The Shrine

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Yip...e

Now, I just wanted to restate my opinion on the X-Box(not like anyone cares, but Crono and Mental's *coughdumbcough* comments in Daily Stuph slightly irk me ; )

All "successful" consoles since the NES have been by companies based out of Japan. Likewise, the content has been very "Jap".

Now I like Japan. They have wacky TV shows and lotsa sick and twisted porn. My kinda people. But what I don't like are their games...

I hate, hate, HATE wacky, badly written, extremely cheesy RPGs that pour outta the land of the rising sun. I HATE THEM!!
I had pretty much started to drift away from gaming a year and half into my playstations life...

What eventually pulled me back? What? You don't care? I'll tell ya' anyway, Computer games!

Damn....PC games absolutely RULE! UO, Arcanum, Fallout, Jagged Alliance, Anachronox, Zeus, Tropico, Anarchy Online, Planescape, Baldurs Gate, God SimSimSimSim, People SimSimSimSim, I SimSimSimSim, Everbody Fucking SimSimSimSim!

*cough*

North American Developers simply Kick Ass. Period.

Now, I love computer games....bbbbbuuuuuuutttt, I really loathe computers...

Patch this, download that and figuring out compatibility issues while hunched over a keyboard....

"Bah!", I say.

.....

Yes....Bah!

What was I to do? Stuck between a rock and a hard place...

Then Bill Gates came along.......my own personal Jesus Christ...

He brought me my salvation...The X-Box.

....

Now, a lot of people are like me...(pc games good/pc bad).
A lot of people are also excited to finally see a viable platform from North America step up.

The only real questions(to whether or not it'll be successful)are:

- Will anti-Microsoft attitudes be enough to keep a significant portion of PC users away from the system?

- Will Microsoft Ads sell the mainstream public to it?

I say 'no' and 'yes' to the above. So in my eyes, the X-Box will be successful AND I'm excited about it.

Am I forgetting anything? Any major stumbling blocks I've overlooked(Besides Mentals insightful "new consoles gotta have an established mascot" theory)? Let me know....

As for the "There is not room for 3 systems" arguement...I agree.

KO-
"Excuse the 'erratic' nature of this post...I kept getting distracted by work"</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Like Soul Hackers(Megaten games), the Langrisser series, the Fire Emblem series, the Tengai Makyou series, among others. Hell, if you liked the Wizardry games, you'd actually get more of them by living in Japan than in the US...which is weird if you think about it.

Back to your arguement, I seriously don't see X-Box becoming a platform that can succeed unless it can court the larger 3rd party developers. It's making good progress with Sega and Namco (and a few others), but I think it's going to need some more of the big boys for it to stand a real chance. I mean, most of the American developers have been PC only until the X-Box, and they WILL port almost any X-Box game they do to the PC as well, which pretty much means that US PC users don't really need to buy an X-Box unless their system is woefully underpowered.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt Arial; text-align: left; '>Say I'm an aspiring American writer with a good bit of talent. It's my dream to set the literary world afire with my ground-breaking ideas. How am I best going to do that? Dicking around with story scenarios for some videogame? Fuck, no. They don't give Nobel prizes or Pulitzers for Best RPG Script. You won't get interviewed in Esquire or win the NY Times Book of the Year award for writing Diablo V. And the next Great American Novel isn't going to come from Nintendo, or Sony, or Electronic Arts.

Same thing for Japanese writers. The talented ones write scripts for anime series, or they write novels, or maybe manga. The ones who couldn't get their novels published or had their script for Demon Rape Festival BukuBuku BukuBuku rejected get hired to write the script for Dragon Quest XVII. That's not to say there aren't perhaps a few talented writers slumming for Square or Konami, but they're the exception, not the rule.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Verdana, Tahoma; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>If the money was there, the writers would be there as well. If game companies wanted to recruit professional novelists to author RPG stories, they easily could do so. They probably just don't see any reason to.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Verdana, Tahoma; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>What games are you looking at?</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>I think it has more to do with culture differences that makes their game so "wierd" to me...

A perfect recent example in a non-game sense would be....*ahem* Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon...

I hope I am safe in guessing that the movie was "supposed" to have been written by talented writers...

It probably was...but it sucked. What a stupid, stupid story(from my NA perspective).

I remember thinking while watching it, "Shit, this reminds me of Crappy ass Jap RPGs".

