Eastern game design: Good (Konami, Nintendo, Square)
Western game design: Bad. (Secret of Evermore, Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, Grand Theft Auto)

About the only thing we excell at is first person shooters, sports games, and PC games. And as far as innovation, there really isn't much at all... it's more or less just a copy of something else that's been done before, only slightly tweaked. Look at sports games. I mean why bother releasing a new version of a sports game every year? What the hell is the difference between last years and this years? A new roster? Whooooo! That just screams innovation and must buy! Can you say "tool"?
Of course there are a few companies that do release unique games, like Insomniac, Naughty Dog, and ummm.... Sucker Punch? (about the only thing I've seen from them is Sly Cooper, a damn good game. And the sequel looks twice as good) Everynow and then a game squeaks by from Western developers that is really done well and very innovative, however they're few and far between. It seems more like and probability then anything else, though... It just seems like Japan has a much better grasp on what is fun to do in a game and they focus on substance. While we tend to go more for explosions, violent death, and crime sprees. Sure as hell says a lot about our society, no?

-xddga

Letters-guy,

This one's easy:

Western game design: Take the latest Hollywood license, slap it onto the nearest half-finished gameplay engine, ship to retailers.

Eastern game design: See also, "Hideo Kojima," "Shigeru Miyamoto," "Hironobu Sakaguchi." But primarily "Hideo Kojima" (there's probably more but those are the big three I can think of at the moment...)

Also before I end this letter I wanted to say a couple things on G4TechTV because it slipped my mind yesterday:

Arena: Someone needs to show them how to showcase DDRMAX2 on the air, their current setup SUCKS. 'Oh all they need to see is the top guide arrows so that's all we'll show them.' Also if I hear one more 'Enchantment Under the Sea' reference I'm going to shoot my TV.

See, G4 *used* to show 'Starcade' till all those Gen-Y n00b gamers started whining how much better 'Arena' was. Well, let's put a random Gen-Y'er in front of a Ms. Pacman machine and see how they fare...assuming they don't walk away in disgust.

Players: 'Go ahead and slam the controller on the ground, if it breaks just have your butler run to the store and buy another!' Must be hard, on a rockstar/moviestar/sports star's bank account to be buying all those games, huh?

G4TV.com: ... it's not a rerun, it's RETRO. (regardless, it still sucks. Need I say more?)

Icons: Hey look, something decent on G4! it's a miracle! The most recent one I've seen is the one on Donkey Kong, and that one was pretty cool.

Sorry that must have ran a little long.

DT

Hi again Chris,

Thank you for such a flattering comment.

Anyway, I think that there is a huge difference between Western and Eastern types of game design. Actually, I just want to focus on console games because PC games are a whole different story. Yeah...

Anyway, Eastern game design, imho, has less emphasis on blood and gore. They don't use realistic body movements or attacks. Western games do this a lot more often. Doom 3 is the best example: here is a game that is realistic (to the point at which demons from hell enter the story...), and bloody as f%^$ing hell! The game's basic formula is this: (1) shoot the bad guys (2) watch them blow up (3) wet your pants at the awesome gore fest (4) get the shit scared out of you by the new monsters (5) get new weapons (6) and in between the loading of levels (if you don't have a good enough graphics card, which is about 85% of the case) you have enough time to change your underpants. As Bill Cosby put it "This is called fun." Many American games seem to feed on immediate gratification such as this: you input commands from the controls, you get immediate feedback. The bastards go boom, yay! Woohoo!

Despite the way I'm portraying Western game design, it isn't all that bad. Activision's extreme sports division seems to do pretty well designing games using "immediate gratification". But I don't like the use of passwords. Games in western design all have some password feature that allows you to cheat and do things the easy way. I remember having to do that with The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and I ended up hating it. Ultimately, there was no real fun to it afterwards! I'd much rather prefer doing things without the aids of passwords. They just seem like a crutch game designers put into their games because they don't have the time or resources to balance the game's challenge and level design.

