I've always observed British and Japanese tourists to be very polite in America, often much moreso than the Americans. I have had problems with other European and South American tourists being very rude, however.
This is not to say that I think all non-Brit Europeans and South Americans are rude, of course... I think it may just depend on where the tourists are and why. And, generally, Americans seem to take foreign vacations because doing so is a mark of status, not because they actually care much about wherever they're visiting.
I figure super-niche titles like Super Robot Wars can easily be replaced by content from Western producers for the American and European releases, which usually lag by about six months or so. I could see the list cutting back to 40 games or so, but 20 strikes me lower than Sony would probably want.
Me? I'll probably just import a PSP along with the new Super Robot Wars when it comes out, since the Sony-console SRWs have always been my favorites. However, the only "modern" platform I've passed on the SRWs for at all is the Wonderswan....
I don't see anything about this that South Koreans would find especially appealing. The culture emphasized here is aggressively Japanese-only, and most of the other Pacific Rim cultures don't identify with the Japanese any more than they do with Western high fantasy. I figure everyone in South Korea who wants to play UO is probably already playing it, or just playing Ragnarok Online instead.
I am completely mystified as to why this was made instead of a new UO game, and who they think the target audience for it is. They can't be seriously trying to woo anime fans with art like that and what appears to be the same old gameplay... are they?
Exactly. This is why the X-Box is primarily popular in Europe and America-- where games that are directly tailored to Western tastes can be published by Westerners on a Western console. It's also why the X-Box hasn't done well in Japan and just isn't going to. A Western game that's good by our standards is probably not going to address the desires of the Japanese gamer. There's no good reason why it should.
While the different regional console wars do influence each other, I really think the battle for the Japan/Asian market, the battle for the American market, and the battle for the European market should be viewed as very different things. Different market pressures operate in each region and the tastes of that region's gamers will be unique.
I know tons of people in daily life who play Angband variants, but basically no one who plays Diablo 2 or Quake 3. Should I conclude from this that nobody outside of the theoretical beings who post to slashdot actually play Diablo 2 or Quake 3?
Anecdotal evidence is just not be relied upon. It reflects what your friends do, not what most people do.
I'd agree that motion is a major weakness of "realistic" graphics right now. In most of the 3D games I've played that boasted high polygon counts and realistic rendering, I've noticed that the characters basically move like very well-lit marionettes, or audio-animatronic figures. As a result, I quite often have a harder time suspending disbelief in these sorts of games than I would in a smoothly-animated 2D game. I guess it just depends on what aspects of the graphics you pay the most attention to....
Devil Children may share the SMT epithet, but yeah, it's definitely no substitute for the original games. Devil Children is almost its own product line at this point, one that just happens to reinterpret a lot of classic SMT monsters in a very Shounen Jumpy style.
I'm pretty fond of the anime that goes along with it, too, but I'd sorta hate to see that get translated... it would inevitably get targeted for broadcast, which would mean very severe censorship. It's kind of sad when you consider that Devil Children was so obviously conceived to be the less horrific, more child-friendly part of the MegaTen game family....
The Hero's mother strikes me as the least of the concerns with SMT1 being censored; what happens to her is pretty much off-camera and tasteful. I think more problematical would be the rampant (if harmless) nudity, the pentagrams, the cult sacrifices, the fact the Hero gets arrested for murder, or the fact that players have the option of siding with the forces of Hell... it's just not a game the American market would've been ready for back then. I think it'd find a place on the market now, though, and while AGTP's rom-patching work is generally excellent, I still wouldn't mind having a pro translation of the GBA remakes that I could play on my SP.
Not surprised. Trying to explain Buddhism in Christian terms usually doesn't work out very well, although I can understand why people try to pull it off. The religions are similar in some interesting ways, but really dissimilar when you get down to the basic worldview the religions imply.
I haven't heard a lot about censorship of the title. If anything, I expect it to just suffer from the translation process... SMT goes on about a lot of concepts that English either doesn't have words for, or doesn't have commonly-used words for.
(For instance, there is a term for the Buddhist death-rebirth cycle the author mentions in the article... it's "metempsychosis". However, it's very rarely used, because how often does your average American discuss cycular reincarnation?)
Dante is a bonus character from the "special edition" of Nocturne called Nocturne Maniacs (the version being translated). He's not particularly important to SMT3's storyline and wasn't originally in the game. Playing SMT3 to see Dante strikes me as a waste of time, as his appearance is basically an in-joke like Cloud appearing in Final Fantasy Tactics.
