Re:just more vague answers and a bad attempt at hy
on
PSP Developer Interview
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Me-quote: Having two screens, in fact, just may enable different kinds of play that a single large screen might not.
You-quote: And that would be a lie....
Me response: NO, it's not a lie. For starters, I thought I was rather clear with the word "may" and "might" that I was speaking hypothetically. It might be possible, but I don't know if it WILL happen or not.
Further, it's not a lie because the separation of the screens is the factor. People are trained, through long years of watching TV, to watch all of one screen.
Having two screens on which things occur means having to look back and forth between them, splitting your attention, which is a gameplay obstacle we've seen very little of. (Even Nintendo's old Punch-Out!! arcade game, which used a similar setup with two monitors, didn't use them very well.) That's the primary difference having two screens provides, and what I had in mind when I wrote the comment. Technically you can do this with one large screen, but due to the way people have been trained to play games it's not exactly the same.
The other use for two screens is that, since they're obviously separated, it makes a better logical fit to always use one screen for game information and the other for a playscreen. Bear with me now, as this is a weird description:
Take The Legend of Zelda series. It was one of the first games to use a subscreen, that is, an alternate screen in an action game that you can call up any time and that, while you're in it, the game is paused and you can make certain gameplay decisions and review data, mostly involving your equipment. In fact I think the original Zelda was where the word subscreen came from.
But why doesn't the game just keep the subscreen up all the time? And why don't other games do this? The answer is because it takes up precious real estate. The player expects a full screen to view the action. On the DS, the second screen is an element that lies outside of player expectations, so the developer is free to devote it to full-time use as a subscreen. And since that screen is always there, the player can always make adjustments on it (using the handy touch-sensitive feature, which starts to make more sense), and doesn't have to pause the game to do so. And if you don't have to pause, then you can have more devious things like combat sequences where real-time item selection is part of the tension.
In both these cases, the utility of the screen comes from playing with the player's expectations for what a game should be. There's no *technical* reason there's two screens, but it could work out anyway.
Let me clarify before some smart aleck does it for me, by NES ports, I did NOT mean the recent NES Classics collection, which are basically unchanged and thus not really worth it to anyone with ready access to flea markets. I was referring, specifically, to Super Mario Advance 1 and 4.
You (and I, for that matter), forgot Fire Emblem, possibly the best strategy game for the system in the US.
In fact, I don't think there's been another recent system with as many strategy games for it. There's also Onimusha Tactics and Shining Force Resurrection of Dark Dragon (a game I've never seen to buy, but would love to get my hands on).
And while I didn't want to mention it before because I was arguing against the system's reputation for quick, fun games, and the title is absolutely known for them, but I've still gotten several dozens of hours of play out of WarioWare. It's just an absolute blast to go in and try to beat your high scores, it's got a full single-player port of Dr. Mario in it, and, well-hidden and often overlooked, Pyoro, which is acres of fun.
If, by "*types* of games", you are refering to the second screen, then I laugh at you and Nintendo.
I'm referring to the stylus and the microphone, in addition to the screen, Mr. Premature Mirth.
Having two screens, in fact, just may enable different kinds of play that a single large screen might not. The difference is more conceptual, in the player's mind, than technical, but still present.
But the stylus is the big thing, it allows for intuitive pointer interfaces that make RTS games a lot easier to pull off, among others.
The Advance Wars games can also be easily and quickly put down. That's the only reason I've been able to play them. If I had to sit in front of my GB for an hour or risk losing progress, I wouldn't play them.
But that has nothing to do with the style of game, and everything to do with the care in which they were implemented.
Almost all Gameboy Advance games are made like this, even the NES ports tend to have more save points than the original versions. Zelda: Link to the Past lets you continue from just about anywhere, instead of forcing you to return to one of the start locations.
