mesoian

I wouldn't mind...but I like seeing them.

I would almost prefer if it they just ditched their points system and did something similar to (shock) what Kotaku was doing a few years ago before they went back to their numbered review system, and just gave the pluses and minuses about each game after a detailed write up. Numbers obscure things in such a dumb way.

@BearSpark said:

Watching TV this morning, one of the top new items was that 2013 would be the year that the percentage of female gamers would overtake that of male gamers. Is this really news? Games appeal to all walks of life and I know loads of females who play games. Why is society so surprised that females might actually be interested in playing games on whatever medium is out there.

Is it news? Not really. But it's something that needs to be stated to put things into prospective.

The problem after that then is you then have to take that idea of "gamers" and split it up. According to these studies, if you have angry birds on your phone, you're a gamer. You have to divide things up to "people who are buying retail games for personal use" to get the numbers that we, the members of this community, would care about.

@Brodehouse said:

And lastly, "casual sexism of selling X to men". No. No, no, no. Targeted your primary demographic in your marketing is not sexism, it's _business_. That's how everything works. That's why when you create a product in which the primarily demographic is black men, you fill the marketing with things black men love. When you create a product to sell to seniors, you don't fill the marketing with Justin Bieber. Targeting a product towards seniors is not ageism, targeting a product towards latinos is not racism, targeting a product's marketing to women is not sexism. Why do you think yogurt commercials always feature a women in her 30s and her idiot husband who can't understand what yogurt is? Because that commercial appeals to the primary demographic of yogurt; 30 year old women!

What you're describing is profiling, which, conceptually, is still "wrong". I work in advertising and one of the most interesting comparisons I get to do are the Dr. Pepper, "It's not for women". Those ads do well in female demographics because they remember that a brand is essentially insulting them. It's using the concept of sexism to drive the idea of Dr. Pepper into their brains, and it doesn't matter if it's in a positive or negative, so long as they remember the ideal of Dr. Pepper. It's hard to say if something like that, or if something like Bill O'Reily spouting blatent lies on the air when his show is billed as a news program is "okay".

But that's a different discussion.

@morrelloman said:

Nobody cares that Link used to be Left-Handed? No reason to change that shit. Just pure Left-handedism. What about that?

Heh, I remember that argument.

There's an interesting conversation that the giantbomb boys had maybe..2 or 3 years ago, basically discussing what the time and situation was for developers to ignore the whining of their fans. To their credit, and for the first time ever, Capcom and Ninja Theory handled the PR for this game well. Both companies are going to make a substantial amount of money on this game and, in the end, their decisions to move in this direction seems to be the correct one.

The issue that capcom, specifically, has is their that upper management and thusly PR for of almost every IP they have been attempting to recapture the new generation of gamers in such a staunch way that they were are changing the direction of progress for everything they've made over the past 15 years. Nothing they've put out this generation even resembles what they did last generation and it's leaving a lot of legacied fans in the cold. But those fans don't matter as much as capturing and holding the market share, which is why going after new blood and making things more accessible and changing how things used to be is in their best interest. It has it's ups and downs (Marvel 3 was a step in the right direction, RE6 was not), but they want to be assured that if that older fanbase grows up and stops playing video games, interest in the products they're making doesn't simply fizzle out.

DmC will do will with people who have never played a Devil May Cry game before, and that's a LOT of people (DMC3 was 7 years ago now). It doesn't really NEED to capture that old audience, though I'm sure Capcom wants to try and hit both demographics.

And to be honest, of all that stupid DmC mewling that happened when the first artwork was shown, the only genuine commentary about how DmC exists differently from Devil May Cry 1-4 is that the combat is more simplistic and open to abuse. That's it. DmC is every bit as stupid as Devil May Cry 1-3 was. Sessler said it best, and i'm paraphrasing, "DmC is the most comprehensible the series has ever been, and that almost works against it because it makes understanding just how stupid everything really is that much more apparent".

So who is Suda51 working with to ensure that this is an actual game and not another art piece like Killer 7?

Because that man needs someone to reel him in and Shinji Mikami gets too caught up in his nonsense to do it.

@Animasta said:

@Mesoian said:

@Animasta: You switch back and forth between disc 1 and 2 a couple times that game.

well I quit after I made it to some village or something.

REGARDLESS, I hated pretty much all of the characters and didn't find any of the early story machinations interesting, and I know I played for about 10-15 hours.

Also LO has some of the slowest battling this side of FFIX.

I won't disagree with you there, most combat systems that revolve around the job system are pretty slow.

You should keep going with LO, it gets pretty interesting once the amnesia trope is cast off.

@Animasta: You switch back and forth between disc 1 and 2 a couple times that game. Did you end up doing a bunch of secondary missions in between getting Janson and getting on Ming's boat?

@Animasta: ::eyebrow raise:: You get the kids after the 2nd mission. It's like...3 or 4 hours in.

@Animasta said:

@Mesoian said:

@Animasta said:

@Mesoian said:

It's still Lost Odyssey. It's the only RPG this gen I can think of that treats the player like an adult in terms of narrative.

what does that even mean?

It's story doesn't cut corners in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It tells the important bits well enough that you can accurately infer certain elements, and spends it's time and effort focusing on emotional connections between the cast.

Compare it with Xenoblade that spends about 40% of it's story repeating the same thing over and over and over just in case you didn't get it the last 10 times, then oops! it's it wasn't important after all. Xenoblade has some of the most outrageous cases of "anime bullshit" weaved into the narrative that I've ever seen in a game period, forget about in RPG's.

well I quit after being saddled with two of the most annoying children characters I've ever seen (also lol at the lowest common denominator remark, always love when people do that)

and really, the only really good parts were the memories, the main story was boring and the characters were lame.

I mean resonance of fate doesn't tell you anything either really, it makes you infer things from NPC dialogue and side quests for the most part.

Well if you quit after you got the kids, you quit like, 3 hours into the game...so you never got very far into the core narrative.

To be fair, I never played Resonance of Fate due to how terrible it's demo was (Ni No Kuni has the same problem, but I'm still pretty jazzed for that game).

@Animasta said:

@Mesoian said:

It's still Lost Odyssey. It's the only RPG this gen I can think of that treats the player like an adult in terms of narrative.

what does that even mean?

Its story doesn't cut corners in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It tells the important bits well enough that you can accurately infer certain elements, and spends its time and effort focusing on emotional connections between the cast.

Compare it with Xenoblade that spends about 40% of it's story repeating the same thing over and over and over just in case you didn't get it the last 10 times, then oops! it's it wasn't important after all. Xenoblade has some of the most outrageous cases of "anime bullshit" weaved into the narrative that I've ever seen in a game period, forget about in RPG's.

@GenghisJohn said:

So I was thinking to myself that I needed a new game, I decided to take a look what was coming out. Browsing through the releases for this year left me a little bummed out, GTA5 is going to be awesome and there are some good games on this list but I am not super excited.

Dead Space 3

Crysis 3

New Gears game

Tomb Raider

Bioshock

Splinter Cell

Lost planet 3

Of course the new console announcement makes this all irrelevant, but that's still 10 months away?

They may not be at the top of your hype list, but all of those games look solid.