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Land of the Rising Fun
I very patiently waited all week before linking to 1up's multi-part Land of the Rising Fun feature. It details several very good, very Japanese titles they've had the pleasure of playing lately. A lot of them are for the DS (no surprise), with Chulip, Odama, and Contact particularly appealing. From the piece: "I've loved Japanese games ever since Pac-Man rocked my childhood. Unfortunately, as the medium matures, its seems more and more Americans take issue with Japan's willingness to defy logic in the name of entertainment. Are the frequently goofy aesthetics of Japanese games a dangerous creative rut? Maybe not. Goofiness is making a comeback, thanks in no small part to the Nintendo DS, which is reaching new audiences with experiences that emphasize creativity above anything so mundane as mere realism."
FFS, Zonk - USE SPELLCHECK.
There is a tendency to take issue with Japanese games, but it is not because people are somehow put off by the "willingness to defy logic". Rather, it is the Japanese tendency to make games violent and degrading towards women in ways that Americans would never even imagine, much less design such a game.
Whereas American games feature violence towards women in the form of raping prostitutes in a game like GTA, a similar game in Japan would be built around kidnapping a woman from the train, keeping her locked in your apartment, and raping her repeatedly until she became so degraded that she can't think of anything but sucking your cock which strangely she has come to crave. It's not a matter of aesthetics and cutsey anime that people take issue with, it's the underlying psyche of the game developers of these rape and torture games that is questioned.