Capcom's guesses weren't completely off the mark. With regards to the Rome thing, you had the precedent of popular things with an antiquity setting like the God of War games and The Gladiator with Russell Crowe. With Onimusha 3, Jean Reno was a somewhat popular actor and Paris was a modern Western city
The thing is that none of those would be the kind of extremely cynical, safe choice you'd make if you were looking to pander to US audiences, which makes them interesting
If you want to see an extremely depressing case of a Japanese developer trying to capture the Xbox bro audience, look no further than Quantum Theory from Tecmo which is a painfully bad Japanese copy of Gears of War by the creator of Fatal Frame
I actually liked all three games, and the third one might've been the most entertaining one. It was just really fun to see Capcom awkwardly trying to turn their incredibly Japanese samurai action game into something that would appeal (more) to Western gamers.
Their guesses as to what American audiences would like are also just fascinating. "Jean Reno? Paris? France? Americans think those are cool, right? Wait, I got it! Gladiators in Ancient Rome!"
I kind of want to check out Shadow of Rome at some point now 🤔
I played through the first three Onimusha games for the first time recently and you can see the beginnings of Capcom's Westward push in Onimusha 3 from 2004. The first two games are incredibly Japanese. The main characters are directly modeled after Japanese actors, the games take place in the Sengoku period and most of the named characters are actual historical figures and the stories are full of Japanese melodrama, especially the second game where characters will cry as they monologue about their traumatic backstories, their dreams, etc
Then you get to the third game and there's a clear push for more general international appeal. The intro cinematic has motion capture done by Donnie Yen and in addition to Takeshi Kaneshiro returning as Samanosuke from the first game, main character duties are split between him and Jean Reno as Jacques, a modern day French soldier/agent/guy with trenchcoat who becomes involved in the plot when series villain Nobunaga Oda finds a way to bring his demonic army through a time portal to modern day France.
Compared to first and second game it's very clear the game's storytelling tries to emulate Hollywood blockbusters, specifically Roland Emmerich movies (Jean Reno was in 1998's Godzilla 🤔). The scene where the Genma invade Paris looks like it's from a disaster movie and Jean Reno's character is a recent widower with a young son who does not get along with Jacques' new girlfriend
The Onimusha games were produced by Keiji Inafune, who was also the main driving force behind Capcom's attempt at appealing more to Western tastes. The first two games contain trailers for their sequels while 3 contains a trailer for Shadow of Rome, Keiji Inafune's first go at building a new franchise from the ground up for the Western market. It failed to sell in the US and the sequel apparently became Dead Rising instead
I don't get why this and the stupid NATO beer that came out a while back use OTAN instead of NATO since no one in Finland uses the French abbreviation
Yeah, they're clearly just generic pick-and-mix candies they've put in a vaguely topical bag
Should've made them shaped like Jens Stoltenberg's head or something
I give it two fucked up Nazi dogs out of ten
Sounds like I've missed out on some fun new lore
How about Epic Games just scrubbing the Unreal series off storefronts for no reason
I picked up Crash Bandicoot 4 again and I'm amazed by how great the game looks. During cutscenes it literally looks like a 3D cartoon, and it's all* happening in-engine in real time!
*except some cutscenes are low bitrate video files, but they use the same assets as the real-time cutscenes and the animation is just as good in both
I don't really play that many newer cartoony games so this might not be that novel an observation but I can't help but go !soypoint-2 at the game
I just think this is a way more impressive use of modern graphics technology than a hyper-realistic Keanu Reeves modeled right down to his nose hairs
He's blatantly wrong since a considerable percentage would be a furry girl with a big butt
It also sounds like the game is pretty po-faced in general, and that the main character has basically no personality. You can totally make a game with exaggeratedly sexy or otherwise over-the-top characters but you need to have an over-the-top overall tone and style to match
With those specs, I'm pretty confident you could run DuckStation, which has never given me trouble with a decade+ old laptop with a weaker GPU
Yahtzee's take on the Stellar Blade discourse seems to be that it's just two camps of monkeys throwing shit at each other, which is pretty inaccurate.
There was only really one camp since no one really protested the existence of a game with a jiggly waifu in it
spoiler
Yahtzee also argues that in a cyberpunk future most people, including him, would choose to put their brains in anime girl bodies with big butts
Then, in 2014, a dark horse emerged. The Evil Within blends the chills of Silent Hill with the action of Resident Evil, offering a unique and terrifying experience.