You only fight God in SMT2, that I'm aware of. SMT3 is supposed to have an unrelated storyline, but what I know of it suggests the implication that it takes place after the sort of total apocalypse that formed the basis of SMT2's plot.
As for recruiting angels, well, you can, but they're only one type of creature. I can also recruit werewolves, Jack Frost, several bodhisattvas, and Chu Chulain if I feel like it. You can also generate Angels by fusing lesser demon forms-- I recall one game where I got one by fusing a pixie and a goblin, and another where I turned an angel into a sort of flying winged magic boat called Ame-no-Torifune.
Agreed that not enough time was spent discussing the games, though. The information about the Tokyo subcultures was interesting but it has never struck me as important to understanding SMT as having a grasp of Japanese religious thought in general. More worth reading than the Wikipedia article about SMT, though.
The big problem is that the "classics" of MegaTen are all pretty much NES and SNES titles that would be pretty hard to sell now. There are PSX remakes of the SNES titles, but they're... weak, to say the least.
I would rather like to see the GBA remakes of SMT I and II come over. They would be strictly niche titles, but both games deserve translation and would help give American gamers a better idea of where Nocturne is coming from.
I don't think datesims about trying to turn games into art, because they're not really games. Yes, I know, you play them on consoles and PCs, and they're interactive so they're technically games, but....
The audience datesims cater to isn't really one that's focused on video games, but one that's focused on anime and manga. One of the yardsticks for measuring success in this genre is if the game gets turned into some kind of (porn-free, even if the game wasn't) anime production like Comic Party, To Heart, or Tsukihime. You will never hear issues that occupy the average/. games reader, like depth of gameplay, open-ended interactivity, or player freedom brought up when people talk about datesims; instead, they'll talk about it in basically the same way they'd discuss anime of a similar genre, which girls they liked best and which plotlines moved them.
In datesims, the game media is just a vehicle for telling an anime-like story in a format that is much cheaper to produce. The game can be used as a basis for other merchandise, and to build fanbases for the characters. Distribution is simpler, cheaper, and the production team will require fewer people.
Personally, I'm glad these games are coming to the US, since there's definitely an audience that will enjoy them in translation. However, that audience is going to be comprised of anime fans, not peopel who are gamers first and foremost. I'd go so far as to say that these games might be more properly shelved with anime in stores like Software Etc., than with other console games.
There's so many federal grants given, though, that it takes something fairly extreme to generate any notice that the grant was given at all, and most of those grants involve relatively small lump-sum amounts of money. The controversies you're thinking of were probably the ones involving the NEA, which tend to be unusually large and result in unusually high-profile projects. I'm sure Wiki could win a grant or two and have awareness of the project not raise one bit higher in the mainstream than it already is.
I imagine Wiki probably intends to pursue several small grants, which tend to have fewer strings attached but are also more fiercely competed for. To be honest, I don't imagine Wiki winning anything until they've been competing for few years at least. And if the government found Wiki's use of the money unacceptable, the worst they could do would be to refuse future grant requests. Wiki is ultimately left no worse off than it was before.
Nothing. Once Wiki is awarded a grant, the money is theirs. Grant approval is done by committee, not by individual politicians, and once money is awarded Wiki can only lose it by mismanaging it.
That's not how it's really worked with the Tekken fans I've known. Most fans seem to look forward to each iteration not as a totally new game experience in itself, but as the newest "upgrade" to Tekken, with improved graphics, more characters, more moves, more options, etc. Most big fighting-game franchises seem to work on that logic.
The console version of Tekken 5 will probably get a lot of hype and coverage, but it's not unusual for major Japanese releases to slide under the American game media's radar. Especially ones like this, where a lot of the best features are meant to cater to a Japanese gaming culture that really has no American equivalent at the moment. Even at the coasts, the American arcade scene is dying, and the people still around probably wouldn't use the online content or ghost characters very often. The customization would be a big hit, but they'll probably have an equivalent to that in the console version.
Voting responsibly involves thinking about politics, which is generally a depressing and unfun subject. It's much easier to think that the election outcome won't matter anyway.
I'm hoping 2000 convinced people otherwise, but it's always hard to tell with us Americans until long after the fact.
