JayHitcher

@VinceNotVance I agree, though there are definitely times and places for both sorts of shows.

If you want to see something like, say, The Flaming Lips at their best, with all of the aesthetic marvels that they throw about, you can only really have that in a larger venue. Otherwise, it just doesn't work, and half of the audience will probably get run over by Wayne Coyne's plastic space-bubble.

But for something like your average punk band, smaller venues are great: reverberating sound, more movement, a more personal relationship between the performers and the audience.

And then there's the rave scene, where it's more about the audience being able to screw around with as little restraint as possible, which can work equally well in big venues (look at your average Daft Punk concert) and smaller ones.

It all depends on the artist and what you're looking to get out of the experience.

Mine was a big free concert at NX35 (music festival in Denton, Texas) in 2010.

Stardeath and White Dwarfs, Midlake, and The Flaming Lips.

Stardeath and Midlake were what you'd expect them to be; good performances, but lacking energy and crowd interaction.

The Flaming Lips put on what will probably be the best concert I've ever been to or ever will be to (unless I'm so lucky to see them again). A fluorescent extravaganza of confetti and barely-disguised sexual imagery. It opened with the band crawling out of a gigantic neon vagina, which set the stage for the rest of the show very well.

My only regret is that the show ran late, so they never got to play "Race for the Prize."

After that, the only other concert I've been able to go to was Missile (local rockabilly punk band from Dallas), Cheap Time (garage rock band who used to have members that went on to be in Be Your Own Pet), and Guitar Wolf. Needless to say, it was fantastic.

I'm currently trying to bum my way to the free show that M Ward and The Shins are playing at SXSW, so hopefully that'll be another great entry on this list.

On a side note, the pedophilia jokes in this thread are funny purely because it's pretty clear that most of the people making them aren't aware of how deep the lolicon rabbit hole goes.

You lucky, lucky people.

It's purely an aesthetic change.

In the western market, people are a lot more apprehensive towards seeing sexualization of underage characters. Giving them shorts, adjusting those aesthetics so the game doesn't get even more negative attention from people who see a kid in a game and immediately think, "Oh this game is for pedophiles," as quite a few people in this thread have said already, is something you'd do if you want this game to get across to most people in a market outside of the east. It's not censorship; it's how you adjust a game for an international market so that you don't alienate everyone.

If they took the race out completely, then you'd have more of an argument here. That'd be removal of content that'd have an actual significant effect on the game itself.

Putting shorts on some lolis doesn't make much of a difference in the end.

If the line between you wanting to play a game or not rests with what pants those characters are wearing, your priorities are pretty out of whack. Just go watch Nisemonogatari or something.

@Beforet said:

@mutha3 said:

Now, that I'm over the initial weirdness of how dumb an idea this is:

Man, that car is ugly as shit. He just plastered a bunch of characters over every square inch of the car. Way too overcrowded and he didn't even have the courtesy to stick pieces of concept art drawn in the same style(Charlie, Chie and Yukiko are in their cg art form, while both Rise's are hand drawn)

I thought the same, actually. There's no artistry, no real craft. It reminds me of those advertisements and signs that will just randomly have a loony toons character on it just because.

Agreed, and there are many better pieces of Soejima's you could use on this car instead of the ones they put on there.