The Legendary Hochu Otsuka

 

Recently I've been playing Triangle Strategy on my Switch and by default the English voices are turned on.  Upon hearing them, I cringed myself inside out at the awful performances and then promptly went to the options menu to change the voice over language to Japanese and not only were the voices across the board MUCH better but I was greeted with a little suprise of a bandit being voiced by this dude in one of the first scenes. 

Born in 1954 and active as a voice actor from 1976 (according to wikipedia) Hochu is one of those big-bad motherfuckers in Japanese voice acting.  He's so prolific that I can almost GUARANTEE that if you're some kind of weeb that watches a lot of anime or the kind of person that enjoys JRPGs to a large degree and plays them with JP voice over like a sane person, you have heard this man at least once or twice in your life.  

I first discovered him when I was quite young, I forget how old exactly but it would have been primary school with his role as Skid Ops Gash in Panzer Dragoon Saga.  He appears shortly after the opening valley section in disc 1 so him, along with Akira Ishida, Masato Ibu and Toru Okawa were some of the first examples of spoken Japanese I ever heard in my life and considering how big of an influence that game was on me wanting to learn Japanese, these guys are kind of a big deal.  

But I'll be honest though, Akira, Masato and Toru, while talented voice actors, are not the kind of people I could pick out of any given production.  For example I googled Akira Ishida and he's been in TONS of shit that I've watched and played but I had no idea it was him at any point.  That's not a weakness of him as an actor, that's more me not paying attention to the credits but I think it says a lot, then, that someone like me who spent a lot of my life not paying attention to credits was able to pick this guy out, Otsuka puts in some really stand out performances.

His performances are all quite similar sounding and for some that can be a really bad thing.  Take Amanda Winn Lee for example, it doesn't matter if she's playing Yukiko Amagi, Jinana (Digital Devil Saga) or Heather Mason, she sounds basically the same every time.  Otsuka on the other hand is a master of injecting a great deal of the characters personality into each individual performance.  Gash, Jiraiya (Naruto) and the Kurata Dealer (Akagi) for example all have the same sounding voice but even just hearing snippits of their dialogue you can tell just how different each character is, he's a dude that really manages to encapsulate a characters personality.

The dude is 68 years old so I was surprised to hear, and this was the inspiration for this post actually, his voice doing some kind of advert in a Family Mart a couple of days ago.  According to wiki the last video game he did was Nioh 2 in 2020 but he's still going in the anime scene with a role in something called A Herbivorous Dragon Get's Unfairly Villainized (? what the fuck) and it warms my dried up little heart to know he's still chugging along.

Next time you're playing or watching something maybe you'll be able to pick him out, it's really not hard to do.  I found out while glancing at the wiki page that he's done dubs of English actors like Jeanne Claude Van Damme and Kurt Russel and that's something I just GOTTA go experience.  What an absolute legend

Morality Systems are Dogshit

 

Recently I've been playing Knights of the Old Republic on Steam and as someone who doesn't really give two flying rat fucks about Star Wars, I'm having a really good time.  The game, however, features a morality system of the player either being a light side or dark side Jedi and what the game decides are light side actions and dark side actions are complete bullshit and this is a problem that has plagued games for a long time so I'm going to rant about it a little bit.

The first instance that got me really hard in Knights was when you get to the Wookie planet with the name I can't remember how to spell.  When you arrive there's some kind of trading company that has set up shop and is kidnapping and selling the native Wookies into slavery.  If you ask me, these are some pretty fucking bad people, but some time into a quest line you are given an option to kill a bunch of them or chase them away.  My attitude is that if you come into someones home turf and start selling them into slavery, you sort of forfeit your right to life on account of being a cunt, so the lightsabers and blasters came out and the party put them down.  Upon concluding the fight I was given Dark Side points.  Dark Side points, for killing invading slavers.  I think it has something to do with Jedi not killing people or something but come the fuck on, you can't just go up to people like that and say "um, excuse me, would you mind NOT enslaving a native race of forest people please?" and just expect them to agree, violence IS the answer here.  But even worse than that there's another quest later on, on a different planet, that involves investigating the murder of some women by some dude.  The way the quest is prestented to you, the situation seems pretty fishy (if you know, ha ha, pun intended) and it looks like the dude that's been arrested has been framed.  On your investigation you go to a hotel where you can question some witnesses and during the dialogue options you can choose to use your force powers to get more details out of a certain NPC.  Using your force powers in this way gets you fucking EVIL points.  Investigating the highly likely framing of an innocent man in a way that guarantees that justice can be served in the correct way is considered to be EVIL by Bioware.  This may be another Jedi thing that I'm unaware of but I remember Obi Wan or whatever in a new hope using the force to manipulate people like that and no one really blinked an eye when HE did it.  Either Bioware have a completely fucked sense of morality or the Jedi are fucking lame, either way it sucks.

