[Note from Jake: our writing staff expands ever further, with the addition of Alex Metcalf!]
 |
| Extreme Close-Up Courtesy of GamesTM.co/uk |
October 15th of this year marked the 50th birthday of one of the most peculiar and arguably one of the least business-friendly designers in the video game business.
Yoot Saito gained his
reputation when he created Seaman for
the Sega Dreamcast. The game was best described as a pet simulator; your pet
grows, develops, and interaction is much encouraged. The key factor, though, is
that your pet happens to be a mutant talking fish that features a human face
and a weird phallic appendage attached to its forehead. The player interacts
with this creature via a cheesy-looking microphone attachment for the Dreamcast
controller. Seaman has the ability to
recognize spoken words with the microphone—almost any spoken word stimulates a
specific voice-over response from the mutant fish to promote intuitive
interaction. This game was released in 1999, so the technology at the time was
rather impressive.
That premise in itself is
one reason why this game bombed pretty hard in its initial sales in both Japan
and the United States. The other reason was that it was on the Sega
Dreamcast—the only major gaming console since 1998 not to have exceeded a
3-year lifespan. Even though sales seemed demeaning in its early process,
attention for the game roused up gradually, especially in Japan.
 |
| And besides, how can anyone not love a face like this? |
In 2006, the slowest year in the Nintendo GameCube's lifespan, Yoot Saito released his next long-awaited project, Odama, on the system. Odama was a breed of pinball gameplay and tactical wargaming in the setting of Japan in its feudal period. With another silly premise and its release on a dying console, does Yoot Saito carry some case of a fetish for these two aspects?
