GAMER LOUNGE 20XX (NO CASUALS!!)

[Dolphman]

What, the actual two games from the SNES? I think I'd pass on that. What Bubsy feels like to me is a cluttered Amiga-style platformer, and for some reason those kind of games have always ticked me off and have felt unplayable. I will give the game credit that certain enemy and background art have piqued my interest in the game once or twice, but the gameplay feels so slippery.

Yeah, a lot of Amiga games did suffer from mediocre gameplay while having awesome graphics and music. Can agree with you on that.
Has anyone tried ripping from Amiga games? I'm surprised we have very little rips currently on the site.

Bubsy does suffer from a few issues, being arguably the first Sonic clone. Very lazy written humor and puns. And being a generic bobcat.
It was indeed unforgiving with it's difficulty. one-hit kills can happen too often, blamed on the fact he moved too fast, and clumsily.
The pilot cartoon has a reason it never got picked up. Rob Paulsen even regrets voicing him in said pilot and the second game.

[psychospacecow]

http://www.twitch.tv/ronaldokun
If you're seeing this fresh, there's a tourney in that link and the SkullGirls devs are in here. About to get Mike Z up in here.

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Match is gonna start now.

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Mike Z got the cat! Ron won a match too!

[Koh]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yWlsec4MP4
Imperial Saga is also a thing...the sprites are so good! They also need to be ripped! XD!

[MandL27]

I've been playing PSMD ever since it came out. I'm just under two thirds of the way to 100% completion, judging by how many Pokemon I've connected with.

[puggsoy]

Thought this was interesting and worth sharing.

[Koopaul]

Wow a lot of that is untrue. And he kind of shoots himself in the foot by pointing out that women generally tend to play games like Candy Crush. So why would console games advertise more to women when they know that's not the kinds of games they want to play?

"Games are games Jake!"

No. It's not that simple. Games have many genres just like movies and books. And just because you advertise certain kinds of games more to a certain demographic doesn't mean that they are saying other demographics can't play it. This is just advertising, not discrimination. I took classes on this stuff.

[Koh]

I think you and many commenters on the video missed his point. He's saying games shouldn't be advertised to a specific gender at all, but just advertised to everyone, since games can be played by everyone. If they're truly interested in the game, they'd buy it based on how appealing it is to them, rather than just buying it because it's a boob fest or ab fest.

[Kriven]

I disagree...

Games definitely should be advertised to a specific gender, if that's their specific audience. There honestly isn't anything wrong with boob-fest games existing. There's an audience for them, so they'll exist, whatever.

I think it's just that there should be a greater variety in the types of games which get advertised in a mainstream way. Right now most of what shows up in magazines/TV commercials and the like are CoD and Gears of War and God of War... Although the mobile space seems to be doing a great job of covering its basis with advertising between Candy Crush, that new island thing I see on Cartoon Network all the time, and the "Be My Hero" commercials obviously targeting dudes.

Er, what I'm getting at is that games for XBox/PlayStation/Nintendo should have more diverse advertising. Splatoon is awesome, and from what I can tell pretty gender neutral. But like, why is it that most games for consoles which get ads are your typical macho shooter? Where's the ads for the next Bust-A-Move/Puzzle Bobble? Cooking Mama?

It looks like for the most part the companies are catering their ads toward the larger console demographic, but that's a demographic they perpetuated. Obviously, if that's what makes them money they aren't going to change. I can't think of anything that will really change things other than to get more diverse audiences to buy and play games as they are? Maybe when the bean counters notice a change in demographics, they'll change tactics?

Or they'll pull a Cartoon Network and cancel Young Justice because oh no girls are watching.

t;dr: It's all a great big Catch-22 for everybody involved.

[Dolphman]

I see the Splatoon ads all the time, even at hours most people are in bed. Here in Australia, we ended up the the infamous Kid/Squid ads.


But the problem with pandering to genders is due to a lot of games for girls are shovelware titles people with a brain would avoid.
And video games are not toys, and shouldn't be treated as such. Same argument as why you should never call animation a genre.

