That's exactly the point. You claim the Japanese should want Halo and DOA3 volleyball. Go into any Japanese game store and tell me a Japanese gamer needs an XBox to play a space-themed shooter or a game with cleavage.
As far as cleavage goes, they'll get a lot more of it for their money out of a "dating" sim.
The XBox failed in Japan not only because it was ugly and big, but because there isn't any compelling reason for the Japanese gamer to buy it.
Even if parents are ignoring the rating system (which they obviously are), the name of the game is Grand Theft Auto; you know, the name of a fairly substantial crime (in the US, I don't know what other countries call stealing cars). I know I won't be buying my hypothetical 7 year old Attempted Arson: Phoenix or Solicitation: Salt Lake City. In what universe does Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas sound like a wholesome game?
Why hasn't there been a similar outcry regarding God of War? Isn't the sex mini-game always available in that title?
I don't get why GTA:SA gets dragged through the mud when a minigame is found, but God of War gets away with it when it's meant to be played.
Methinks some groups have it out for the GTA series.
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Oh, no! A Mature rated game has mature themes and adult content. However my child's video game system raise him properly now?
Give me a break. If parents were okay with the content of GTA:SA before this minigame was found, they're either still okay with it or they don't really care about parenting.
This generation's consoles are more stackable than what came before. Right now my television doesn't occupy the entire space alloted for it in my entertainment center.
The PS2 sits next to the television horizontally. My Gamecube sits on top of it on the left side with no problems. The rest of the space on top of the PS2 is where I keep memory cards.
I'm not sure what the big deal is. I don't think I'm in the minority here, but I don't play all of my past consoles all the time. If I want to fire up my SNES or DreamCast, I just set them on the floor in from of the television and hook them up through the front-side RCA jacks.
And although I don't have it set up this way. All my components could be stacked like this, from the bottom. Receiver, DVD player, cable box, VCR, PS2, GameCube.
Well...there are no pictures to take, but Paper Mario: the Thousand Year Door does this. It wasn't after I beat the story that I went down to the Pit of 100 Trials.
It's definitely good for the completionists among us, and personally, I'm glad I could do it in that order. The end boss was easy enough without the Return Postage badge (which I know I would equip if I had it because it's the best badge in the game, in my opinion).
There's a trade here. It's a lot harder to implement freedom if the developer wants to tell a story (as most RPGs do). And it's a lot harder to tell a coherent story when the developer doesn't know what the player is going to do next.
Riviera: The Promised Land is extremely linear, but I'm really engrossed in the story. I don't know if I'd feel the same if I could go wherever I wanted whenever I wanted.
Despite being a big game of dress-up, I think Final Fantasy X-2 is about as close as you're going to get to implementing freedom in an RPG while telling a story. Yeah, you had to pick missions, but you could do them in whatever order you wanted (for the most part).
As soon as you give the player complete freedom, you get the same experience as most MMOs offer. All the battling you want with none of those pesky plot points to get in the way.
Sly Cooper left me wanting more. I think I finished in around 10 hours, and I had gotten all the extra moves. I tried some of the time trials and decided the commentary wasn't worth the insane difficulty. I wanted more story, and I have no problem saying the game was great, but too short.
Sly 2 felt right to me. I finished this one in about 20 hours. Got all the moves again and had a great time doing it. Varied mission ovjectives, characters, and play styles kept the platformer from getting dull, and the story was decent enough for a platformer that I didn't think it dragged.
I-Ninja felt long to me despite my finish time of around 15 hours. Why? 2/3 of my play time was replaying levels to earn extra content. Most levels had to be played 3 times to completely finish them. Why couldn't I have unlocked optional levels that were different?
So the answer is this. Leave me wanting more, and the length doesn't matter. Don't pad your game with pointless fetch quests and if I'm going to unlock bonus levels, they shouldn't be the same as the mandatory levels.
No no no. As much as the DualShock 2 is my least favorite controller, it is uniquely suited for Katamari Damacy.
