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A Salute to Japanese Game Designers
thegamebiz writes "Amped IGO has a great tribute to Japanese game designers. From the article: 'In an industry where so much is owed to our friends across the Pacific it seems almost blasphemous to forget about the contributions of those that inhabit the Land of the Rising Sun. If it weren't for them, not only would we not have a lot of the franchises we love, but the industry as a whole would certainly not be as lively as it is today.'"
but the industry as a whole would certainly not be as lively as it is today. Other than the NES bringing the industry back from the brink, what do we owe Japanese developers? Personally I owe them a good bit. Most of my favorite games are from Japanese studios, but there are nearly an equal amount of western developed games that Ive enjoyed as well. Maybe even more. Salute to them for doing a good job, sure, but dont give them most of the credit.
---space.is.the.place---
The japaneese have done a lot with inovation in games, they also make interesting game which challenge you in different ways, and sometimes they just push the envolope in weird.
Electroplankton for the DS seems really inovative and i'm looking forward to being able to buy it, its nice to see an inovative take on something like that, using the microphone and it being a game where you don't have to go through levels, its more just for fun, no begining, no end, just fun.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
So, from my comment, you can see I haven't yet experienced Tomonobu Itagaki's creation Ninja Gaiden - although a lot of friends seem to love that. Fumito Ueda's Shadow of the Colussus looks really cool and not Just Another Game, keep meaning to check it out. Shigeru Miyamoto's Pikmin really rocks, but I've not been as enthralled by his Legend of Zelda - my son is though. Hironobu Sakaguchi's Final Fantasy is legend of course, and I've only heard good things about his Blue Dragon for the xBox360 (but am going to give the xBox360 a pass, as I didn't really like the platform, and mostly bought cross-platform games like Sims2 and Lego Star Wars for it (ok, so I got Fable and Fable Lost Chapters ...)).
Don't really know any of the titles of Yu Suzuki, though.
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Look, the article is called a "SALUTE TO JAPANESE GAME DESIGNERS" I wonder why it talks in reverence to them? Then you go on to diss Final Fantasy XII which is currently unreleased and still months away. The demo might've been disappointing to you, but who knows how old that demo might be. Just because it came out in November doesn't mean it was made in November. There have been a multitude of disappointing demos for other games too, including western games.
Probably because he's pissed that Namco was going to pump out a sequel with or without his help/approval.
I wonder if there's a Japanese site that links to some weird game in the US, with the title, "The American-game-to-end-all-American games". :)
Yeah, there are a lot of weird, sexually-theme games in Japan. After all, it's home to many hentai games (hentai is the rough equivalent to porn in the US, although it's in animated form). When I spent some time in Japan as part of a school trip, I often ran into hentai games on the same shelf space as other games. You definately get the feeling that Americans are prude.
-- jchenx
Japan really influenced the west in many ways. It's not only the games that are not quite like the western ones, it's also anime vs. cartoons, hentai vs. porn, japanese horrors vs. western horrors, karate/judo/aikido vs. box/wrestling, sushi vs. steak...
Even if Japan woulnt produce their own games there's tons of stuff that penetrated to the west that made our games cooler..
Can kiss my ass. The man is immature and a loudmouth. DOA is the worst fighter out there, and he has the gall to say the things he's said about the Namco fighters? How he can make a game that sucks as much as DOA:Ultimate and then make something like Ninja Gaiden is beyond me. It seems to me that he needs to stop dissing other designers in his press releases and spend more time working on Ninja Gaiden 2.
That link is to a "doujin soft", an amateur-produced game. Similar to doujinshi (fan comics), doujin soft are games made which either feature original characters or characters "borrowed" from mainstream game/anime/manga culture. Sometimes these doujin soft can be very good, for example, the Melty Blood doujin soft games (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melty_Blood) are almost modern professional quality fighting games involving the characters from TYPE-MOON's Tsukihime visual novel game (which later became an anime and a manga).
My other first post is car post.
"Hentai" is also pretty much a made-up western term, just so you know.
A better example is Dragon Quest; wildly popular there but doesn't sell much here. DQ is to America what Halo is to Japan.
I think the Japanese use "ero game".
My joke got modded as Insightful and my insight got modded as Funny.
America is obese, Japan is slender. So what? Got some more exotic clichés to share?
There's a point to it, though. While I happen to like some of the typical American game types you listed, it might be worth to mention that most of them come down to being brute and trying to mimic reality, if in the sense of winning the war after all, or crashing foreign cars. Of course, Japan has these types of games as well, albeit with a twist here and there, but those are marginal at best.
In contrast, Japanese games have all the futurism -- and I don't mean the UT type -- that American ones lack.
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
"Pixel" is his handle--now here is a completely unknown japanese guy who definitely deserves some acclaim. He single-handedly created Cave Story over the course of five years, and it's often described as being a "perfect" game. Think Castlevania, Metroid, and Yoshi's Island, among others--some great old-fashioned platforming gameplay to be found here. It has some amazing 8-bit era graphics and chiptunes, charming characters and plot, really fun boss battles; it appeals greatly to any nostalgic gamer out there. And it's freeware to boot. Check it out.
Game English Patch
"We would not have a game industry these days without Nintendo, Sega and yes, Sony, along with the developers that went along with them (and they were mainly Japanese as well)."
No, not Sony. Sony was a late comer. By 1995, it was pretty damn obvious that gaming was here to stay (having been back in vogue for 12 years) and also was moving to the point where, with the help of optical media, you could really cram some interesting stuff on. Sony only came because it smelt money, not because it was (at its core) a gaming company like Sega or Nintendo.
I will never credit Sony or Microsoft for saving or enhancing gaming in that way. They are only here for the money, as a side channel to diversify from their main income streams -- much like I would probably never take a Nintendo MP3 player or a Sega operating system as seriously as I would from a company that specializes in producing those. Your company cannot be core competent when you do this, especially once you grow to the size where one arms wants DRM in your other arm's fancy new device (the PSP).
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Ai ai ai
I'm your little butterfly
Green, black and blue
Make the colors in the sky
*shakes fist angrily*
DAMN YOU, GRANDPARENT!
DAMN YOUUUUUU!
well, yeah, DQ is hot in Japan, and DDR (and all the other spinoffs) is not as much, but worldwide Dance Dance Revolution brings in more revenues for the company ...
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