It's bad for them when their sales are trailing so poorly. If the console was a stronger performer, I'm sure we'd be seeing lots of GC/X-Box exclusives that skipped the PS2.
Unfortunately, best hardware has never equated best sales in the console scene.
It's also assumed that preview readers mostly want to see advance information about the game, and aren't interested in a quality assessment of what is likely still an unfinished product.
Amen. The boyfriend isn't into video games at all, but he's willing to discuss them and even watch me play if I need to get through something quick in order to make deadline. He accepts this as a quirk of my personality, just like I accept his.
Women who have problems this severe with their SO's hobbies... uh, should be dating other men. Or wondering what they were doing wrong so that they could get upstaged by video games in the first place. My boyfriend has certainly never found his comic books more interesting than me when presented with a choice between alternatives....
I think it's more a problem of not knowing what American gamers want. When viewed in light of the Japanese marketplace, most of Nintendo's recent decisions are fairly understandable, if not always optimal. Only a few, like the early DS release in the US or the upcoming "grown-up" Zelda game betray even a moderate concern with the demands of the American market as it stands.
Today you have already more or less physically correctly behaving bodies, shoot them in the arm and they will have a bleading wound there, shoot them in the head and they will leave a trail of blood on the wall, bunch them down the stairs and they will fall down quite accuratly.
Man, what games are you playing? All the stuff I see on consoles, the CG human characters move like stringless marionettes and die as bloodlessly and unrealistically as they ever did. At best, they fall down in different positions to reflect the physics of what hit them.
Most games are still basically cartoons, they just create the illusion of reality in three dimensions now. I guess this is enough to spook people.
Female gamers. Which is probably why most of us stick to puzzle games and the DS right now, and avoid mainstream games entirely.
To my mind, this is a bad thing-- there's a lot of great mainstream games most women would play in a heartbeat, if doing so didn't mean having to look at a Boobie McBoob character for hours on end.
David Sheff's Game Over pretty well confirms that Nintendo didn't want to leave the NES hardware, and probably wouldn't have if not for the success of the Genesis and the PC Engine (in Japan). That's just part of Nintendo's traditional design policies: they never, ever upgrade hardware until customer complaints and competition force them to.
I'm sort of neutral on Kojima. He gives a good interview, but tends to make games that just don't appeal to me.
Most of the Kojima fanboys I know swear by everything he touches and wave most of the sillier aspects of his games away as artistic craziness, of course, but that's to be expected.
Frankly, I have a hard time taking it seriously myself... but, what I report has indeed been my experience. I know a lot of people who are taking Metal Gear Acid seriously purely because it's a Metal Gear title and Hideo Kojima is involved. I think I know one guy who has expressed interest in the PSP for reasons other than Metal Gear Acid.
Maybe I just know an unusually high number of Hideo Kojima fanboys?
The anecdotal evidence always struck me as pretty convincing. I have a friend who had to spend something like four years trying to get a visa to come to the US to study. If he didn't want to go to a specific American school, I'm sure he would've just given up.
Under Netscape, I experienced crashes that were accompanied by the feedback utility and crashes that weren't. And then sometimes the feedback utility would appear even when Netscape wasn't crashing, and harmlessly go away when told.
I don't use any plug-ins or extensions (besides Flash), and the only Firefox version that has ever crashed on my computer is Firefox 1.0. However, it's only crashed once, and otherwise performs noticeably superior to PR1.0 in other respects. The problem seems to be the automatic feedback agent, which is suspiciously similar to the one that would crash old Netscape browsers on a regular basis.
Xenosaga is one of those games where I wonder why they just didn't sit down and make a TV series. That's obviously what they really wanted to do; the cut-ins get a million bazillion times more effort put into them than the gameplay, which got repetitive and irritating really fast.
For a Japanese launch? Super Robot Wars, Gundam, and Megami Tensei spring immediately to mind. I really have a hard time imagining the DS not having at least one game from each franchise. Multiple Gundam and Megami Tensei games are easily possible.
I think the deities from the Greco-Roman tradition tended to be portrayed as all-powerful... well, compared to humans, at least. You especially get a lot of invincible deities in the latest parts of the Roman tradition, when they were starting to deify increasingly abstract concepts.
I think between this and the Juedo-Christian-Muslim tradition you mentioned (which is from a region not far removed from the Greco-Roman region), Western culture inherited its idea that godhood equates to absolute power.
