My Japanese Coach cheat

Well, it looks like Ubisoft is giving out the cheat to people who call customer support and request it. A reader of this blog posted it as a comment to the entry titled "More My Japanese Coach News." I figure since Ubisoft is giving it out, I might as well make a full blog post detailing the cheat. If your copy of My Japanese Coach is sitting on your shelf collecting dust, then this should help breathe some new life into it.

Go to the dictionary and look up the word "cheat". Touch the "V" next to the verb to open the conjugation chart. Hold the L and R triggers for a few seconds. If done correctly, you will hear the word "cheat" in Japanese. The cheat has now been activated.

Now to use the cheat, you must return to the main menu, go to Options, then Sound. Pressing R will advance you 1 lesson, and pressing L will advance you to the beginning of the next lesson group (usually every 50 lessons).

Now beware, once this cheat has been activated, it is saved to your profile, and can't be turned off until you delete your profile. And there's no way to go back to previous lessons that you skipped over. Sure, you can visit the skipped lesson from the lesson map, but there's no lesson map once you get past lesson 100.

One last caveat...the cheat has always functioned properly in all testing that I have done, but, as Game Informer magazine says in every issue, "Cheat codes are buggier than Virginia in August." Although I don't anticipate any problems (other than the aforementioned permanent unlock), use the cheat at your own risk.

More My Japanese Coach news

At the time of this writing, My Japanese Coach is currently ranked #6 in DS games on Amazon.com. It is currently behind Mario Kart and New Super Mario Bros., but ahead of Brain Age and Spore Creatures.

There is also a video review, as well as lots of game footage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JLRjHRsDbs

After reading through the message boards at GameFaqs/GameSpot, I found a few more issues I'd like to talk about.

1. A lot of people want to know if there's a cheat code so they can skip ahead to some new material they don't already know. Others just want to skip to lesson 30 to get away from romaji. I can tell you that there is a cheat (I programmed it), but it's up to the publisher, Ubisoft, to decide when/if that ever gets released. I'd suggest contacting them. Perhaps I can post it here when they give the OK.
2. The vocabulary lessons (after lesson 100) are not grouped in any meaningful way. I agree that it would be better if they had been grouped with similar words, but unfortunately, there wasn't enough time to do this. The words were randomly assigned a lesson, in groupings of 10.
   
3. Just as a clarification (many are confused in the posts I've read), the game defaults to romaji until lesson 30, at which point it defaults to kana (for features that don't require romaji.) The toggle in the options stays gray until lesson 30, at which point you may re-enable romaji.
4. Some of the characters require more strokes than the actual number of strokes. As I mentioned before, with a dictionary of 11000 words, some incorrect characters may have been overlooked. If you finish writing a character, but the game doesn't accept it yet, you can press the A button to check it. This is the easiest way to get past these.
5. On a related note, you can clear the current character by pressing the B button. This is an easy way to start over on the current character if you mess up.
6. The highest lesson you can unlock with the placement test is 11. For non-beginners, the cheat might be your best option (again, you'll need to contact Ubisoft).
7. Unfortunately, there is no verb conjugation game. We had one in My Spanish Coach, but it didn't translate as well to Japanese. However, you can go into the dictionary and click on the "V" next to verbs to view a conjugation chart.
   

A lot of these are valid complaints, and, if there's ever a sequel to this game (Ubisoft decides), then these things will definitely be taken into account. Unfortunately, play testing only gets us so far before the game is released. It's great to see all the things many of you would like to see changed to make this a better product. Perhaps Ubisoft will do an Intermediate version, but the ones that I see on GameSpot for the Spanish version are foreign to me. I don't know anything about them. Perhaps Ubisoft has another developer making those.

