"One new idea a year..."

So there's a game company out there that has been shamelessly and blatantly copying popular game concepts games for their own sale and distribution. Bet you can't guess what country this developer belongs to. China? South Korea? Russia?

It's France.
Wait what? Yep! A French company, Gameloft, has been replicating popular PC/console titles on mobile devices, such as Android and iPhone. It's copied Gran Turismo (GT), Midnight Club (Asphalt), World of Warcraft (Order and Chaos Online), Halo (NOVA), Assassins Creed (they ported AC, but they also released Backstab), Sunset Riders (Cowboys and Aliens), Uncharted (Shadow Guardian), God of War (Hero of Sparta), GTA4 (Gangsta: Miami Vindication), and Starcraft (Starfront). And that's just for Android!

Hard to believe that they've cloned some of these games on the phone... But just look: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.gameloft.android.ANMP.GloftMMHM

That's nearly 1:1 identical to WoW. How they don't have lawsuits crash onto their ass like a ton of bricks, I don't know. Of course, we've seen shameless game copying before, so why would I talk about it now?

Well, there have been many before me to call Gameloft a copycat, and their CEO has actually responded.

"The video game industry has always played around a limited number of themes. There is maybe one new idea a year. If a type of game is not available, then you should make it. The damaging thing is if you do a bad expression of a good idea."
- Michel Guillemot

Bold statement, buddy. Even if Guillemot's claim of a singular unique idea per year was true, that is not a flattering situation. Nor is it an excuse. It makes us wonder what is happening in the game industry that is causing this stagnation of ideas. Could it be in part that upper management like Guillemot himself is too focused on mimicking popular titles rather than reaching out with daring concepts, leading game designers to hesitate when proposing and promoting new game concepts like back in the gaming golden age of the late 80's and 90's? Could it be that Guillemot is right about the lack of ideas, but yet ironically he is the plague that is pervading it?

Guillemot is a disgusting worm. He's not just copying to make a quick buck like some Asian game developers do... But he doesn't even think it's copying or setting back the development of the industry and propagating more development studios with FEWER original ideas. In fact, his narcissism allows him to believe that he's doing us a favor by paying homage to leading titles. You have to be pretty twisted to say that.

Fallout: New Vegas - Finishing games before release is a thing of the past.

Again, little late for this, but I guess I'm catching up on some overdue homework.

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If you've heard anything at all about Fallout: New Vegas, then you've heard about how buggy the game is. For the uninitiated, here's a taste: Quests break constantly and cannot be continued; NPCs disappear when you leave the area and come back, making quest hand-ins impossible; World entities such as items or even characters get jammed or lost or clipped about a mile below the ground. You NEED the developer console and the respective commands to just PLAY the game. If you're playing on the PS3 or the Xbox, you are fucked. Fortunately, the story is alright, and the setting and events fit together well. You'd expect that the major unification faction of the West (developed in previous Fallout games) the NCR, would eventually make its push eastward and encounter resistance. And the location matters: an invaluable energy source post-apocalypse, the Hoover Dam, and the blast furnace of a new economy, the casinos and resorts of Vegas. Trading companies from all over struggle for control in the area, but are considered insignificant in the highly discerning eyes of Vegas. However, the city needs power (the dam), and the power needs the city (money to operate and maintain it), and everything in FNV seems to fall into the balance in the same way. Fallout 3 wasn't quite as good in terms of seeking that balance in setting and lore, but felt like it had more content and hours of fun regardless. In fact, a lot of my experience in FNV was spent retreading old territory because of the bugs and the constant need to replay a segment to avoid it. Statistically, I made a total of fifty saves in FO3. FNV was near 800.

Bugs aside though, I was also a little disappointed by the lack of a climactic super weapon at the end of the game ala Liberty Prime and the FEV. While Helios One was a very very very cool location, it didn't have the significance and impact I wanted on the outcome of the story. The Boomers and their carpet bombing is pretty awesome though, but was unfortunately just a short fly by and a result of an isolated sidequest.

Hoover Dam, the final battle site, and also the major location talked about from beginning to end, is a popular topic in our reality for conspiracy theorists, who believe it was constructed to house a top secret American weapon. What better location than to put something awesome in an alternate universe storyline where America has plenty of money, no ethical boundaries, tons of robotics and is willing to pulverize their communist enemies in any manner? Disappointingly, FNV doesn't try to explore that at all, and the Dam is just a regular hydroelectric plant. After all that build up, that's all we get? Really? I was really hoping for a result or weapon that would have consequences on the world, not just the west coast, like you know, when in previous Fallouts they were developing viruses to turn EVERY human into a mutant, or maybe in Van Buren, where they were going to control all the nukes stored in the orbital bombardment satellites. That's heavy stuff.

FNV was good enough overall, but next time I really hope the developers actually finish their game before releasing it next time. The industry is already starting to copy their style of 'release first, finish later'. Just look at Age of Conan, or perhaps worse, Magicka.

Dying Japanese video game industry

I'm hardly surprised looking at the things they pump out month after month. Its the same shit over and over.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/technology/20game.html?_r=2

From the article we can see how they are trying to westernize their games. Yeah you can tell from games like The Last Remnant that Cent ripped apart. Even games like NIER that I never played and just read about. Apparently there is a she-male but that has nothing to do with it. The thing is in the Japanese version you get a girlyboy but in the English version you get a muscleman.

The problem is not the characters, the problem is that over the years there isn't much change in game play or storyline. That's not the biggest reason though, the biggest reason would be that Japan just can't compete with the amount of games coming out of the west. Even if sales of Xbox360 sucks balls over in Japan there is a huge market of games in the west. That's why the market for Japanese games seems small.

Overall many Japanese game companies are seeing loss of sales in their games. Maybe if they stop making games with some spiky haired anime boy trying to save the world and get the girl then people would be more interested in playing them. You get lame dialogue stories and two dimensional characters with a cliched plot. At one time pumping those games out one after another worked but the gamers of today has higher standards for their games. Western gamers pump out similar games over and over too, just look at the sports titles. But since I don't play sports games I can't really comment on those. The games I play are action games, RPGs and Shoot em ups mostly. So those are the games I will talk about.

How many times have you seen a Japanese RPG main character save a world? I started gaming playing those games and now I can barely touch one without puking with blood as you can see from the posts I posted. There are games that try new things like Persona and a lot of people seemed to like it. I didn't. I felt it was a step forward from the cliched RPGs but it included many new horrible things. The western market isn't so full of RPGs. You see a lot more FPS, hell I don't think I even seen a Japanese FPS. They really need to expand on their games, they need more online play, they need a lot more. The old Nintendo and Playstation days are over. Competition has arrived, you can't pump out the same crap and expect to sell when better games are coming out everyday. Most hardcore gamers today are older now. I grew up playing SNES and Playstation. I don't want to play the same shit I played so many years ago.

Here's another article on Japanese gaming clicky!

In 2009, Japanese games have dropped 24% in sales. The western market is huge. They can't really make games that the Japanese want to play and westerners want to play as well. Its just too different. Japanese gamers seem to be closed off from the world. You might not agree with my views and I may sound pretty biased but we'll see in the coming years. The gaming industry is still rapidly changing.