I wasn't referring to Studio Ghibli at all, the production company behind the films I was referring to is supposedly animation giant Toei. The series of films is supposed to be older, possibly dating back to the 50's or 60's, but I haven't been able to dig up any information on them in English. The person who spoke to me about them in relation to Wind Waker specifically referred to them as adaptations of traditional fairy tales from the Western canon. It is entirely possible this series of films influenced Miyazaki and/or Genndy Tartakovsky as well as Wind Waker, if they do indeed end up existing and being anything like what was described to me.
Samurai Jack and Ghibli being direct influences is possible, of course, though of the two I think Miyazaki is much more likely. I'm not sure Samurai Jack has even run in Japan yet, while Miyazaki's style is one of the major film influences of Japanese cinema.
The artstyle is apparently a reference to a line of fairy-tale films put out by Toei that I have been told are very famous and recognizable to the average Japanese person. If this is indeed true, then I think the problem with Wind Waker's style is simply that Americans don't get the joke, and therefore have a harder time appreciating the game's interpreation of the franchise. I'm not terribly surprised that the next Zelda game is using a style that Americans will have a much easier time putting into context, since it's very cinematic and clearly a bit inspired by the LotR movies.
d.) Don't talk about Star Trek, Slashdot, Linux, or quote Monty Python. They don't have the slightest interest in any of those topics so it's not like they can interact with what you're saying.
You know, this is all the stuff I don't bother bringing up around my boyfriend because it's too geeky for him. Well-- except for Star Trek, but he actually likes Star Trek quite a bit more than I do so it's hardly a regular topic of conversation.
Have to agree. I never read magazines anymore, except for online versions and the odd comic book... but I go through about 4-5 books from the various public libraries around here a week. Tons of information, and all for free.
Most teachers probably won't accept wikipedia as a source, at least for the sorts of papers where you have to cite sources. When I've mentioned it to educators before, they refuse to consider it a "reputable publication" because it doesn't have a print equivalent and many articles aren't written by professionals. I completely disagree with that attitude, but what can you do? Most educators make up their mind about something and then never, ever change it until state or federal law forces them to.
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I've always observed British and Japanese tourists to be very polite in America, often much moreso than the Americans. I have had problems with other European and South American tourists being very rude, however.
This is not to say that I think all non-Brit Europeans and South Americans are rude, of course... I think it may just depend on where the tourists are and why. And, generally, Americans seem to take foreign vacations because doing so is a mark of status, not because they actually care much about wherever they're visiting.
I figure super-niche titles like Super Robot Wars can easily be replaced by content from Western producers for the American and European releases, which usually lag by about six months or so. I could see the list cutting back to 40 games or so, but 20 strikes me lower than Sony would probably want.
Me? I'll probably just import a PSP along with the new Super Robot Wars when it comes out, since the Sony-console SRWs have always been my favorites. However, the only "modern" platform I've passed on the SRWs for at all is the Wonderswan....
I don't see anything about this that South Koreans would find especially appealing. The culture emphasized here is aggressively Japanese-only, and most of the other Pacific Rim cultures don't identify with the Japanese any more than they do with Western high fantasy. I figure everyone in South Korea who wants to play UO is probably already playing it, or just playing Ragnarok Online instead.
I am completely mystified as to why this was made instead of a new UO game, and who they think the target audience for it is. They can't be seriously trying to woo anime fans with art like that and what appears to be the same old gameplay... are they?
Exactly. This is why the X-Box is primarily popular in Europe and America-- where games that are directly tailored to Western tastes can be published by Westerners on a Western console. It's also why the X-Box hasn't done well in Japan and just isn't going to. A Western game that's good by our standards is probably not going to address the desires of the Japanese gamer. There's no good reason why it should.
While the different regional console wars do influence each other, I really think the battle for the Japan/Asian market, the battle for the American market, and the battle for the European market should be viewed as very different things. Different market pressures operate in each region and the tastes of that region's gamers will be unique.
I know tons of people in daily life who play Angband variants, but basically no one who plays Diablo 2 or Quake 3. Should I conclude from this that nobody outside of the theoretical beings who post to slashdot actually play Diablo 2 or Quake 3?
Anecdotal evidence is just not be relied upon. It reflects what your friends do, not what most people do.
