A Week In Comments

*Evaporated in a mushroom cloud*

I think user experience would be crucial to a title like this, and portable gaming doesn’t offer the immersion that they would have needed. Afterall, we’ve become accustomed to emotional involvement with the movies we watch, and that’s opened the gates for video games. We’re used to projecting ourselves into our television sets and becoming invested with characters we see there, so the characters in our games aren’t a far leap. But a tiny screen that’s sitting in our laps? I think the path to immersion becomes a longer walk in that case…

*Normally. I admit there are glitches, which exist outside the narrative of the allegory.

No one deserves that tone, ever. It was mean and those poor poor video game playing children, just trying to have fun, received the harshest of tones.

Do you hear me!? TONE!

In all seriousness… Some of you need to get a grip. Lambasting the man for banning a mouthy, modding little reprobate and subsequently 1 day banning his equally puerile, completely untrustworthy and flaunting friend (gee golly, I love me some of his glitching and modding videos), is just… asinine.

Fuck political correctness. He did his job, set an example and should be commended. Tone be damned.

It’s understandable that a Japanese history quiz is out of reach for most westerners, but playing a game like Yakuza is all about peeking into the the more recluse parts of an exotic culture. There’s only so much you can take out or adapt in a game like this before it loses its focus. Localizing intelligently then becomes a task of making these foreign elements understandable and entertaining.

When struggling with a topic you know your customer base will have a hard time understanding, it’s better to find a constructive solution than to underestimate your target audience and deny content. Those who DO understand would be deprived of an enjoyable element of the game.

An interesting path to follow, then, would be to include a bonus menu with additional infos and comments on the characters, locations and events discovered in-game as the player progresses. Assassin’s Creed II and Metal Gear Solid 4 (through a separate downloadable program) both have these complementary menus to help the players “get” what’s going on, who is who, and why they’re doing their crazy stuff. If it works for fictional history and universes, why couldn’t that work for a foreign culture?

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