Re:It exists for shock value.
on
Game with God
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· Score: 1
There's a lot of imagery in Evangelion that is pure shock value, I'll agree, but I don't think the Judeo-Christian references go in that pile. Evangelion was made for a Japanese audience, after all, and most Japanese aren't Christian. Furthermore, using crosses and crucifixion imagery and references to God is pretty old hat as far as anime goes. I imagine if you'd been surrounded by programs of that nature all your life, you'd just expect it because it's the sort of thing that anime does, and probably wouldn't be inclined to take it very seriously.
Re:Yeah, I found that particularly cool
on
Game with God
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· Score: 4, Interesting
While many Japanese games and animes often have some Christian symbolic elements and the like, outside of Evangelion I can't think of any such case that has as strong of Christian elements, and none have as close of a parallel to real Christianity and its history as Tactics.
Presuming you're allowing both anime and games, this is just off the top of my head:
Both of the classic SNES Shin Megami Tensei games, but especially Shin Megami Tensei 2. I strongly suspect somebody on the Evangelion team played SMT 2, a lot of the material is remarkably similar.
Fullmetal Alchemist
Xenogears (although XG is a pretty straightforward Evangelion clone, I will admit)
Rurouni Kenshin (and, to be honest, a lot of anime & manga with a "feudal" setting will end up doing stuff with the arrival of Portuguese reformers and the subsequent political and cultural upheavals the introduction of Christianity to Japan caused)
The various anime adaptations of Bible stories. (there's also a lot of anime adaptations of Buddhist fables, too!)
Tetsuwan Atom. No, I'm serious; the material concerning this had to be censored out of Astro Boy.
A fair portion of Matsumoto's Captain Harlock stuff brought in Christian themes very tastefully, but subtly. It was usually done so in pure allegory, but hey, that's what Tactics did, too. Tactics just made itself very obvious.
Final Fantasy X. Though, really, a lot of the modern FFs seem to draw on it to more or less of a degree... it's not always very important to the storyline, though in FFX it pretty much was the storyline.
Pretty much all anime/game/pop-culture works I've seen that deal with Christian themes have struck me as heavily derivative of the works of Japanese novelist Endo Shuusaku, who wrote very concretely about the Catholic Church's operations in Japanese history and Jesus himself. Some of his works are available in translation and I would suggest checking them out. A lot of other of his literary contemporaries also dwelled on Christian themes at great length, and the effects that the appearance of Christianity had on Japanese thought. Games like Tactics draw very heavily on this literary tradition... so I tend to think of them as using stock plot. Not necessarily a bad plot, but nothing I (or the intended audience) wouldn't expect.
Re:Semi-serious?
on
Game with God
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Also a cop out -- why not have gods that are just undefeatable, and the players have to deal with their lives within that context?
Well, at least as far as the Japanese experience goes-- this is completely alien to their concept of deity. The gods of Japan's native and almost-native traditions, Shinto and Buddhism, are not invulnerable, just very powerful, and humans have to deal with them in certain ways to get what they want without being destroyed. Buddhism goes so far as to maintain the belief that gods are just sort of irrelevant, because they won't help people become enlightened and aren't perfectly enlightened themselves. So, as far as that goes, deities are often protrayed as being largely inferior to wise monks or incarnate buddhas in Japanese folklore. I think it's hardly a cop-out for Japanese creators to follow the ideas about godhood that are natural to their culture.
The idea of totally invincible godhood is strictly Western, and as far as the Japanese experience goes, strictly Judeo-Christian. While Japanese declares itself to be officially Christian, only maybe 1% of the population would fit the usual definition of a faithful believer. However, that 1% tends to be among Japan's cultural elite, so Christianity remains very much on the Japanese mind despite being a religion that not many people actually practice.
This being said, your idea for a game that involved really absolute, invincible deities could make for some very nice gameplay, especially in a well-designed RPG. I don't think an RPG like that is ever going to come out of Japan, though....
Re:Yeah, I found that particularly cool
on
Game with God
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· Score: 4, Interesting
What FFT did is actually a bit of a "stock plot" in regards to Japanese video game & anime stories that include a conspicuously Christian-modeled religion. Usually the political organization itself is criticized or portrayed as corrupt while the faith of the most devout worshippers is praised as being good. This is pretty consistent with the Japanese historical experience with Christianity and has a lot of precedent in Japanese literature from the early 20th century.
