Last Fri. evening, I passed by the Plaza Singapura Open Plaza.  There was a stage, complete with high resolution screen & rock band set-up, eloquent emcee & a scattered group of audience? It was only upon the emcee mentioning that I realized there’s a Guitar Hero competition preliminary round going on.
Guitar Hero?! How come no one is the office is mentioning it? Most of my colleagues and suppliers are fanatics, even the boss himself. How come turnout is so low? Strange… It’s Guitar Hero!
So out of curiosity, I did a search online using “guitar hero contest at plaza singapura”. Surprisingly, there wasn’t any official site on this. Quite an rare occurrence these days…

The most direct link was http://www.breathe.sg/happeningsdetail.aspx?id=476 where the event details were listed. Only then I realized the event was part of the continuous effort by the Health Promotion Board (HPB) to discourage smoking.  I popped over the HPB’s website and was surprised to see that nothing on the road show was mentioned.
The rest were merely links to blogs that briefly mentioned about the event. Another search with the event title, “Rockin’ Without Smokin’ doesn’t generate much difference in results. More question marks….
When I saw the poster on breathe.sg, it just dawned to me I’ve seen its bus stop billboard several times a day at different locations but I was totally clueless what it was all about because it is always blocked by people standing in front of it or the rubbish bins.

What a waste, really…
Creative are fantastic! The contest idea is good, theme was cool & relating; tagline was appropriate and great “Live it up without lighting up” and poster design was good, etc.
Assuming if they had create a micro site focusing on the competition off the HPB website, ping the link on the 500++ Guitar Hero fan page on face book ….( I don’t know… but they ought to be some Singapore –based folks somehow right?), online forums (there’s a guitar hero thread on sgclub) or  ping it on the tag box on gaming bloggers, etc…  At least it’s more targeted and costs lower than billboards I guess?!
Unless the organizers are betting on the weekend crowds & the fan base of the celebrities (think they cost more than building website? Shrugz) to hype-up the day of the competition finals? Nothing wrong actually. Everyone can be the target audience of a nation-wide health education program. I’m just sadden by the fact that such a good idea was unable to shine as much as it could potentially could.

On another note, the hassle of the pre-registration process could be another reason for the low turnout.  People like conveniences. Given a choice, I would rather
1.    type, type, click, click in the various fields and

2.    submit online (connect to singpass if necessary

(This can be easily integrated into a micro site using simple CMS or Googledocs)

Rather than
1.    downloading a word.doc,
2.    fill it up when trying hard not to shift the alignment
3.    then realized I need to sign on it,
4.    scan it,
5.    attach in email back to the HPB officers…… and probably received a email from the officer saying “Hi, you forgot to attach.” Urghs …
Unless I’m really desperate to win that $500/- cash, chances are I won’t re-attach. (I’m generally a patient person).

For some others, they never see that email because 90% of the time is spent is trying to clear the advanced level on Guitar Hero.  LOL
My point is: It IS possible to attract the right people to go down for your road show. Our favorite French intern joined some french-in-singapore group page in face book, the committee will arrange parties & send invites via face book. RSVP back the same channel & the response & turnout rate is ALWAYS fantastic.
As I’m churning this article on the Sunday at an isolated corner of this sunny island, I won’t be able to know how’s the turnout rate is going to be like.  Though I’m seriously curious to know.
Anyone who managed to catch the contest finals this evening at Plaza Singapura, tell me how it went =)

As broadcasted and boasted about, I have decided to pen my thoughts on the recent Distant World concert I have so much looked forward to and enjoyed over the weekend.

This is not so much a review, but rather, an observation I made during the concert itself.

The concert started with an impactful and resounding piece from FF8 called Liberi Fatali, accompanied by a whole choir and a huge screen displaying the beautiful opening sequences from the game itself. 

It later showed a stark contrast when the FFI-III Medley was played, alongside the 16 bit graphics.

