Capcom’s guesses weren’t completely off the mark. With regards to the Rome thing, you had the precedent of popular things with an antiquity setting like the God of War games and The Gladiator with Russell Crowe. With Onimusha 3, Jean Reno was a somewhat popular actor and Paris was a modern Western city

The thing is that none of those would be the kind of extremely cynical, safe choice you’d make if you were looking to pander to US audiences, which makes them interesting

If you want to see an extremely depressing case of a Japanese developer trying to capture the Xbox bro audience, look no further than Quantum Theory from Tecmo which is a painfully bad Japanese copy of Gears of War by the creator of Fatal Frame

I actually liked all three games, and the third one might’ve been the most entertaining one. It was just really fun to see Capcom awkwardly trying to turn their incredibly Japanese samurai action game into something that would appeal (more) to Western gamers.

Their guesses as to what American audiences would like are also just fascinating. “Jean Reno? Paris? France? Americans think those are cool, right? Wait, I got it! Gladiators in Ancient Rome!”

I kind of want to check out Shadow of Rome at some point now 🤔

I played through the first three Onimusha games for the first time recently and you can see the beginnings of Capcom’s Westward push in Onimusha 3 from 2004. The first two games are incredibly Japanese. The main characters are directly modeled after Japanese actors, the games take place in the Sengoku period and most of the named characters are actual historical figures and the stories are full of Japanese melodrama, especially the second game where characters will cry as they monologue about their traumatic backstories, their dreams, etc

Then you get to the third game and there’s a clear push for more general international appeal. The intro cinematic has motion capture done by Donnie Yen and in addition to Takeshi Kaneshiro returning as Samanosuke from the first game, main character duties are split between him and Jean Reno as Jacques, a modern day French soldier/agent/guy with trenchcoat who becomes involved in the plot when series villain Nobunaga Oda finds a way to bring his demonic army through a time portal to modern day France.

Compared to first and second game it’s very clear the game’s storytelling tries to emulate Hollywood blockbusters, specifically Roland Emmerich movies (Jean Reno was in 1998’s Godzilla 🤔). The scene where the Genma invade Paris looks like it’s from a disaster movie and Jean Reno’s character is a recent widower with a young son who does not get along with Jacques’ new girlfriend

The Onimusha games were produced by Keiji Inafune, who was also the main driving force behind Capcom’s attempt at appealing more to Western tastes. The first two games contain trailers for their sequels while 3 contains a trailer for Shadow of Rome, Keiji Inafune’s first go at building a new franchise from the ground up for the Western market. It failed to sell in the US and the sequel apparently became Dead Rising instead

I wondered if it was that but that’s just… not funny

I don’t get why this and the stupid NATO beer that came out a while back use OTAN instead of NATO since no one in Finland uses the French abbreviation

d’oh, of course

Yeah, they’re clearly just generic pick-and-mix candies they’ve put in a vaguely topical bag

Should’ve made them shaped like Jens Stoltenberg’s head or something

I give it two fucked up Nazi dogs out of ten

Sounds like I’ve missed out on some fun new lore

How about Epic Games just scrubbing the Unreal series off storefronts for no reason

Even the original Lara Croft was a larger-than-life action hero

He’s blatantly wrong since a considerable percentage would be a furry girl with a big butt

It also sounds like the game is pretty po-faced in general, and that the main character has basically no personality. You can totally make a game with exaggeratedly sexy or otherwise over-the-top characters but you need to have an over-the-top overall tone and style to match

With those specs, I’m pretty confident you could run DuckStation, which has never given me trouble with a decade+ old laptop with a weaker GPU

Then, in 2014, a dark horse emerged. The Evil Within blends the chills of Silent Hill with the action of Resident Evil, offering a unique and terrifying experience.

I mean, the first Evil Within was a perfectly decent RE4 clone from the same guy that made RE4 but that’s really all it was. It had a fun combat sandbox but the plot was dumb as rocks (and so was the original RE4 but that game was intentionally goofy and self-aware) and the entire game is just a procession of disparate horror tropes and setpieces with the “it’s all a dream” conceit of the story used to string them together. It was a fun game but there wasn’t much going on in terms of story, atmosphere or horror

I do miss when we would get simple, straight-forward new single player games like Evil Within though

They’re not as detestable than the other guys

These companies don’t want to just sell games to you. They want you to interact with their apps and live in their ecosystem and I have zero interest to learn to use a shittier Steam where I have no games

If they just sold you no-frills installers like GOG does (with an optional Steam-like ecosystem I never use) I wouldn’t mind, but of course they don’t want to do that

I just hate Valve and CDPR much, much less than I do Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA and Epic

One could simply not bother with the slop these companies squirt out

Yep, it certainly looks way more like a Swery game than a Suda one to me. Unfortunately, most of what Swery’s done since D4 has not been that great. Coincidentally, that’s everything he’s done as an indie after he left Access Games

such energy

All everyone did was make angry posts online and ask for refunds on Steam. Neither of those works for moving the needle on things that actually matter

I saw a glow-worm some years ago. I thought someone had dropped a glowstick until I took a closer look

Definitely not too common in Finland