Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter, while not universally liked (some hate one, some hate the other, some like both, some hate both), were successful enough.
The Resident Evil movies make money.
Silent Hill was generally well-accepted, even by critics.
These movies are all far from good IMO (though Street Fighter does have a hilarious Raul Julia as M.Bison), but they were successful as far as I know.
Someone should mod you up because I actually took the 3 seconds to imagine what that would look like and it would indeed be really funny to send something like that to Ford.
I have $20 that says at least one TV crime-drama-whatever show will have a plot where a bad guy tries to plot some train crash by messing with a TV remote, or better yet, video game controller.
This kid does deserve to get in trouble, though, big-time. You don't go around derailing trams, that's not cool.
In reality, chances are that they just won't let you on the plane, let you into the IRS building, or let you vote, or something like that,... I agree, air travel and voting is sooo 20th century it's time to move on.
Calling it the "Spurs Engine" implies it's nice and consistent, gets the job done, but is pretty slow. Yes Tim Duncan is one of the best players ever but really the Spurs are one of the oldest teams in the league and at this point naming something after them that's supposed to be "new tech" just is silly.
The "Suns Engine," though, that means lightning speed. Plus it's fun cause then you can refer to the control CPU as "Steve."
If this doesn't get modded "offtopic" that's just lazy
Man you are NOT helping here! Especially with that extra "expect" type word you put in there. And then you also misspelled it later. And the second sentence is more like a sentence fragment. Clearly this article is hurting a lot of people's brains.
Besides the obvious reasons folks have already mentioned, there's also the issue that a lot of companies have developed in-house software that has web-based front ends and these only work in IE because that was the only browser anyone was even allowed to use internally in the first place. So what you end up with is a bunch of software people have grown to need that would need to be rewritten to work with multiple browsers. That's a big time and money investment, and it can also be a serious risk.
So at times you might have not only pressure from the "higher-ups" to stick with IE, but even from the devs who could otherwise be stuck rewriting JavaScript and CSS and whatever else for a while.
But it's 7am on Monday and that doesn't help in any case. Ok... that statement was unexpected... Wow see mornings are bad for me. Even.. Friday ones. Yay it's Friday:3
From TFA:
"We expected something unexpected, but we did not expect this," says Skinner. I really don't have anything to say about it other than... "huhwhat?" If he said something like "we expected something unexpected, and that's what we got," that would be better. But it's 7am on Monday and that doesn't help in any case.
Well, the thing is also the government *has money for this.* The FBI is budgeted to do stuff; headquarters gets money to use for wiretapping and renting cars and buying fake moustaches and trenchcoats and new jackets with big yellow "FBI" lettering and all that other good FBI stuff, as, so I gather, do the various offices. The problem is the money isn't being managed well. On the one hand you have headquarters not paying for stuff it's supposed to pay for. On the other hand you have agents stealing money.
The government has a LOT of money, and much of it is put back into private business for a service. In those cases it's a customer like everyone else.
Well if we want to get that deep into it, then it starts to also matter what domain you're in. "3 of the monitors in our IT offices are CRT, but 252 are LCD" implies 255 monitors since those are pretty much the only kinds of monitors you can expect would be talked about. In this case, yeah, the other recommendation might still be under consideration, and really I was making a joke with my original post and nothing more. But to have someone step in and throw set theory at me was just stupid.
LOL how cute. Maybe once you get a better handle on English grammar and basic arithmetic you'll learn that "agreed to do X things but said Y things are unfeasible" implies X+Y things (not a number less than or equal to X+Y). Furthermore, play around with misinterpretations of that sentence and with set theory all you want, you're not going to end up with 16 recommendations.
But for real this is all hardly ideal. Ideally we'd be paying taxes to have the FBI/NSA/etc. investigate folks what are *reasonable* to investigate. By far most of us would never have to worry about having our privacy invaded, etc. That is, the FBI and other agencies would be *doing their job keeping us safe.* And, ideally, they'd be doing it competently and paying their bills on time so that they're allowed to do their work!
From TFA:
Fine's report offered 16 recommendations to improve the FBI's tracking and management of the funding system, including its telecommunication costs. The FBI has agreed to follow 11 of the suggestions but said that four "would be either unfeasible or too cost prohibitive." The recommendations were not specifically outlined in the edited version of the report. 11+4 = 15. HOLY CRAP just how bad IS the FBI at tracking numbers?? There's a whole recommendation missing there. It's probably the one that says "don't freaking steal thousands of dollars for personal use."
