I don't Qare for Qore.

I'm trying to Qope.

Sony's monthly PS3 showthing rubs me the wrong way. Here are some reasons.

1) Veronica Belmont is too damn Qute. I can see the wheels turning in their funny little marketing noggins as they blow hard in the completely wrong direction. Sony knows most gamers are male, late twenties, early thirties, and what do males in that demographic like? Pretty, sassy, bubbly, young little chicas, and so they got the best they could find, stole her from C/Net or where ever she was, and stuck her in the show. Personally, I resent that. I would rather watch a balding old game journalist. It's nothing against Miss Belmont directly; she's a perfectly talented broadcaster. It's against Sony. Don't insult me by pandering to my carnal lust. A pretty girl won't get me to pay $3.00, watch your ads, and hear about games I would normally have no interest in. That doesn't work. I won't buy your show (you can't take a fart without gassing off on a code for a "free!!" episode anyway), and I still don't care about The Incredible Hulk or whatever you're trying to pander this month. It's a useless tactic.

"I'm Qute! Watch Qore!"

Um, unless you're Soul Calibur IV, in which case, appealing to my carnal lust, and incorporating decent gameplay, got me. Boob physics. What can I say.

I don't feel as guilty objectifying digital women. Plus, Taki here makes a more convincing paranormal investigator than Belmont makes a convincing games journalist.

2) Veronica Belmont is obviously not part of the Belmont Qlan. Yeah, I get their plan. I see your scheme again, Sony. You want me to think, gee, a Belmont! If her legendary ancestors can slay vampires, surely that lends credibility to their descendant! Well, sorry, unless she can brandish a whip and/or take on Upside-Down Castle as well as Alucard, she's no Belmont of mine.

Now this is a Belmont! Though, I admit, I can see a family resemblance. Is it the boots? The twig-thighs?

3) It bodes poorly for the health of our industry. It pains me to see Sony make the same mistakes every single console generation. So far, amazingly, it's panned out for them, but as they learn lessons, they happily throw any useful knowledge right out the window when it's time for a new machine, and this time, it's been worse than ever. Qore feels like another bid to convince the public that the PS3 is some fantastic multi-media machine. That may have worked when the PS3 was the cheapest, or at least a competitively priced, Blu-ray player, but these days, it just ends up looking like an expensive game machine without enough games and plenty of useless little doo-dads. The first-party titles have shaped up nicely, but the fact remains that Sony needs more robust third-party backing. The multiplatform releases, which should be better on PS3, usually still end up inferior to the versions on competing platforms, the third-party exclusives are absent (can you blame them?), and there just isn't enough interesting software coming from Japan, which was a huge strength for the PSone and PS2.

Even as a medical Qonsultant, she can't heal our ailments.

4) Qompletely overpriced. $3 a month? $25 a year? So you can advertise to me and give me journalism way below the bar of what I could get elsewhere for free? Are you kidding me?

"Quick, bird! Whisper something insightful about video games that I can 'parrot' back! I got nothing!"

5) Veronica called Aquanaut's Holiday "boring". "That's fine," you might be saying. "Everyone's entitled to an opinion." Sure, but has she played it? Of course not. A game journalist would should at least recognize the title, must be familiar with its history and well-versed in the Japanese games available for Sony's system, as it's one of the platform's main strengths historically, but she didn't even know what it was, picking it up off the shelf of a Japanese game store, making her pronouncement, and tossing it back. And they aired it, right in the segment! Sony to their own foot: "Hello there! Ready to be shot again?" Oh, that Veronica. Isn't she adorable? Now when Sony, or some kind, risk-taking third-party, decides to localize Aquanaut's Holiday, she can interview them about it and pretend it never happened. "I meant it was a shame it wasn't getting a US release when I said it was... Qoring! I said Qoring! Like HardQore!"

"Boring"?? There's some Qold water to the face.

6) Qan't focus. But, in reality, Qore would never cover a game like Aquanaut's Holiday, or something the likes of brilliant Valkyria Chronicles that so desperately needs the marketing boost. Sony completely undervalues interesting, unique third-party software, which is, again, a huge part of what powered the PSone and PS2. Somehow it's always turned around later (uncomfortably later) in their systems' lifecycles, but here, when we need it most, they blither on about games that are already getting advertisement elsewhere. Why not champion some lesser-known titles and show what a far reach the PS3 could really have across the user base?

Qome on. The best Japanese RPG so far this generation, and it sells 30,000 copies? What is wrong with you people?

In the end, Qore is symbolic of Sony's mistakes and problems this generation, and if stuff doesn't turn around quickly, it's only going to get worse, and that's no good for anyone who loves this industry, whether you like Sony or not.

Take heart, though, Veronica; at least you're not Jessica Chobot.

Chobot gets her tongue stuck in the UMD drive every time it freezes.

Jesse Dylan Watson is platform agnostic; they can release on Super NES for all it matters to him.

Hideo Kojima joins the vague discourse on western games

Today, it's Metal Gear Solid director Hideo Kojima commenting upon the state of Japanese game design as compares to the West. Who will it be tomorrow, George Lucas? Or will I finally be able to write about something else?

This time, it's Edge's news section I'm sourcing, and they're, again, via Develop, and so we find out what Kojima thinks about the whole situation. Like yesterday's Jun Takeuchi, Kojima intends for Japanese games to "westernize," particularly his games. He says that making games is expensive business (something I eluded to yesterday), and therefore in order to be profitable, one market isn't enough; Japanese games must sell in foreign territories, and therefore they must appeal to a broader audience.

He says, “I've come to understand that the way we've made games up until now won't translate globally, and I've come to think that I need to make Kojima Productions a team that can compete alongside the rest of the world.” Funny, that, since the Metal Gear Solid games seem to have always sold a little better in the west than in Japan.

