Edia has brought Valis Collections 1, 2, and 3, Cosmic Fantasy Collections 1 and 2, and Telenet Shooting Collection 1 to the west in English, and they also available physically on the Switch from Limited Run Games. There is also the Cho Aniki Collection, digital only.
Since then, they've announced many more collections, with suspiciously missing English announcements. The Tenshi no Uta collection, and I think one more, said it was getting a western release with "details to be announced later". But many more have not gotten any such promise, and I suspect they're slowing down on the effort to bring these over.
If there is any English release still planned, that LRG Direct thing in a few days is probably the best chance to confirm it. The Earnest Evans collection seems like a strong contender, since LRG already released two of these as Sega CD repros. For the one in this article though, I'd say low odds of this one ever coming over if the other ones don't start appearing.
He defines it right there. "catering to loyal customers".
Just because you can trick a grandma into buying a movie licensed game, or a sports fan into buying a sports game, doesn't mean these people are going to continue buying from you in the future. They're aiming for long-term customers, who will buy every product, because they actually like and trust the company.
Or maybe you're hearing it from the opposite end, like gacha games? That's because they know they'll never have a mass-appeal product, so they're aiming to entwine a small dedicated group of gambling addicts.
I'm against historical censorship myself, but I don't feel like this is the case here. I'm sure this is also what ALL PLATFORM-HOLDERS (not "Nintendo") are going to do too; evaluate if this can stay because the games are trying to be historically accurate.
But they will likely get denied, because these games are set in the modern day and have nothing to do with imperialism or WW2. It was just a bunch of English people who put it in the game because they thought it was the Japanese flag, and were unaware of its real connotations throughout Asia.
Just like if somewhere in Asia they wanted to make a game set in the US, and used the Confederate flag. And while technically these are flags that were used and a person may see, it's not seen in good taste to wave one around.
And on another note, who was comparing this to destroying paintings and statues? You can't be serious. The original version of this game still exists, with the rising sun flag still there. Nobody is rounding up copies and "destroying" anything. This NEW version of the game, however, will have a different flag in it. Should we also complain when remasters don't have the same exact artwork as the original game?
Haha, I had the same confusion with the headline. Though I thought "under the hammer" meant "will get destroyed if no one buys them", which... is probably about the same. And I'm not too worried that someone won't buy the games if they're really cheap.
But the big part was thinking 100 arcades were closing. And "Mortal Kombat" is an oddly specific name for an arcade... oh, wait, okay, it means to say arcade MACHINES, or arcade CABINETS, are going down.
I don't know about regional slangs, but historically an "arcade" is definitely the word for the building itself, not anything inside of it.
She was really best known for transitioning, at a time long before the current trans movement or acceptance. Kind of groundbreaking at the time, though I can understand the author wanting to dance around a sensitive topic.
To the people bickering about health care, I doubt she has a lot of money. Other than the elephant in the room above, she was really only known for tales of office hijinks on the early Bard's Tale games, and then later for drama and schisms between the original Bard's Tale creators.
As you can see above, the rest of her career is a bunch of headscratchers, and even The Bard's Tale was far from a financial avalanche. She probably did fine with day-to-day money, but is vastly unprepared for something of this scope.
Oh, and the N64 was Nintendo's foray into making one big "primary" button that you should always press. The GameCube and Wii took this idea further with making the button literally gigantic. And while I guess it worked well for new players who only wanted to press one button, it was a huge pain for anything that involved pressing multiple buttons together. So they ditched that during the Wii U and went back to the SNES layout. Which their handheld systems had been using the entire time anyway. And so far that's been the end of their weird "buttons for non-gamers" phase.
I was talking about in Japan. Circle as accept was the standard the entire time, and all systems they commonly played all had the accept button in the same exact location.
In the west the PSX was a mess, with some people using X and some using Circle. (Early SNES had this problem too actually.) Also, often it would be Triangle for the "back" button, which lasted all throughout the PS2 era too. There was no standard for any of this. The MGS series used Circle as accept all the way until MGS4.
