There was a very real tendency, especially later on, for G-Collections to release games that were pretty abysmal. I mean, the “pick a character” “method” of “gameplay” was just … garbage. And the reason they did this was pretty simple. A sequel to an existing game is easy to make. “Pick a character” kind of “scenario” “writing” is a lot easier than for example something like Tokimeki Checkin. Simple to write, simple to translate, simple to design … I think a few of them even used the same engine. It was very much about cranking them out and trying to lower development costs, or so it appeared.
Can’t really say I blame em, either – considering what happened (the collapse) they must have been barely treading water there for awhile. But that doesn’t mean the titles that got picked later on were really all that representative of what ZYX’s output might have been, more generically.
Even if it’s true that zyx games are shallow (yes I know I said Professor Chery was good, but after the 5th or the 6th blowjob, I changed my mind :? ), it’s still 1000 X better than… the X-change serie.
And what I really don’t understand, is why even now they’re making a new X change (XC-A2).
Regardless that, nobody talked about Ever17.
I was disapointed because when I saw the awesome ending… I had to realize nobody had translated the other KID games ! :x
Ever 17 was really great.
I just loved the scenario - the whole survival aspect of it and how people react and cooperate in such extreme situations.
Then again I generally like mystery/survival plots more than the usual “going to school / working at a restaurant” plot.
EDIT:
I would like to add Ai Aori Yoshi to the biggest disappointment list.
Having high expectations from such a revered and good anime series such as Ai Aori Yoshi,
I found the game to be nothing short of a shock.
After beating it in 1 hour I just sat there staring at the monitor and denying the existance of god.
Being graphically and technically good, this game was shorter than a demo of many games would be.
At least games like Pretty Soldier Wars TRIED being good and failed, but this game here doesnt even try.
Its incredibly short on purpose, yet demands the full price to be paid for it.
Of course it could have been a great game if a bit more time and effort was invested in it.
YMK-great. But that didnt happen, so that is why its the biggest disappointment for me.
Ai Aori Yoshi not the crappiest game out there, but the biggest disappointment. Period. Not the female one.
I long ago got used to people disagreeing with me. I sounded off about Pretty Soldiers War because I don’t want our good friends amoung The Great Lord Peter’s Empire (Peach Princess, G-Collections, JList, and the others) from passing on other tactical games because there’s been a few vocal posters saying “PSW sucks”. From what I can recall, it and Piece of Wonder are the only current tactical games currenty being sold from the Great Lord Peter, bringer of all things Japanese, empire currently.
PSW isn’t really a date sim, since you don’t date. You just get “memorable events” if you let your Pretty Soldiers do more killings. You let them have some action, they give you some action.
I think I own a copy of Power Dolls. Isn’t that actually a fighting game? Humm— I guess I am thinking of Metal and Lace. Let’s see what my Google-fu turns up. Ah. I see. Nope, haven’t tried that. I’ll put it on my list of games to play. Thanks!
As strategic game, i was hopping that they can improve something from good old xcom, it can be so hard to beat a game from 1991.
You mentioned X-Com? I recently (approx. 2 months ago) picked up Jagged Alliance 2, and I’m currently running JA2 v1.13. Good fun, if you know what you’re doing. v1.13 also introduced a new plethora of firearms, and the modding community is still going even after 10 years. It also influenced my decision to purchase a PSP-3000 a month later and pick up Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness, making it my first handheld TRPG.
Someone please pass me some gameplay screenies of PSW so I can see just how bad it is.
It isn’t actually bad. It is just VERY old-school. Move and shoot. No diagonal movement. No breakable cover. No in battle power ups or medi-packs. No grenades or other AOE weapons. The weapons of your troopers never change, although they do level up from experience, so they get better as they are used. Problem is, your targets, I mean, opponents also go up in level, and that offsets your troopers improvement. People tend to get mad when they look at the listed stat box and it is listing the trooper at “impossible to miss” (ie, “accuracy 95%”), and then you shoot, and darn it all! Your trooper shoots almost as well as a Star Wars Storm Trooper trying to shoot a Jedi.