But at the very least, in Knight's case, there's a discussion of the morality to be had.  Maybe I shouldn't be so quick to use brain magic to get secrets out of people, sure, fine, whatever, but in a lot of other games morality systems are just tacked on lame bits of shit that aren't engaging in any way.

Now I love Bioshock, it's a cool game but it really does highlight just how poorly thought out these things are.  In Bioshock, upon killing a Big Daddy you are granted a "moral choice" of infanticide or to not do that.  Killing the little girl nets you more points to buy plasmids with and not doing it gives you a bit less and a different ending.  The thing to consider though, is that Bioshock, even on hard mode, is piss easy and you can get everything you need by not killing them which makes the choice feel hollow.  The ONLY reason to kill little sisters in Bioshock is to either be edgy or because you specifically want to see the "bad" ending.  

Another big example of this is Mass Effect, a game that presents you with "moral choices" at various parts of the story but the only real options for each situation is to either be the literal reincarnation of Jesus Christ or to be the biggest ball-bag in the galaxy.  No way to be even a little bit moderate or level headed in any of these games.

Morality on a binary scale like this is a stupid, useless feature that feels like padding.  It's a lazy way for developers to claim their game has replay because you essentially have to play the game twice to see everything.  Really bad offenders in this category include things like Dante's Inferno where the game doesn't really change significantly either way, just do it once where you stomp a dude and once where you play DDR every so often.  

The truth of the matter is simple, it would take far too much work to put this into a game in a way that would actually be interesting or even a little bit realistic.  It would involve a great deal of skill in JUST the writing, let alone all the technical stuff that would then have to come from that to then put it in the game.  There are games that have come kind of close, like New Vegas, but really I can't think of a single game off the top of my head while writing that's had a morality system in it that doesn't just come off as lazy dogshit that only lets you play to extremes.  

Just don't fucking do it

Bioshock Infinite Is a Bad Game

 

Recently I did a stream where I finished Bioshock Infinite in a single session so I wanted to spend a post talking about it a little bit because while I didn't have an awful time with it, it's a pretty shitty game.

Bioshock Infinite was released in 2013 and follows the story of a dude called Booker DeWitt as he travels to Columbia, the city in the sky, where he is tasked with saving a girl called Elizibeth from some evil bloke called Comstock.  Elizibeth is no ordinary girl though as she has the power to open holes in space time so the two of them meet up and then go on a shooty, multi-dimensional journey to escape fantasy turbo-racist sky America.

As a game in it's own right, Bioshock Infinite isn't a bad game.  The gunplay is just fine, the Vigors (formerly known as Plasmids) make a return and give a few extra options to things when fighting and also there are set places where Elizibeth can open some space time holes for you that grant you access to guns, robots to shoot for you, movement options or cover.  By itself, Bioshock infinite is FINE, a good old turn off your brain and shoot bang the bad men until they go away and do it in the admittedly quite pretty backdrop of a sky city.

However Bioshock Infinite is not an original IP that we can judge entirely on its own merits, it's the third entry in a series and when you start to make those comparisons Bioshock Infinite becomes a incredibly dumbed down boredom-fest that is nothing more than a shell of what it once was.  Bioshock 1 and 2 didn't quite have the depth to be called a full on "immersive sim" but there was still a quite cerebral element to play.  For example you had lots of choices with what guns you used, you could carry all of them at once, pick a few to suit your play style for upgrading purposes and then attempt to tailor your approach to a situation based on that.  For example, if you were the kind of guy that favored getting in there with a shotgun you might use the ice plasmid for your human foes and the electro bolt to disable mechanical ones and go apeshit in a group of enemies.  If you prefered to be a bit more sneaky you might want to use the grenade launcher alt-ammo to lay down traps, equip plasmids that turn enemies on each other and try and avoid the fray.  There were a lot of options for play style and there were a lot of chances for you to use the environment to your advantage.  Another example might be that enemies were prone to running to a healing station in a level if they were low on health.  If you werent good at hacking or couldn't be bothered (the mini game did kind of suck in Bio 1) then you'd have to drop what you were doing to go deal with the fleeing enemy.  If you DID like hacking though, you could hack the healing station so that when an enemy tried to use it they would take damage instead, meaning that a fleeing foe is something you don't have to worry about during a heated shoot out.