This is actually not as easy to do for a turn-based game like Advance Wars as you might think, and especially games like Fire Emblem, where there's a luck element and dire circumstances, since, if you're not careful, the player can endlessly retry an individual turn until he gets a result he likes. They usually do things like save the pseudorandom seed along with the game, to ensure that the same move will play out the same way each time.
There is a lot more revolutionairy stuff about this PSP than there was in the Game Boy Color, the Virtual Boy, The Game boy Advanced, and the Gameboy Advanced Advanced. I think that the PSP is speced to be an awsome contender in the portable market.
I have to disagree, the DS has an amazing number of cool features, and wireless is just the top of the list, and PSP's battery life will likely be a major problem for it. The fact that it's a rechargable, and doesn't run on AAs, will help a bit in order to save it from the fate of the battery-gobbling Game Gear, Lynx and Nomad.
The larger screen and analog stick are admitted advantages, but the fact that the DS can run different *types* of games seems, to me, to give Nintendo an edge in this round.
Oooh, good point. Of course, most SNES games had been out of print for almost a decade at the introduction of the GBA, so they seemed new to many gamers. Playstation games are a lot fresher in people's minds, so it'll be harder for Sony to use that technique.
Also, while the PSX had some good games, I think history treats SNES games more kindly in the race towards oblivion, because of Nintendo's timeless design ethic.
I think two portables could end up coexisting if a strategy were put into place. Right now (i.e. pre DS or PSP), portable gaming is pretty much "short simple fun little games".
No, that's not always the case. Gameboy Advance games have approximately the same length as SNES games, which weren't necessarily simple at all. The Advance Wars games, for example, are extremely challenging and lengthy, and kept my friends occupied for many months.
The cool thing about the Super Monkey Ball games is, you really do get better with practice. They are superbly designed in that regard. If you're trying to reach the goal by random bouncing then you're probably not doing the level right -- a good number of levels have multiple ways of reaching the goal, some of them less obvious than others.
The camera is a little annoying in places, true, but in the game's defense you can usually get the camera to point the way you want to go by backing up a little and moving in the direction you want it. Most levels that need you to get the camera pointed in a direction provide a little space in which you can do it (in other words, there are no 90-degree, razor-thin ledges).
I agree - I own both Gamecube Super Monkey Ball games, and I've even completed Master Extra on SMB2. (Though I have NOT yet seen Expert Extra or Master on SMB1).
It looks exactly like us GC loyalists have been snubbed for making their games so damn popular.
"Essential and critical element of the plot" is one of those things that is more obvious in some cases than others. Does Moby Dick need Captain Ahab? By all means, yes. Other things aren't as certain; Peter Jackson apparently didn't think that Tom Bombadil or the Scouring of the Shire needed to be in his movie, but Tolkien thought enough of them to put them in the books.
It is possible to argue this about many things, however. In practice, the determinor of whether something is "needed" for the story falls first to the author, second to the editor, and they tend to have more liberal notions of plot-essentialness than film adaptors. But even so, there must be *some* basis of whether it's important to the story. To take an extremely broad case, you can't just have angels in your story just because you want angels to be in it, their angelness must be important in some way. (This I shall suddenly call Harris' First Law of Fanfiction Suckiness.)
I'm all for fun and engaging. What I'm against is astroturfing, advertising that's meant to look like an unsponsored outpouring of affection. Remember little Ralphie's experience with waiting weeks to get the secret decoder ring in A Christmas Story? "Remember to drink your Ovaltine!"
At least traditional advertising is immediately obvious, and thus easily brain-filterable.
Interesting, because now I've heard two opposite reactions to Aeris' death in this forum: she became the hero at the end in spirit form, and her death meant squat.
Random character death is not a good thing in a story, because stories are not random. Things that happen in them should appear unplanned, but should not be arbitrary. Everything should happen for a reason, even if it's not an obvious one. Killing off a character for no reason at all is bad writing.