*shrug*

KO-</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>You bring up a good point however. If most of the content is ported to PC, why would PC users buy into the X-Box?

As I said before, I am sure alot of people are like me in that they like PC games, yet hate the platform...

At the same time, I am sure there are people who like their PC...

Hopefully, X-Box can pull off enough exclusive content(a big question I have, apparently, overlooked....thx).

I guess we'll see...

KO-
"btw - I've played most of those "wacky" series you've mentioned. I was big into importing back in the SNES days(when modding was a simple matter of pliers)....I just grew out of those games at some point."</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>- Anachronox
- Elder Scrolls
- Abe's Oddessy
- Fate
- Any other ORPG
- Hunter
- Enclave
- Project Ego
- Halo
- Anything outta Interplay's stables
- Anything from former Fallout members(Troika, etc)

A couple of others I can't quite recall.

KO-</div>

<div style='font: 11pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light"; text-align: left; '>Does Enclave have anything to do with Fallout?</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '><b>Link:</b> <a href="http://xbox.ign.com/previews/16337.html">Enclave</a>

Half-Lifeish with a D&D twist...follow the link...and watch the movies.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>but basically, unless the list has grown considerably (which I'm pretty sure it didn't) X-Box has about a total of a dozen or so japanese 3rd parties as developers, with pretty much none of them working as an X-Box exclusive company (DoA3 and the other games will be ported over sooner or later). While I doubt I'll buy any more than 1 more console over the next 2 years or so (I'm guessing I'll be getting the Gamecube...then again, I got all 3 3rd gen consoles in the end...), I don't think X-Box will even be in the contention by then unless they manage to beef up their Japanese 3rd parties to 3-4 times that size.

I'm saying this because even if they have all the US companies they want, the type of games that they'll make WILL be pretty limited. We'll see something like 30% Sports games, 30% FPS games, 10% RPG, 15% Action/Adventure 15% RTS games...and not all of these genres transfer over to the console controls very well. Not only that, X-Box(Any system, rather) NEEDs tons of games coming out every month to keep the momentom strong and to build comsumer confidence. Lots of games released means more variety, more shelf space in stores, which in turn makes the consumer feel safe about investing in your system (If you go into a store and was a casual gamer, wouldn't you feel safer by going with the system that offers the most variety of games?). I don't think the X-Box will have either one of these without strong Japanese 3rd party support. I mean, when was the last time a system suceeded without it?</div>

<div style='font: 11pt arial; text-align: left; '>I don't think you give RPG writers enough credit. I don't think they are inept. It's just that writing a video game is much different from writing a book/movie/etc.

1.) RPG's first and foremost are games and not books. The storylines will tend to reflect this second-priority status.
2.) RPG's (good ones) are almost exclusively developed in Japan. Foreign cultures (especially eastern ones) have a different sense of what makes a good story.
3.) Because of (2), most RPG's were originally written in Japanese and translated to English, and there's always going to be something lost in the translation.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Verdana, Tahoma; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>Also, keep in mind they likely aren't given too much freedom - x event has to happen at y time. I'm sure the game designers have a very good idea of what they want to happen, the writer just does the grunt work of fleshing it out.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt Arial; text-align: left; '>No disagreement here. The problem is, very few developing houses are going to pay the kind of 6-or-7-digit figures most premiere novelists are going to demand to work on a project that is--let's face it--several steps down from literature.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt Arial; text-align: left; '>To put it another way: would you trust someone who never read a book about anything other than algorithms to write a good story? I sure wouldn't. Plot and game design go hand-in-hand, and are not mutually exclusive. That means involving the writer(s) in every step of the design process.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Whoever writes the script plans out the entire storyline and such, and generally gives general clues for any specific puzzles or quests they want done and how it's supposed to do done. They leave a lot of stuff (like items, weapons, battle system, dungeon layout, etc) for the other people to figure out, but they're in control of the storyline and the dialogue 100%.