These are just some very basic examples of stuff from previous games that you could do but Bioshock Infinite has NONE of that.  You only get 2 guns at a time, so there's no emergent play style because you aren't using guns you like or guns that are good for a situation, you're using whatever is lying around so that you have ammo for it.  The Vigors in this game are absolute dogshit and barely do anything most of the time.  I only really used 2 vigors the entire game which was possesion and shock jockey.  Possession was particularly broken because once upgraded it basically becomes a "delete a guy" button except before deletion he will fight for you.  I got a whole bunch of things that all kind of did the same thing, boiling down to nothing more than "click to do thing, hold and release to drop a trap for that thing".  Even the environmental stuff was bullshit because every area is just a shooting arena with a couple of rips in space time for you to abuse.  I didn't have to think about if I wanted to use the gun turret rip in space time, I just did it because why the fuck would I NOT want a robot gun helping me save ammo?  There's not even anything clever with the health system because they turned that into fucking Halo of all things.  Get hit, lose a shield and then suck your thumb behind a wall until it comes back, rinse and repeat until the fight is over.

They had made TWO games, even more if you include the System Shock games that worked and were fun and cool and instead of building upon the ideas layed down in all those games, they ripped it all out so you could play Call of Duty: Wizard Edition.  I'm not going to spoil anything in this review but clearly all the efforts at being "clever" went into the plot which involves time travel and multi-verse type bullshit but it's all just a bunch of pretentious nonsense and once you get to the end it's just as unsatisfying and the gameplay 

If there's one thing I cannot stand its the dumbing down of games.  If you want to make an original that's about a shooty person making heads explode then fine, do that, I'm sure it'll be a good time.  What you shouldn't do is take a game series that already exists and is interesting and rip all of the interesting aspects of that series out to chase lowest common denominator bullshit.  That just makes you an asshole

I finished it on hard, I might go back to check out the DLC chapters that were set in Rapture but I have no intention of ever playing the sorry excuse for a campaign ever again.  Fuck this game

Yakuza 3 is mostly very ass

 

On my stream I have been playing through the Yakuza series and right before I started the horror month, I polished off Yakuza 3.  This series is generally pretty fantastic but this game, both the original PS3 release AND the remastered version, are pretty fucking awful.  

There isn't really a lot to love about Yakuza 3 but I do want to start by saying that the story for this game is great.  Despite all the problems that I'm about to list off, I was still pretty excited to get around to this game every week just to see what was going to happen next.  I don't know what the gaming equivalent of a "page turner" is but this game is exactly that.  Even when the plot is doing some absolutely insane nonsense such as, without spoiling anything, a show down at a rodeo it's equal parts awesome spectacle and gripping narative.  Despite the stories strengths though there is some issues with pacing where Kiryu, having left Tokyo to start an orphanage in Okinawa, must spend large amounts of time within the main story doing stuff with and for the kids he's looking after.  I know WHY the pacing is like that but it's still a bunch of boring bullshit.  But when it comes to the plot, the positives far FAR outweigh the negatives.

But then there's the rest of the fucking game and holy fuck is it BAD.  The most obvious thing is the combat because you have to spend a lot of time doing it and it's almost never fun at any point.  Yakuza 1 and 2, at least in their original PS2 forms, had pretty stiff combat so I'm not going to begrudge the game for that but the enemies are CONSTANTLY blocking every attack you ever do.  I was also playing on hard mode so my incoming damage was pretty high which made dealing with groups an absolute nightmare and the absolute worst part of all this is that no matter how much I upgraded Kiryu's skills, it never got any easier.  The blocking problem could sort of been circumvented by just grabbing dudes constantly but when you are against enemies that can't be grabbed the combat is just absolutely unbearable.  Eventually you will learn a combo where you do a sort of overhead smash after a 3 punch combo which, even if blocked, will do a very VERY small amount of damage, so most encounters devolved into just spamming that combo until you win which takes a long ass time and is not fun even a little bit.  One thing to point out though is that the final boss just sort of forgets to block at all and ends up being a complete pushover.  Your random street goons will throw up guards so strong that even a bicycle to the forearms won't make them flinch but the head honcho of a Yakuza family seems to be completely oblivious to the idea of self preservation. 