Of course, I'm something of an outspoken critic of Final Fantasy-style writing. I've been rereading The Hobbit lately, and noticing how it progresses: the characters actually get through a good number of adventures, somehow without a fatality on the part of the main characters (though a good many goblins and spiders die). Some of the men of Lake Town drown or get flamed when ol' Smaug goes on his rampage, true, but none of the dwarves or Bilbo are among their number, they're safe. But several dwarves do die in the Battle of Five Armies, to make the point that war, ultimately, is hell.
Death for a meaningful purpose is not a cliche of games, though I wouldn't be surprised if there are a couple of similar cliches, it's a cliche of writing, period. But we give it a pass when we tell stories because it's one of the primary tools in the writer's box, so we should give games that attempt to tell a story the same kind of pass.
C'mon, world destroying events are a dime-a-dozen in these games. I think it was one of the points of the original article that character death advancing the plot is inherently more personal than world-saving.
Anyway, the point remains, we're talking about characters dying as part of a story, not the significance of that act. (And say what you want, I was actually a little shocked when Nei got offed, even though RPGs back then really didn't have a lot of dialogue for their characters.)
But lots of game companies have been mismanaged in an Atari kind of way, and look how long they've survived.
No, Atari GAMES (as distinct from Atari Corp) never really recovered from the Street Fighter 2 craze. They persisted for a while, and made some of cool games after SF2 hit arcades (such as ever lovin' Rampart), but they were never really as seen as hip after that. Consider that in the old days Atari was the unquestioned king of arcade games. Atari's success-graph never plunged as steep as it did then.
There was a time when they pulled lots of promising games off of test, including a sequel to Marble Madness, Marble Madness!!, because they didn't do well in arcades while the Street Fighter craze was going on. The fighting craze isn't as strong these days, but it's never really died out either.
This is not to discount mismanagement, of course. But in the long run Atari Games had better management than Atari Corp, which died years ago.
Capcom does makes original stuff once in a while, like Viewtiful Joe. But they're greatly outnumbered by the sequels they produce. Just HOW long have they beaten that Street Fighter horse? How many times did they use what was practically the same engine for each NES Mega Man game? Say what you will about Nintendo making sequels, but each of the 2D Marios is still a different game in many ways. When they get a big hit, like Resident Evil, you'll see game after practically unchanged game out of them. How is that different from endless Madden sequels?
SquareEnix: People make a big deal over how each Final Fantasy game has a different system, but there's been less variety as of late than usual. The job system has been used three times now in the core line, and twice in FF Tactics, and Active Time Battle at least six times, plus one in ChronoTrigger. But these things can't fix what I consider to be the core problem with the series now: RPG style battles have been done many, many times in many, many games.
Namco: Ridge Racer anyone? Tekken?
Of course, Sega has made three Crazy Taxis, and even though I never get enough of them (my high score in the first game is over $68,000). Nintendo has made Mario Sunshine. But these two companies tend to be more prone to strike out new territory than most.
But there are limits to even Nintendo and Sega's ingenuity. You want to know what the most innovative game company in the history of gaming was? They made Asteroids, Missile Command, Battlezone, Centipede, 720 Degrees, KLAX, Gauntlet, STUN Runner, Toobin' -- yes, it's Atari Games, an *American* company! And what did it get them? They died, ultimately, because of Capcom, which milked Street Fighter games that, although not really very different from each other, proved to be extremely popular. That set the pace for the whole industry, eastern *and* western, and only now are some mainstream gamers starting to think "Gee, there's not really a lot of different things to play, is there?"
My advice to the industry: whatever Ed Logg is doing now, wherever he is, companies, snap him up!
We might, but I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't advertised as Virtual Boy games. Nintendo barely mentions the VB these days, though there *is* a five-second-long reference in WarioWare....
The origins of the console-style RPG genre reside in Dragon Quest/Warrior, but RPGs are a fair bit older than that. Wizardry, Bard's Tale and Ultima all predate what the typical "modern" gamer would call an RPG, and although I haven't played them all, I'm pretty sure there are moments like that in at least one of them.
