Left, Right, Up, Down, Chu Chu Chu!

Tonight, I'm going to see Tetsuya Mizuguchi speak at ACMI. Should be a hoot. I've even brought along my copy of Space Channel 5 for him to sign, should the opportunity present itself.

As a game designer, he seems to be interested in experimenting and trying new things, bringing gameplay, visuals and sound together in occasionally confusing, but mostly interesting and satisfying ways. He's a bit of a maverick, and one of the designers who really still seem to have the spirit that made Sega such an exciting and innovative company. Along with Yu Suzuki, who's a bit of a personal hero of mine, and Yuji Naka, who seems to have lost his touch lately. Oh, and Toshihiro Nagoshi, who's still doing his thing, but has also flown the Sega coop, like Tetsuya Mizuguchi.

I hope I've got all of these names right, spelling-wise.

ACMI is somewhere I've spoken myself, as a game designer, so it'll be interesting and maybe a bit weird to see a designer I admire speaking in the same place. I'm also supposed to be submitting an abstract for another talk today, this time for the Australian Game Developer's Conference. I had previously submitted an abstract for a motivational talk that I wanted to do, but got knocked back on the grounds that they already had a talk on a similar topic lined up. But now I've been asked to do a talk about developing for Nintendo platforms. I'm going to talk about the transition from developing for GBA to developing for DS, I think, but I have to come up with a decent angle. Wish me luck.

I'm probably not supposed to say too much about the DS at this stage, in a public forum such as this. But, just between you and me and the lamppost - I think it's pretty damned cool.