Aside from fighting in the main story though you can also fight and blunder your way through a number of side stories, none of which are particularly interesting and most are overly short and completely forgetable with rewards that are almost never worth it.  There are side stories from the first two Yakuza games that have stayed with me long after I finished and there are side stories in the later Yakuza games that I'm aware of just because the fans like to gush about them but there is basically NOTHING in Yakuza 3 worth talking about.  If there is a good one in there somewhere and it's just slipped my mind then I'd love to hear about it because I'm wracking my brains and got nothing.

The mini games are also very ass, most of which controlling like complete garbage or just being unfun to play.  The worst offender being darts which is basically impossible to control in any way.  I think I would have better luck scoring at real darts with 2 broken hands and a blindfold on than trying to play Yakuza 3 darts normally.  The best mini-game is Karaoke because its just a bare bones rhythm game that the devs basically couldn't fuck up.  Even the things that should be easy, like the gambling are annoying because the menus feel so stiff.  It's really hard to describe just how shitty it is but just navigating through slow menus to double down in blackjack feels shitty.

Then there are a bunch of non mini game side activities which are all stupid as fuck.  For example you can do these things called revelations where you see some funny sequence of events that Kiryu will snap pictures off on his phone via QTE.  Then you get 3 prompts and if you choose the right one Kiryu will become inspired and write a blog post on his piece of shit gara-kei which will then allow him to learn a new move.  It's fine but if you mess up the prompt at the end you fail the revelation and must leave the area for a while for it to come back and then watch the whole silly animation again.  It's funny the first time but when you messed up the prompts twice and are watching the same "tee hee isn't this very silly" chain of events for the third time it's just annoying.  The worst side activity though in this regard is a chase game where you must avoid bystanders and shoulder ram a guy until he runs out of stamina and if you take too long you run out of stamina and the guy gets away.  The problem comes from the fact that judging depth is basically impossible so unless you're sprinting right up the guys butthole you're probably going to miss and the margin for error in these games are very small.  You do it a few times as part of main story missions but the game was so proud of this inclusion that it becomes a full on mini-game all by itself near the end and I think I'd have more fun swallowing nails.

Also in 2022 this is sort of a non-issue but I want to write about it anyway, that this entry in the series on PS3 was the point where I stopped playing the franchise because I was pretty upset about cut content.  There are a few things cut from the original release but the worst of which was the removal of Shogi and Mahjong.  Not only did the PS2 version of Yakuza 2 have both shogi and mahjong, but they even came with extra manuals in the box with explinations on how to play but then Yakuza 3 rolls around and all that shit is just gone.  As someone who is a huge enjoyer of Japanese mahjong I was so mad about its exclusion that I didn't play a single Yakuza game until I started up the series again with Kiwami 1 last year.  Like I said though, Yakuza 3 Remastered on steam puts all this cut content back in, so no fear if you're buying it today, but the fact it happened at all its unforgivable.  

There are a few things to really love about Yakuza 3, for sure, but it's all wrapped in such a thick layer of complete and total bullshit that it's really hard to recommend to people.  If you're playing through the series like I am and want to experience everything the franchise has to offer then I guess you will have ot just grin and bare it but if you're just a casual fan of it then just skip it.  Watch the cutscenes on YouTube and save yourself a bunch of stress. 

Criticism and Developers

 

Being a creative can be tough, I think this is one of those things that everyone knows regardless of how creative you are personally.  Coming up with those ideas, putting those ideas together and then having the confidence in that idea to put it out into the world is quite an amazing feat.  But when you go through that process you are obviously going to come up against criticism for the thing you made in one form or another.  Sometimes it'll be constructive and sometimes your stuff will miss the mark with someone so hard that you'll get a petty and probably dishearening insult towards your work but this is just something you have to deal with as a creative.  Read it, take from it what you can to improve and move on to the next thing.  Some developers, or groups of developers, do not deal particularly well with criticism and the resulting events and both kind of funny and kind of sad.

