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Team Ninja In-Depth
Kimi writes "1up.com had a whole week of Team Ninja coverage the past few days, with exclusive screenshots and a discussion with Tomonobu Itagaki about the Reinvention of DOA. They also looked into DOAX2, Ninja Gaiden 2 on Xbox 360, an exclusive opening cinematic of DOA4, and punky short film created by Itagaki."
Team Ninja has been very good at producing quality games in the past, and I really look forward to their future projects. DOA is by far one of my favorite game franchise.. :)
Add me as a friend!
(On discussing development suggestions in DOA)"Within those, the destructible cars, that's just a parody of Street Fighter II, so that's ridiculous, so that was gone."
Clearly we can always use more parodies of SFII. Especially the destructible cars sequence!
Chun Li v. Honda, FIGHT!
Or does Tomonobu Itagaki think he's some sort of God? I mean, the guy is so full of himself it's not even funny. I mean sure, his team pops out a good game every now and then (Ninja Gaiden), but the man is no Miyamoto, even though he seems to think he is.
I think it's about time for DOA: Super Mega Turbo Special Tournament Edition v. Obscure Marvel Sidekicks circa 1967.
"Some players might laugh when they hear this, but one of the things that was discussed was "how about making cars destructible?" Or for instance characters hanging from a ledge, and you could stomp on their fingertips causing them to fall off the ledge and die. Or a one-on-five, where it's one guy versus five and you just had this free-for-all and you took them all on. I"
Funny All those ideas are from old games, as they said busting cars is in SF2, but zones that damage your characters has been there from the NeoGeo Game World Heroes (ok game) Smashing people form the ledge? Super Smash Brothers, and one on Five? well we had 1 vs 2 in MK2, 1 vs 3 Simultanious in Smash Brothers (team based, free for all, 2v2 also) 1 vs 30 in Super Smash Brothers Melee 3 at a time... and many games besides these and then we had Tekken's "adventure" style stages. and so on.
It's fine that they take from those games but they act like they have unique ideas but the fact is these have ALL been done before and good enough where they arn't reinventing the wheel, they are just taking the good ideas from other vehicles.
basically their idea to reinvent doa is to make it into something that's just not a 1 vs 1 fists on fighting game(more into something like smash brothers or something..).
or into ninja gaiden.
the interview is pretty lame and useless to read unless you're a fanboy out of ammunition and want to make an ass of yourself.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
From TFA:
1UP: Like Soul Calibur palette swaps?
TI: Bringing up Soul Calibur suggests that Namco likes to do that sort of thing, but let's not broach that today, because we don't want to waste our time on that kind of petty stuff. I think the technique of recycling characters and changing the names and keeping everything else the same just to add meaningless volume is the worst thing you can do, I hate it. I don't have time to talk about something so despicable when we have so much other stuff to talk about.
While the highlighting was my addition, this really drives home a point. I design graphics engines for shader-related hardware (read: game consoles), and still I was not aware of the absolute animosity that existed between the game designers. These are some very srong words from a very respected developer towards another very respected game designer. Are there rivalries like this amongst American developers, or is this part of the demographics that I have yet to understand? Can anyone comment on the American market?
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php?date=2005-06- 01
He makes a fighting game. Not just a fighting game, a fighting game with a gimmick (albeit a very successful one). Is anyone really surprised he added in a a female with the fighting style of a wrestler? If you are, go home and spank yourself. No, not THERE.
It's not that I don't like DOA, it's that they are making it to be much more than it really is. It isn't some masterpiece, a work of art so great it reinvented the fighting genre. Tell me, exactly, what did they reinvent? It is very, very difficult to do anything new in the genre in which you mash buttons to punch and kick people. People play DOA for one reason, and it isn't the story. I didn't even know there was a story until I read this. I just always thought those cutscenes where for a little hands-on time, if you know what I mean.
And props to 1UP for giving such a great interview. They really grilled him hard, like when they asked what Team Ninja did to reinvent the series, and they didn't answer, and when 1UP asks about the traffic pattern being dynamic or present, and they don't answer, and all those "questions" suggesting things to which TeamNinja just answers "yeah, fo' shure." What is the point of including them? Where is the editor? This smacks of PR. Then again, it is 1UP. And a lot of their fans would rather talk about Mario than play one of his games (no giant ta-tas there).
I'm not trying to troll. It's just that this whole interview is crap. It could be summed up in the following way, instead of being sprawled across 4 pages: "How are you reinventing DOA?" "We're adding new female characters, and a dinosaur."
His top five hated games are all Tekken! http://teamninja.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3144194 Plonker.