This is funny now. But I noticed you at least dropped the 'knowing Japanese culture' line, since it bought you nothing. (Though how you thought that referring to that was "putting words in people's mouth" is beyond me, not that I care.)
That's what they do best is what I said, yes. You're not only trying to just hide behind your own wording rather than admit that you were just plain wrong, but you also forget what you said! Here it is again:
All the western devs know how to do are FPS/TPS, racers and sports (and not even all of them). Let me remind you that it was this nonsensical statement that bothered me in the first place. And it's completely acceptable to point out BG and Elder Scrolls as a counter, as those are two of the most respected RPG franchises in history. If you're going to start arguing about how the games I mentioned are old, then how about Oblivion being one of the most critically acclaimed games of 2006 or Starcraft 2 and Fallout 3 being two of the most highly anticipated games in the coming couple of years? I didn't even bring in the MMORPG genre, which is being utterly *dominated* by American developers (even if some are owned/funded by NCSoft). Oh and you said nothing of limiting the discussion to 360 when you said what western devs can and cannot do. Even if you did, Oblivion and Mass Effect disprove your claim. Even though you don't think Mass Effect is an RPG. I'll tell you, it's as much an RPG as Oblivion, or are you going to say that Oblivion is a "first/third-person-melee fighter with RPG elements" the way you described Mass Effect? Come on man, this is all laughable and I can't believe you'd rather try to weasel out of your BS when you should just admit you were making unfair claims!
I guess you just have a very narrow idea of what an RPG is, an idea inconsistent with developers and publishers and most gamers, I might add. The *combat* is 3rd person shooter. That's it. If you're going to tell me that Mass Effect is only about the combat, then you haven't played it. Its ratio of combat-to-everything-else is no greater than in most JRPGs that I have played, particularly the better ones.
As for what JRPGs might succeed/fail on the 360, that's open to speculation. Certainly a good Final Fantasy (not trash like FF:CC or Revenant Wings) might do well. A KH game might as well. And there can always be new properties. See, one thing that sets Western gamers apart from the Japanese (in general) is there is less brand and franchise loyalty. So something new is more likely to succeed in the US and Europe than in Japan.
The JRPG fanbase on the 360 is indeed small, but that makes perfect sense when this fanbase is completely unsatisfied by the 360! From the beginning I have been talking about diversifying the 360's lineup. Naturally this doesn't mean with crappy games or games that aren't marketed, since I'm considering the 360's livelihood here.
For starters, I know a lot more about Japanese culture than you'd think. I also know that it has basically no bearing on how well a Japanese-developed game does outside of Japan. The term "JRPG" doesn't need to imply a cultural theme, and usually doesn't. Just because JRPGs can draw on specifically Japanese culture doesn't mean they do or that it is this cultural infusion that drives their commercial success.
I'm not going to argue numbers with you and how much of a future Microsoft's gaming division has. It's not even the point of this discussion.
As for the last bit of your response, you really ought to be ashamed of yourself. First you claim that Western devs can only make shooters, racers, and sports games. A subjective and baseless claim. I provide counterexamples with commercially and critically successful games from RPG and RTS genres, but that goes right over your head and you assume I'm talking only about sheer numbers when those games have set standards for their respective genres or sub-genres as far as all developers across the world are concerned. You further continue with "games on XBL" which has *nothing* to do with the games I presented, showing that you don't actually have a clue about what you're discussing. Let me make it clear: Western game developers have, either in the past or recently, revolutionized a number of mainstream genres, including fighting games, and your ignorance of the majority of these contributions is inexcusable if you choose to go toe-to-toe with me like this.
Frankly I'm surprised you entered the conversation to begin with given your knowledge of basically nothing here. It seems to me you're basically a troll who dislikes non-Japanese games.
360 owners in general aren't like me, because I play a lot more games and genres than just on the 360. As for the 360's future in Japan, if you understand Japanese culture the way you act like you do, you should already know what it would be. If not I can always give you a hint.