Yeah, but it was a "fake" death, they resurrected him with time travel. If you bring someone back to life it doesn't count -- death has no sting unless it's for good.
Similar, though not exactly the same, are the dozens of RPGs in which characters "die," but can be resurrected trivially. Phoenix Down, World Tree Leaves, Moon Mist, whatever you call them, what in our world would make Bill Gates hand over his entire fortune is available at the local Final Fantasy Tonic Hut for pocket change.
Those games are not bad (and Eternal Darkness was great in some respects), but there are certainly other western publisher worth their salt. Bioware and Blizzard are two favorite examples. Maxis games helmed by Will Wright are another, and don't forget about Sid Meier and Peter Molyneux.
But the poor fact is, these are pinpricks of light admist a vast, black curtain. Most western games are horrible. But then again, most eastern games are also horrible, it's just the better ones we see over here. Also, there are more eastern companies that have a more mature approach to game development: Nintendo and Sega definitely, sometimes Namco, Konami and SquareEnix, occaisionally Capcom. (There are others too -- amuse yourselves with attempting to name them.)
Slashdot Mirror
Me-quote:
Having two screens, in fact, just may enable different kinds of play that a single large screen might not.
You-quote:
And that would be a lie....
Me response:
NO, it's not a lie. For starters, I thought I was rather clear with the word "may" and "might" that I was speaking hypothetically. It might be possible, but I don't know if it WILL happen or not.
Further, it's not a lie because the separation of the screens is the factor. People are trained, through long years of watching TV, to watch all of one screen.
Having two screens on which things occur means having to look back and forth between them, splitting your attention, which is a gameplay obstacle we've seen very little of. (Even Nintendo's old Punch-Out!! arcade game, which used a similar setup with two monitors, didn't use them very well.) That's the primary difference having two screens provides, and what I had in mind when I wrote the comment. Technically you can do this with one large screen, but due to the way people have been trained to play games it's not exactly the same.
The other use for two screens is that, since they're obviously separated, it makes a better logical fit to always use one screen for game information and the other for a playscreen. Bear with me now, as this is a weird description:
Take The Legend of Zelda series. It was one of the first games to use a subscreen, that is, an alternate screen in an action game that you can call up any time and that, while you're in it, the game is paused and you can make certain gameplay decisions and review data, mostly involving your equipment. In fact I think the original Zelda was where the word subscreen came from.
But why doesn't the game just keep the subscreen up all the time? And why don't other games do this? The answer is because it takes up precious real estate. The player expects a full screen to view the action. On the DS, the second screen is an element that lies outside of player expectations, so the developer is free to devote it to full-time use as a subscreen. And since that screen is always there, the player can always make adjustments on it (using the handy touch-sensitive feature, which starts to make more sense), and doesn't have to pause the game to do so. And if you don't have to pause, then you can have more devious things like combat sequences where real-time item selection is part of the tension.
In both these cases, the utility of the screen comes from playing with the player's expectations for what a game should be. There's no *technical* reason there's two screens, but it could work out anyway.
Let me clarify before some smart aleck does it for me, by NES ports, I did NOT mean the recent NES Classics collection, which are basically unchanged and thus not really worth it to anyone with ready access to flea markets. I was referring, specifically, to Super Mario Advance 1 and 4.
You (and I, for that matter), forgot Fire Emblem, possibly the best strategy game for the system in the US.
In fact, I don't think there's been another recent system with as many strategy games for it. There's also Onimusha Tactics and Shining Force Resurrection of Dark Dragon (a game I've never seen to buy, but would love to get my hands on).
And while I didn't want to mention it before because I was arguing against the system's reputation for quick, fun games, and the title is absolutely known for them, but I've still gotten several dozens of hours of play out of WarioWare. It's just an absolute blast to go in and try to beat your high scores, it's got a full single-player port of Dr. Mario in it, and, well-hidden and often overlooked, Pyoro, which is acres of fun.