I mean, the first Evil Within was a perfectly decent RE4 clone from the same guy that made RE4 but that's really all it was. It had a fun combat sandbox but the plot was dumb as rocks (and so was the original RE4 but that game was intentionally goofy and self-aware) and the entire game is just a procession of disparate horror tropes and setpieces with the "it's all a dream" conceit of the story used to string them together. It was a fun game but there wasn't much going on in terms of story, atmosphere or horror
I do miss when we would get simple, straight-forward new single player games like Evil Within though 
These companies don't want to just sell games to you. They want you to interact with their apps and live in their ecosystem and I have zero interest to learn to use a shittier Steam where I have no games
If they just sold you no-frills installers like GOG does (with an optional Steam-like ecosystem I never use) I wouldn't mind, but of course they don't want to do that
I just hate Valve and CDPR much, much less than I do Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA and Epic
I'm not a huge N64 person but this seems really cool. I hope this approach starts to get explored with other tricky-to-emulate systems in the future.
I imagine just feeding an Xbox 360 game dump to a program and it spitting out a PC port
One could simply not bother with the slop these companies squirt out 
Yep, it certainly looks way more like a Swery game than a Suda one to me. Unfortunately, most of what Swery's done since D4 has not been that great. Coincidentally, that's everything he's done as an indie after he left Access Games
Can't believe I completely missed the news, I remember being really excited when they first joked about collaborating however many years ago.
Unfortunately, I hate to say it but the game looks to be a bit, well... crap. !dean-neutral
Visually it reminds me of Swery's first indie game, THE MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories which was also a rather spartan-looking 2.5D platformer with whacky visuals and tons of violence. I assume that's a limitation of the probably tiny budgets he's working with these days, so I guess I can't harp on him too much for it, but still, it's disappointing to see when his early games had him ambitiously punching way above his weight class.
As someone who loved Deadly Premonition it's just sad to see Swery continue to flounder.
such energy
All everyone did was make angry posts online and ask for refunds on Steam. Neither of those works for moving the needle on things that actually matter
I saw a glow-worm some years ago. I thought someone had dropped a glowstick until I took a closer look
Definitely not too common in Finland
https://youtu.be/430X2G4Vii8
Beware, some of the other national stereotypes are... less amusing
!pain
Author mentions being a kid in the Wii/PS3/Xbox 360 era
Author mentions being a kid when the PS4 and Xbone were out
Check out his silly getup SICK trenchcoat, shades and bike. What a badass !skeleton-motorcycle
This game has some really goofy scenes
Man, they just don't make games this stupid anymore !sicko-wistful
Where the first two Onimusha games felt very much like they were intended for a Japanese audience, Onimusha 3 has been really interesting in how it tries to pivot to appeal to a more Western one. You have the big name Western actor, the introduction of a modern-day Western setting (2004 Paris) and the introduction of a bunch of Hollywood tropes straight out of Roland Emmerich movies. There's the disaster movie opening where Nobunaga's demonic forces invade Paris as well as Jean Reno's character, Jacques, a divorced dad with an estranged son with whom he's trying to connect and who doesn't like his new fiancée.
I think this is the beginning of Keiji Inafune's famous push to capture the Western market
Dude's got some Eiichiro Oda snotty crying action going on !chefs-kiss
While I was playing Onimusha 2 I was really struck by just how good the character models looked. The PS2 had tons of games with really well-animated characters but I felt Onimusha 2's were especially nice.
One thing that's really noticeable looking back is just how bad character models and animation generally were by comparison in Western games from the same time period with the exception of Half-Life 2. Devs didn't seem to give a shit and just went with stiff faces with basic mouth flaps even if the games were otherwise pushing the envelope graphically
Last time I complained about snow it was just a light dusting of snow that melted in a few hours !dean-frown
The combination of full-on winter scenes with snow on the trees, birdsong and lots of daylight is trippy
It's snowing on the 20th of April, this is BULLSHIT !angery
Coldest spring since 1992
I'm playing Onimusha 2 with an undub patch and this difference between the Japanese and English scripts got a chuckle out of me.