The analog sticks are the same size and they're directly accross from one another. I wouldn't want to try it with a c-stick or the Xbox's offset sticks.
You're thinking of Panel del Pon. And the N64 version was called Pokemon Puzzle League. Apparently the North American audience (myself included) are too dumb for the real name.
It's available with Yoshi's Cookie and Dr. Mario for the GameCube as part of the Nintendo Puzzle Collection. Definitely the best import GameCube game I have, and it's the reason I bought a FreeLoader.
One thing that I wish is that they would go back to some of the things from Call to Power II:
Resources represented in the tens, hundreds, and even thousands (produced per city per turn) as opposed to basically ones and tens. This allows the game to be more fair, in my opinion. Also, resources are gathered equally from all available squares in each "band" around your city (your city can end up taking squares up to five tiles away).
Being able to feed and pay your citizens less, and work them more, while reducing their happiness. Building tile improvements with public works (I would set it at 30% (maybe this is too much against humans; I don't know), except at the beginning, where it would be at 0%) instead of workers.
More units. A big tech tree that goes hundreds of years into the future (Welcome to sensorium). I think the future was the most fun part of the whole game, with advanced units, buildings, technologies, and governments to create/research/enact. And looking up the history of these future things was always fun and usually dystopian (I love the information for Corporate Republic (the way America will soon be completely), Technocracy (the next step after Corporate Republic), and Ecotopia (an ecoterrorist government)). Too bad they don't really go into the future anymore (sticks tongue out).
One thing I don't want at all is ruins. They're very imbalancing, especially when you get free techs or settlers, and to a lesser extent units (how can a tribe have Fusion Tanks?).
I did dumb some of what I wrote down, as I don't want to spend forever, so be nice to me. Also, it seems that/. doesn't care about all the times I used enter twice to divide this into paragraphs, so blame/. if it's irritating to read.
Research!? The rating is spoken aloud at the end of a video game commercial, and they're displayed on all video game packaging. Your child's 12? See that M rating? That means it's not for him until you've decided it's okay. Buying your child an M (or T when they're young enough) rated game is no different than taking a toddler to an R movie. The ratings don't enforce themselves; they're parental guidelines.
I sure wish that was all the "research" I ever had to do.
When the dev team acknowledges that a portion of their product is broken, I discontinue using it. Until then, it's all part of how the game-world functions.
It's like another poster said, if I'm in a real gunfight I'm sure as hell going to get the best snipe spot I can, and if that means standing on my buddy's shoulders to get there then so be it.
There may be a distinction between fairness and courtesy, but the manual isn't the place to find it.
Should fighting game players only punch and kick (no specials) because the manual doesn't expressly tell the player how to execute a special? Is your knowledge of how to perform specials (I suck at figthers) unfair because I can't remember the combinations or I'm not as dextrous as you?
Is it unfair to rocket jump even though it's not in the manual?
Should we all avoid gear that stacks attributes because the manual says gear attributes don't stack (you only get the highest one)?
No, this is the way the game world is created for us. Do (or did) you bitch other students who studied more or got better grades than you because they may have had a natural aptitude for it?
No. If you don't like the way the game world allows you to play, stay off of that map, don't play that game, or shut up. They're just games, and they're supposed to be fun. If you're not having fun, go find something else to do.
Plus they are already exposed to the digital interface whether you like it or not - DVDs, cell phones, digital cable - it's a natural interaction for them even if adventure games specifically are outside their specific experience.
I call BS on this one. You find an adult that's familiar with all those things and happens to have missed out on video games, and I bet they'll adjust just as easily.
This particular anecdote speaks more about the quality of games and control schemes Capcom has put into its GBA Zelda titles and Four Swords than it does about the speed at which children get good at video games.
For what it's worth, the Sly Cooper games (1, 2) were very intuitive console games. The character acknowledge the contoller. They call the 'X' button the 'X' button instead of the 'jump' button, etc. It's nice to hear Bentley say something like "In order to execute your new thief move, jump with 'X', then press the 'O' button."