Egh. I'd think the way to do targeted content would be to bring Japanese developers on-board. This stuff... presenting it to a Japanese audience strikes me as like Squaresoft populating a game targeted at Americans with caricatured cowboys and indians.
'course, I am not Japanese, so who knows, maybe the players will eat it up. Certainly, Americans would be all over a cowboys & indians Squaresoft title, and probably find any stereotyping in it amusingly quaint.
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It's bad for them when their sales are trailing so poorly. If the console was a stronger performer, I'm sure we'd be seeing lots of GC/X-Box exclusives that skipped the PS2.
Unfortunately, best hardware has never equated best sales in the console scene.
What looks stunning on a television often looks cluttered, nondescript and smudgy on a handheld screen...
The PSP has the 16:9 screen for a reason.
It's also assumed that preview readers mostly want to see advance information about the game, and aren't interested in a quality assessment of what is likely still an unfinished product.
Amen. The boyfriend isn't into video games at all, but he's willing to discuss them and even watch me play if I need to get through something quick in order to make deadline. He accepts this as a quirk of my personality, just like I accept his.
Women who have problems this severe with their SO's hobbies... uh, should be dating other men. Or wondering what they were doing wrong so that they could get upstaged by video games in the first place. My boyfriend has certainly never found his comic books more interesting than me when presented with a choice between alternatives....
I think it's more a problem of not knowing what American gamers want. When viewed in light of the Japanese marketplace, most of Nintendo's recent decisions are fairly understandable, if not always optimal. Only a few, like the early DS release in the US or the upcoming "grown-up" Zelda game betray even a moderate concern with the demands of the American market as it stands.
Today you have already more or less physically correctly behaving bodies, shoot them in the arm and they will have a bleading wound there, shoot them in the head and they will leave a trail of blood on the wall, bunch them down the stairs and they will fall down quite accuratly.
Man, what games are you playing? All the stuff I see on consoles, the CG human characters move like stringless marionettes and die as bloodlessly and unrealistically as they ever did. At best, they fall down in different positions to reflect the physics of what hit them.
Most games are still basically cartoons, they just create the illusion of reality in three dimensions now. I guess this is enough to spook people.Female gamers. Which is probably why most of us stick to puzzle games and the DS right now, and avoid mainstream games entirely.
To my mind, this is a bad thing-- there's a lot of great mainstream games most women would play in a heartbeat, if doing so didn't mean having to look at a Boobie McBoob character for hours on end.
David Sheff's Game Over pretty well confirms that Nintendo didn't want to leave the NES hardware, and probably wouldn't have if not for the success of the Genesis and the PC Engine (in Japan). That's just part of Nintendo's traditional design policies: they never, ever upgrade hardware until customer complaints and competition force them to.
I'm sort of neutral on Kojima. He gives a good interview, but tends to make games that just don't appeal to me.
Most of the Kojima fanboys I know swear by everything he touches and wave most of the sillier aspects of his games away as artistic craziness, of course, but that's to be expected.
Frankly, I have a hard time taking it seriously myself... but, what I report has indeed been my experience. I know a lot of people who are taking Metal Gear Acid seriously purely because it's a Metal Gear title and Hideo Kojima is involved. I think I know one guy who has expressed interest in the PSP for reasons other than Metal Gear Acid.
Maybe I just know an unusually high number of Hideo Kojima fanboys?
Gran Turismo 4? I don't know anyone who wants a PSP that talks about that...
It might be different with the Japanese audience, but most Americans I know who talk about wanting a PSP want it so they can play Metal Gear Acid.
The anecdotal evidence always struck me as pretty convincing. I have a friend who had to spend something like four years trying to get a visa to come to the US to study. If he didn't want to go to a specific American school, I'm sure he would've just given up.
Under Netscape, I experienced crashes that were accompanied by the feedback utility and crashes that weren't. And then sometimes the feedback utility would appear even when Netscape wasn't crashing, and harmlessly go away when told.
I don't use any plug-ins or extensions (besides Flash), and the only Firefox version that has ever crashed on my computer is Firefox 1.0. However, it's only crashed once, and otherwise performs noticeably superior to PR1.0 in other respects. The problem seems to be the automatic feedback agent, which is suspiciously similar to the one that would crash old Netscape browsers on a regular basis.
