We Love Japan
The bad news is that, yet again, we have to halt work on Robotology in order to work on N+. After a couple weeks of DS/PSP level work, we should be able to return to it yet again, for good this time. Hopefully.
The good news is, we went to Japan!
It was fantastic. Japan is a wonderful country filled with amazing things, and the best cell phones we’ve ever seen. Wow that’s futuristic. Curse you, North American cell phone network, which refuses to support other systems!
Tokyo Game Show was inspiring. We met several cool people, including a few from Q? and Nintendo of Japan. Sweet! We were even able to provide people with a chance to try out N+, alongside Everyday Shooter at the hastily prepared Sherpa Games booth at the Canada Games Pavilion. Maybe next year the XBLA version will be ready to show 
We gave a brief presentation about Metanet Software and our games at the Canadian Embassy, which went very well. We had a chance to meet several Japanese business-people, and really enjoyed speaking through a translator.
We tried to see a lot of Tokyo while we were there, and glimpsed many hilarious things on the way. Being in Tokyo was ultimately very inspiring. It’s such a huge city, which we really missed when we returned to the very tiny (comparatively) Toronto. You may already know that when making N levels, we’re often inspired by architecture, much of which can be seen in and around Toronto. We would love to go back, and do a Tokyo-inspired set of N levels; the architecture of Tokyo is especially well-suited to N levels. It was seriously breathtaking.
Arcades are very popular in Japan, and we visited a bunch. It was hard not to! We kept looking for the really strange, eclectic games, but our search was unfortunately fruitless. We did see some cool games, and though we didn’t necessarily understand every game we tried, we had a great time trying them out. Arcades are few and far between here in Toronto, and usually populated by crappy games generally in a state of disrepair, so it was great to hang out at a decent one!
We also visited two video game bars, 8bit and 16shots. These bars are so cool. The atmosphere is amazing — casual yet tangibly artsy, and fiercely reverent of video games and their aesthetics. They had some crazy games, too! We’re tossing around the idea of opening such a place in Toronto (when we’re fantastically rich, of course), but are not sure it would work so well. We brought some N+ stickers and asked if we could leave them for people to pick up, and with the help of Jason, who is awesome, gave out some N+ shirts too. We met a Japanese fan of the original N, which was so cool — we really hope N+ is well-received in Japan. Oh, and thank you to the people at 8bit — we love our shirts!
Tokyo is such a vibrant, disparate city. It’s like nothing else… So busy, and so beautiful. We can’t wait to go back!
October 10th, 2007 at 9:30 pm
haha, I’m going to Japan at the end of this year. We’ll probably just be seeing the ordinary touristy things though..
Who’s that with a bag on his head in that photo? Raigan? What happened there?
October 10th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
yep, that’s Raigan. He’s feeling sick and didn’t really want to be photographed. We both enjoyed how you can still make out his glasses through the blue hat though…
October 11th, 2007 at 9:56 am
Awesome pics. Sounds like you had a great time!
October 11th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Wow, some good pics. Mare is still looking ravishing, Raigan still looking like my hero.
I’m glad you had a good time, and I hope this generated some interest. It can be so easy to get people I know excited about N, hopefully it was the same at the show.
October 15th, 2007 at 6:42 am
Wow, the N+ demo and the presentation look awesome!
… would there be any chance of us maybe being able to download either of these? I know there are tons of people like me who want to try out N+ on a computer (don’t have a DS or anything, you see).
But yeah, keep up the totally awesome looking work, and hopefully make some demos if you’ve got time
Lenny
October 15th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
sorry… the presentation consisted of Mare talking about N+ etc while Raigan demo’d an older PC build of XBLA N+, which is unfortunately not publicly available. We’ll see what we can do for the future, but for now, our hands are tied.
October 22nd, 2007 at 4:32 am
really cool post. i’ve gotta say, im super super excited for N+ to come out.
(especially the psp version, portable N is going to kick serious ass)
anyways.. you guys definitely made me want to go visit japan with this post, so good work. lol! i love how you found architecture that reminded you of N! awesome.
January 16th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
I can’t wait for n+ to come out for psp, I play N game all the time when I am home and I just think it is so addicting! I’m going to get it for psp. Also my birthday is March 23rd so I’ll just get it for the psp then.
October 12th, 2008 at 2:34 am
[...] We are currently in Tokyo for the Tokyo Game Show, which is amazing. You might remember that we love Japan; everything here is [...]