If, by "*types* of games", you are refering to the second screen, then I laugh at you and Nintendo.
I'm referring to the stylus and the microphone, in addition to the screen, Mr. Premature Mirth.
Having two screens, in fact, just may enable different kinds of play that a single large screen might not. The difference is more conceptual, in the player's mind, than technical, but still present.
But the stylus is the big thing, it allows for intuitive pointer interfaces that make RTS games a lot easier to pull off, among others.
So, in summary, nyaah.
The Advance Wars games can also be easily and quickly put down. That's the only reason I've been able to play them. If I had to sit in front of my GB for an hour or risk losing progress, I wouldn't play them.
But that has nothing to do with the style of game, and everything to do with the care in which they were implemented.
Almost all Gameboy Advance games are made like this, even the NES ports tend to have more save points than the original versions. Zelda: Link to the Past lets you continue from just about anywhere, instead of forcing you to return to one of the start locations.
This is actually not as easy to do for a turn-based game like Advance Wars as you might think, and especially games like Fire Emblem, where there's a luck element and dire circumstances, since, if you're not careful, the player can endlessly retry an individual turn until he gets a result he likes. They usually do things like save the pseudorandom seed along with the game, to ensure that the same move will play out the same way each time.
There is a lot more revolutionairy stuff about this PSP than there was in the Game Boy Color, the Virtual Boy, The Game boy Advanced, and the Gameboy Advanced Advanced. I think that the PSP is speced to be an awsome contender in the portable market.
I have to disagree, the DS has an amazing number of cool features, and wireless is just the top of the list, and PSP's battery life will likely be a major problem for it. The fact that it's a rechargable, and doesn't run on AAs, will help a bit in order to save it from the fate of the battery-gobbling Game Gear, Lynx and Nomad.
The larger screen and analog stick are admitted advantages, but the fact that the DS can run different *types* of games seems, to me, to give Nintendo an edge in this round.
Do you know what the name this handheld is? :)
Oooh, good point. Of course, most SNES games had been out of print for almost a decade at the introduction of the GBA, so they seemed new to many gamers. Playstation games are a lot fresher in people's minds, so it'll be harder for Sony to use that technique.
Also, while the PSX had some good games, I think history treats SNES games more kindly in the race towards oblivion, because of Nintendo's timeless design ethic.
I think two portables could end up coexisting if a strategy were put into place. Right now (i.e. pre DS or PSP), portable gaming is pretty much "short simple fun little games".
No, that's not always the case. Gameboy Advance games have approximately the same length as SNES games, which weren't necessarily simple at all. The Advance Wars games, for example, are extremely challenging and lengthy, and kept my friends occupied for many months.
The cool thing about the Super Monkey Ball games is, you really do get better with practice. They are superbly designed in that regard. If you're trying to reach the goal by random bouncing then you're probably not doing the level right -- a good number of levels have multiple ways of reaching the goal, some of them less obvious than others.
The camera is a little annoying in places, true, but in the game's defense you can usually get the camera to point the way you want to go by backing up a little and moving in the direction you want it. Most levels that need you to get the camera pointed in a direction provide a little space in which you can do it (in other words, there are no 90-degree, razor-thin ledges).
Question is, will anyone actually be bothered to sit through three HUNDRED levels of this?!
SMB1:
Beginner: 10 levels.
Beginner Extra: 3 levels.
Advanced: 30 levels.
Advanced Extra: 5 levels.
Expert: 50 levels.
Expert Extra: 10 levels.
Master: 10 levels.
TOTAL: 118 levels.
SMB2:
Beginner: 10 levels.
Beginner Extra: 10 levels.
Advanced: 30 levels.
Advanced Extra: 10 levels.
Expert: 50 levels.
