Japan is a treasure trove of PC98 games and software of which the only surviving copy might be rotting in a pawn shop right now.
Definitely. Worked with Japanese companies (not gaming industry) a while and it’s quite challenging.
The time difference with central Europe was a big issue. Due to almost no overlap in working time we communicated a lot via email but if there was misunderstanding we had to wait a whole day to try again.
Then the Japanese colleagues tended to be very positive but “yes” often didn’t mean “I agree” or “I understand”, more like “I acknowledge that you said something”. To actually get their approval you had to explicitly check if they agreed and basically quiz them to find out if they understood what was said.
Also a big part of software development is to finding and avoiding bugs. However, they were not very open to it, especially if we called something a bug or potential flaw. That made them lose face to their superiors and they got super defensive and didn’t want to improve anything. Instead we had to call all their stuff amazing and disguise bug reports as suggestions for improvement or feature requests.
In general their approach was quite difficult from ours. We had a few testers that did a lot of exploratory testing and actively tried to break things. We developers thought a lot about potential race conditions and stuff like that.
The Japanese guys had a ton of testers that focussed on the most common use cases.
When we reported e.g. a sequence diagram, logs and a description how to trigger a race condition or a different kind of bug (often requiring a specific timing or uncommon sequences), sometimes with catastrophic consequences, they filed it but didn’t fix it with the (understandable) reason: Our testers performed this use case 10000 times and never triggered it. It’s extremely unlikely to happen in production and we will fix it once a customer reports this problem.
One of my colleagues did a lot of work in Japan in a very niche industry.
They lost their shit one day because he replied to an email without the formal salutations…like rather than Dear Honorable Hiro San, We thank you for your data transfer, and will begin the process of review; He wrote something like Hey Hiro, got your files, and will investigate. Thanks.
It was a big kerfuffle with managers involved on how he could be so rude and disrespectful.
Having worked with Japanese tech companies, it’s kind of fascinating how often a American company is willing to throw millions of dollars to partner up. And if the Japanese company doesn’t feel like it’s a culture fit, they’ll thank you and reject it.
While when it happens in other countries, they bend over backwards for American investments.
This explains why Sony consumer software is terrible
No need to hold your breath for Bloodborne on PC, get yourself over to https://shadps4.net/ and get ready to slay a few beasts. It’s for your own good.
Even better with 0.10.0:
The big new feature this release brings with it is readbacks, which emulates shared memory on the PS4 by reading back memory that was modified on the GPU back to the CPU side, …, fixing vertex explosions in Bloodborne and similar games
Do you know if they ever fixed the enemies disappearing on higher resolutions? Don’t really want to play it in 720p.
Snatcher and Policenauts would be majorly welcome, though I don’t have high hopes being published by Konami.
We can already play both of those on their respective emulators for free.