Excuse me? you just described a third person shooter with RPG elements. Thanks! "real time RPG"? That doesn't even mean anything. If the combat system is enough for you to classify a game by genre and simply regard the rest of the gameplay as "additional elements" then a) you're arguing from a position that's not common to most folks, especially w.r.t. RPGs b) you make me laugh because at the same time you don't what 'real-time RPG' means. Let me help you out: it means 'not turn-based' with regards to combat. Morrowind as opposed to Mario RPG, for instance.
As for Blue Dragon, that game was also marketed terribly in the US. Halo, Gears, Mass Effect -- these games had a presence in retail stores. They had pre-orders being collected. They had TV ads on non-VG-dedicated channels. Blue Dragon, not so much. Besides that, it wasn't good enough to become a "sleeper hit" the way some other poorly-marketed-but-good games do. It just wasn't.
JRPGs *can and do* perform well in the US, just look at Playstation software sales. (And hardware sales driven by the JPRG games.) They just need to be marketed well (look at Kingdom Hearts), and there has to be something decent to market in order to keep the sales afloat and people with 360s interested.
Mass Effect is not "yet another third person shooter with RPG elements." You either have a very narrow definition of "RPG" all the way down to the combat system, or you haven't played the game, or both. Mass Effect is a real-time RPG with a 3rd person shooter *combat system.* In terms of design it is no less an RPG than Baldur's Gate or KOTOR, and given the character customization and story immersion, arguably *more so.*
It's not "JRPG"s that bomb on the 360 I'd say but "bad games" on the whole. Whether they are JRPG or not doesn't matter. Blue Dragon was simply not a good enough game. Eternal Sonata is somewhat esoterically designed and it was hardly marketed as far as I could tell. When a *good* JRPG, something on the level of FFXII or a Golden Sun makes its way onto the 360 and despite being marketed does poorly, then your generalization would certainly have some weight to it. For now I believe it is unfounded.
You really don't have a good idea of who you're talking to. Anyway, to say that the JRPG game design needs to draw on Japanese culture, well that's a rather baseless claim. For success in Japan, that may help (though to say the absense would hurt is merely an assumption), but for success in the US and Europe, hardly.
I'm well aware of the RPGs released so far on all consoles, and I know how poorly Blue Dragon did. That it's *not really a good game* isn't to blame, though, is it? ~_^ As for correcting me that it's not DBZ character design but rather Toriyama Akira design, how's that for disingenuity considering he designed both Dragon Ball characters and Blue Dragon characters and they are noticeably similar? My comment at least shined a light on the unoriginal design in the 360 game.
As for fighting games, my comment regarding the Smash Bros series is fully valid. To assume that if it's easy to improve on the game someone would have already done it is flawed because to date no competent developer has even bothered to. Why they haven't escapes me, but publishers aren't always in tune with *the whole* of what will sell and tend to go with what they are most comfortable with.
Smash Bros also doesn't prove me wrong about fighters not having progressed much. Brawl isn't out yet, and to say that we've seen a big jump from the original to Melee would be stretching the truth.
Regarding your last comment, the NA market is still the biggest gaming market in the world. Europe is a close-enough second. The XBox 360 is doing well in those regions so far, especially in terms of software sales. So yes, things are good for the console.
All the western devs know how to do are FPS/TPS, racers and sports (and not even all of them). Well, when Japanese developers outdo Starcraft, Baldur's Gate II and the Elder Scrolls games maybe I'll start taking what you say seriously but until then you merely make yourself seem biased and not very informed despite throwing Japanese game designers out there to give an illusion of the opposite.
Slashdot Mirror
Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter, while not universally liked (some hate one, some hate the other, some like both, some hate both), were successful enough.
The Resident Evil movies make money.
Silent Hill was generally well-accepted, even by critics.
These movies are all far from good IMO (though Street Fighter does have a hilarious Raul Julia as M.Bison), but they were successful as far as I know.
No, I'd do eight.
Someone should mod you up because I actually took the 3 seconds to imagine what that would look like and it would indeed be really funny to send something like that to Ford.
Interns.
I have $20 that says at least one TV crime-drama-whatever show will have a plot where a bad guy tries to plot some train crash by messing with a TV remote, or better yet, video game controller.
This kid does deserve to get in trouble, though, big-time. You don't go around derailing trams, that's not cool.
1) Philip Morris say video games are promoting smoking among children.
2) KKK Grand Wizard says video games are making children racist.
3) Exxon-Mobil says video games make children averse to renewable energy.