Anyway, so around PS3 Sony was now strictly enforcing standard button usage. If you had a non-standard setup, they rejected your game. Which is where it officially became X in the west, and Circle in Japan. PS4 even included a really cool option in the system itself where you can swap them around for all games. And then PS5 came along, and said everyone everywhere must use the western setup. And since Japan had been using Circle as accept for like 30 years now, that did not go over well.
Many outlets do use AI, yes. As mentioned above, it can be used as just another another efficiency tool. I mean, are these people not using spellcheckers either?
But that is a good point, maybe all this hate from some writers is supposed to be like a flex about declaring that they write real articles and not full-AI SEO slop. Though I imagine it's more like a case of "old man set in his ways". Like some guy back in the day who angrily insists on calligraphy and refuses to use a printing press.
Also, some of you here seem way too young. The SNES had B-A because that's what the NES did. So if you played a NES port or something, the letters are still in the same place. They ordered Y-X in reverse to match. (But they're not really in reverse; just read them top-to-bottom.)
The Genesis had A-B-C in left-right order, and later added X-Y-Z to match (For the same exact reason as the SNES: Two distinct rows). Eventually the Dreamcast just chopped off the C and Z from the pad itself. (But they still exist as inputs! Other controllers use them, like the official fightstick.)
In the modern day, the PlayStation straight-up copied the SNES layout, and just "renamed" the buttons as symbols. To be legally distinct and not get sued, or something, I don't know. But they literally started as an SNES add-on, you know.
And similarly, the Xbox was just a continuation of the Dreamcast, under new ownership, and they flat-out copied the Dreamcast controller exactly. (Kind of. They added back in the "C" and "Z" buttons, now as "Black" and "White". But people hated that controller, so those buttons were then moved around, and eventually on the 360 they became the second shoulder buttons, to match the PlayStation.)
And that's it. It's not complicated. We currently have two face button styles, deriving from either Nintendo or Sega. Although Sony eventually took the ballsy move of switching their buttons to match the Xbox, instead of continuing to match Nintendo. Thus forever pissing off Japan.
This explanation makes no sense. What does X and Y have to do with CAD? Yes, it uses X-axis and Y-axis, but so does the entirety of mathematics. Also, X is often used for "new variable", and after X, then Y will be used (and then Z). What is this alleged connection between the Nintendo designers being huge fans of drafting, and somehow not knowing X and Y from basic mathematics?
Also, his factoid about that's why the top row is a different color and concave is clearly BS, between the original SFC controller didn't do either of this. This seems like an incredibly unreliable source.
It seems much more logical that they just wanted to have two rows of buttons, and chose letters that were far away from each other and would allow more to be added in the future, without confusing which row/letters are on top and which are on bottom. This doesn't seem like rocket science.
I agree about the moral panic, and I want to add that I always see a lot of anti-AI articles keep coming up on the same sites, repeatedly. Like it's really obvious which people are trying to push an agenda about it. Or maybe it's just a high-click-rate ragebait topic. But either way, it's super apparent when it's always the same sources blasting it out in their echo chambers.
This feels like one of those things that would've easily been found by just reading Japanese sources for this game. Like certainly the makers of this demo disc magazine had heavily advertised this, yeah?
There's actually a lot of things like this with games, and some still happening to this day. Like I recently solved a CvS2 mystery (how to determine your final boss) that no one in the West knew for over 20 years... by simply spending two minutes looking it up in Japanese. It's funny seeing these things that are widely known in the country, but no one ever wrote it down in English.
Yeah, I've never understood the claim that people get worse at games as they get older. Like maybe if they stop playing over the years? (And were never actually good in the first place, but rose-tinted-glasses?)
Because as I've gotten older, I've gotten WAY better at games. In fact I routinely go back to games I was never able to finish as a teenager, and beat them easily.
Ha, I was thinking about the Atari/ET landfill thing too. Out of nowhere this documentary comes out claiming to "mythbust" it, but before that point not a single person ever called it a myth. And then they eventually sold people garbage for outrageous prices, so you can kind see what their angle was...
Ah, you could be right. I just read on the previous article that the preservation group said the seller backed out at the last minute, and that's why they were raising money. But perhaps that wasn't the start, and they were actually in the middle of the bidding war at the time. And like you said, that group and their story might just be unreliable in general.