The reason for this post stems from the recent release of a game called Super Lone Survivor, a re-release of the 2012 game Lone Survivor.  I just want to start by saying that I played the original version of this game and it was actually pretty good.  The atmosphere was heavy and despite the low resolution visual style the visuals were nice and creepy.  The gameplay felt sort of stiff but nothing that you couldn't adapt to and overall I had a good time with it.  One user who bought this game, a guy known in online spaces for playing and speedrunning horror games, bought it as a big fan of the original after being told about the games additional content.  He plays through it about 2 times, encounters basically none of the new stuff and then proceeds to give it a negative Steam review saying that he was expecting a bit more considering the 20 GPB price of entry.  

This then causes Jasper Byrne, the developer of the game, to throw a strop basically blaming him for sales slowing down, rants about him on twitter and causes video game shit-rag Destructoid to make an article on him.  Fast foward one day and the Destructoid article is taken down and Jasper proceeds to claim that he has issued an apology to the writer for the escalation but he did it the "apology" on his personal twitter page with his account locked so no one could see it.  Complete shit show

Lone Survivor has 23 reviews at time of writing and 22 of them are positive.  It's kind of silly to argue that a single bad review would be solely responsible for the slow sales of the game.  Maybe the game is just niche as fuck with the re-release being bought only by fans and a couple of curious new adopters and after that initial rush sales just slowed down naturally.  The worst part is, that despite Jasper's little outburst regarding the review, the store page has been changed to reflect that Super is probably not for people who already own the original and the new content is "hard to find", it's sort of sad.

Let's not single out just Jasper though because this is not the first time that indie devs salty about not being showered with constant praise has led to some embarassing bullshit and this one is arguably way worse.  Summer of 58 by EMIKA_GAMES is an under 2 hour, poorly written, unscary walking simulator with shit game play.  One thing you have to understand is that on steam, if you play a game for less than 2 hours you can actually get a refund on it.  It's not a feature I've ever used, not even for this piece of garbage, but apparently with just a few clicks you can have a full refund for a title as long as the play time is under the 2 hour mark.  

So people bought this game, played it, beat it and then refunded it.  There may have been SOME users who were refunding it just because they could but I would be willing to bet both of my kidneys that most people refunded it mainly because it's just not a good game.  This of course leads to the developer throwing a twitter sook, claiming that he's quitting development entirely because of the high number of refunds.  This of course leads people to start buying the game because they feel sorry for the guy which is actually pretty clever because instead of taking that feedback and improving, he took that pity sale money and instead developed another shitty thing that he released in October of this year.  So much for quitting, huh? 

But these are indie devs, so if we want to be charitable we can at least argue that they are probably a bit more emotionally attatched to the game that they made than something from a AAA company and a huge team.  But even developers of generic AAA dross like Horizon Forbidden West aren't immune to petulant complaining due to bad press or, in this case, a lack of interest in their game.  Horizon, an open world game about killing robotic dinosaurs or something, has had a bit of bad luck when it comes to release timing.  The first game released roughly at the same time as Breath of the Wild and was completely overshadowed as a result and when the sequel Forbidden West came out it was again completely overshadowed by the release of Elden Ring.  

This led to a number of Horizon developers making some extremely petty comments about the game probably just out of jealousy for From Softwares success over their own.  The tweets that got the most traction online out of these were a number of comments from one developer regarding Elden Ring's UI, which is really funny because Forbidden West has that semi-cluttered generic ass open world UI that people having been ragging on for years.  

This case is even worse that the previous two indies because its not even a case of direct criticism really, at least not intially.  It's just being mad another companies game being more successful which makes the petulant whining about Elden Ring and its team even more embarassing.

If you're in a creative field, harsh and/or constructive criticism is something that you just have to face and deal with.  The best approach is to read it, take from it any lessons than you can and then move on.  Trying to rally against "the haters" is just sad and at least indicates to me than you probably have your head up your ass a fair bit.

