Binaries and Controversies: Why are Japanese Shooters discriminated?

I have some beef against the western society who tend to call themselves "shooter gamers" as they seem a bit prideful and ignorant about how the gaming industry works. I find it kind of misplaced and crude that while western rpgs are allowed to flourish in our industry, J-Shooters are seen with a discriminate eye.

It first started with games like Lost Planet where they brought Triple-A quality japanese storytelling to the shooter market, but then for some excuse or another our western culture had to find some way of belittling the recent slew of eastern takes on the genre. Even people like IGN criticize this new space as "it's not COD, so it's not a real shooter" or "it's too japanese-ified to be taken seriously", yet on our end we allow awkward games like Skyrim to open arms.

It's just funny that people who call them Pro-J or Pro-East gamers somehow condone the use of "japanese-ness" in RPGs such as final fantasy and such, were such of the anime influence can be downright mind-jarring, but when they find their shooting stuff instead of smacking it with a sword...it is scene as an abomination.

THE LITTLE THINGS:

Due to the fact that one I don't really get, is the fact that some people won't play some non-US shooters just because the fact that they are THIRD-PERSON. What is wrong with being able to see the character for once? You admit that "OH NO, THEY DESTROYED ANY SENSE OF REALISM!", but the fact that the game isn't real in the first place...give me a break people. I don't see what's more attractive to just staring at the "butt" of a rifle or other gun than it is seeing a fully-detailed character AND a gun.

Also the fact that one of the best and maybe only successful TPS to come out of Japan is Metal Gear, and nobody seems to be complaining about staring and Snake's body for forever.

That and the fact that people sometimes play shooters because they DON'T WANT a good story, just seems they just play games just to shoot people....yay shooting?

THE BARRIER:

Seeing how the Japanese are experts in telling stories (albeit convoluted and half-baked at times), at least their characters are developed enough to make dialogue, cinematics, and some of the dramatization seem engaging and interesting. Sure, games like MW2 have "holywood" quality storylines, but by the end of the game you're like..."Who were those people again?". You never become attached to the characters, and in some ways western titles do that intentionally since they want to kill off as many non-mains as possible for the next release.

Sure, people die in J-games, but they also let you get attached to them and you feel more motivated and confident than the characters are actually "real" to you. Games like Metal Gear, Ace Combat, and others are usually good at making you WANT to keep on going.

GRAPHICS and GARBAGE:

Due to the fact that one of the biggest selling points for shooters is quality and immersive graphics...sometimes some of the biggest franchises like COD are behind the times. I just find it strange that some people like IGN show magnificent screens for J-Shooters that are oozing with detail, with PC versions compliant to DX10 and DX11, but after they show the screens their like.."Meh, they could be better". It's one of those times that either think these people are blind, or they are self-rejecting the fact that J-shooters generally look better than normal shooters...Binary, Lost Planet, and the like are almost ahead of their time and it seems these people are just finding some self-justification to shoot down the rivals on the other side of the pond.

I know for a fact that people who are playing shooters for graphics, aren't gonna find it in games like COD, but if they want graphics they're better off with games like Binary, Lost Planet, and of course MGS.

PIECE OF THE PIE/GIVE UP JAPAN:

I'm going a bit back and forth with this one, and this is why some people are J-lovers hate J-shooters. They think the only reason why Japanese are making shooters is they want a piece of the COD-pie, and that's a pie they will never have. They think japan is in over their heads, even though its quite clear on how generic COD is...they already took the pie, just nobody realizes it. People are brainwashed into thinking games like COD are the only shooters, while games like Binary, Lost Planet, and others are clearly higher values in story and immersion. COD is just like "Shoot shoot..do this..shoot shoot do this", technically that's a shooter, but do you really think that's what they only have to offer?

Going along with this...are the people who are like "Give up japan, every time you release a J-shooter, you're just making something that could have been a good RPG...and if it was an RPG...since I like J-RPGS...I would have bought it BECAUSE I only want Japan to make RPGS and Anime". Yeah, you love your sister country so much, but when it comes to the gritty you won't buy a japanese game since its NOT an RPG, good job idiot.