Also, whether they're for-profit or non-profit doesn't really matter. A lot of non-profits run scams. Being non-profit doesn't mean that you can't pay yourself and other employees. So what they do is just take all the money, give it to themselves, and call it their "salary". And hey, no money left over, that means no "profit". They can also throw lavish parties, buy "company equipment", yadda yadda, as long as everything they spend goes back into the company itself. And personally, I don't see how making your company grow bigger while giving yourself a fat paycheck is somehow any different than what a for-profit company does. Not having cash reserves? So they might have to close the company if times get tough? Yeah, I'm sure they're worrying about that all the way from the mansion to the Ferrari.
@Daniel36 I feel the same way. At first I was really excited to hear about these old PC games coming to the west via Eggconsole. Like I absolutely love DQ4, so I probably would've bought this. Except why would I purchase a game if I can't actually play through it?
At least just throw on an easy machine translation. Sure it won't be great, but it'll at least be more usable than NOTHING. And nobody's going to be playing a 1987 game anyway expecting to find the work of Shakespeare.
I don't feel sorry for this person at all. He had all the chances in the world to donate it to the preservation group mentioned, but instead he backed out and tried to sell it to the highest bidder. And now it's being taken from him because it was all stolen goods in the first place. If anything I'm glad to see some greedy ***** get karma for once.
I mean, it's certainly a shame about the games though. If only he actually cared about getting them dumped, then he would've done so and at that point no police could ever take them away. Hope this is a lesson to everyone else who doesn't know how to share.
@KainXavier Yeah, I had read those before, and that article by John was exactly what I was thinking of when I said it should informative instead of divisive. Instead of attacking people for not knowing, he uses the opportunity to talk up historical games and events that younger audiences don't hear about often, and even provides lots of references they can use to find out more. I agree that it's very well done, and I like his work a lot in general.
For that first article, though it was indeed pretty aggessive, at least it was the actual topic of debate, and more newsworthy since the ignorant claim came from an actual big-name gaming journalist.
(I'd actually like to see gaming sites check each other more often. Many of them have devolved into "My word is god, don't you dare question me." Comments disabled, and all their peers just sit idle by and nod.)
This article though, just feels like a huge stretch. The base story was just devs talking about the influences used in their games. But that was all reframed into an attack piece because a deep dive into a Twitter thread found one unknown person who said something dumb. I don't think we really need to get up in arms about random hot takes.
I also want to say, this is like the exact opposite of most features on this site, which profess that it's important to understand influential games even if they weren't well-known in your own country. But here, these men do not understand a bunch of influential games that weren't popular in their country, but now this time we should be mocking anyone who dares question this knowledge hole. Really bizarre double-standard, and honestly I'm getting very wary of UK-centric news sites that can't rein in their bias (*coughEurogamercough)
Like this article could've easily been "Devs tell us about their backgrounds", and then added in "Because did you know, over in France..." Nice and informative, without trying to divide people.
What a bizarre article. It seems to be trying to foster a narrative of "Americans are so ignorant that their experience wasn't superior", but all it is showing is tons of Europeans getting high-and-mighty saying that THEIR experience was superior (and that Americans are soooo dumb). Especially that St1ka guy re-tweeted above, who goes full keyboard warrior responding to every single comment and going into deep denial mode about Nintendo systems having influential games.
And even better, these "outrage" threads are showing that usual hilarious ragebait result, where only like two people are "upset" about it, and then there are just hundreds of people being upset about this fictional army of other upset people. It's just blowing up a reply tweet from a random unimportant nobody, and everybody else is just getting off to how they are so much more superior to that guy and his non-existent massive followers.
And even the two people who are surprised by this don't even sound surprised that the guy didn't have a Nintendo system growing up, but moreso the fact that he allegedly STILL hasn't played games on Nintendo consoles. Which is indeed kind of weird, especially when your whole job is to understand game design. Like maybe take some time to study up on this? It's like, sure, maybe you didn't watch a lot of movies growing up, but once you become a film-maker, maybe you should go back and check out all those things you missed out on? Hell, that's why I like this site. Tell me all about those highly influential games that we in the west were ignorant about. I'm not sitting here like "Well I personally never played it, so it must've not been important at all!" And yet these voices are the exact ones this article is amplifying.