The troopers are individuals with a range of combat stats. You’ve got a fast HTH specialist, a couple of fast scouts, a pair of good LR snipers, and some moderate middle range troopers. The game is set up so that some of your longer ranged hitters CANNOT shoot anything “too close” to them, so you always need a few short range or HTH around. The enemies get a little aggravating at times, as a few of them can shoot through any obstacle, like brick walls or other targets, to get your troopers, but you cannot blast through anything. But if it weren’t for the cheating twirps, you could always sit back behind chokepoints, concentrate your fire, and plug the hole with by rotating your toughest two troopers— and that would just be boring doing that all the time.
Well, the lack of battle options already differentiates PSW from strategy RPGs of the same era, if not even earlier. Famicom titles had item/equipment systems and customization options, so it’s hard to simply describe this as an old-school trait. The tight corridors often employed by D.O.'s mappers (plain bad design) also eliminate any chance of strategic play.
Compared to the Raidy team, D.O.'s staff put more effort into improving their game, but you could also argue that the changes (artificially making the game harder) are for the worse.
I don’t know what you tjink about it, but isn’t it disturbing that Chieri (professor cherry) has the same voice as… Antoinette !
Doesn’t it make you hate her ? lol
Skua, you would have preferred if I called it “original school”? I believe I described that.
When I first got into tactical games, that’s how they were. They slowly were adding in new options to differentiate themselves from “what had come before”. I remember when it was big news when they folded the first “RPG” elements (customizable EQ, improving stats with experience) got folded in, and a LOT of tactical grogs back then hated it. All of a sudden, it really mattered which units went into the meat grinder first— as you wanted to keep your “better” experienced units alive through the scenario so they would be “god” units by the end of the campaign— otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to achieve victory.
Everything changes. PSW is good for what it is— a simple tactical. But experienced tactical players might find going back to the way things were just too aggravating. Those that didn’t start with the genre may not find it as “charming” as I did. But it does force players to pay attention to the very basics of tactical. I find with many tacticals I’ve played, you find the exploit, and you just repeat until victory (and some games are designed for you only to beat the scenario by using the exploit). This games “exploits” are the basic structure of the tactical game. Concentrate firepower. Unit move management. Managing choke-holds. Drawing opponents into overlapping fields of fire. In that sense, I found it to be a good game. Your mileage may vary. :mrgreen:
Well, there ARE games that concentrate on sex. But not that many that concentrate on making something that might be termed a “game” (as you’re using the word). It’s a LOT cheaper to make a visual novel than to make a game. Taking big financial risks is a good way to go broke in this business even in Japan.
Fundamentally, you want something that’s a bit different than what these games typically are. Most of the good ones are either thin excuses for lots of sex scenes (in which case, the design philosophy is “just give people what they want, don’t make them work for it”) or, well, novels. I can understand where you’re coming from with “if I want story, I’ll read a book or watch a movie” – but this is fundamentally different than what story-based games are trying to do.
I had a similar problem with the movie The Matrix: it’s hard to explain, but essentially, I wanted to see the deeper philosophical implications examined more, and the script badly needed work. I wanted something more like a horror movie than what they made (which was an action movie with all the lightweight things that action movies typically have).
B-games are kind of not really heavily focused on the kind of games you want. There are gameplay-heavy companies out there, like Giga or Alicesoft. None of them have significant ties with the western market. The one time a company with a big-name property did try (Knights of Xentar = Dragon Knight … 4?) it flopped.
(Personally, I’m squarely on the side of story. People will pay huge amounts of money for 20-plus volumes of a manga, or boxsets of some anime, but they won’t buy one of these games? This seems a big incongruous. I think part of it is they’re marketed as games, and the ‘visual novel’ part hasn’t really been emphasised enough.)
