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Team Ninja In-Depth

Posted by Zonk on from the who-doesn't-like-ninjas? dept.

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."

5 of 21 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Is it just me... by Errandboy+of+Doom · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "...does Tomonobu Itagaki think he's some sort of God? I mean, ...the man is no Miyamoto..."

    Yes, unlike Miyamoto, who is in fact a God.

  2. Ugh. Why not just admit they are already been used by kinglink · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "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.

  3. I sense a little hostility... by SkyFire360 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:I sense a little hostility... by PhotoBoy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      There is generally a lot of respect and mutual admiration between game designers. Itagaki is something of an exception; he's extremely arrogant and he's always saying nasty things about other developers and their games.

      He also recently called gamers who couldn't finish Ninja Gaiden on normal difficulty "pussies" (well it was translated as that). I tried pointing that out at 1UP.com here but the asshole running that page kept editing and deleting my posts. I don't know why he has a comments box if he's going to delete and edit anyone that doesn't agree with him, but the point stands, Itagaki is incredibly conceited.

  4. Re:Quality Games by Zangief · · Score: 2, Informative

    What? since I played DOA on the Playstation and Dreamcast, I only saw a button masher. You learn a good combination or two, and spam your adversary, hoping he doesn't counter. This was so noticeable, that I, as a total newbie on 3D fighters, could win around 45% of the rounds just doing this, against my friend, the owner of the game, who had been practicing for weeks before.

    If a guy who knows nothing and a guy who does, have more or less the same chance of winning, both of them are just playing a glorified coin toss. DOA is a pointless game. I guess that, if you dedicate your life and soul to the game, you can punish button mashers, but the amount of knowledge necessary for this is too high to make it worthy.

    Yes, the graphics are pretty, the girls are gorgeous, and the destructible scenary is interesting, but the gameplay is bad. Period. This is why they did DOA Xtreme Volleyball, because that way they could capitalize what they did best (pretty girls and graphics) and hide their horrible gameplay.

    That said, I haven't played Ninja Gaiden. But seeing that another post around points that Itagaki it is just copying ideas from other games and claiming they are his, I don't have too much faith on it.

    Itagaki is an asshole.