Also, from another interview, I see another team member of Expedition 33 talking about how he loved Paper Mario, and even told the guy above to try it out. So yeah, this game playing similar to some Nintendo stuff isn't a random coincidence. Some people on the team were indeed well aware of these games, even if the guy above wasn't.
Comments 25
Re: Six PC Engine Games From Telenet Japan Are Being Reissued On Nintendo Switch Early Next Year
Edia has brought Valis Collections 1, 2, and 3, Cosmic Fantasy Collections 1 and 2, and Telenet Shooting Collection 1 to the west in English, and they also available physically on the Switch from Limited Run Games. There is also the Cho Aniki Collection, digital only.
Since then, they've announced many more collections, with suspiciously missing English announcements. The Tenshi no Uta collection, and I think one more, said it was getting a western release with "details to be announced later". But many more have not gotten any such promise, and I suspect they're slowing down on the effort to bring these over.
If there is any English release still planned, that LRG Direct thing in a few days is probably the best chance to confirm it. The Earnest Evans collection seems like a strong contender, since LRG already released two of these as Sega CD repros. For the one in this article though, I'd say low odds of this one ever coming over if the other ones don't start appearing.
Re: McDonald's Is Teasing Something Street Fighter-Related, But Only In Japan
Hopefully this one won't result in scalpers dumping food on the streets everywhere.
Re: "People Talk About Physical Being Dead... But We Have A Loyal Community" - Broken Sword Boss On "Defining Your Tribe"
He defines it right there. "catering to loyal customers".
Just because you can trick a grandma into buying a movie licensed game, or a sports fan into buying a sports game, doesn't mean these people are going to continue buying from you in the future. They're aiming for long-term customers, who will buy every product, because they actually like and trust the company.
Or maybe you're hearing it from the opposite end, like gacha games? That's because they know they'll never have a mass-appeal product, so they're aiming to entwine a small dedicated group of gambling addicts.
Re: Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror Is Officially Set To Get The "ReForged" Treatment
How "faithful" are we talking about here? Because Nico better be able to solve a puzzle by flashing her breasts.
Re: The English Fan Translation Of PS2 RPG Tales Of Rebirth Has Just Hit A Major Milestone
Really? I would want to play the original version exactly how it originally was. And if I wanted new content I would play the newer version instead.
Re: "Nintendo Has Made Serious Objections" - Last Ninja Collection Delayed On Consoles
I'm against historical censorship myself, but I don't feel like this is the case here. I'm sure this is also what ALL PLATFORM-HOLDERS (not "Nintendo") are going to do too; evaluate if this can stay because the games are trying to be historically accurate.
But they will likely get denied, because these games are set in the modern day and have nothing to do with imperialism or WW2. It was just a bunch of English people who put it in the game because they thought it was the Japanese flag, and were unaware of its real connotations throughout Asia.
Just like if somewhere in Asia they wanted to make a game set in the US, and used the Confederate flag. And while technically these are flags that were used and a person may see, it's not seen in good taste to wave one around.
And on another note, who was comparing this to destroying paintings and statues? You can't be serious. The original version of this game still exists, with the rising sun flag still there. Nobody is rounding up copies and "destroying" anything. This NEW version of the game, however, will have a different flag in it. Should we also complain when remasters don't have the same exact artwork as the original game?
Re: Over 100 Arcades, Including Mortal Kombat, OutRun And Daytona USA, Are Going Under The Hammer Down Under
Haha, I had the same confusion with the headline. Though I thought "under the hammer" meant "will get destroyed if no one buys them", which... is probably about the same. And I'm not too worried that someone won't buy the games if they're really cheap.
But the big part was thinking 100 arcades were closing. And "Mortal Kombat" is an oddly specific name for an arcade... oh, wait, okay, it means to say arcade MACHINES, or arcade CABINETS, are going down.
I don't know about regional slangs, but historically an "arcade" is definitely the word for the building itself, not anything inside of it.
