Latest news with #Coincidence
Korea Herald
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
Onewe marks 10th year with new album, world tour, and a stronger bond than ever
Onewe returns with 'We: Dream Chaser,' full of all kinds of dreams This year is a special year for Onewe: The band has released its first studio album in five years, is celebrating its 10th anniversary and will embark on its first-ever world tour. 'We are thrilled to be releasing our second studio album after five years, and we know our fans have been eagerly anticipating it as well. As always, every track on this album is self-composed," said guitarist Kanghyun during an interview with reporters Friday. The album, "We: Dream Chaser," is the group's first LP following "One" released in 2020. It features a total of 11 tracks, including main track "The Starry Night." Dreams in all their forms — whether they be aspirations, ideals or even dreams one has while sleeping — are the central theme of the album. 'I think all kinds of dreams are embedded within these 11 songs,' said bassist and rapper Giuk. 'It'll be fun for listeners to interpret what type of dream each track conveys.' The title track, an upbeat song with bright guitar sounds, was inspired by Vincent van Gogh's painting "The Starry Night." "I started by setting the tempo first, then decided on the theme before composing the song. Since we performed at a lot of festivals last year, we realized that fast-tempo songs and high-energy stages suit us well," said Kanghyun, who composed the main song. Onewe is also exploring new themes. Leader Yonghoon had high hopes for "Traffic Love" and "Coincidence," the band's first songs about one-sided love. He added that the band had more creative input than ever before. 'This time, we actively contributed ideas, from outfits to hair and makeup. Over the years, we've learned a lot by observing what our fans like and how other artists interpret their concepts. We've grown through that process,' said Yonghoon. Formed in 2015, the five-member group made its official debut in 2016 under the name MAS 0094. In 2019, it rebranded itself as Onewe. The original members have stayed together for 10 years, fostering an exceptionally strong bond. 'After spending 10 years together, we've witnessed each other's teenage years, and we've been around each other even longer than our own families have. The only people we've ever made music with are each other. That's why I want to keep going with this team,' said Dongmyeong. Even when Yonghoon and Kanghyun temporarily stepped away for their mandatory military service, the team's bond remained strong. Yonghoon was discharged in January 2024, followed by Kanghyun in February. 'In a band, we need every member to have 100 percent synergy. So performing without two members felt like something was missing. It made us appreciate our members even more,' Harin said. On March 21, Onewe will start its world tour in Vietnam, moving on to North American stops in April and May before concluding the tour with two concerts in Seoul, June 14-15. 'We are beyond excited for our first world tour. None of us have ever been to the US before, so the fact that we are going there to perform makes it feel like we are achieving a huge dream. Lately, we've been studying English together to better communicate with our fans, and we are also preparing some special cover performances,' said Yonghoon. Dongmyeong added, 'Aside from 'Gravity,' most of our songs have Korean lyrics. Despite that, people seem to really connect with our emotional lyrics and energetic stage presence, which means a lot to us.' As for long-term goals, Dongmyeong emphasized that Onewe is in it for the long run, saying, 'Artists like Psy and other steady-selling musicians who hold annual year-end concerts are truly admirable. Our goal is for Onewe's concerts to become a brand —something that audiences look forward to every year.' jy@
Yahoo
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
One of the best puzzle game designers is back with Kaizen: A Factory Story, a game about manufacturing Japanese consumer goods during the largest economic bubble in history
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. From the release of SpaceChem in 2011 through to Last Call BBS in 2022, indie developer Zachtronics was a legend in the admittedly small world of puzzle games that are a bit like programming a computer. While the studio made a variety of games, including a prescient visual novel about AI called Eliza, its specialty was a kind of engineering puzzle all about refining your input to create the ideal output—games that came to be known as Zach-likes. "I hate saying Zach-like," says Zach Barth, who both Zachtronics and the Zach-like were named after. "If anybody has any suggestions for a different thing we can call them?" Zach Barth's next game, Kaizen: A Factory Story, will certainly be, er, Zach-adjacent. It's about running a factory in Japan in the 1980s, manufacturing products ranging from toys to electronics to clothes, refining the process for each item to make it as smooth as possible. "We have an electric toilet seat," Barth says. "That's one of the puzzles. Like, that's one of my favorites." Zachtronics