There have been cases where the designer also penned the story, but this isn't usually the case, and even when this is true, they usually only come up with the general storyline, leaving a writer to flesh out the details.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light"; text-align: left; '>Some would say the same thing about movies.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt Arial; text-align: left; '>That's a relief to hear. What company do you work for, if you don't mind me asking?</div>

<div style='font: 14pt "Sans Serif"; text-align: justify; padding: 0% 15% 0% 15%; '>Also, the fact that writing is the LAST thing most development houses are going to spend money doesn't help. Writing doesn't get games out the door after all; artists and programmers do that. There was a good article on this very topic somewhere. Gotta find it....</div>

<div style='font: 14pt "Sans Serif"; text-align: justify; padding: 0% 15% 0% 15%; '>These days, a lot of designers (people on the team who carry the title) come from lots of different backgrounds, not just programming. I see what you meant though. I gotta find that little blurb I read on video game writing....It's pretty hard to break into...</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Verdana, Tahoma; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>I'm willing to bet your experience is not the norm for the games we play. How big are the companies you've worked for? I have the feeling that Sakaguchi knows what he wants in a Final Fantasy, it's not up to the dialouge and narrative writer to decide.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt Arial; text-align: left; '>Anyway:

<B>I don't think you give RPG writers enough credit. I don't think they are inept.</B>

Not all of them are, no. But I will continue to assert that there are a lot fewer talented RPG writers than there are talented novelists, screenwriters, or playwrights. I can't prove that quantitatively, of course, but I think it's something most of us can agree on. The reasons, I've already stated: there's much more fame and recognition to be had in those other fields, so more people try to find success within them.

<B>It's just that writing a video game is much
different from writing a book/movie/etc.</B>

I never said otherwise. But there are certain standards of drama by which any piece of fiction, interactive or static, can be held up to. Almost always there is a plot. Almost always there is some form of conflict: man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. himself, etc.

You get the picture. Whether or not the medium is a book, a television set or a computer game, drama is drama, and a good story is a good story.

<B>1.) RPG's first and foremost are games and not books. The storylines will tend to reflect this second-priority status.</B>

Of course. But the trend for Japanese-developed RPGs has led to a much greater emphasis on story. Just compare Final Fantasy VIII or IX with the first Dragon Quest. One of the nice things about this is that people are more accepting of RPGs with lackluster gameplay, so long as the story is reasonably good. But as RPGs continue to sacrifice more and more gameplay for the sake of telling a story, the pendulum of risk swings the other way. Those games that live by the plot can also die by it.

<B> 2.) RPG's (good ones) are almost exclusively developed in Japan.</b>

I disagree. American RPGs have always concentrated more on gameplay aspects than their Japanese counterparts, a fact I've become increasingly appreciative of, like Kali. O. I enjoyed Diablo II more than any Japanese RPG in years because it didn't waste much time trying to tell a story (what plot there was was exceedingly goofy, but that's not the point of the Diablo games), and concentrated instead on stellar gameplay.

As a side note, you know what American-developed game has a really good story? Starcraft. I played through the entire single-player game for both Starcraft and Brood Wars because I wanted to see what happened next. And this is a game that isn't even a RPG!

<B>3.) Because of (2), most RPG's were originally written in Japanese and translated to English, and there's always going to be something lost in the translation.</B>

Well, I can only go by what's on the screen in front of me. We can speculate all we want about "what was lost," but I'm not going to hold off on criticizing what I think are weak points simply because the translation may or may not be first rate. If there is ample evidence of a bad translation, like in Final Fantasy Tactics, then I might grant more lenience.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Verdana, Tahoma; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>When I say "writer," I mean the guy who actually pens the dialouge. I doubt this is the same person as who decides what the story is going to be like, and what happens to each character. I'm betting that is done by someone much higher up in the corporate ladder, someone who has much more influence over the entire process.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt Arial; text-align: left; '>But Sakaguchi IS a bonafide writer (though not a particularly good one, IMO), with undeniable experience. He co-wrote the script to the FF movie, I think.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Verdana, Tahoma; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>But I doubt he's the one who pens the dialouge for the games.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Verdana, Tahoma; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>Movies like Pearl Harbor, yes. Those aren't made by a person, they're made by a committee.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt Arial; text-align: left; '>If that's so, then he needs to better coordinate his efforts with his writing staff. This top-down approach you describe is a bad way to write a script.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Try Anachronox.

Mind you, it's not quite "dramatic"...but it sure as hell well written AND funny(I cracked up at the "stranded on the spaceship" scene)...

I might upload it to a pub if you guys can't find it elsewhere...