PROMISES and UNDER-MARKETING:

With all this said and done, the people like IGN and gamers are not the only ones to blame. Yes, even the companies making the games are sometimes at fault.

Lost Planet, Binary Domain, and MGS have recently been having good videos and impressive articles......every other century or two. That's it though isn't it? Seeing how okay games like COD get a commercial almost every week to hype or grab people into the franchise...while it's like..."Hey..this lost planet game...its...COMING OUT....SOMETIME"...yeah...

While marketing cost money, nobody is gonna even know the game EXISTS if you don't push it. I know that PC players for LP2 were almost non-existent seeing how the PC version just disappeared for almost a year and about 2 months before release they re-announced it...but it was too late because of that.

Binary Domain suffers some problems of only being shown at conventions, at SEGA has only been sending info "after" people want it...their Multiplayer looks awesome, but the fact people wanted to know that info ahead of time...people might not be searching for that info anymore....boom...failure.

GENERIC INNOVATION:

You heard me, a lot of people hate J-shooters because while the games are awesome...people look at them through a "W-shooter" eye. They think "the japanese are making me shoot bad guys, lame" and kind of not even look at the fact that "This game has an awesome new AI system, and the characters have a consequence system"..."This game is awesomely innovative"......"Oh, I didn't notice that...its J-Mass Effect"....

Yeah, it's always the rippings and generic things to look at a game, its not like games are NEVER generic in some capacity..I might as well start throwing away the games in my apartment now...idiots.

If I had a dime for every game I played that was generic, I wouldn't need to use my parent's allowance to be buying them.

Closing Comments:

Call me opinionated, but it's comments like the ones above that make people seem ignorant and stuck-up about not giving hugely potential titles a chance, and it disgusts me. It's becoming to where people are more "haters" than "gamers", and just the simplest details make a J-shooter "lame". These misplaced assumptions and remarks are why we ourselves are the cause, and it's not because what seems to be the brightest and most creative country in world is wanting their grubby hands on our already half-baked industry.

Thanks for reading, stay tuned for more articles.

My idea for a Batman video game collaboration between Team Ninja and Rocksteady/WB.

First off, I think this game would pretty much rock as it would explore more of Bruce Wayne's past as he fights to become Batman. As I have decided based on recent animated movies of Batman...he's not looking for closure or healing from his parents' death, he's looking for revenge and ways to take out thugs whose mission is to terrorize Gotham.

I think Team Ninja could do this quite well since they did a pretty good job about making Samus look vulnerable in Other M, sure she was still the cold-hunter shell gameplay-wise and still taking out the enemies, but maybe some players want to see not only what batman is saying, but what he is thinking. Batman's a genius and I think team ninja and WB could collaborate into showing players why batman is so smart, maybe even through mental/physical puzzle elements into the game just to showcase how batman thinks.

Also this game should show in a Ninja Gaiden-esque way that Batman is a trained-killer, not actually killing people but show that he has more to him than just beating up people randomly.

That and I think unlike the somewhat mundane and ugly bink cinematics that kind of plagued Arkham Asylum, have the CG branch of Team Ninja due their thing and make movie quality cinematics and cutscenes like they did for Other M. Batman should have entertainment goodness, and low resolution bink crud doesn't cut it.

That and I think with this entertainment value in mind, this batman game should have enough east/west elements that it is still entertaining for not only people playing it, but for people watching it also.

Like I said in the last post, Batman's origin is not that he is healing through taking out criminals...the pain in his parent's death is still fresh and he is just as angry as ever...and while he doesn't really show it, the use of showing batman's thoughts maybe should show that he is less or more angry than he appears. Also through this campaign maybe the developers should showcase where batman gets his day to day motivations, and in these motivations show that he is restless and eager to kick butt.

