware it came on. Microsoft’s Xbox launched in the US in November 2001, while Steel Battalion arrived less than a year later, hitting Japan in September 2002 under its original name of Tekki. Microsoft was an unlikely newcomer to the console war, offering up what was basically a consolised PC in a box; the multiformat press was sceptical pre-launch. It was a hulking ribbed behemoth, and it was powerful. An advert for Alienware computers from 2001 helps contextualise things – Xbox’s third-generation Nvidia graphics card was comparable to the more expensive PC builds, and while its SDRAM was less than any of them, all it had to do was play games, not multitask. Sure, you could technically build a more powerful PC, but for $300, the Xbox was considerably cheaper.
Read the full article on timeextension.com
“I felt this anger against the entire industry. You’re all just making the same old shit”.
“What are you talking about? Are you trying to insinuate that I flooded a hotel room? That’s outrageous!” bellows Hifumi Kouno, in pseudo-offence that gives way to raucous laughter which infects everyone in the room. We’re at the Nude Maker office in Tokyo, interviewing the likeable rogue responsible for Steel Battalion on Xbox. A couple of weeks earlier, we’d interviewed the game’s script translator, Shinsaku Ohara, who had told us about this alleged hotel incident. We’ll get into that, but first: what was Steel Battalion?
It was an experiment as brazen as the hardware it came on. Microsoft’s Xbox launched in the US in November 2001, while Steel Battalion arrived less than a year later, hitting Japan in September 2002 under its original name of Tekki. Microsoft was an unlikely newcomer to the console war, offering up what was basically a consolised PC in a box; the multiformat press was sceptical pre-launch. It was a hulking ribbed behemoth, and it was powerful. An advert for Alienware computers from 2001 helps contextualise things – Xbox’s third-generation Nvidia graphics card was comparable to the more expensive PC builds, and while its SDRAM was less than any of them, all it had to do was play games, not multitask. Sure, you could technically build a more powerful PC, but for $300, the Xbox was considerably cheaper.
Read the full article on timeextension.com