If you were playing the Bongos-ready DK side scroller, I think you were playing Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. Donkey Konga 1 & 2 are both music games: no player side scrolling required.
I don't know about Solitaire, but Bejeweled and Texas Hold 'Em (two of my Mom's favorites...she also like Rocket Mania) are available on the GBA. If they really want to play on the big screen, hook them up with a refurbed GameCube with a GameBoy Player. Never take the GBP boot disc out, and voila, Pickup-and-play games station with no spyware!
Oasis is one of the most intuitive games I have ever played, and it's fun and original enough that I actually plopped down the $20 for it.
You can learn all you need one piece at a time in the tutorial levels, and then you've got three skill levels: Easy, Normal, Hard that are, get this, easy, normal, and hard!::Gasp!::
It's turn-limited Minesweeper meets Civilization-lite. It is very enjoyable, and it's proof that pickup-and-play games aren't dead. They just seem to have moved away from the console market.
You wouldn't need a multi. Or am I missing something? It seems like you'll play PS3 games and/or watch BlueRay on your PS3 and you'll watch movies on your new HD-DVD player. Since more people watch movies than play games, HD-DVD will become the movie standard, and media balance will return. Games on Blue-Ray, movies on HD-DVD.
One console maker's game media preference won't have a profound impact on the movie-buying public's preferences. Look at the BetaMax and the MiniDisc. Their new format will not be met with support, and they'll be the only ones to support it. It's not like we saw movies specially formatted to play on the GameCube just because Nintendo decided to go with Mini-DVDs, and we didn't see movies ported to GCDs for the Dreamcast either. Eventually, we'll all realize that video game hardware and movie-watching hardware won't sell as combined units to non-gamers until the prices are comparable to those of movie-only players.
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly the point. You claim the Japanese should want Halo and DOA3 volleyball. Go into any Japanese game store and tell me a Japanese gamer needs an XBox to play a space-themed shooter or a game with cleavage. As far as cleavage goes, they'll get a lot more of it for their money out of a "dating" sim. The XBox failed in Japan not only because it was ugly and big, but because there isn't any compelling reason for the Japanese gamer to buy it.
Even if parents are ignoring the rating system (which they obviously are), the name of the game is Grand Theft Auto; you know, the name of a fairly substantial crime (in the US, I don't know what other countries call stealing cars). I know I won't be buying my hypothetical 7 year old Attempted Arson: Phoenix or Solicitation: Salt Lake City. In what universe does Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas sound like a wholesome game?
Why hasn't there been a similar outcry regarding God of War? Isn't the sex mini-game always available in that title?
I don't get why GTA:SA gets dragged through the mud when a minigame is found, but God of War gets away with it when it's meant to be played.
Methinks some groups have it out for the GTA series.
Oh, no! A Mature rated game has mature themes and adult content. However my child's video game system raise him properly now? Give me a break. If parents were okay with the content of GTA:SA before this minigame was found, they're either still okay with it or they don't really care about parenting.
This generation's consoles are more stackable than what came before. Right now my television doesn't occupy the entire space alloted for it in my entertainment center.
The PS2 sits next to the television horizontally. My Gamecube sits on top of it on the left side with no problems. The rest of the space on top of the PS2 is where I keep memory cards.
I'm not sure what the big deal is. I don't think I'm in the minority here, but I don't play all of my past consoles all the time. If I want to fire up my SNES or DreamCast, I just set them on the floor in from of the television and hook them up through the front-side RCA jacks.
And although I don't have it set up this way. All my components could be stacked like this, from the bottom. Receiver, DVD player, cable box, VCR, PS2, GameCube.
Yeah, because video games aren't popular in Japan, India, and most other countries at all.
If your friend has a PSX or PS2, he could play FF I and FF II on it. Final Fantasy Origins is available for under $20.
Well...there are no pictures to take, but Paper Mario: the Thousand Year Door does this. It wasn't after I beat the story that I went down to the Pit of 100 Trials.