It’s also largely because of people like Indio here, that people avoid them like the plague. Sex sells, but it also hinders at the same time. Companies like PP can’t get their titles out to larger audiences with ease because not many stores will carry their products, and advertising can only go so far when most game and anime sites try to regulate content to maintain a ‘safe’ environment for most age groups.
As long as people continue to look at this market as ‘nothing but animated porn’ like Indio here, it’s never going to grow, at least not fast anyways.
Me, I’ll take a game like Planescape: Torment or Ever 17 over a weak RPG/strategy using sex as it’s selling point(because no one would buy it otherwise), or a collection of H-images being passed off as a story in the form of a sex romp.
I couldn’t agree more with you Dalburnan. Put in a form similar to what Indio said, it would be this: If I just want to see sex, I’ll just watch porn (or an H anime if you want something that is drawn).
If I remember it correctly, I think it was Dragon Knight 3.
that aside, how come they don’t “kiss” in those games, most of the time they get into the “action” without kissing first! (or at the very least they don’t give you a CG of the kiss, they just say that they kissed).
titles that have game play in them do add value to the title (I love DUAL SAVIOR (spelling), replayed it a number of times just of the arcade fights). But still, I rather play a VN then read a book* or watch a movie :mrgreen:
As far i remember, the habit of kissing has origns in western culture. It was not very known in asian countries until later, introduced by europeans. So is not uncommon to still find people (japanese included) still not used to the habit of kissing as a sign of affection, nowadays.
That’s basically what I was trying to say. If he just wants sex, h-OVAs are generally better at delivering it. Even sex romps still have only got CG slideshows. So Indio is not likely to ultimately be satisfied by h-games; too many of them don’t have what he wants, and even the ones that do, are not animated.
H OVAs and actual pornography, to me, place more emphasis / makes more obvious the very mechanical / repetitive nature of sex. That’s why I don’t get anything at all out of pornography or H anime. The only stuff that ‘works’ for me is literature, which is essentially exactly what the H scenes in eroge are, but with added visuals/audio etc.
And I don’t think the H scenes in most eroges are that bad - to me, Giga probably do the best ones (in their kono aozora / chocolat / parfait etc. games), but some others, particularly ones in doujin games that place more emphasis on the actual feelings etc. involved than the mechanical actions (e.g. Himawari’s H scenes) are decent as well.
That said, the stories are absolutely important - the thing is that while I can enjoy stories without sex, I can’t enjoy sex without stories. Essentially, what I need is the ‘context’. The stories don’t have to be exceptional, but they can’t be terrible or nonexistent.
Well that’s the problem most companies who spend the time to make a quality engine decide to strip out the h-content to get a wider audience. Which is why I rarely buy h-games. The last english one was YMK at a convention. The last Japanese one. dunno. I usually end up finding out the good ones too late because not many people seem to be like me and want rpg quality games like PS:T or even something like SMT:P3, but with hentai…so i never find out about them until they are out-of-print.
I want some quality RPGs like that or simulators like True Love or CRC (which are not the same type, despite everyone classifying both of them as dating sims. CRC is, but TL is a life simulator). I do like VNs, but not so much. It takes an exceptional VN to get above my disdain for them. That said, my 3 favorite eroge titles are all VNs.
Honestly games like PS:T and SMT in general are more or less considered rare gems in the gaming world anymore let alone a good title -with- H-content. Companies are putting less time and money into plot and character development and instead spending the big bucks on ‘cutting edge’ graphics and trying to ‘revolutionize’ game play mechanics. I pretty much always keep my eye on Atlus anymore, and NIS to a lesser degree. No matter what type of game it is, I have to have good story, or at least a lot of good humor.
The way I look at it is if a game can’t stand on it’s own with story or gameplay after the H-content is removed, it’s worthless in my opinion.(And I can fully accept not everyone can agree with such an opinion.)
But yeah, the good ones tend to always be the ones you’ll never be able to find once they’ve been out for awhile.
(or at the very least they don’t give you a CG of the kiss, they just say that they kissed).