Farming out major 16-bit franchises to western devs for revival

[kedawa]

Japanese devs just don't seem interested in applying any form of new technology to their games aside from superficial graphical improvements.
As far as AI, physics, and just logic in general is concerned, they're a decade behind the west.

[NeoZeedeater]

The F-Chan in me cries knowing the whites are catching up to the Japanese in game design.

A lot of people believe in that fairytale version of the '80s and '90s where there weren't excellent Western-developed games each year. It's okay to let it go.

[gameoverDude]

I'm for it in some cases, if the Japanese parent companies aren't interested in new 2D versions. Contra 4 turned out well, and is most likely not a fluke. The right Western developer would be better than the wrong Eastern developer. There are probably Western teams who could've made DoDonPachi II better than IGS did.

The Xbox ports of Out Run 2 & OR2 SP were done in the UK and turned out perfect.

[YellerDog]

I'm for it in some cases, if the Japanese parent companies aren't interested in new 2D versions. Contra 4 turned out well, and is most likely not a fluke. The right Western developer would be better than the wrong Eastern developer. There are probably Western teams who could've made DoDonPachi II better than IGS did.

The Xbox ports of Out Run 2 & OR2 SP were done in the UK and turned out perfect.

Wouldn't "European" count as Western? Anglo and what-not?

(holy shit. there needs to be a River City Ransom MMO right now)

[bVork]

A lot of people believe in that fairytale version of the '80s and '90s where there weren't excellent Western-developed games each year. It's okay to let it go.

The people who believe in this also tend to believe that Nintendo saved the videogame industry after the Great Crash. After the decline of the original two generations of consoles, Western developers moved onto computers (a trend that was apparent even before the crash) and the Genesis. People who grew up playing solely Nintendo consoles can (almost) be forgiven for believing this, as there wasn't a great deal of Western development on NES and SNES.

Short version: Western developers have never been behind. They have just been doing most of their stuff on different systems than Japanese developers. It's only with the last generation that the majority of Western and Japanese development has showed up on the same systems and allowed a direct comparison.