Most console games do have options like that, actually. Some GBA games do but it's not "standard" yet.
You can... turn the volume all the way down, which makes the music inaudible. Have you tried this?
Xenosaga is one of those games where I wonder why they just didn't sit down and make a TV series. That's obviously what they really wanted to do; the cut-ins get a million bazillion times more effort put into them than the gameplay, which got repetitive and irritating really fast.
For a Japanese launch? Super Robot Wars, Gundam, and Megami Tensei spring immediately to mind. I really have a hard time imagining the DS not having at least one game from each franchise. Multiple Gundam and Megami Tensei games are easily possible.
Well... import gaming that doesn't involve importing a console, too.
Yikes, but doing that is expensive, though.
I think the deities from the Greco-Roman tradition tended to be portrayed as all-powerful... well, compared to humans, at least. You especially get a lot of invincible deities in the latest parts of the Roman tradition, when they were starting to deify increasingly abstract concepts.
I think between this and the Juedo-Christian-Muslim tradition you mentioned (which is from a region not far removed from the Greco-Roman region), Western culture inherited its idea that godhood equates to absolute power.
There's a lot of imagery in Evangelion that is pure shock value, I'll agree, but I don't think the Judeo-Christian references go in that pile. Evangelion was made for a Japanese audience, after all, and most Japanese aren't Christian. Furthermore, using crosses and crucifixion imagery and references to God is pretty old hat as far as anime goes. I imagine if you'd been surrounded by programs of that nature all your life, you'd just expect it because it's the sort of thing that anime does, and probably wouldn't be inclined to take it very seriously.
Presuming you're allowing both anime and games, this is just off the top of my head:
Pretty much all anime/game/pop-culture works I've seen that deal with Christian themes have struck me as heavily derivative of the works of Japanese novelist Endo Shuusaku, who wrote very concretely about the Catholic Church's operations in Japanese history and Jesus himself. Some of his works are available in translation and I would suggest checking them out. A lot of other of his literary contemporaries also dwelled on Christian themes at great length, and the effects that the appearance of Christianity had on Japanese thought. Games like Tactics draw very heavily on this literary tradition... so I tend to think of them as using stock plot. Not necessarily a bad plot, but nothing I (or the intended audience) wouldn't expect.
Well, at least as far as the Japanese experience goes-- this is completely alien to their concept of deity. The gods of Japan's native and almost-native traditions, Shinto and Buddhism, are not invulnerable, just very powerful, and humans have to deal with them in certain ways to get what they want without being destroyed. Buddhism goes so far as to maintain the belief that gods are just sort of irrelevant, because they won't help people become enlightened and aren't perfectly enlightened themselves. So, as far as that goes, deities are often protrayed as being largely inferior to wise monks or incarnate buddhas in Japanese folklore. I think it's hardly a cop-out for Japanese creators to follow the ideas about godhood that are natural to their culture.
The idea of totally invincible godhood is strictly Western, and as far as the Japanese experience goes, strictly Judeo-Christian. While Japanese declares itself to be officially Christian, only maybe 1% of the population would fit the usual definition of a faithful believer. However, that 1% tends to be among Japan's cultural elite, so Christianity remains very much on the Japanese mind despite being a religion that not many people actually practice.
This being said, your idea for a game that involved really absolute, invincible deities could make for some very nice gameplay, especially in a well-designed RPG. I don't think an RPG like that is ever going to come out of Japan, though....
What FFT did is actually a bit of a "stock plot" in regards to Japanese video game & anime stories that include a conspicuously Christian-modeled religion. Usually the political organization itself is criticized or portrayed as corrupt while the faith of the most devout worshippers is praised as being good. This is pretty consistent with the Japanese historical experience with Christianity and has a lot of precedent in Japanese literature from the early 20th century.
Egh. I'd think the way to do targeted content would be to bring Japanese developers on-board. This stuff... presenting it to a Japanese audience strikes me as like Squaresoft populating a game targeted at Americans with caricatured cowboys and indians.
'course, I am not Japanese, so who knows, maybe the players will eat it up. Certainly, Americans would be all over a cowboys & indians Squaresoft title, and probably find any stereotyping in it amusingly quaint.