4) McDonald's CEO is a peen.
Calling it the "Spurs Engine" implies it's nice and consistent, gets the job done, but is pretty slow. Yes Tim Duncan is one of the best players ever but really the Spurs are one of the oldest teams in the league and at this point naming something after them that's supposed to be "new tech" just is silly.
The "Suns Engine," though, that means lightning speed. Plus it's fun cause then you can refer to the control CPU as "Steve."
If this doesn't get modded "offtopic" that's just lazy
Man you are NOT helping here! Especially with that extra "expect" type word you put in there. And then you also misspelled it later. And the second sentence is more like a sentence fragment. Clearly this article is hurting a lot of people's brains.
Besides the obvious reasons folks have already mentioned, there's also the issue that a lot of companies have developed in-house software that has web-based front ends and these only work in IE because that was the only browser anyone was even allowed to use internally in the first place. So what you end up with is a bunch of software people have grown to need that would need to be rewritten to work with multiple browsers. That's a big time and money investment, and it can also be a serious risk.
So at times you might have not only pressure from the "higher-ups" to stick with IE, but even from the devs who could otherwise be stuck rewriting JavaScript and CSS and whatever else for a while.
Well, the thing is also the government *has money for this.* The FBI is budgeted to do stuff; headquarters gets money to use for wiretapping and renting cars and buying fake moustaches and trenchcoats and new jackets with big yellow "FBI" lettering and all that other good FBI stuff, as, so I gather, do the various offices. The problem is the money isn't being managed well. On the one hand you have headquarters not paying for stuff it's supposed to pay for. On the other hand you have agents stealing money.
The government has a LOT of money, and much of it is put back into private business for a service. In those cases it's a customer like everyone else.
Well if we want to get that deep into it, then it starts to also matter what domain you're in. "3 of the monitors in our IT offices are CRT, but 252 are LCD" implies 255 monitors since those are pretty much the only kinds of monitors you can expect would be talked about. In this case, yeah, the other recommendation might still be under consideration, and really I was making a joke with my original post and nothing more. But to have someone step in and throw set theory at me was just stupid.
Well I was just joking. It could also be a typo in the article.
LOL how cute. Maybe once you get a better handle on English grammar and basic arithmetic you'll learn that "agreed to do X things but said Y things are unfeasible" implies X+Y things (not a number less than or equal to X+Y). Furthermore, play around with misinterpretations of that sentence and with set theory all you want, you're not going to end up with 16 recommendations.
But for real this is all hardly ideal. Ideally we'd be paying taxes to have the FBI/NSA/etc. investigate folks what are *reasonable* to investigate. By far most of us would never have to worry about having our privacy invaded, etc. That is, the FBI and other agencies would be *doing their job keeping us safe.* And, ideally, they'd be doing it competently and paying their bills on time so that they're allowed to do their work!
Sadly neither of those seems to be the case.
I guess you just have a very narrow idea of what an RPG is, an idea inconsistent with developers and publishers and most gamers, I might add. The *combat* is 3rd person shooter. That's it. If you're going to tell me that Mass Effect is only about the combat, then you haven't played it. Its ratio of combat-to-everything-else is no greater than in most JRPGs that I have played, particularly the better ones.
As for what JRPGs might succeed/fail on the 360, that's open to speculation. Certainly a good Final Fantasy (not trash like FF:CC or Revenant Wings) might do well. A KH game might as well. And there can always be new properties. See, one thing that sets Western gamers apart from the Japanese (in general) is there is less brand and franchise loyalty. So something new is more likely to succeed in the US and Europe than in Japan.
The JRPG fanbase on the 360 is indeed small, but that makes perfect sense when this fanbase is completely unsatisfied by the 360! From the beginning I have been talking about diversifying the 360's lineup. Naturally this doesn't mean with crappy games or games that aren't marketed, since I'm considering the 360's livelihood here.
For starters, I know a lot more about Japanese culture than you'd think. I also know that it has basically no bearing on how well a Japanese-developed game does outside of Japan. The term "JRPG" doesn't need to imply a cultural theme, and usually doesn't. Just because JRPGs can draw on specifically Japanese culture doesn't mean they do or that it is this cultural infusion that drives their commercial success.
I'm not going to argue numbers with you and how much of a future Microsoft's gaming division has. It's not even the point of this discussion.