It's definitely good for the completionists among us, and personally, I'm glad I could do it in that order. The end boss was easy enough without the Return Postage badge (which I know I would equip if I had it because it's the best badge in the game, in my opinion).
There's a trade here. It's a lot harder to implement freedom if the developer wants to tell a story (as most RPGs do). And it's a lot harder to tell a coherent story when the developer doesn't know what the player is going to do next.
Riviera: The Promised Land is extremely linear, but I'm really engrossed in the story. I don't know if I'd feel the same if I could go wherever I wanted whenever I wanted.
Despite being a big game of dress-up, I think Final Fantasy X-2 is about as close as you're going to get to implementing freedom in an RPG while telling a story. Yeah, you had to pick missions, but you could do them in whatever order you wanted (for the most part).
As soon as you give the player complete freedom, you get the same experience as most MMOs offer. All the battling you want with none of those pesky plot points to get in the way.
I'll use 3 platformers as evidence here.
Sly Cooper left me wanting more. I think I finished in around 10 hours, and I had gotten all the extra moves. I tried some of the time trials and decided the commentary wasn't worth the insane difficulty. I wanted more story, and I have no problem saying the game was great, but too short.
Sly 2 felt right to me. I finished this one in about 20 hours. Got all the moves again and had a great time doing it. Varied mission ovjectives, characters, and play styles kept the platformer from getting dull, and the story was decent enough for a platformer that I didn't think it dragged.
I-Ninja felt long to me despite my finish time of around 15 hours. Why? 2/3 of my play time was replaying levels to earn extra content. Most levels had to be played 3 times to completely finish them. Why couldn't I have unlocked optional levels that were different?
So the answer is this. Leave me wanting more, and the length doesn't matter. Don't pad your game with pointless fetch quests and if I'm going to unlock bonus levels, they shouldn't be the same as the mandatory levels.
No no no. As much as the DualShock 2 is my least favorite controller, it is uniquely suited for Katamari Damacy.
The analog sticks are the same size and they're directly accross from one another. I wouldn't want to try it with a c-stick or the Xbox's offset sticks.
You're thinking of Panel del Pon. And the N64 version was called Pokemon Puzzle League. Apparently the North American audience (myself included) are too dumb for the real name.
It's available with Yoshi's Cookie and Dr. Mario for the GameCube as part of the Nintendo Puzzle Collection. Definitely the best import GameCube game I have, and it's the reason I bought a FreeLoader.
If you want to do it in HTML just write your paragraphs like this:
<p>text text text</p>
Epic with Data's AI.
/. doesn't care about all the times I used enter twice to divide this into paragraphs, so blame /. if it's irritating to read.
One thing that I wish is that they would go back to some of the things from Call to Power II:
Resources represented in the tens, hundreds, and even thousands (produced per city per turn) as opposed to basically ones and tens. This allows the game to be more fair, in my opinion. Also, resources are gathered equally from all available squares in each "band" around your city (your city can end up taking squares up to five tiles away).
Being able to feed and pay your citizens less, and work them more, while reducing their happiness. Building tile improvements with public works (I would set it at 30% (maybe this is too much against humans; I don't know), except at the beginning, where it would be at 0%) instead of workers.
More units. A big tech tree that goes hundreds of years into the future (Welcome to sensorium). I think the future was the most fun part of the whole game, with advanced units, buildings, technologies, and governments to create/research/enact. And looking up the history of these future things was always fun and usually dystopian (I love the information for Corporate Republic (the way America will soon be completely), Technocracy (the next step after Corporate Republic), and Ecotopia
(an ecoterrorist government)). Too bad they don't really go into the future anymore (sticks tongue out).
One thing I don't want at all is ruins. They're very imbalancing, especially when you get free techs or settlers, and to a lesser extent units (how can a tribe have Fusion Tanks?).
I did dumb some of what I wrote down, as I don't want to spend forever, so be nice to me. Also, it seems that
Pressing Enter twice works to devide the paragraphs as long as you choose Plain Old Text from the drop-down menu next to the preview button.
