Michel Gagne is a nice guy. I'm happy to see this coming out soon.
He's an amazing effects animator. Anything that splashed, exploded, lasered, rocketed, or really really exploded in The Iron Giant was him. He worked on the older Clone Wars cartoon and character design for Osmosis Jones, among other credits.
Last edited by YellerDog; 21 Jul 2009 at 03:15 PM.
Originally Posted by Razor Ramon
On the flipside though, look at Community Games - there's such an awful amount of awful looking, awful conceptually, or just downright awful playing games there. This is the no-holds-barred style of game development in process. Now not to say that there couldn't be gems, but who wants to wade through a sea of crap for it? I'm guessing it's a slim margin.
How many times have you played Xexex or Gun Force II?
Time to ride the crazy chair!
Going to have to disagree with Yoshi here. I'd rather have new games over arcade ports, though Xexex and Gun Force II would be nice as they haven't ever been ported yet. Xexex is available in the Salamander collection on PSP, but not on a console.
Real arcades are dying, but I think that arcade-style designs have a chance to continue to prosper on services like XBLA. My main complaint about XBLA and other services like PSN right now is their slow metamorphosis from places to put cheap arcade-style games into more general digital download platforms. Shadow Complex looks awesome but I don't think there's any reason for it to be on XBLA as opposed to a retail disc.
Exactly. And to go along with that the prices have gone from $5-10 to $10-20.
About the new versus port discussion, almost all of these new 2D games are made in the west. Japan kicks the living fuck out of the west in the 2D arena, just like the west kicks the living fuck out of them in the 3D arena. Japanese XBLA games and western discs please. Obviously there are a handful of key exceptions.
And a special fuck you to MS for not letting Cave put their shooters on XBLA.
Last edited by Yoshi; 21 Jul 2009 at 05:01 PM.
Time to ride the crazy chair!
Again, going to have to disagree about the Western-vs-Japanese thing. The only difference is that, for a few years in the late 90s and early 00s, Western 2D games all but disappeared (apart from RPGs and shareware/indie titles). With no competition, obviously Japanese 2D games reigned supreme. The recent revival of 2D gaming has generally been Western-led, and there have been some spectacular examples of 2D art recently (even ignoring the "2.5D" stuff like Bionic Commando Rearmed and LostWinds). Apart from the topic of this thread, there's Aquaria (though I know not everyone is happy with the way the animation is handled, there's no denying the beauty of the backgrounds), Braid, Castle Crashers, Contra 4, and Blueberry Garden: .
Yeah, those are nice, but they don't even belong in the same book as the best 2D Japanese games, let alone the same sentence.
Time to ride the crazy chair!
I RESPECTFULLY DISAGREE GOOD SIR.
Just because they aren't intricate pixel art (apart from Contra 4) doesn't mean they aren't awesome.
It's the gameplay that separates them. It has nothing to do with the art. And the fact that your short list contains a western continuation of a long-running Japanese series furthers my point.
To be fair, almost all the best 2d Japanese games for gameplay are a decade or more old so even if an advantage did exist at one point, I doubt it would anymore. How many modern 2d games, Eastern or Western, would rank among the best of all time?
And even in the past, it often came down to genre preference anyway. In the '90s, I preferred Japan overall for 2d because platformers were my favourite genre but for someone with graphic adventures or RTS as their top genre, the West probably ranked higher. I preferred Japanese RPGs back then, too, although going back to games like Planescape: Torment and Fallout in recent years has made me change my mind. I find them deeper and better aging than most JRPGs from that era.
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