My Japanese Coach reviewed

As I mentioned previously on this blog, I was the lead programmer on My Japanese Coach and My Chinese Coach. While My Chinese Coach has been out a while, My Japanese Coach seems to have a lot more buzz surrounding it, and was just released on Tuesday Oct. 14th. The first reviews are in, and the overwhelming majority seem to be pretty positive. While the larger review outlets have yet to say anything about the game, I found the following links on some more obscure websites:

http://diehardgamefan.com/2008/10/17/review-my-japanese-coach-nds/

http://robgalbreath.com/2008/10/16/the-first-my-japanese-coach-review/

Now, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. No one is more eager to read reviews of games than the people who worked on them. Most of the people on my team google "My Japanese Coach review" nearly every day. We want to know what people think of our games. We are very interested in knowing what parts you liked, or didn't like so we can use that knowledge to make the best possible product in the future. I will most likely be the lead programmer on future language coach titles, so I will definitely take into consideration a lot of the things people write about these games. We even read message boards, like on GameSpot, or user reviews on Amazon.

I have noticed, in reading reviews and comments about the game, that there are some issues that keep coming up. I would like to address some of those here:

1. There are 100 scripted lessons in the game. My Spanish Coach and My French Coach only had 40 scripted lessons, but Japanese and Chinese both have 100. There are about 1000 lessons total, but after the first 100, they are pretty much just vocabulary lessons made up of random groupings of words from the dictionary, with 10 words per lesson.
2. There has been some misinformation in the reviews regarding how the stroke recognition system works. No, it does not just count the number of strokes, but actually uses stroke recognition to compare your strokes against the stored strokes from our artists. Obviously this system can be hit or miss, causing it to be somewhat confusing as to how it actually works (Brain Age anyone?). The stroke recognition system did not change between the Chinese and Japanese versions of the game, so any reviews that say otherwise are simply remembering it wrong.
   
3. There have been complaints that people want to use kana/kanji earlier on in the game. Unfortunately, the first time that it defaults to something other than romaji is at lesson 30. At this point, you can go into the options and switch it back to romaji if you wish. For more in-depth kana/kanji prior to lesson 30, you can always go into the writing comparison module and practice these anytime you want.
4. The review on diehardgamefan.com mentions "...with the DS lite, you will find some severe stylus detection issues." The stylus detection system did not change in the slightest. I think the reviewer's DS lite is just defective.
5. Some reviewers/commenters have noted that some of the characters (VERY few, from my understanding) require you to use the wrong stroke order to get them correct. With thousands of characters in the dictionary, there were bound to be some incorrect strokes that would get overlooked. Unfortunately, I speak Spanish, not Japanese, so I was much more helpful on My Spanish Coach than on this game, as far as the language itself is concerned.

If you have any desire to learn Japanese for any reason, then I highly recommend this title (I hear it's a great companion for imported Japanese games). But you don't have to take my word for it. The reviews speak for themselves.

If you have any questions about the game, or wish to discuss a specific aspect of it, I'd be glad to facilitate those here on this blog. And if you want to meet our Japanese expert, his blog can be found at:
http://darkeneddreamsgame.blogspot.com.

Games I've worked on

When I tell people I make video games for a living, they often ask if I've worked on any games they've heard of. I've listed them below. For a full list of games my company has made, visit http://www.sensorysweep.com or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_Sweep_Studios.

• Tom and Jerry Tales (2006, Nintendo DS)
• My Spanish Coach (2007, Nintendo DS)
• My French Coach (2007, Nintendo DS)
• My Chinese Coach (2008, Nintendo DS)
• My Japanese Coach (2008, Nintendo DS)

It's not a lot yet, but it takes time to get a lot of titles under your belt. I was lead programmer on My Chinese Coach and My Japanese Coach, so if you have any suggestions or complaints, feel free to discuss them here.

Speaking of My Japanese Coach, it's very encouraging to see the buzz it's receiving on forums around the internet. Chinese Coach is doing well in it's own right, but My Japanese Coach isn't even out yet, and it's ranked higher on Amazon.com than the Chinese version. So, let me know what you think of those games. If you have specific comments, or questions, I'm open to discussing as much as my boss will let me.

These games have been a lot of fun to work on. The DS is a pretty easy platform to work with, considering it's all done with C and C++. Unfortunately, I can't tell you about any future titles I may or may not be working on, but as soon as I can talk details (meaning, when future games are announced), I'll be sure to post them here.