Expert Extra: 10 levels.
Master: 10 levels.
Master Extra: 10 levels.
Story Mode World 10: 10 levels.
TOTAL: 150 levels.
GRAND TOTAL: 268 levels.
I own both games, and enjoyed them greatly and wanted more, and what we've seen is already only 32 levels shy of what's promised in the new game.
So the answer to your question is, yes.
(And it's not nearly as simple as you suggest.)
I agree - I own both Gamecube Super Monkey Ball games, and I've even completed Master Extra on SMB2. (Though I have NOT yet seen Expert Extra or Master on SMB1).
It looks exactly like us GC loyalists have been snubbed for making their games so damn popular.
Yeah, we'd never let them do that to us in a movie theater either.
(In case you're wondering, yeah I'm bitter.)
Posts like this are the reason it's a shame Slashdot's moderation system maxes out at 5. Well done!
May I humbly suggest Weboggle?
"Essential and critical element of the plot" is one of those things that is more obvious in some cases than others. Does Moby Dick need Captain Ahab? By all means, yes. Other things aren't as certain; Peter Jackson apparently didn't think that Tom Bombadil or the Scouring of the Shire needed to be in his movie, but Tolkien thought enough of them to put them in the books.
It is possible to argue this about many things, however. In practice, the determinor of whether something is "needed" for the story falls first to the author, second to the editor, and they tend to have more liberal notions of plot-essentialness than film adaptors. But even so, there must be *some* basis of whether it's important to the story. To take an extremely broad case, you can't just have angels in your story just because you want angels to be in it, their angelness must be important in some way. (This I shall suddenly call Harris' First Law of Fanfiction Suckiness.)
I'm all for fun and engaging. What I'm against is astroturfing, advertising that's meant to look like an unsponsored outpouring of affection. Remember little Ralphie's experience with waiting weeks to get the secret decoder ring in A Christmas Story? "Remember to drink your Ovaltine!"
At least traditional advertising is immediately obvious, and thus easily brain-filterable.
Look at it this way: it allows us whimsical Slashdot users to comment upon these stories, and rip it to shreds if need be.
I'd be afraid to pimp my product of service in a Slashdot forum; who know what those crazy, irreverant, anarchist posters will say!
Interesting, because now I've heard two opposite reactions to Aeris' death in this forum: she became the hero at the end in spirit form, and her death meant squat.
Random character death is not a good thing in a story, because stories are not random. Things that happen in them should appear unplanned, but should not be arbitrary. Everything should happen for a reason, even if it's not an obvious one. Killing off a character for no reason at all is bad writing.
Of course, I'm something of an outspoken critic of Final Fantasy-style writing. I've been rereading The Hobbit lately, and noticing how it progresses: the characters actually get through a good number of adventures, somehow without a fatality on the part of the main characters (though a good many goblins and spiders die). Some of the men of Lake Town drown or get flamed when ol' Smaug goes on his rampage, true, but none of the dwarves or Bilbo are among their number, they're safe. But several dwarves do die in the Battle of Five Armies, to make the point that war, ultimately, is hell.
Death for a meaningful purpose is not a cliche of games, though I wouldn't be surprised if there are a couple of similar cliches, it's a cliche of writing, period. But we give it a pass when we tell stories because it's one of the primary tools in the writer's box, so we should give games that attempt to tell a story the same kind of pass.
C'mon, world destroying events are a dime-a-dozen in these games. I think it was one of the points of the original article that character death advancing the plot is inherently more personal than world-saving.
Anyway, the point remains, we're talking about characters dying as part of a story, not the significance of that act. (And say what you want, I was actually a little shocked when Nei got offed, even though RPGs back then really didn't have a lot of dialogue for their characters.)
But lots of game companies have been mismanaged in an Atari kind of way, and look how long they've survived.