As for the last bit of your response, you really ought to be ashamed of yourself. First you claim that Western devs can only make shooters, racers, and sports games. A subjective and baseless claim. I provide counterexamples with commercially and critically successful games from RPG and RTS genres, but that goes right over your head and you assume I'm talking only about sheer numbers when those games have set standards for their respective genres or sub-genres as far as all developers across the world are concerned. You further continue with "games on XBL" which has *nothing* to do with the games I presented, showing that you don't actually have a clue about what you're discussing. Let me make it clear: Western game developers have, either in the past or recently, revolutionized a number of mainstream genres, including fighting games, and your ignorance of the majority of these contributions is inexcusable if you choose to go toe-to-toe with me like this.
Frankly I'm surprised you entered the conversation to begin with given your knowledge of basically nothing here. It seems to me you're basically a troll who dislikes non-Japanese games.
360 owners in general aren't like me, because I play a lot more games and genres than just on the 360. As for the 360's future in Japan, if you understand Japanese culture the way you act like you do, you should already know what it would be. If not I can always give you a hint.
"real time RPG"? That doesn't even mean anything. If the combat system is enough for you to classify a game by genre and simply regard the rest of the gameplay as "additional elements" then
a) you're arguing from a position that's not common to most folks, especially w.r.t. RPGs
b) you make me laugh because at the same time you don't what 'real-time RPG' means. Let me help you out: it means 'not turn-based' with regards to combat. Morrowind as opposed to Mario RPG, for instance.
As for Blue Dragon, that game was also marketed terribly in the US. Halo, Gears, Mass Effect -- these games had a presence in retail stores. They had pre-orders being collected. They had TV ads on non-VG-dedicated channels. Blue Dragon, not so much. Besides that, it wasn't good enough to become a "sleeper hit" the way some other poorly-marketed-but-good games do. It just wasn't.
JRPGs *can and do* perform well in the US, just look at Playstation software sales. (And hardware sales driven by the JPRG games.) They just need to be marketed well (look at Kingdom Hearts), and there has to be something decent to market in order to keep the sales afloat and people with 360s interested.
Mass Effect is not "yet another third person shooter with RPG elements." You either have a very narrow definition of "RPG" all the way down to the combat system, or you haven't played the game, or both. Mass Effect is a real-time RPG with a 3rd person shooter *combat system.* In terms of design it is no less an RPG than Baldur's Gate or KOTOR, and given the character customization and story immersion, arguably *more so.*
It's not "JRPG"s that bomb on the 360 I'd say but "bad games" on the whole. Whether they are JRPG or not doesn't matter. Blue Dragon was simply not a good enough game. Eternal Sonata is somewhat esoterically designed and it was hardly marketed as far as I could tell. When a *good* JRPG, something on the level of FFXII or a Golden Sun makes its way onto the 360 and despite being marketed does poorly, then your generalization would certainly have some weight to it. For now I believe it is unfounded.
I'm well aware of the RPGs released so far on all consoles, and I know how poorly Blue Dragon did. That it's *not really a good game* isn't to blame, though, is it? ~_^ As for correcting me that it's not DBZ character design but rather Toriyama Akira design, how's that for disingenuity considering he designed both Dragon Ball characters and Blue Dragon characters and they are noticeably similar? My comment at least shined a light on the unoriginal design in the 360 game.
As for fighting games, my comment regarding the Smash Bros series is fully valid. To assume that if it's easy to improve on the game someone would have already done it is flawed because to date no competent developer has even bothered to. Why they haven't escapes me, but publishers aren't always in tune with *the whole* of what will sell and tend to go with what they are most comfortable with.
Smash Bros also doesn't prove me wrong about fighters not having progressed much. Brawl isn't out yet, and to say that we've seen a big jump from the original to Melee would be stretching the truth.
Regarding your last comment, the NA market is still the biggest gaming market in the world. Europe is a close-enough second. The XBox 360 is doing well in those regions so far, especially in terms of software sales. So yes, things are good for the console. All the western devs know how to do are FPS/TPS, racers and sports (and not even all of them). Well, when Japanese developers outdo Starcraft, Baldur's Gate II and the Elder Scrolls games maybe I'll start taking what you say seriously but until then you merely make yourself seem biased and not very informed despite throwing Japanese game designers out there to give an illusion of the opposite.