Less whinging, more creatin' please? Thank you

AVGNs Misaligned Retro Games

Recently The Angry Video Game Nerd released his latest video about DOOM and its various versions and before I get into the meat of this post, can we just take a moment to appriciate just how long James Rolfe has been going with this thing.  DOOM is his 205th episode and while you could argue there's been somewhat of a dip in quality compared to his older stuff, the show is still pretty entertaining to watch.  Hell, I remember being in highschool watching this shit on gametrailers.com when he was a member of that weird duo called Screwattack and his name was the Angry Nintendo Nerd, remember that shit?  Regardless of how you feel about his show, being able to run a web series for THIS long is quite the achievement.

I've noticed over the years from talking to people both in person and online that AVGN has at least had some hand in shaping general opinions on retro games.  There are a pretty significant number of people who will watch an episode of AVGN, see the footage that Rolfe has taken and his comments on the game and come away with a rather strong opinion of the game sucking despite never having played it themselves.  Then, when the topic of that game comes up, they will state very strongly and very confidently about its suckage because they've been totally convinced by the episode.  Having played most of the games that AVGN has covered and having beaten most of them, I'd say that most of the time if a game has appeared on the show, you're probably safe in assuming that it sucks shit.  No one is going to argue that Super Pitfall is some kind of hidden NES gem that has got a bad rap, just looking at it really is enough to just tell that it sucks

But there are a couple games that he has covered that have this awful reputation online that are actually pretty good and I want to talk about those a little bit

Simon's Quest was AVGNS very first episode.  It's an interesting episode too since it's basically got none of the production that we would come to see shortly after it being put out, it's just James talking over bits of game play footage.  There IS a lot of criticise in this game as well, to be fair such as kind of bland level design in the mansions, cryptic puzzles that I'm not sure how you're supposed to figure out and a stupid day/night transition but the game, overall, isn't THAT bad.  Traversing the overworld is generally pretty fun, upgrading your gear is cool and this game basically laid a bit of groundwork down for what modern Castlevania would end up turning into.  If you like the later entries in the series such as Symphony of the Night and Aria of Sorrow then it can be cool to come back to this one and see the beginning of the idea.  Sure, progress is a little hard to just intuit by yourself but play with a guide and a lot of the frustration sort of just goes away.  I've met a lot of people who have played and really love Castlevania 1 and 3 but have completely skipped over 2 because they "have heard it sucks" and that's a damn shame.

 

This is one that actually really grinds my gears because Silver Surfer for the NES is actually really fucking good but because of that, admittedly quite funny, episode of AVGN I feel like this game gets a lot of flak in retro gaming spaces for no reason.  The graphics are decent-ish, and soundtrack is amazing and the gameplay is tight but holy fucking shit is it HARD.  But that's the problem, bring up a conversation about Silver Surfer and people will go on about how much it sucks when really those "problems" are things that are true for a lot of other shmups.  The big example is how you can't touch any of the walls in a stage or you just die, which yes is sort of annoying but there are plenty of other games where that's true.  R-Type and Gradius do that shit too but you don't see anyone knocking those games for that.  The real issue with Silver Surfer is that your hitbox is MASSIVE which makes avoiding things pretty hard but its something you just adapt to.  With a little bit of memorization and enough skill to keep your power ups, the difficulty of Silver Surfer is no worse than literally any other shmup on the system.  

This was the game that inspired this post, fucking Countdown Vampires.  When I played this as part of my 31 game horror challenge I was also kind of guilty of just thinking it was shit because it was an AVGN feature.  I wanted one shitty game on the list that we could all laugh at but really it was just fine.  Nothing spectacular, not the kind of thing that will be remembered as a survival horror great or anything but functional.  Also we still got a laugh from the weird script and voice acting and overall the experience was pretty enjoyable.  That said though, anyone who even had a passing knowledge of this game all said the same thing of "oh god it's THAT game, that game SUCKS" despite most of them having never played it in their lives.  There's even a decent amount of effort on display with the amount of guns, monster variety and pre-renders.  Hell, there's even one bit near the end of the game where there are 3 different pre-renders for an area that has nothing in it aside from a single box of ammo.  Someone modelled, rendered and got that shit to work in the game just so we could run up and down it and barely pay attention to it while we get an item.  I see you Mr or Mrs 3D artist, good for you.

Yes it's easy, yes the dialogue is terrible but in a sort of endering way that I quite like and yes the game barely has any countdowns OR vampires but you know what, good game.