Eastern games, though, are more about prolonged gratification. You start out slow, but as you reach the end, things get more and more interesting and you get totally blown away by all the cool things that you can do. This is a lot like the PC sims we have in our country such as Age of Empires and such, but the Eastern games are a bit more "arcadey". For instance, nobody in the West is going to make a game like Final Fantasy or Lunar: Eternal Blue. Not gonna happen. Not even Ogre Battle. Sucks, huh? To focus on something either than the RPG genre in eastern game design... The East has a tendency to make experimental games that diverge from the normal immediate gratification offered by Western games. For instance in the game Rez, you go with the music, right? Dance Dance Revolution is another example: you earn points immediately by dancing the steps properly. These are game concepts nobody would've even thought of in the West. Earning points by exercising? Remember, karaoke (as it is a Japanese word) is a Japanese concept. It just gained a cult status in the US. And even fighting games can take a different turn, such as Smash Bros. Melee. You don't kill anyone, nor beat the shit out of them, you just whack them to the next millenium. There is a big difference. It's like in Pokemon whenever Team Rocket got blasted off into space, they never went anywhere and they were always able to make it back to the next episode. So smashing characters out of the screen is not really killing or beating up a character like in most fighting games, it is just smashing them away.

But I have to say that I'm looking at both the East and the West to improve their games. In the West, they need to look at different types of games to make. Something weird and original. The Sims did that. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic did that. And Tony Hawk did that when it was originally released. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater franchise, unfortunately, needs a bit more than new tricks to make it more inviting to the casual gamer. I think the reason The Sims did well was because typical people always had an ideal notion of who they'd be or what they'd do or where they lived. The Sims was the answer to that concept, not necessarily making things perfect in every way, but enabling you to control the way things go in your life without having to deal with the stress. Pushing a button to ask a girl out on a date is a lot less stressful than actually asking her out in real life. That's the concept Will Wright was focusing on, I think. Then again, the absolute perfectionist may want one specific girl to like his character. Oops. But Western games also have to be different. It's all sports, action, and sports. Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, Sly Cooper... those are the types of games I'm thinking about. Metroid Prime is the same way. I think Metroid Prime is an excellent hybrid of East/West game design: first person shooter with third person exploration. Western game developers can learn a lot from Eastern game developers.

On the other hand, Eastern game developers create new genres, and beat the old genres to death. RPGs have evolved on the PC far faster than they have on consoles. Final Fantasy XII's battle system better be good, or else it'll be the same thing all over again. Not that there is anything wrong with it, but it is repetitive. Yasumi Matsuno, though, is the dude who brought us Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy Tactics, so he should do better. I just want to see the old genres the East Coast has mastered be improved. Don't rework the formula, make new formulas.

Btw, Doom 3 and other PC games are made to be used with specific graphics chips made by either ATI or n-Vidia. For instance, Half-Life 2 will work well with one company's graphics card, but not another's. And to get the best performance out of the game, you need the best card. Isn't that a lot like the console wars? And worse yet it is more expensive. The PC games industry might alienate their users if they continue to go down this road, man. Games that don't efficiently use the power already put into a computer aren't good games at all. My teachers at college always teach me to use the most time and processor efficient programming techniques possible to get the most out of the computer. So how come games have to have bigass processors? Bad karma man. Also, if a person playing PC games--who is used to playing all games on one single graphic card--finds out that some games work better on one graphics card and other games work better on another graphic card... what is he going to do then? I've got a problem with this...

Chris Pioli, who never thought he was awesome, but is telling himself to save his letters to gameforms incase he can publish it somewhere... it is a possibility

Greetings Chris.

I was wondering if you or any of the readers could help me identify this game that's been nagging at my brain for years now. It was a game in the same style as Bubble Bobble or the original Mario Bros. (1 screen levels, kill all enemies to move ahead), only to kill the bad guys, you had to dig the ground from under their feet, and then when they are stuck in a hole, you had to hit them, or jump on their heads, I don't remember exactly. I also remember it having pretty cool bosses, and lots of weird score giving pickups, like in Bubble Bobble (fried egg, pack of cigs, etc.)

I don't rmember the game's name, nor what console it was on, save that it was 16-bit or above. I remember it being really fun though.

I would really appreciate anyone helping me out with this.

-NoKidding

The West Rules because we have the power of God and Wisdom Tree games on our side. The East has you collecting coins and taking mushroom drugs to get "super" while the west has frankensense counts and bible trivia. Though Japan did release some game called Jesus which doesn't seem to have much to do with Jesus... So I guess we're even.

MadMan Todo-San "Labeled: Just another drugged-out loser. But your little tag's way off. I'm a thinker, an uncle, and the last thing I lit up was a rugby scoreboard." Best anti drug ad evar.