Also, knowing the highly detailed perks of the Ninja Gaiden III engine, I think it's safe to say that Team Ninja's engine should be used to showcase the more gritty look this Batman game should use. It's not meant to be like the Arkham games, so why does it have to look it? That and maybe the NG3 nature of having thug regulars one away from batman after getting their butt kicked would be a nice effect.

With that said, it would be nice if the music was more akin to modern/electo-orchestra similar that of The Animated Series, which pretty much had the best music of pre-Warner Premiere titles. That and Batman's art style should showcase his pain and freshness.

I think this is it for now, thanks for reading.

Frowned Upon or Who-dun it?: Why don't game developers collaborate more (with each other)?

With a wealth of old and new ideas in the gaming industry, one of the most rare occasions is for studios to actually STOP competing for a sec and actually shake hands on a project and collaborate to bring a new or old franchise more originality.

From bringing Link into SCII, to Team Ninja redefining the classic style of Metroid games pre-Prime, these games while being large departures at least keep franchises new and fresh even if the departures are almost alienating to fans of the previous vision.

Metroid: Other M is not exactly a "bad game", but its hard to re-adapt to TN's arcade like controls where the FPS mechanic is few and far between, that and actually giving Samus a more vulnerable personality gave some fans like me the impression that the game tried to make Samus too human from her almost cold-hunter shell in Prime.

That said, without Collaboration in a broader sense we wouldn't have some of the most blockbusting titles that are pretty much better than companies native titles, such as Marvel VS Capcom being easily a better franchise than the notoriously famous yet bland Street Fighter Series due to almost an additional plethora of characters, features, and the like.

Due to this, there are some collaborations just begging to happen, such as one I thought of earlier today, that WB/Rocksteady (Batman Arkham) should at some point collaborate with Team Ninja to make a Japanese-style Batman game (maybe explore Batman's ninja/samurai training background). Also it would be interesting to see Batman partake in a more Ninja Gaiden atmosphere that helms to more of the recent anime/premiere adaptions of Batman.

But my issue with this is, why don't people do it more often. Yes competition is the most known way of stimulating new and fresh ideas, but recently that hasn't been the case. Series like Battlefield and Call of Duty don't win in competition for new ideas, they win competitions by sticking to OLD ideas and keeping people in their markets by just having them play pretty much the same gameplay through each new title.

As if though it is almost frowned upon or blame-stricken for studios to collaborate since new ideas are almost hypocrisy and blasphemous. Kind of like how Other M was almost completely destroyed by critics because of giving Samus Aran a real personality, even IGN's article title being over-the-top with "Killing Samus".

I might not have liked the new Samus, but I don't think they actually BUTCHERED the character as IGN's persecution specifies. The only reason she DIDN'T have a personality in Prime is it was a bare-bones FPS made by an american branch of Nintendo, and usually the usual blunt perspective of FPS games is that the character has no real personality. Japan loves and is famous for creating exasperating character backgrounds and personalities, and while we don't openly admit it, they are pretty much the kings of taking a bland franchise and giving it life with an amazing story. You go from Prime where everyone's two-dimensional from Other M where everyone seems like an actual person.

I'm pretty sure Team Ninja could do the same with Batman. While he is a mean bad-butt take-all-names beat-em-up, the only reason he became batman is to take out his anger and parents' death on criminals. Maybe Team Ninja can explore his inner pain while he is actually doing his vigilante work. Batman's a jerk to his enemies, and maybe some people want to know why in game-play form.


This pretty much ends my rant for now, hope you enjoyed this thought-provoking post.

Thanks for reading,

Cyrain.

Spilling the beans: How do you REALLY tell the difference between pure story info and spoilers?

It has come to my abundant recent knowledge that due to the more increasing nature of sites like IGN, Gametrailers, and Gamespot...that some of the info they give out about entertainment seems to lie in a vast gray area of story or plot details. Though we think that while a mere synopsis or detailed report of details seems unharmful, how do we objectively decipher that someone may or may not wanted to know that bit of info, and in their opinion it was really a spoiler in disguise?