is no more, however, having shut down following the release of Last Call BBS and a final collection of solitaire games. Kaizen is the work of a new studio called Coincidence, which consists of Barth and several of his Zachtronics collaborators like writer, producer, and audio designer Matthew Burns. "It's not a Zachtronics game," Barth says. "This is a Coincidence game, which is a totally legally distinct game studio." Coincidence represents a fresh start, and an opportunity to approach the puzzle of how to make a machine-engineering puzzle game that's welcoming to new players from a new angle. As Barth puts it, "One of the big things we've been wrestling with for a long time is that you build this machine, you hit play, you watch it run, it breaks, you say 'fuck', and you hit stop. Then you're like, 'Wait, where was I? Where were things when it broke?' You can build something that's really elaborate, that has many steps, and you don't remember what happened along the way, and you can't edit it until you reset." Which is why in Kaizen we'll be able to scrub each construction attempt back and forth like we're trying to understand what someone is saying in a Christopher Nolan movie we're watching on a phone. If the toy robot our factory's making today ends up with the arms and legs in the wrong positions, we'll be able to scrub back, swap things around, and try again. So why make it about the specific world of Japanese consumer goods in the boomtime 1980s? "It's an area of history and a location that we've always kind of been interested in," says Burns, "because fundamentally, the games that we make are about making things. And this was a time period where the things that were made weren't just successful as products, but successful as things that we remember today." This is the era of the Sony Walkman, of Japanese camcorders and computers and consoles, VCRs and TVs and microwaves. It's the reason all those 1980s cyberpunk books and movies predicted a future where Atari would be a world-conquering megacorporation and everyone would be eating ramen in the rain. "I was able to integrate some stuff that I remember from growing up," says Burns, "because I'm half-Japanese, my mom is from Tokyo. So we decided to tell this story about a Japanese-American main character whose name is David, and he goes to Japan to work at a Japanese company at the height of this 'Japan is taking over' thing. "We hint at this a little bit in the game, it's not like a main point of it, but we hint at the media environment in the US at this time, which was that the US was panicking about the Japanese economic machine. There were all kinds of concerned news programs and business books and even movies about ruthless Japanese businessmen taking over American business and, oh no, they're going to kill us. They're all samurai warriors!" I mention the Michael Crichton book Rising Sun, and especially the movie version with Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes, and Barth and Burns say they recently watched the trailer and laughed at how ridiculous it is. It's a perfect example of the popular perception of the time that Japan was an economic powerhouse because everyone had a code of Bushido honor and a black belt. Burns mentions part of the research for Kaizen was a more accurate book called Inventing Japan. "That book does a great job of demolishing the stereotype of 'Japanese people are good at business because of samurai stuff that happened, like, 400 years prior'. People used to say things like that. 'The Japanese prioritized loyalty because of samurai culture.' This book is like, look, that was so long ago. That would be like saying Europeans are good at business because there used to be knights in shining armor." Instead, Kaizen is about the philosophy of revision and iteration that actually helped Japan rebuild itself after World War 2. "It's a word that means continuous improvement," says Barth, "but it's also the word that Toyota, when they were designing their production quality control system, used to refer to empowering people who work on the line to make improvements from the bottom up instead of the top down. If somebody whose job is to put screws in can think of a way to make those screws go in faster or more reliably, they're encouraged to speak up and bring that up and make that improvement. I think that's a really cool idea." All the way back to SpaceChem, kaizen has been the hidden philosophy behind the Zach-like. Continuous improvement from the smallest details up to the top is the common element of all these puzzle games. Well, that and a solitaire minigame. "We don't have to put a solitaire game in every game," Barth says. "It just keeps happening." In Kaizen, the solitaire game has pachinko as its theme—pachinko being another success story of the 1980s, becoming more complicated and compulsive as it turned electronic. Like most gambling machines, pachinko's not actually fun to play if there's no money involved, however, which is why in Kaizen it's presented as solitaire. "It's the first solitaire game I've ever made that has gravity in it," Barth says. Kaizen: A Factory Story doesn't have a release date yet, but you can find it on Steam.
