While at ASI I had the opportunity to interview Mike Rudowicz, President of the AAMA and Frank Cosentino of Namco America. These audio clips are far from perfect – there is a lot of background noise but for the most part they are understandable. Mike’s interview is more understandable as there is far less background noise as we were able to do this in a room a little ways off the floor. I do apologize for the low quality of the Namco clip and I have been working on writing it down as I tried fooling around with the equalizer to get it to sound better but there wasn’t much improvement. So before the clips get too old I’ll post them here – if anyone is an expert at cleaning up audio clips (specifically the Namco clip) where the source is fairly bad it would be appreciated if you could help.
Interview with Mike Rudowicz of the AAMA (roughly 10 min long, ok quality)
Interview with Frank Cosentino of Namco (roughly 15 min long, poor quality, it does cut off towards the end).
To give you a rundown of what to expect on the Namco clip for the hard to understand parts, first we talk a little bit about Namco’s redemption efforts, then Maximum Tune 3 and how the game works in letting one build their car and how the game remembers how you drive, a little bit about Tekken 6 and how they haven’t decided on releasing it yet due to it’s high cost and waning interest in fighters, what Namco might be doing with the Wii including using the Wii hardware to power future games (much like the Triforce hardware where they modified a Gamecube to power games like Mario Kart GP) which may or may not include motion-based controls, a little discussion about future developments including some talk about the Gundam Pods in Japan (could we see them in the States or something like it), online gaming and Namco’s plans for including more online features in games. Also after the interview I asked them about possibly bringing Pac-Man CE (which appeared on XBLA only a while back and was designed as a true sequel of sorts to the original Pac-Man) to the arcades and in a funny coincidence they had been throwing that idea themselves “just a few days ago”. I think it would be an excellent idea, giving the game exposure to those that don’t have XBL and maybe they could add a few features that wasn’t in the Xbox version.
