Post by revolver on Aug 7, 2006 16:43:11 GMT -5
In 1985, gaming rose from the ashes of the Great Crash, and for a time, all was well. The great wall that separated the Japanese and Western markets crumbled, and for many years the they worked in harmony. Japanese and Western developers pretty much made the same types of games throughout the 8-bit and 16-bit era, and if there was something different, it was designated to the PC market. Despite the harmony, the Japanese seemed to dominate the market.
In the 32/64-bit era, things seemed to change. With console titles like Tomb Raider, Syphon Filter, Legacy of Kain, and a slew of PC games, the West began to pick up steam.
Now those once PC exclusive genres (FPS, MMORPG, RTS, etc.) are cluttering the console market, and the West seems to be taking over. The problem is that the Japanese aren't interested in what the West has to offer (check out the Microsoft booths at the Tokyo Gameshow for the past few years. Not even the crickets bother to show up to chirp). Likewise, it seems that gamers from the West seem to be growing less and less interested in Japanese games, with Madden, Halo, and Grand Theft Auto making all the big bucks. So once again, a rift is growing between the two markets.
So where is this all going? Are the markets going to coexist, or is the isolationism of the Japanese market going to return? Does this indicate that another crash is looming overhead? Where do you stand in all of this? Are you for the East? For the West? Or are you staddling both sides like the cheap prostitute that you know you are?
I personally stand faithfully with the Japanese market. I've always felt that the Japanese developers program and test their games much better, their memory management is infinitely better, their production values are much higher, and their control schemes are a lot tighter.
The Western market, though growing more interesting by the day, is still pretty despicable in my point of view. Where the Japanese market "rehashes", the Western market doesn't even do that; they release Expansion Packs. Their games tend to be buggy, glitch-ridden, have cumbersome control setups, and a lot of their games still lack motion-capture. They also seem to have a serious problem managing memory (1meg for Jak and Daxter?! That's 1/8th of a memory card!).
Overall, I just don't like what the West has to offer. While there's some great, innovative western games out there (Fable), overall, I think their market is growing stale. Western gamers (PC gamers, XBox fans) pretty much limit themselves to three unchanging genres; FPS, RTS, and MMO. A lot of FPS games are still running off of the Unreal engine, which was implemented in 1998. RTS games are pretty much all the same, the only innovations in the genre being introduced by games like Kingdom Under Fire (which is from Korea). MMOs are a get-out-of-jail free card for lazy developers. Let's face it, take any MMORPG offline and you'll have an awful, boring game. That means a developer can make an awful, boring game, throw it online and it'll be dubbed game of the year (Blizzard, I'm looking at you), along with 20 other titles.
I'm just not feeling the western market, and I think Western gamers for the most part get excited over the wrong things. Take the God of War craze for example. God of War presents absolutely nothing that Devil May Cry, Bujingai, Ninja Gaiden, Chaos Legion, Genji, Onimusha, and many other games just like it haven't already presented in a better fashion, but because it's a Western game, it gets major buzz. On the flip side, Metroid Prime is well respected by most of the gaming community, but because it's still attached to a Japanese company, FPS gamers don't take it seriously, segregating it as an "FPA" simply because they can't accept the fact that a game created by a Japanese company and developed by a Western house owned by a Japanese company totally trounced all their precious Western FPS games. They wont put it in the same genre as Halo or Half-Life because they don't want the superiority of those games challenged.
If you need proof that the Western market doesn't really know what it's doing, Microsoft is 4 BILLION DOLLARS in the hole thanks to their XBox campaign. Not million, BILLION. On the other hand, Nintendo and their "gimmicks" is dominating the market with the DS, which is rapidly becoming one of the highest grossing pieces of gaming hardware in history. And those gimmicks, like the WiiMote? Well, that little bit of novelty was enough to draw huge crowds that dwarfed Sony and Microsoft's pathetic showings at E3.
In the 32/64-bit era, things seemed to change. With console titles like Tomb Raider, Syphon Filter, Legacy of Kain, and a slew of PC games, the West began to pick up steam.
Now those once PC exclusive genres (FPS, MMORPG, RTS, etc.) are cluttering the console market, and the West seems to be taking over. The problem is that the Japanese aren't interested in what the West has to offer (check out the Microsoft booths at the Tokyo Gameshow for the past few years. Not even the crickets bother to show up to chirp). Likewise, it seems that gamers from the West seem to be growing less and less interested in Japanese games, with Madden, Halo, and Grand Theft Auto making all the big bucks. So once again, a rift is growing between the two markets.
So where is this all going? Are the markets going to coexist, or is the isolationism of the Japanese market going to return? Does this indicate that another crash is looming overhead? Where do you stand in all of this? Are you for the East? For the West? Or are you staddling both sides like the cheap prostitute that you know you are?
I personally stand faithfully with the Japanese market. I've always felt that the Japanese developers program and test their games much better, their memory management is infinitely better, their production values are much higher, and their control schemes are a lot tighter.
The Western market, though growing more interesting by the day, is still pretty despicable in my point of view. Where the Japanese market "rehashes", the Western market doesn't even do that; they release Expansion Packs. Their games tend to be buggy, glitch-ridden, have cumbersome control setups, and a lot of their games still lack motion-capture. They also seem to have a serious problem managing memory (1meg for Jak and Daxter?! That's 1/8th of a memory card!).
Overall, I just don't like what the West has to offer. While there's some great, innovative western games out there (Fable), overall, I think their market is growing stale. Western gamers (PC gamers, XBox fans) pretty much limit themselves to three unchanging genres; FPS, RTS, and MMO. A lot of FPS games are still running off of the Unreal engine, which was implemented in 1998. RTS games are pretty much all the same, the only innovations in the genre being introduced by games like Kingdom Under Fire (which is from Korea). MMOs are a get-out-of-jail free card for lazy developers. Let's face it, take any MMORPG offline and you'll have an awful, boring game. That means a developer can make an awful, boring game, throw it online and it'll be dubbed game of the year (Blizzard, I'm looking at you), along with 20 other titles.
I'm just not feeling the western market, and I think Western gamers for the most part get excited over the wrong things. Take the God of War craze for example. God of War presents absolutely nothing that Devil May Cry, Bujingai, Ninja Gaiden, Chaos Legion, Genji, Onimusha, and many other games just like it haven't already presented in a better fashion, but because it's a Western game, it gets major buzz. On the flip side, Metroid Prime is well respected by most of the gaming community, but because it's still attached to a Japanese company, FPS gamers don't take it seriously, segregating it as an "FPA" simply because they can't accept the fact that a game created by a Japanese company and developed by a Western house owned by a Japanese company totally trounced all their precious Western FPS games. They wont put it in the same genre as Halo or Half-Life because they don't want the superiority of those games challenged.
If you need proof that the Western market doesn't really know what it's doing, Microsoft is 4 BILLION DOLLARS in the hole thanks to their XBox campaign. Not million, BILLION. On the other hand, Nintendo and their "gimmicks" is dominating the market with the DS, which is rapidly becoming one of the highest grossing pieces of gaming hardware in history. And those gimmicks, like the WiiMote? Well, that little bit of novelty was enough to draw huge crowds that dwarfed Sony and Microsoft's pathetic showings at E3.