I keep my eye on Atlus, Paradox Entertainment, NIS (for a few titles), and a few remakes of classic games by SE (plus DQ9…but that’s cuz i’m a DQ fanboy…though not so much so with their recent stripping of party talk and giving the US the same treatment as Europe). The last non-anime PC game, aside from Paradox (whos games are war strategy games (strategy, not tactical)), I bought was Morrowind. And before that…BG2:ToB…after mods had come out for BG2 & TOB to balance it and add RP content. PC games don’t inspire me to buy them anymore and most console games don’t.
And yea, if a game can’t stand on it’s own without the h-content, it’s not worth playing.
It’s harder to figure out what games like that will be in the eroge community because all the crap. There’s a lot more of it concentrated under fewer sub-genres with far more turnover than general market.
“Shunned” isn’t exactly the right word for it. All the games with actual gameplay are well-liked both over here and in the original Japanese market. It’s more a consequence of the cutthroat nature of the business. Making these games is expensive (as referenced in the “how much does it cost to make an eroge” thread) and making a game with actual gameplay just adds to that.
These companies are really small (with a very small number of exceptions) and only release a couple games a year. And apparently games don’t really stay “in print” the way they do over here; they get an initial run, maybe a reprint or two, then go out of print pretty quickly. (Since so many titles come out, there’s not as much of a market for old games anyhow.) They haven’t got the cash reserves to deal with making an actual game, by and large.
This is one of the big potential wins from the US market: if we can actually get real market penetration for the kind of games in America, the increase in potential audience would mean you could actually do something like an eroge with an actual game attached to it.
I’m actually kind of disappointed in NIS America. Their localization jobs seems to be significantly inferior than the ones Atlus did. And I’m finding out that a lot of the titles they picked to bring over didn’t get brought over before for valid reasons: many of the games have been getting middling reviews.
That’s why i said select titles. Pretty much NIS i’m only looking at their Disgaea and to a lesser extent Mana Khemia titles. I’ve played a few others, like La Pucelle, and it wasn’t as good.
My thoughts exactly. While I will still watch porn on occasion, it is nowhere near how much I watched when I was younger. I just find the physical act without any emotion behind it to be utterly pointless anymore.