Research!? The rating is spoken aloud at the end of a video game commercial, and they're displayed on all video game packaging. Your child's 12? See that M rating? That means it's not for him until you've decided it's okay. Buying your child an M (or T when they're young enough) rated game is no different than taking a toddler to an R movie. The ratings don't enforce themselves; they're parental guidelines.
I sure wish that was all the "research" I ever had to do.
When the dev team acknowledges that a portion of their product is broken, I discontinue using it. Until then, it's all part of how the game-world functions. It's like another poster said, if I'm in a real gunfight I'm sure as hell going to get the best snipe spot I can, and if that means standing on my buddy's shoulders to get there then so be it.
There may be a distinction between fairness and courtesy, but the manual isn't the place to find it.
Should fighting game players only punch and kick (no specials) because the manual doesn't expressly tell the player how to execute a special? Is your knowledge of how to perform specials (I suck at figthers) unfair because I can't remember the combinations or I'm not as dextrous as you?
Is it unfair to rocket jump even though it's not in the manual?
Should we all avoid gear that stacks attributes because the manual says gear attributes don't stack (you only get the highest one)?
No, this is the way the game world is created for us. Do (or did) you bitch other students who studied more or got better grades than you because they may have had a natural aptitude for it?
No. If you don't like the way the game world allows you to play, stay off of that map, don't play that game, or shut up. They're just games, and they're supposed to be fun. If you're not having fun, go find something else to do.
Devil May Cry 2 is also a 2-disc game, I believe.
Plus they are already exposed to the digital interface whether you like it or not - DVDs, cell phones, digital cable - it's a natural interaction for them even if adventure games specifically are outside their specific experience.
I call BS on this one. You find an adult that's familiar with all those things and happens to have missed out on video games, and I bet they'll adjust just as easily.
This particular anecdote speaks more about the quality of games and control schemes Capcom has put into its GBA Zelda titles and Four Swords than it does about the speed at which children get good at video games.
For what it's worth, the Sly Cooper games (1, 2) were very intuitive console games. The character acknowledge the contoller. They call the 'X' button the 'X' button instead of the 'jump' button, etc. It's nice to hear Bentley say something like "In order to execute your new thief move, jump with 'X', then press the 'O' button."
If you were playing the Bongos-ready DK side scroller, I think you were playing Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. Donkey Konga 1 & 2 are both music games: no player side scrolling required.
I don't know about Solitaire, but Bejeweled and Texas Hold 'Em (two of my Mom's favorites...she also like Rocket Mania) are available on the GBA. If they really want to play on the big screen, hook them up with a refurbed GameCube with a GameBoy Player. Never take the GBP boot disc out, and voila, Pickup-and-play games station with no spyware!
Oasis is one of the most intuitive games I have ever played, and it's fun and original enough that I actually plopped down the $20 for it.
You can learn all you need one piece at a time in the tutorial levels, and then you've got three skill levels: Easy, Normal, Hard that are, get this, easy, normal, and hard! ::Gasp!::
It's turn-limited Minesweeper meets Civilization-lite. It is very enjoyable, and it's proof that pickup-and-play games aren't dead. They just seem to have moved away from the console market.
You wouldn't need a multi. Or am I missing something? It seems like you'll play PS3 games and/or watch BlueRay on your PS3 and you'll watch movies on your new HD-DVD player. Since more people watch movies than play games, HD-DVD will become the movie standard, and media balance will return. Games on Blue-Ray, movies on HD-DVD.
One console maker's game media preference won't have a profound impact on the movie-buying public's preferences. Look at the BetaMax and the MiniDisc. Their new format will not be met with support, and they'll be the only ones to support it. It's not like we saw movies specially formatted to play on the GameCube just because Nintendo decided to go with Mini-DVDs, and we didn't see movies ported to GCDs for the Dreamcast either. Eventually, we'll all realize that video game hardware and movie-watching hardware won't sell as combined units to non-gamers until the prices are comparable to those of movie-only players.