Re: Gaming Legend Rebecca Heineman Could Really Do With Your Positive Vibes Right Now
She was really best known for transitioning, at a time long before the current trans movement or acceptance. Kind of groundbreaking at the time, though I can understand the author wanting to dance around a sensitive topic.
To the people bickering about health care, I doubt she has a lot of money. Other than the elephant in the room above, she was really only known for tales of office hijinks on the early Bard's Tale games, and then later for drama and schisms between the original Bard's Tale creators.
As you can see above, the rest of her career is a bunch of headscratchers, and even The Bard's Tale was far from a financial avalanche. She probably did fine with day-to-day money, but is vastly unprepared for something of this scope.
Re: Here's Why Controllers Have 'A, B, X & Y' Buttons, And Not 'A, B, C & D'
Oh, and the N64 was Nintendo's foray into making one big "primary" button that you should always press. The GameCube and Wii took this idea further with making the button literally gigantic. And while I guess it worked well for new players who only wanted to press one button, it was a huge pain for anything that involved pressing multiple buttons together. So they ditched that during the Wii U and went back to the SNES layout. Which their handheld systems had been using the entire time anyway. And so far that's been the end of their weird "buttons for non-gamers" phase.
Re: Here's Why Controllers Have 'A, B, X & Y' Buttons, And Not 'A, B, C & D'
I was talking about in Japan. Circle as accept was the standard the entire time, and all systems they commonly played all had the accept button in the same exact location.
In the west the PSX was a mess, with some people using X and some using Circle. (Early SNES had this problem too actually.) Also, often it would be Triangle for the "back" button, which lasted all throughout the PS2 era too. There was no standard for any of this. The MGS series used Circle as accept all the way until MGS4.
Anyway, so around PS3 Sony was now strictly enforcing standard button usage. If you had a non-standard setup, they rejected your game. Which is where it officially became X in the west, and Circle in Japan. PS4 even included a really cool option in the system itself where you can swap them around for all games. And then PS5 came along, and said everyone everywhere must use the western setup. And since Japan had been using Circle as accept for like 30 years now, that did not go over well.
Re: Code Mystics "Horrified" By Accusation Its New Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 Port Uses AI-Generated Art
Many outlets do use AI, yes. As mentioned above, it can be used as just another another efficiency tool. I mean, are these people not using spellcheckers either?
But that is a good point, maybe all this hate from some writers is supposed to be like a flex about declaring that they write real articles and not full-AI SEO slop. Though I imagine it's more like a case of "old man set in his ways". Like some guy back in the day who angrily insists on calligraphy and refuses to use a printing press.
Re: Here's Why Controllers Have 'A, B, X & Y' Buttons, And Not 'A, B, C & D'
Also, some of you here seem way too young. The SNES had B-A because that's what the NES did. So if you played a NES port or something, the letters are still in the same place. They ordered Y-X in reverse to match. (But they're not really in reverse; just read them top-to-bottom.)
The Genesis had A-B-C in left-right order, and later added X-Y-Z to match (For the same exact reason as the SNES: Two distinct rows). Eventually the Dreamcast just chopped off the C and Z from the pad itself. (But they still exist as inputs! Other controllers use them, like the official fightstick.)
In the modern day, the PlayStation straight-up copied the SNES layout, and just "renamed" the buttons as symbols. To be legally distinct and not get sued, or something, I don't know. But they literally started as an SNES add-on, you know.
And similarly, the Xbox was just a continuation of the Dreamcast, under new ownership, and they flat-out copied the Dreamcast controller exactly. (Kind of. They added back in the "C" and "Z" buttons, now as "Black" and "White". But people hated that controller, so those buttons were then moved around, and eventually on the 360 they became the second shoulder buttons, to match the PlayStation.)
And that's it. It's not complicated. We currently have two face button styles, deriving from either Nintendo or Sega. Although Sony eventually took the ballsy move of switching their buttons to match the Xbox, instead of continuing to match Nintendo. Thus forever pissing off Japan.
Re: Here's Why Controllers Have 'A, B, X & Y' Buttons, And Not 'A, B, C & D'
This explanation makes no sense. What does X and Y have to do with CAD? Yes, it uses X-axis and Y-axis, but so does the entirety of mathematics. Also, X is often used for "new variable", and after X, then Y will be used (and then Z). What is this alleged connection between the Nintendo designers being huge fans of drafting, and somehow not knowing X and Y from basic mathematics?