After defeating a lady demon boss, Jūbei says fairly neutrally in the English version:
>All demons will be destroyed!
While the Japanese line is:
>これで、世の男たちは一安心だぜ。
Which translates to "The men of the world can rest easy now." Jujudormah, the boss in question, was a joke character whose entire joke consisted of "Fat ugly lady thinks she's hot and is always horny." She also killed the protagonist's mom before the boss fight but I guess Jūbei is so stoic and unflappable he got over that already and didn't need to make his post-fight one-liner about getting revenge for her, preferring to instead reiterate one final time that the demon was, indeed, an uggo
Something something woke localisers destroying Japanese culture !frothingfash
I watched a Japanese video about the awful classic 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie since I was curious about how it was viewed from a Japanese perspective. Disney's involvement in the movie's production is mentioned at which point the author jokes that "if today's Disney was in charge, Mario would probably be made into a black guy"
I love how everyone's brains are being pickled by the same shitty American culture wars worldwide
The comments were also great
>"Toad could work as a black person because his head kind of resembles an afro"
>"Italians are already considered a minority in America so they wouldn't need to change him into a black man"
The best part about learning new languages is being able to read even more racist comments on the internet
Look at the little panda plushie moving around in his pouch !michael-laugh
I finished the first Onimusha, and overall it was a delightful little time capsule of early 6th gen gaming. The most interesting part to me was its obvious relation to Resident Evil. I know it literally started out "samurai Resident Evil" as Capcom wanted to use the formula from their biggest hit to create more hits like they'd already done with Dino Crisis.
I wish it'd stuck closer to Resident Evil. Had it been a slower-paced survival horror game where you explored a creepy Japanese castle it could have been one of my favourite games of all time, but the finished product ended up going in a more hack-n-slashy, character actiony direction with the tone of that soap operatic Sengoku Era samurai schlock the Japanese love so much combined with a tokusatsu show. (Which is still fun, mind you)
I love fixed camera angles, pre-rendered backgrounds and tank controls but even I can admit that all of those things pair pretty poorly with anything approaching character action gameplay. Thankfully, the game was easy enough and generous enough with health and item refills that it never became a real problem, but it did make the optional challenge tower and attempting to master the counter system too annoying to bother with. It might actually be worth it to instead play the 2018 remaster instead of the PS2 original since it had the option for analog movement.
Maybe I'll actually get to fight Oda Nobunaga in Onimusha 2- despite a demonically resurrected Nobunaga being set up as the main villain of the first game you actually never get to fight him
spoiler
Cardinal Syn was an edgy violent fighting game for the PS1 where one of the characters, Bimorphia, was created when the villain sliced a lady and a dude in half and stapled them together
Or bras, judging from the jiggle physics
I know sexy female ninjas are a trope but she still looks goofy running around with no pants on
Reminding me of Resident Evil, Dino Crisis and Devil May Cry is a great first impression.
There were 4 of these games on the PlayStation 2 and one of them has fucking Jean Reno in it !michael-laugh
Interesting to see what the quality curve on these will be given they were pumped out in about 5 years
Edit: It's got tank controls and pre-rendered backgrounds !pingu-horny
I finished Kuon, which is a really cool survival horror game from a pre-Dark Souls From Software. All of its 3 playable characters are women, of which the final, unlockable one is apparently some legendary Japanese mystic whom the devs decided to gender-swap for the game. The funny thing is that they still made the female Abe no Seimei unflappably cool and ludicrously OP, demolishing all the enemies in the game with ease !shrug-outta-hecks
Also Japanese writers just love turning male historical figures into girls, don't they !michael-laugh
I actually ended up really liking Kuon's writing and characters, so it's interesting to see the devs being kinda weird about their female protagonists
In all honesty though, as a connoisseur of fixed camera angles, Kuon's camera angles aren't that amazing most of the time. The game's environments are fairly open and empty so the angles are mostly pretty pulled back and utilitarian, more focused on giving you a clear view of each area rather than setting a mood with creative shot composition like your Resident Evils and Silent Hills. The game reminds me of Silent Hill 4 which had a similarly detached camera to go along with its larger, sparser environments.
Despite the kind of simplistic gameplay and repeated puzzles and progression during its two campaigns I'd recommend Kuon if you're into PS2 horror and traditional Japanese ghost stories