No, Atari GAMES (as distinct from Atari Corp) never really recovered from the Street Fighter 2 craze. They persisted for a while, and made some of cool games after SF2 hit arcades (such as ever lovin' Rampart), but they were never really as seen as hip after that. Consider that in the old days Atari was the unquestioned king of arcade games. Atari's success-graph never plunged as steep as it did then.
There was a time when they pulled lots of promising games off of test, including a sequel to Marble Madness, Marble Madness!!, because they didn't do well in arcades while the Street Fighter craze was going on. The fighting craze isn't as strong these days, but it's never really died out either.
This is not to discount mismanagement, of course. But in the long run Atari Games had better management than Atari Corp, which died years ago.
Think for a moment:
Capcom does makes original stuff once in a while, like Viewtiful Joe. But they're greatly outnumbered by the sequels they produce. Just HOW long have they beaten that Street Fighter horse? How many times did they use what was practically the same engine for each NES Mega Man game? Say what you will about Nintendo making sequels, but each of the 2D Marios is still a different game in many ways. When they get a big hit, like Resident Evil, you'll see game after practically unchanged game out of them. How is that different from endless Madden sequels?
SquareEnix: People make a big deal over how each Final Fantasy game has a different system, but there's been less variety as of late than usual. The job system has been used three times now in the core line, and twice in FF Tactics, and Active Time Battle at least six times, plus one in ChronoTrigger. But these things can't fix what I consider to be the core problem with the series now: RPG style battles have been done many, many times in many, many games.
Namco: Ridge Racer anyone? Tekken?
Of course, Sega has made three Crazy Taxis, and even though I never get enough of them (my high score in the first game is over $68,000). Nintendo has made Mario Sunshine. But these two companies tend to be more prone to strike out new territory than most.
But there are limits to even Nintendo and Sega's ingenuity. You want to know what the most innovative game company in the history of gaming was? They made Asteroids, Missile Command, Battlezone, Centipede, 720 Degrees, KLAX, Gauntlet, STUN Runner, Toobin' -- yes, it's Atari Games, an *American* company! And what did it get them? They died, ultimately, because of Capcom, which milked Street Fighter games that, although not really very different from each other, proved to be extremely popular. That set the pace for the whole industry, eastern *and* western, and only now are some mainstream gamers starting to think "Gee, there's not really a lot of different things to play, is there?"
My advice to the industry: whatever Ed Logg is doing now, wherever he is, companies, snap him up!
We might, but I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't advertised as Virtual Boy games. Nintendo barely mentions the VB these days, though there *is* a five-second-long reference in WarioWare....
No prob, and I caught the "at least."
The origins of the console-style RPG genre reside in Dragon Quest/Warrior, but RPGs are a fair bit older than that. Wizardry, Bard's Tale and Ultima all predate what the typical "modern" gamer would call an RPG, and although I haven't played them all, I'm pretty sure there are moments like that in at least one of them.
Yeah, but it was a "fake" death, they resurrected him with time travel. If you bring someone back to life it doesn't count -- death has no sting unless it's for good.
Similar, though not exactly the same, are the dozens of RPGs in which characters "die," but can be resurrected trivially. Phoenix Down, World Tree Leaves, Moon Mist, whatever you call them, what in our world would make Bill Gates hand over his entire fortune is available at the local Final Fantasy Tonic Hut for pocket change.
Those games are not bad (and Eternal Darkness was great in some respects), but there are certainly other western publisher worth their salt. Bioware and Blizzard are two favorite examples. Maxis games helmed by Will Wright are another, and don't forget about Sid Meier and Peter Molyneux.
But the poor fact is, these are pinpricks of light admist a vast, black curtain. Most western games are horrible. But then again, most eastern games are also horrible, it's just the better ones we see over here. Also, there are more eastern companies that have a more mature approach to game development: Nintendo and Sega definitely, sometimes Namco, Konami and SquareEnix, occaisionally Capcom. (There are others too -- amuse yourselves with attempting to name them.)