The immediate reaction from the audience was laughter. It figures that it was not because the music played was funny, especially when you are playing something as serious as Dear Friends (FFVI), or the sadder parts in FFI-III Medley. It was more of because the graphics looked ludicrous amongst all the graphics we have seen from FF thus far. When FF7 was released, it was a revolutionary step up in graphics, and was considered one of the best games at that time. Looking at it now, Aerith dying in her cute, pixelated form seems unreal and almost funny. i remembered there was not even a drop of blood spilled as Sephiroth struck her.

In contrast, when Zack died later on in Crisis Core, there was a lot more blood and you feel almost sorry for Cloud who had to keep watching people die.

But of cos, my point is not that you should feel sorry only because the person appears to be much lifelike and beautiful later on, but there is only so much emotions we can invoke with 16 bit characters. I can only draw the reference for the former as using a knife to stab your stuffed dolls and the later as a katana through a real person.

This is the same as how we draw attention with the relevant graphics nowadays. Whether in games, movies, websites or just pictures, how you target your audience highly depends on the nature of graphics used. Like how technology rapidly evolves nowadays, users are no longer satisfied with worded websites, or even static images. We want dynamism, realism and relativism. That, of cos, applies many other marketing techniques nowadays.

Ultimately, it is a question of whether you want to remain in the 16 bit era, or continue to improve. However, I believe that while we embrace the newer technologies, we must still not forget the old. You never know when 16 bit graphics may actually help in your concept one day.

I received an interesting link the other day about video games. Though it’s pretty simple, but I think it pretty much sums up the target audience for each gaming platform. The diagram is also making fun of PC gamers in the sense that PC gamers are more commonly attributed to be hardcore gamers. But that itself is a point for contention which I will not expound on.

I’m not sure if the respective platform owners came up with the concept for their platforms with this diagram in mind but out of all the 3 console platforms, Wii has definitely defined itself very well as the casual/family oriented platform. PS3 and Xbox360 are still wavering between catering to hardcore and casual gamers, though Xbox360 stands out in terms of community activities. Xbox360’s marketing efforts have also paid off with their roadshow at Marina Square last year, the election of another Xpert and a new profile page (which I must say, looks similar to Wii). Though, PS3 is slowly stepping up its game by making more online games available, it’s a tad bit slow for me and they haven’t been doing much marketing in the region as well. I hope Sony comes up with something soon. 

i refer to the article by David Ellis on the new PSP speculation here.

When i first saw this sliding PSP I whooped with joy, and swear that I’ll get my hands on it if it were ever produced (within a certain budget, of course).

I wouldn’t call it revolutionary… or out of this world… but I was just very delighted by the concept. You see, PSP 1000-3000 has always looked the same (a bit thinner, but yeah) with the same old functions (you wouldn’t really call upgraded firmware a huge improvement would you), so this one looked pretty awesome in contrast.

Plus, I have a huge love for sliding phones, and I think a sliding PSP is superb, if it doesn’t add to the thickness that much (it’ll be good if we can add a tune when you slide up and down xD). You can immediately see that the screen has gotten much wider and bigger, but I’m not sure putting the L and R trigger keys on the top screen is good (since you may keep pushing your screen down whenever you trigger happy).

This PSP also comes with a 1.3 MP camera (though you can’t see it in the picture), and it seems that Sony is doing away with the UMD slot and replacing it with a flash hard disk. Well, it may be good for someone who has downloaded all their stash of games their entire life… but I’m a hard core collector of certain RPG games, so I kind of see my UMDs rotting away in the near future if that were to happen. Not that I can’t easily get it in a file format and put it in the Memory Stick…

Things that I’d really like to see in the new PSP, however: some compatibility with PS2 and PS3 games. No idea how they are gonna make it, but seeing the Little Big Planet screenshot on this demo model is really, really tempting (I’d love for the new FF13 to be on it as well). I’d pay to have these PS3 titles converted to PSP format. And touchscreen is good if it still keeps the Wi-Fi, since it’s quite troublesome to scroll through all the alphabets to type. I’d also want compatibility with movie formats like avi and divx, because it’s so troublesome to have to convert movie files to mp4 for PSP.

But the article is just a speculation. Perhaps, if we generate enough interests, Sony might really invest in this. Because you can’t just tempt your consumers and tell them nothing’s gonna happen after that. It will be such a huge, HUGE letdown.