KO-</div>

<div style='font: 9pt Arial; text-align: left; '>I had no idea it was out. I'll see if I can find it for a good price somewhere.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Verdana, Tahoma; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>I really don't know for sure, but in projects as large as these, that's what I bet happens.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "Arial bold"; text-align: left; '>The only problem is: support beyond the first year. As of right now, it looks like Microshaft will have a nice launch, but what will it be like after that? I don't think they can survive on just PC developers in the console market. Then you'll have paid too much for a dead system</div>

<div style='font: 12pt Arial; text-align: left; '>never.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt Arial; text-align: left; '>Most of the Japan-made games that sell well in America lately are action games, survival horror, fighters, and other such stuff that are as western as it gets. I've not played an RPG in years, either, sorry.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt Arial; text-align: left; '>That, and, countless shriners expressed their belief that they don't like Xbox in some way or another (in the past, many occassions) so don't think it's a minority of two.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>which translates Hentai PC games >:P I was thinking of applying for the Enix translator job but it requires me to relocate so...

The companies that Peach Princess translates is Will and Crowd, which are both pretty big companies with 20-30 people on their staff, so I doubt what they do is really any different than what msot other companies do.

Anyway, the games I've worked does include RPGs and in the scripts you usually see tons of notes that the writer wrote down so that other people have a better idea what kind of characers these people are and etc. For super large companies like Square, my quess is :one person writes the general storyline, another one does most of the character /creature dialogues &etc.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt "comic sans MS"; text-align: left; '>GC all the way. Besides, it's kewl to hate microsoft.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Well, back before the days of Nintendo, when Atari was king.. :P</div>

<div style='font: 11pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light"; text-align: left; '>Yeah, back when it took only a meager programmer to write a decent game...</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Why "shriners"? What a dumb term.

KO-</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>What makes you think support will fall out?</div>

<div style='font: 11pt arial; text-align: left; '>I always forget about PC titles, but, as you said, Diablo (as with most PC RPGs) aren't really based on storyline and don't really have much to do with this discussion.

There are certain universal standards in what makes a "good" story, yes, but as I said, when writing an RPG you have to concentrate on how to make it fun to play moreso than how to make it well-written. I know all of us have been in situations where you ask yourself "Why would somebody build a village on top of a demon-infested mountain?" or "Why is every forest in the world brimming with slavering, bloodthirsty beasts?" or "Why is it that anyone important to the story somehow manages to situate themselves so that they can only be reached by first fighting your way through hordes of kill-crazy monsters?" But regardless of how good an RPG's plot may be, I don't want to just sit there and read. I bought the game to <i>play</I> it. There have to be some sacrifices made in the writing to accommodate this.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt "comic sans MS"; text-align: left; '>Hey! I'm smrt you dummy!</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "Arial bold"; text-align: left; '>Shriners is an easy term to use considering the board's name.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Well... I suppose we could try "tOWSers" or "Otherworlders"... but I just tend to sum it up with "You people" or some other similar phrase.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt Arial; text-align: left; '>I think there's going to be some big wakeup calls to any PC developers trying to write console (xbox) games. What? No patching? The shit has to work out of the box? Yeah, that's going to be a big shocker to some developers, shit, all PC developers have this mentality.

I'm sure there will be some good games for this thing, I'm not hardcore enough to buy all these new systems, so it doesn't matter to me either way. I too, hate PC's. Why? Because of all the damn incompatibilities, who's fault is this? Not completely Microsofts fault, but it is their OS. DirectX was a savior, but it's still not perfect. The thought have having a M$ based console in my living room is something I would struggle with, even if I really wanted one. They don't write good code, sure OS's are complicated, but damn, you have to have your shit together on a console.

As with any console, the first gen stuff will be ass... the next gen will be good enough to carry the system.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt Arial; text-align: justify; padding: 0% 8% 0% 8%; '>Also a horrid idea, as Shriners are part of a cult that worships the Los Angeles Shrine Auditorium (I'm not kidding about this at all!). Towsers are probably a better term.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Hmm... well, if we wanted to be really absurd, we could try "Moonies"... but I suppose that'd be a little far, eh?</div>

<div style='font: 9pt Arial; text-align: left; '>tOWSies!</div>

<div style='font: 9pt Arial; text-align: left; '>Hard to develop for, and it's still pretty much a port for PC games.</div>

<div style='font: 14pt Plakatbau; text-align: left; '>The dialogue and stories in hentai games aren't usually stimulating, though. Well, if you don't count the 'pants' department.</div>