Also, his factoid about that's why the top row is a different color and concave is clearly BS, between the original SFC controller didn't do either of this. This seems like an incredibly unreliable source.
It seems much more logical that they just wanted to have two rows of buttons, and chose letters that were far away from each other and would allow more to be added in the future, without confusing which row/letters are on top and which are on bottom. This doesn't seem like rocket science.
Re: Code Mystics "Horrified" By Accusation Its New Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 Port Uses AI-Generated Art
I agree about the moral panic, and I want to add that I always see a lot of anti-AI articles keep coming up on the same sites, repeatedly. Like it's really obvious which people are trying to push an agenda about it. Or maybe it's just a high-click-rate ragebait topic. But either way, it's super apparent when it's always the same sources blasting it out in their echo chambers.
Re: 26 Years On, The Mystery Of Vandal Hearts II's Gradius Weapon Has Finally Been Solved
This feels like one of those things that would've easily been found by just reading Japanese sources for this game. Like certainly the makers of this demo disc magazine had heavily advertised this, yeah?
There's actually a lot of things like this with games, and some still happening to this day. Like I recently solved a CvS2 mystery (how to determine your final boss) that no one in the West knew for over 20 years... by simply spending two minutes looking it up in Japanese. It's funny seeing these things that are widely known in the country, but no one ever wrote it down in English.
Re: One Of The Virtual Boy Games Coming To Switch Is "Worth $10,000"
It's not going to be worth that anymore. 🤣🤣🤣
Re: "The Creative Cauldron Of Nintendo Is A Bit Of An Anti-Climax" - 35 Years Ago, The BBC Visited Mario's Birthplace
I mean, were western devs getting all that rich themselves? Miyamoto got a steady paycheck, plus now he's probably richer than anyone from back then.
Re: "You Still Can't Beat Me" - 100-Year-Old Grandma Plays Her Super Famicom Every Day
Yeah, I've never understood the claim that people get worse at games as they get older. Like maybe if they stop playing over the years? (And were never actually good in the first place, but rose-tinted-glasses?)
Because as I've gotten older, I've gotten WAY better at games. In fact I routinely go back to games I was never able to finish as a teenager, and beat them easily.
Re: Who Is Chris Houlihan? One Of The Greatest Zelda Mysteries May Have Been Solved
Ha, I was thinking about the Atari/ET landfill thing too. Out of nowhere this documentary comes out claiming to "mythbust" it, but before that point not a single person ever called it a myth. And then they eventually sold people garbage for outrageous prices, so you can kind see what their angle was...
Re: Sega Dev Kit Raid "A Preservation Disaster" For "Collectors, Archivists, And The Gaming Community"
Ah, you could be right. I just read on the previous article that the preservation group said the seller backed out at the last minute, and that's why they were raising money. But perhaps that wasn't the start, and they were actually in the middle of the bidding war at the time. And like you said, that group and their story might just be unreliable in general.
Also, whether they're for-profit or non-profit doesn't really matter. A lot of non-profits run scams. Being non-profit doesn't mean that you can't pay yourself and other employees. So what they do is just take all the money, give it to themselves, and call it their "salary". And hey, no money left over, that means no "profit". They can also throw lavish parties, buy "company equipment", yadda yadda, as long as everything they spend goes back into the company itself. And personally, I don't see how making your company grow bigger while giving yourself a fat paycheck is somehow any different than what a for-profit company does. Not having cash reserves? So they might have to close the company if times get tough? Yeah, I'm sure they're worrying about that all the way from the mansion to the Ferrari.
Re: Here Are The Next Two PC-88 Titles Getting EGGCONSOLE Reissues On Nintendo Switch
@Daniel36
I feel the same way. At first I was really excited to hear about these old PC games coming to the west via Eggconsole. Like I absolutely love DQ4, so I probably would've bought this. Except why would I purchase a game if I can't actually play through it?