This also transcends specific genres as there is a divide in the fanbase. A lot more RPG enthusiasts find story details to be more spoiler-written than say an FPS game. Take for instance a wiki article on games like Final Fantasy, compared to the almost total plot-telling of RAGE that id gave out. Then again, how these games are presented, the biggest part of an RPG is figuring out the story yourself, while with an FPS knowing more of the story ahead could change if you're motivated to buy or complete game.

Going along, there are some games that show spoilers but you don't know they are 'til you play the game, one of the biggest examples of this is Ace Combat where some of the more definitive scenes are shown in big-budget trailers to grab your interest, later to find out that some of those sequences aren't til the final missions or cutscenes.

There are also issues about some RPGs and Adventure games that show "a little too much", not in the sense of spoiling major parts of the game, but showing scenes out of context in the accidental nature of confusing more of the audience than they may have intended. This is also of course another form of marketing, as to trying to say to their market "buy it to figure out the scene and not be confused anymore". Of course the consequences are much higher about this form of details since people like me don't want to be confused about details if they want to make a solid purchase, if not that a later trailer dissolves some of the confusion from the earlier footage.

With all this said, this all entails to the final notion that most marketers or info sites overlook, just how smart some of their audiences are. People like me who have played certain genres for almost decades aren't that hard to be fooled into thinking how more or less of the game they have actually showed. I could say for a fact that while some of the FF-XIII-2 footage has left me confused, that I also know that there is plenty of room in the game to those scenes to become completely understandable(as far as FF plot-telling is able to achieve). Thus why do FPS games seem to give out more info than RPGs because after id told most of the story of RAGE, I know that they have pretty much told me the whole basic plot of the full game.

Subplots aside, I think while these kind of motives have more good than bad intentions...Companies should re-evaluate their nature of what they deem story info and all-out spoilers.

M rated games: What defines a TRUE Mature game?

I've been getting a bit pounded on by people close to me that I've gone to the "Dark Side" and that many people of my faith think of M rated games as "stupid".

While this is the case for most of them IMO, my personal collection don't really into the word "stupid", they are in fact in reality "Mature" in my opinion.

Bad Company 2 with the Vietnam extension might be the most genious game, it makes some good points and is quite entertaining.

Deus Ex is by no in the far reaches of the galaxy stupid, as the game takes brains as well as guts to complete quests and tasks.

Rage, it might not be the most unique game in it's genre, holds some novel ideas on how the weapons, characters, and mechanics function to bring a rarely-seen fluid combat game, it's pure 60 FPS beauty.

Battlefield 3...need I say more? The game is pretty much the pinnacle of war shooters and brings a sense of realism and immersion that would be hard to do in a game lower than M...it's M for a reason.

Binary Domain...again, need I say more? The game while hinges on generic media plots brings an update to what squad shooters have been known for inconsistent graphics and group dynamics. This game brings voice commands, CG-style visuals, and a creepiness to the robots that is almost impossible to pass up.

Resident Evil: Racoon City...This game is not trying to break the mold of co-op shooter games, but rather refine it. Ghost Recon/SOCOM style squad-play with an assortment of zombie-slaying classes and interesting visual and CG dynamics that while still clunky, brings a sense of uniqueness and fun-looking gameplay that games like L4D scratched on the surface.

Killzone 3: Dear goodness...the Darth Nazis are plenty explaining...that and the visuals and gameplay just rocks on what might be the most epic PS3 FPS to date!

Ninja Gaiden III: Love the new realistic take the series has embedded, not as "cartoony" as the last two, the graphics are more vibrant and the replacement of gore from just enemies crying/bleeding to death makes it sound more horrific for me. That and the first-person-like combat of actually feeling like your a ninja cutting people down. That and the assassin's creed looking villain just takes the cake.

Well, I think that's about it for me...don't be a hater.

Thanks for reading!

Defining a medium: J FPS/RPG?