I'd agree that motion is a major weakness of "realistic" graphics right now. In most of the 3D games I've played that boasted high polygon counts and realistic rendering, I've noticed that the characters basically move like very well-lit marionettes, or audio-animatronic figures. As a result, I quite often have a harder time suspending disbelief in these sorts of games than I would in a smoothly-animated 2D game. I guess it just depends on what aspects of the graphics you pay the most attention to....
It'll never take off in foreign markets, though.
Can you imagine WMD in some place like Iraq?
Devil Children may share the SMT epithet, but yeah, it's definitely no substitute for the original games. Devil Children is almost its own product line at this point, one that just happens to reinterpret a lot of classic SMT monsters in a very Shounen Jumpy style.
I'm pretty fond of the anime that goes along with it, too, but I'd sorta hate to see that get translated... it would inevitably get targeted for broadcast, which would mean very severe censorship. It's kind of sad when you consider that Devil Children was so obviously conceived to be the less horrific, more child-friendly part of the MegaTen game family....
The Hero's mother strikes me as the least of the concerns with SMT1 being censored; what happens to her is pretty much off-camera and tasteful. I think more problematical would be the rampant (if harmless) nudity, the pentagrams, the cult sacrifices, the fact the Hero gets arrested for murder, or the fact that players have the option of siding with the forces of Hell... it's just not a game the American market would've been ready for back then. I think it'd find a place on the market now, though, and while AGTP's rom-patching work is generally excellent, I still wouldn't mind having a pro translation of the GBA remakes that I could play on my SP.
Not surprised. Trying to explain Buddhism in Christian terms usually doesn't work out very well, although I can understand why people try to pull it off. The religions are similar in some interesting ways, but really dissimilar when you get down to the basic worldview the religions imply.
I haven't heard a lot about censorship of the title. If anything, I expect it to just suffer from the translation process... SMT goes on about a lot of concepts that English either doesn't have words for, or doesn't have commonly-used words for.
(For instance, there is a term for the Buddhist death-rebirth cycle the author mentions in the article... it's "metempsychosis". However, it's very rarely used, because how often does your average American discuss cycular reincarnation?)
Dante is a bonus character from the "special edition" of Nocturne called Nocturne Maniacs (the version being translated). He's not particularly important to SMT3's storyline and wasn't originally in the game. Playing SMT3 to see Dante strikes me as a waste of time, as his appearance is basically an in-joke like Cloud appearing in Final Fantasy Tactics.
You only fight God in SMT2, that I'm aware of. SMT3 is supposed to have an unrelated storyline, but what I know of it suggests the implication that it takes place after the sort of total apocalypse that formed the basis of SMT2's plot.
As for recruiting angels, well, you can, but they're only one type of creature. I can also recruit werewolves, Jack Frost, several bodhisattvas, and Chu Chulain if I feel like it. You can also generate Angels by fusing lesser demon forms-- I recall one game where I got one by fusing a pixie and a goblin, and another where I turned an angel into a sort of flying winged magic boat called Ame-no-Torifune.
Agreed that not enough time was spent discussing the games, though. The information about the Tokyo subcultures was interesting but it has never struck me as important to understanding SMT as having a grasp of Japanese religious thought in general. More worth reading than the Wikipedia article about SMT, though.
The big problem is that the "classics" of MegaTen are all pretty much NES and SNES titles that would be pretty hard to sell now. There are PSX remakes of the SNES titles, but they're... weak, to say the least.
I would rather like to see the GBA remakes of SMT I and II come over. They would be strictly niche titles, but both games deserve translation and would help give American gamers a better idea of where Nocturne is coming from.
I don't think datesims about trying to turn games into art, because they're not really games. Yes, I know, you play them on consoles and PCs, and they're interactive so they're technically games, but....
The audience datesims cater to isn't really one that's focused on video games, but one that's focused on anime and manga. One of the yardsticks for measuring success in this genre is if the game gets turned into some kind of (porn-free, even if the game wasn't) anime production like Comic Party, To Heart, or Tsukihime. You will never hear issues that occupy the average /. games reader, like depth of gameplay, open-ended interactivity, or player freedom brought up when people talk about datesims; instead, they'll talk about it in basically the same way they'd discuss anime of a similar genre, which girls they liked best and which plotlines moved them.
In datesims, the game media is just a vehicle for telling an anime-like story in a format that is much cheaper to produce. The game can be used as a basis for other merchandise, and to build fanbases for the characters. Distribution is simpler, cheaper, and the production team will require fewer people.