In his comments, we see two seperate trends I've been commentating about. First, this (probably erroneous--see previous posts) notion that Japanese games need to westernize to compete, and second, due to the first, games on the current-generation systems are just too damn expensive for even some larger developers to remain solvent with. After spending so much money on Metal Gear Solid 4 and seeing decent but not blockbuster sales worldwide, Konami obviously thinks it needs a bigger piece of the pie. How will Kojima do it? Well, rumor has it he's working on a first-person shooter, and we westerners (myself excluded) love our FPSes, ever since Wolfenstein (which is getting another reboot in 2009).

So everyone wants a bite of the global pizza. Takeuchi is worried western publishers are going to take over Japan while Kojima himself is obviously heavily targeting western territories with his next design. Again, we see that it's okay, maybe a "must," for Japan to sell in the West, but we uncover resentment when it comes to the West selling in Japan.

And are western developers really trying to sell in Japan? How? Does this mean they're attempting to make games the Japanese public at large will enjoy (Dragon Quest West? Final Fantasy from Florence?) rather than just a small segment? Wouldn't that alienate the home territory, the West that Japan seemingly wants so desperately to recapture?

I think there's a lot of paranoia and misconception in the industry right now fueling this sort of conundrum.

Oh, it's an odd, odd console generation, and I still wonder if this kind of thing is not doomed to failure. I don't know if Kojima can really make an FPS to compete with the likes of Gears of War 3 in holiday season 2010. Why would he want to? People are going to buy Gears and Halo here, not Hideo Kojima's Shoot for the Skull. Even something like Resistance 2 seemed to have difficulty competing. Development costs have spiraled out of control, and the genres and games I've always loved the most are what suffer, as brilliant titles like Folklore and Valkyria Chronicles get overlooked, selling poorly in the United States and Europe, and, shockingly, even more poorly in their home territory of Japan, and developers from the homeland of such games decide they need to "westernize" to be profitable.

Whatever "westernizing" actually means. Kojima never really says. "I've thought a lot about how Western games have been winning, looking [at] it from a global perspective, and there are things that I've noticed." What, that people like to blow stuff up? That gory headshots are popular with kids? That cutscenes lasting longer than 10 seconds make us reach for the "skip" button so fast we create a small tsunami off the coast of Thailand? I wonder what would happen if Japanese developers started to look at what made Japanese games great all these years instead of attempting to distill what about western games is supposedly so fabulous. I have a fear they're going to import the bathwater with the baby.

Jesse Dylan Watson is behind the curve. Here the fad is westernization, and he's been trying, all these years, to easternize! Maybe he'll start sitting in chairs again.

Star Capcom producer voices fears for Japanese market

It sounds like I'm not the only one worried about the state of the gaming industry, particularly as related to Japanese games. Joystick reports via Develop, who in turn is writing (good Lord, what a chain--did I leave anyone out?) on an interview published in a recent issue of the behemoth weekly Japanese gaming magazine, Famitsu. While I won't insult your intelligence by quoting verbatim what you can read elsewhere, the main gist seems to be that Resident Evil 5 producer Jun Takeuchi (with a production record including other games in the RE series and Lost Planet) has concerns about what sells and does not sell in Japan. Mainly, he thinks it's a sad, sad world when Japanese can't make games that other Japanese will buy.

I agree with him, to a huge extent. Strangely, though, he might be missing the point a little; it isn't as if Japanese games aren't selling in Japan. Monster Hunter and its iterations tear up the PSP charts, and of course the Wii is just as big there as it is here. I can't even imagine when their forces combine with Monster Hunter Tri. Japan will probably lift right out of the ocean and ascend to Heaven in a great monster hunting orgy of joy and ganbatte. What he should really be concerned about is the lack of a home in Japan for games like The World Ends with You, which sold piteously few units in its native territory yet sold so well in the States that Square Enix had to reprint it beyond their modest first run, even at the exorbitant $39.99 pricepoint.

Instead, the main undercurrent of Takeuchi's statement is his anxiety for a future where Western games swoop in and take over the Japanese game charts. He says Japan is "the last big marketplace" for Western publishers, implying (maybe correctly) that it's their goal.

He doesn't mention how Japan continues to trump up Westernization in its game design in order to appeal to a Western audience (he doesn't mind Japanese games selling in the West, but he doesn't like Western games selling in Japan?), which appears a bigger problem to me. Historically, Japan has had great success in adopting other cultural traditions and making them wholly their own. The Meiji Restoration was all about Westernizing, which we also saw after WWII (forced or not), and millenia before that, they borrowed extensively from China (art, architecture, food, even a writing system) to marvelous effect. I sometimes wonder if it's the same with video games, though; I've always enjoyed distinctly Japanese games most (though, again, their original foundation may have come from the Western Atari craze), and their absence this generation is what bothers me more than the thought of Western developers dominating the diet of Japanese gamers. Frankly, that's comfortingly unlikely, and if it's Takeuchi's only worry, I can mentally send him a confident pat on the shoulder (and he can mentally send me back an awkward, horrified expression).

He has some encouragement for Japanese fans, saying that Capcom has yet to really announce its plans for 2009 and hopes to surprise us soon. Fingers (and toes) crossed that the surprise is awesome Japanese games and not Capcom farming their franchises out to more Western developers as they're doing with the Wii installment of Dead Rising, which looks, frankly, abysmal. "You don't need to buy Western games, Japan, because Japan is now making Western-style games! Surprise!" That's not a quote from the interview, just a quote from the Takeuchi of my nightmares.

Jesse Dylan Watson is scared to finish Persona 4 because he's not sure how long it'll be until another great Japanese game is released here, and his backlog is full of... gulp... western games.