Frankly, I don't like ads for mobile games on TV. I think they should be banned, due to most I've seen being freemium trash.

[Lemonray]

I disagree...

Games definitely should be advertised to a specific gender, if that's their specific audience. There honestly isn't anything wrong with boob-fest games existing. There's an audience for them, so they'll exist, whatever.

Gender and audience preferences are sexist constructs, Kriven. Get with the times, man.

[Kosheh]

I disagree...

Games definitely should be advertised to a specific gender, if that's their specific audience. There honestly isn't anything wrong with boob-fest games existing. There's an audience for them, so they'll exist, whatever.

Gender and audience preferences are sexist constructs, Kriven. Get with the times, man.

Yeah man, get with the times. You don't market to Dudes - you gotta market to people. Faceless, generic, boring people



The video above has a point, though - the marketing/advertising/community outreach of most projects are still pretty old-fashioned. However the userbase is beyond "boys" and "girls": gamers in the West are starting to prefer "people".

But what I think is partly the issue is that we live in a culture now full of political correctness...like, even harder than ever before, and one particular issue with that is I feel like that's probably going to lead some Japanese developers to pull out of the market because in some cases the ideas in their games may be deemed "too offensive" for American audiences, or they'll end up overlocalizing titles to the point where they're outright dumbed down.

Like, when you think about it - a lot of the criticism you see on the Internet isn't about how VIOLENT games are any more (with probably the exception of games like Hatred, which intentionally pushes the envelope) but it's about content that's relatively nitpicky in the grand scheme of game design ["I don't like this character because this is an highly unrealistic portrayal of a man/woman"]
(Actually - it's important to note that overly sexualized characters like Bayonetta and even like, the cast of Senran Kagura are actually viewed as an empowering character in Japan, whereas our view on those characters are that they're fetishising/objectifying women. It's...weird, and something that could potentially hurt both the Japanese and American gaming markets)

If you think about it, it's kinda like the Starbucks holiday coffee cup controversy. Rather than actually focusing what's inside the coffee cup, people are making too big of a fuss about the cup itself, completely ignoring that the driving force of the company is actually the coffee. Not the cup.

[Dolphman]

It should be noted that Bayonetta was created by a woman. People seem to never learn that.
Also, what's happening lately is pretty much political correctness gone mad. We don't want that, because it can get out of hand.
That's like America's argument over Christmas. In other countries, you almost never hear/see "happy holidays" or "holiday" at all.

Those complaining are idiots on Tumblr claiming to be feminists who really are just sexist women not researching anything.
If we let them get their way, adult films and magazines would be illegal.

[Helmo]

My favorite thing I've seen on Tumblr is their idea of "realistic women" in video games is just to photoshop an extra 80lbs to "unrealistic women".

[Jermungandr]

That's like America's argument over Christmas. In other countries, you almost never hear/see "happy holidays" or "holiday" at all.

Honestly you hardly ever actually see people saying Holiday instead of Christmas in the United States either. The media and internet make it out to be a big deal but the honest truth is nobody actually gives a shit and just says whatever they want.

I'm surrounded by people of different religious beliefs all the time and none of them are actually ever offended.

[Kriven]

I say "Happy Holidays" a lot, but I'm specifically referring to the entire Thanksgiving-New Year's season. It was always a lot more convenient, in my mind, than changing up to a new holiday so quickly. Sometimes I'll let a "Merry Christmas" tumble out if I'm feeling particularly Kringlesy, but none of my wish-wells are intended to be political x.x;

It should be noted that Bayonetta was created by a woman. People seem to never learn that.

Whenever I see this mentioned, the Pro-PC Overlord crowd always calls it "Internalized Misogyny." Same with the point about Japanese Female Empowerment differing from American Female Empowerment. So I don't think it's so much that people aren't learning that these characters are created for/by women, it's just that they aren't accepting of the intentions behind the character because they don't conform to their specific, narrow idea of an empowered lady.