Kitsune
02-17-2007, 07:29 PM
Taking in the news of the AOU this week was a joy. The arcade industry continues to revive itself and grow larger and more relavent again with each passing year. While I don't think any of you really care about Answer x Answer, Sega's cool-looking vs. quiz game, there's a whole bunch of other cool stuff going down, like arcade MMOs and a new shooter from Konami.
That's when it hit me that my goodness, there's just too much great stuff around in gaming form these days. The DS, PSP, PS2 continue to rock out, the Xbox 360, Wii and PS3 will keep gaining their feet with all sorts of cool shit planned for them, the PC, cellphones and arcades continue to chug healthily along like always.
Take someone like me who loves text adventures and adventure games in general. You have some seriously awesome things going on with the DS in that category, but you could spend a lifetime with all sorts of gooey good PC freeware in that category. That gaming fans would work so hard to bring you stuff for free seems unbelievably fortunate to me. A lot of isn't crap either, especially the text adventures.
On that note, I spend more time playing freeware Japanese RPGs on my PC than any other thing today, from games where you play as an Egyptian god who uses people's faith in him to level up, to dungeon hacks where the whole concept revolves a trick to revealing treasure on each floor, to games where you simply play a thief in training learning the ropes or a village elder who travels into rogue-like dungeon to aid her town-building efforts, the variety is astonishing, and because its made by small enthusiasts, all sorts of ideas you'd never see elsewhere pop up.
For me, the only genres I don't get into are tactical shooters (I call 'em Tom Clancy games), MMOs and 4X strategy, but everything else seems to have no shortage of good games available for them. You couldn't say this about 2 or 3 years ago, when puzzle and console adventure games were a dying breed and dungeon hacks seemed to be evaporating. Now there's a new one announced every week.
There are some other things that make me extremely excited:
-The DS is having a huge effect on the Japanese market. Games in other formats are taking its touch screen innovations to heart, small developers' financials like Marvelous, Spike, Atlus and Rocket Company have revealed they are finding a bounty of new success unattainable elsewhere on the machine and the simple ideas that make up so many of its games are inspiring a lot of companies produce new games that resemble the carefree, anything goes philosophy of the Famicom days (Dewy's Adventure, Kiki Kaikai, that strange rhythm fighting game, Ecolis and Gabu Gabu Planet).
-Falcom is producing/porting games to consoles again after such a long time out of it. This means much higher quality of their mostly excellent PC releases and much less of the complete mediocrity that results when their properties are mishandled by outfits like Taito, Bandai and Konami. I've finished Legend of Heroes VI: FC (don't be fooled by the shitty Bandai ports of the earlier games in the series, not only were they better on the PC, but they are old games, whereas Heroes VI is modern and wonderful) and I cannot wait for the Second Chapter to release. It really is the best PSP RPG out there and might be the best portable RPG release thus far. I can only pray we get cool stuff like Ys Origin, Oath in Felghana, Sangokushi, Arcturus and Xanadu Next on consoles.
-Dragon Quest IX is coming out this year! Woooohooooo!
-If you're an MMO fan, there's so many being produced no matter you're neck of the woods, your transition into zombiehood will be accelerated by insane amount of releases and considering the taste of the market, likely, fans will enjoy becoming zombies!
Basically, it's such an awesome time so many good games and so many good trends going on, and release lists are packed all year long without one single lull. It's amazing and I love it.
-Kitsune
That's when it hit me that my goodness, there's just too much great stuff around in gaming form these days. The DS, PSP, PS2 continue to rock out, the Xbox 360, Wii and PS3 will keep gaining their feet with all sorts of cool shit planned for them, the PC, cellphones and arcades continue to chug healthily along like always.
Take someone like me who loves text adventures and adventure games in general. You have some seriously awesome things going on with the DS in that category, but you could spend a lifetime with all sorts of gooey good PC freeware in that category. That gaming fans would work so hard to bring you stuff for free seems unbelievably fortunate to me. A lot of isn't crap either, especially the text adventures.
On that note, I spend more time playing freeware Japanese RPGs on my PC than any other thing today, from games where you play as an Egyptian god who uses people's faith in him to level up, to dungeon hacks where the whole concept revolves a trick to revealing treasure on each floor, to games where you simply play a thief in training learning the ropes or a village elder who travels into rogue-like dungeon to aid her town-building efforts, the variety is astonishing, and because its made by small enthusiasts, all sorts of ideas you'd never see elsewhere pop up.
For me, the only genres I don't get into are tactical shooters (I call 'em Tom Clancy games), MMOs and 4X strategy, but everything else seems to have no shortage of good games available for them. You couldn't say this about 2 or 3 years ago, when puzzle and console adventure games were a dying breed and dungeon hacks seemed to be evaporating. Now there's a new one announced every week.
There are some other things that make me extremely excited:
-The DS is having a huge effect on the Japanese market. Games in other formats are taking its touch screen innovations to heart, small developers' financials like Marvelous, Spike, Atlus and Rocket Company have revealed they are finding a bounty of new success unattainable elsewhere on the machine and the simple ideas that make up so many of its games are inspiring a lot of companies produce new games that resemble the carefree, anything goes philosophy of the Famicom days (Dewy's Adventure, Kiki Kaikai, that strange rhythm fighting game, Ecolis and Gabu Gabu Planet).
-Falcom is producing/porting games to consoles again after such a long time out of it. This means much higher quality of their mostly excellent PC releases and much less of the complete mediocrity that results when their properties are mishandled by outfits like Taito, Bandai and Konami. I've finished Legend of Heroes VI: FC (don't be fooled by the shitty Bandai ports of the earlier games in the series, not only were they better on the PC, but they are old games, whereas Heroes VI is modern and wonderful) and I cannot wait for the Second Chapter to release. It really is the best PSP RPG out there and might be the best portable RPG release thus far. I can only pray we get cool stuff like Ys Origin, Oath in Felghana, Sangokushi, Arcturus and Xanadu Next on consoles.
-Dragon Quest IX is coming out this year! Woooohooooo!
-If you're an MMO fan, there's so many being produced no matter you're neck of the woods, your transition into zombiehood will be accelerated by insane amount of releases and considering the taste of the market, likely, fans will enjoy becoming zombies!
Basically, it's such an awesome time so many good games and so many good trends going on, and release lists are packed all year long without one single lull. It's amazing and I love it.
-Kitsune