Personally, I'm glad these games are coming to the US, since there's definitely an audience that will enjoy them in translation. However, that audience is going to be comprised of anime fans, not peopel who are gamers first and foremost. I'd go so far as to say that these games might be more properly shelved with anime in stores like Software Etc., than with other console games.
There's so many federal grants given, though, that it takes something fairly extreme to generate any notice that the grant was given at all, and most of those grants involve relatively small lump-sum amounts of money. The controversies you're thinking of were probably the ones involving the NEA, which tend to be unusually large and result in unusually high-profile projects. I'm sure Wiki could win a grant or two and have awareness of the project not raise one bit higher in the mainstream than it already is.
I imagine Wiki probably intends to pursue several small grants, which tend to have fewer strings attached but are also more fiercely competed for. To be honest, I don't imagine Wiki winning anything until they've been competing for few years at least. And if the government found Wiki's use of the money unacceptable, the worst they could do would be to refuse future grant requests. Wiki is ultimately left no worse off than it was before.
Nothing. Once Wiki is awarded a grant, the money is theirs. Grant approval is done by committee, not by individual politicians, and once money is awarded Wiki can only lose it by mismanaging it.
That's not how it's really worked with the Tekken fans I've known. Most fans seem to look forward to each iteration not as a totally new game experience in itself, but as the newest "upgrade" to Tekken, with improved graphics, more characters, more moves, more options, etc. Most big fighting-game franchises seem to work on that logic.
The console version of Tekken 5 will probably get a lot of hype and coverage, but it's not unusual for major Japanese releases to slide under the American game media's radar. Especially ones like this, where a lot of the best features are meant to cater to a Japanese gaming culture that really has no American equivalent at the moment. Even at the coasts, the American arcade scene is dying, and the people still around probably wouldn't use the online content or ghost characters very often. The customization would be a big hit, but they'll probably have an equivalent to that in the console version.
A lot of us don't.
Voting responsibly involves thinking about politics, which is generally a depressing and unfun subject. It's much easier to think that the election outcome won't matter anyway.
I'm hoping 2000 convinced people otherwise, but it's always hard to tell with us Americans until long after the fact.
I wasn't referring to Studio Ghibli at all, the production company behind the films I was referring to is supposedly animation giant Toei. The series of films is supposed to be older, possibly dating back to the 50's or 60's, but I haven't been able to dig up any information on them in English. The person who spoke to me about them in relation to Wind Waker specifically referred to them as adaptations of traditional fairy tales from the Western canon. It is entirely possible this series of films influenced Miyazaki and/or Genndy Tartakovsky as well as Wind Waker, if they do indeed end up existing and being anything like what was described to me.
Samurai Jack and Ghibli being direct influences is possible, of course, though of the two I think Miyazaki is much more likely. I'm not sure Samurai Jack has even run in Japan yet, while Miyazaki's style is one of the major film influences of Japanese cinema.
The artstyle is apparently a reference to a line of fairy-tale films put out by Toei that I have been told are very famous and recognizable to the average Japanese person. If this is indeed true, then I think the problem with Wind Waker's style is simply that Americans don't get the joke, and therefore have a harder time appreciating the game's interpreation of the franchise. I'm not terribly surprised that the next Zelda game is using a style that Americans will have a much easier time putting into context, since it's very cinematic and clearly a bit inspired by the LotR movies.
d.) Don't talk about Star Trek, Slashdot, Linux, or quote Monty Python. They don't have the slightest interest in any of those topics so it's not like they can interact with what you're saying.
You know, this is all the stuff I don't bother bringing up around my boyfriend because it's too geeky for him. Well-- except for Star Trek, but he actually likes Star Trek quite a bit more than I do so it's hardly a regular topic of conversation.
Have to agree. I never read magazines anymore, except for online versions and the odd comic book... but I go through about 4-5 books from the various public libraries around here a week. Tons of information, and all for free.
Most teachers probably won't accept wikipedia as a source, at least for the sorts of papers where you have to cite sources. When I've mentioned it to educators before, they refuse to consider it a "reputable publication" because it doesn't have a print equivalent and many articles aren't written by professionals. I completely disagree with that attitude, but what can you do? Most educators make up their mind about something and then never, ever change it until state or federal law forces them to.
The point of this story is that dinosaurs are awesome.