At least just throw on an easy machine translation. Sure it won't be great, but it'll at least be more usable than NOTHING. And nobody's going to be playing a 1987 game anyway expecting to find the work of Shakespeare.
Re: Sega Dev Kit Raid "A Preservation Disaster" For "Collectors, Archivists, And The Gaming Community"
I don't feel sorry for this person at all. He had all the chances in the world to donate it to the preservation group mentioned, but instead he backed out and tried to sell it to the highest bidder. And now it's being taken from him because it was all stolen goods in the first place. If anything I'm glad to see some greedy ***** get karma for once.
I mean, it's certainly a shame about the games though. If only he actually cared about getting them dumped, then he would've done so and at that point no police could ever take them away. Hope this is a lesson to everyone else who doesn't know how to share.
Re: Random: "That's Wild" - The Fact That Two French Devs Didn't Play Nintendo As Kids Appears To Have Upset Some People
@KainXavier
Yeah, I had read those before, and that article by John was exactly what I was thinking of when I said it should informative instead of divisive. Instead of attacking people for not knowing, he uses the opportunity to talk up historical games and events that younger audiences don't hear about often, and even provides lots of references they can use to find out more. I agree that it's very well done, and I like his work a lot in general.
For that first article, though it was indeed pretty aggessive, at least it was the actual topic of debate, and more newsworthy since the ignorant claim came from an actual big-name gaming journalist.
(I'd actually like to see gaming sites check each other more often. Many of them have devolved into "My word is god, don't you dare question me." Comments disabled, and all their peers just sit idle by and nod.)
This article though, just feels like a huge stretch. The base story was just devs talking about the influences used in their games. But that was all reframed into an attack piece because a deep dive into a Twitter thread found one unknown person who said something dumb. I don't think we really need to get up in arms about random hot takes.
Re: Random: "That's Wild" - The Fact That Two French Devs Didn't Play Nintendo As Kids Appears To Have Upset Some People
I also want to say, this is like the exact opposite of most features on this site, which profess that it's important to understand influential games even if they weren't well-known in your own country. But here, these men do not understand a bunch of influential games that weren't popular in their country, but now this time we should be mocking anyone who dares question this knowledge hole. Really bizarre double-standard, and honestly I'm getting very wary of UK-centric news sites that can't rein in their bias (*coughEurogamercough)
Like this article could've easily been "Devs tell us about their backgrounds", and then added in "Because did you know, over in France..." Nice and informative, without trying to divide people.
Re: Random: "That's Wild" - The Fact That Two French Devs Didn't Play Nintendo As Kids Appears To Have Upset Some People
What a bizarre article. It seems to be trying to foster a narrative of "Americans are so ignorant that their experience wasn't superior", but all it is showing is tons of Europeans getting high-and-mighty saying that THEIR experience was superior (and that Americans are soooo dumb). Especially that St1ka guy re-tweeted above, who goes full keyboard warrior responding to every single comment and going into deep denial mode about Nintendo systems having influential games.
And even better, these "outrage" threads are showing that usual hilarious ragebait result, where only like two people are "upset" about it, and then there are just hundreds of people being upset about this fictional army of other upset people. It's just blowing up a reply tweet from a random unimportant nobody, and everybody else is just getting off to how they are so much more superior to that guy and his non-existent massive followers.
And even the two people who are surprised by this don't even sound surprised that the guy didn't have a Nintendo system growing up, but moreso the fact that he allegedly STILL hasn't played games on Nintendo consoles. Which is indeed kind of weird, especially when your whole job is to understand game design. Like maybe take some time to study up on this? It's like, sure, maybe you didn't watch a lot of movies growing up, but once you become a film-maker, maybe you should go back and check out all those things you missed out on? Hell, that's why I like this site. Tell me all about those highly influential games that we in the west were ignorant about. I'm not sitting here like "Well I personally never played it, so it must've not been important at all!" And yet these voices are the exact ones this article is amplifying.
Also, from another interview, I see another team member of Expedition 33 talking about how he loved Paper Mario, and even told the guy above to try it out. So yeah, this game playing similar to some Nintendo stuff isn't a random coincidence. Some people on the team were indeed well aware of these games, even if the guy above wasn't.