Countdown Vampires is fucking good

--- 

There are some other examples outside of these 3 of games that he rages at but are really just fine.  Nightmare on Elm Street on NES comes to mind in this regard but you get the picture.  Usually he's pretty accurate about a game being shitty but every so often he does miss.

The Weird Longevity of DDR and IIDX

 

Rhythm games are a thing that I assume most people, even the most enthusiastic of gamers, don't think about very often.  Around 2005 the genre got a pretty big boost in popularity for a while with the release of Guitar Hero and that boost was bolstered in part by the subsequent release of Rock Band but the whole thing turned out to be just a fad and the genre once again faded back into obscurity once those games died.  If you are a person who owns a Guitar Hero, Rock Band or DJ Hero controller I can almost guarantee that it's caked in dust and you probably forgot to take the batteries out and they have no leaked everywhere.

This is a bit less true for the Japanese arcade scene where the genre has been a staple almost for as long as the genre has existed but even in a space like this games come and go all the time.  Various rhythm games will pop up for a while and then vanish without a trace or be reduced to one machine stuffed in a single corner of the arcade that never gets used.  For example when I first moved into my new house in January of this year, there was a new game called Chrono Circle and at current time of writing I am completely unable to find a single cab for it anywhere.  It's been removed from my local place despite them initially having 5 cabinets and none of the bigger arcades I frequent in central Nagoya have them either, dead on arrival.  

But then there's Dance Dance Revolution, a game that has been a core part of the arcade experience both in Japan and the west since I was in primary school and a series that doesn't seem to be slowing down its content updates even in the current day.  I remember seeing it for the first time, I must have been about 10, in a bowling alley near my old house in Manchester.  Most arcades were either sit-down fighting game cabs, novelty games or rail shooters but then this motherfucker just sat there with its giant pad and massive speakers blasting out J-Beats and it sure as hell got peoples attention.  I played in that arcade pretty much all the way to me graduating high school and it was the one machine that would often stay fairly well maintained and updated with the place replacing the Euromix 1 cab with a Euromix 2 cab almost as soon as that version dropped.  Fast foward to my life in Japan in 2022 and DDR is STILL going strong, being one of the most popular games in basically any game center you go to and still being updated on the regular.  Hell, the last version to be released was DDR A3 which came out March of THIS YEAR with new songs being added constantly.  Also I can't speak with any degree of certainty but the few enthusiast arcade places I know about in the UK seem to always be packing at least a Euromix 1 or 2 cab.

Beatmania IIDX is another game with a similar life span as DDR but with it being Japan only its a game that most people outside of the rhythm game enthusiast circles actually know about.  It started with Beatmania back in 1997 which had 5 buttons and a turn table for a controller which was probably quite unique at the time.  Then in 1999 Konami released Beatmania IIDX which was a bigger, badder, louder looking machine with 7 buttons and then there was a Beatmania 3 in 2000 which had a pedal or something? and everyone hated it and it died after 2 years.  IIDX however, like DDR, is still getting content updates and new versions to this very day with the newest version IIDX 30: Resident being released very recently 

There are other games in the Bemani franchise such as Guitar Freaks and Drum Mania which have also had similar life spans and still get updates but the machines are stocked less and barely used by anyone that I can see.  Meanwhile, DDR and IIDX are so popular that most places have to have multiple copies of them and even with an average (based on places I go to) of 2 DDR cabs and 4 IIDX cabs there are still queues CONSTANTLY to actually get to play them.  Some of newer games from the Konami library are starting to cement their places in the arcade such as Jubeat and Voltex but if they are still around in, lets say 10 years, only time will tell 

I can't imagine why this is the case really other than that the skill ceiling for mastering these two games inparticular is IMMENSELY high.  Seeing extremely high level play for games like Voltex, Chunithm, Taiko etc. isn't exactly uncommon if you spend enough time hanging around these places but really high level play for DDR and IIDX is not something you see very often at all.  If I was to hazard a guess I guess it's the drive that these players have to truly master these games that keeps them coming back and pumping coins or Paseli credit into the machines which in turn keeps Konami updating them and pumping out new versions for people to get good at.

That's just my game theory on the matter anyway.  Does make me wonder if DDR will still be around in 30 more years.....and if I'll still be able to play it at that point