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This Week in Games - Welcome Back To The Stage

As long as you can beat/contain your FOMO there is no real reason to watch the Game Awards. Most of the time is filled with ads, the acceptance speeches are kept painfully short (please wrap it up) and the announcements you can easily watch the next day. I used to watch every year and complain what a waste of time it was and at some point I simply stopped realising what a waste of time it was.

I got exactly what I paid for with Shenmue III. I find it a bit baffling that people complained it wasn't more modern, as Yakuza still exists, and for someone like myself that finds the Dreamcast to be a religious experience, there would have almost-certainly been complaints from my end of the audience if Shemue III came out and it didn't look and feel like a janky Dreamcast experience.

For mihoyho leaving twitter, I hope it is something that sticks. This isn't the first time where people seemed to leave twitter, only to come back because of various reasons. Companies will move much slower than the regular user, and are going to be more prone to wait to see if people actually stay with whatever replacement they picked. Twitter coming out and saying that its going to be scraping stuff for AI may be more of a push though. As much as companies seem to be ok with the idea when they do it, they hate the idea of it happening to them. And the sad reality is that Blue Sky will probably need big companies to join to have long-term viability.

For those of us who generally wait a few years to buy games, at least those of the triple A variety, The Game Awards are an utter non-entity whose existence I am only reminded of for a couple of weeks a year in November.

If Playstation's even-more-expensive and heavily-promoted Concord hadn't been utterly DOA, Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown would be a likely contender for flop of the year.

Concord was being sold as the start of a new age.

I'll have to give that new Trigran box set a watch after I play Gungrage GORE, as I recall both series originating from the same creator.

For mihoyho leaving twitter, I hope it is something that sticks. This isn't the first time where people seemed to leave twitter, only to come back because of various reasons. Companies will move much slower than the regular user, and are going to be more prone to wait to see if people actually stay with whatever replacement they picked. Twitter coming out and saying that its going to be scraping stuff for AI may be more of a push though. As much as companies seem to be ok with the idea when they do it, they hate the idea of it happening to them. And the sad reality is that Blue Sky will probably need big companies to join to have long-term viability.

I am curious what will happen with Shenmue. [...] The idea of making the game as if it came out when it was supposed to makes a certain kind of sense, but most potential customers are going to expect more modern gameplay. And having so long between games probably would have been a good reason to revise the plot to not have it end like it did. I've heard that it was originally supposed to be 6 parts, but considering what it took to make part 3, maybe it wasn't a great idea to stick to it.

Shenmue’s clunkiness was one of the things that impacted the game’s marketability. In addition the Yakuza games have had some clunky gameplay elements that as time has passed have seemingly been mostly ironed out. There’s not reason a new Shenmue can’t do the same.

In other news, Virtua Fighter 5 is finally on Steam so that's amusing if nothing else.

For those of us who generally wait a few years to buy games, at least those of the triple A variety, The Game Awards are an utter non-entity whose existence I am only reminded of for a couple of weeks a year in November.

I glanced at the list of nominees and there's very little I'm interested in ever actually playing even in four years when they'll be $5 on Steam but, aside from a couple of indie games, 2024 was a total wash-out for the sort of games I'm interested in anyway. The one 2024 game that I was most looking forward to, Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown turned out to have no offline single-player career mode, which is how I played the first two Test Drive Unlimited games and which is the only way I was interested in playing the new game since I've never been into multiplayer, and apparently it doesn't even do "online" that well by locking players out from playing against players from other regions or players on other platforms meaning most lobbies are empty, which is kind of a problem if you're selling a game as being a MMO experience. It's been less than three months after launch and Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown's peak daily player count on Steam has been under 300 for the past couple of weeks, which is dire for a game which was in development for about five years and which shelled out big money for expensive car licenses like Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Porsche.

If Playstation's even-more-expensive and heavily-promoted Concord hadn't been utterly DOA, Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown would be a likely contender for flop of the year.

As long as you can beat/contain your FOMO there is no real reason to watch the Game Awards. Most of the time is filled with ads, the acceptance speeches are kept painfully short (please wrap it up) and the announcements you can easily watch the next day. [...] The speed where the host for that part would read the categories, nominees, and then winner was fast enough that it felt like even the people working at the show didn't care.

Since you brought up Okami and Sakuna at the same time, I must again mention that it is interesting that they both spoiler[integrate aliens with existing legends in a less technological setting. I have just never seen this up until now and then I saw it in two series. I have seen people say perhaps gods were actually aliens before, but never seen it done to visually until these games.] It's just such a specific shared detail between the two, I wonder if there are other games that do this and I am just unaware?

Great article as always also!

Part of the issue is that Yu Suzuki himself has gone the extra mile of ignoring and defying modern game design. This is the flipside of something like what Takahata pulled with Xenoblade, reiterating on his old concepts and themes until he found a take on them that stuck with folks; Suzuki is bull-headed about making Shenmue work... but Shenmue is still a game and most other games have taken the concepts or ideas from Shenmue and realized them much better in the years since. It's 100% Francis Ford Coppola releasing Godfather in 2024, exactly as he did it in 1972. Media just... isn't produced that way anymore. I say again, we're better for it existing, but it's valid to critique Shenmue 3's design as outdated. Sometimes, an auteur sticking to their guns isn't the best way to go?