Now recently I have been contemplating the most cliche-d and abundant FPS/RPG genre...post-apocolyptic settings that are based on player choices, heavy-duty enemies, and a bombardment of what is said to be 100s of hours of main and side quests.

Now, many of my friends who are JRPG-ethic gamers find these games quite "meh" as the Japanese and American terminology and usage of the term RPG has blurred into an even deeper divide. That is why I have come to somewhat of a challenge....

How do you make a JRPG/FPS, or what would be defined as a "Final Fantasy Fallout?"

I have had some ideas, which might work to narrow the gap...having japanese style designs to everything instead of stereotypically-bland designs, which some people wouldn't find mutually exclusive. A world more resembling a japanese-style "post-something" world, instead of the "this nuke..bla bla bla" kind of mentallity. That and weapons could be more robustally or creatively defined unlike the "BFG #51" you picked up today.

Of course, the main and side quests would be more definitive as in being more than just "A to B to C to Endgame" and that the character development be more akin to actual tangible characters than some of the characters you find in western ones that are as flat as the side of your wall.

Of course transportation would have to be a prominent factor, but why stick with your "waste-buggy" when you could have a "waste-air-ship"? That and some more prominent options and more robust leveling system than just "BFG #51 has now reached level #51". Not to say you shouldn't be able to level up specific weapons, but the system should be more streamlined at less gun-stressed into thinking you'll have to be with BFG #51 at Level #51 for the next few hours.

Now, I have written stories before, but I find why games like Fallout or others are so hit and miss because of how the stories conflict with the design. The most recent example is that New Vegas had a more potential story but the overall design was boring as all get out compared to the more polished Fallout 3....with RAGE being a more typical game that just focuses totally on design and gun-ethic.

That said, I think the best way to go about it is design the first batch of designs as...I don't know..."Steampunk Valkyria Chronicles" and go on from there, I don't know why...but that's how I picture a basic J-Fallout.

To add onto that, in this economy we could use more defining and engaging games that are meant to both mindblow and simplify the gaming-needs of players who are looking to get a good deal on both story and design.

Also, I feel like the music of such a game should not only be epic, but be a "steady-epic" that defines the lows and highs of the game, not quality-wise...mood-wise lol.

Of course, the "boss battles" most be quite articulate and well-defined in the sense that I don't want to see that wannabe R2-D2 thing having some wierd cutscene just to explode cheesily in a wannabe camera-shot. That should be only for boss fights, and still specific to how you take-down stuff.

The game must still feel like you're using both sides of your brain, unlike some games that only include the technical or creative side of the brain.

bla bla bla....I think I've said everything that makes sense to people at this point, hope to make more posts soon.

That's it for now...thanks for reading!

Apollo: Dead Space + Apollo 13 + Aliens + Metro + Moon

Apollo (hopefully not the real name of the game) is a few concepts I was brainstorming about kind of meshed together into one engaging game.

Apollo starts off when small chunks of the moon break off and end up crashing with Earth, causing havoc in several large cities. Even though the space program was formally post-poned, an "Apollo" spacecraft with numerous new technologies and equipment is sent to the moon to investigate the mystery behind these moon particles. The spacecraft successfully makes it near enough to the Moon before being bombarding by more total-damaging bits that cause the spacecraft to fail and crash on the moon. Your character is the only survivor.

Little does your character know that gargoyle like aliens have been causing the havoc by making nests of their young. The gargoyle aren't too happy when you stumble upon one of their breeding pits and wish to kill you onsight. With only a zappper rifle and a day's full of oxygen in your high-tech new spacesuit, your character is pretty much determined to rid the moon of this infestation before midnight.

Luckily your spacecraft had stored a space-assault-buggy to hose down some of the aliens, that and a motion tracker for when you have to go deeper into the moon to fight some pesky digger-pits.

The game ends with you taking care of the alien infestation, and another spacecraft comes to rescue you, little did you know that the moon particles that hit earth were "portable breeding pits" in disguise. Earth is gonna have a fun time...