Forum - View topicThe X Button - Scare Supply
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Chrno2
 Posts: 6171 Location: USA |
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Thank you. That's good info to know. I'll look into these. 
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 4491 Location: New York |
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Fall of Cybertron, the sequel to War, may be an even better game.
Which just reaffirms there's no reason Korra had to suck. Then again, Avatar has never done well in toys and games. The creators of the show thought it would be fun to troll the toy company when they asked for more toyetic costumes and they cancelled their contract as a result. |
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lostrune
 Posts: 313 |
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 Seriously? Biting the hand that feeds you seems like a bad idea in this business.
Maybe Korra could pull a Deadpool and try to brainwash little Japanese kids into supporting her to get some toys 
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Beatdigga
Posts: 4491 Location: New York |
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...that is beautiful. |
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Levitz9
 Posts: 1022 Location: Puerto Rico |
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Answer 1: Can you blame them? The show isn't doing well with kids, and the college-aged people who buy into it couldn't be bothered to watch it on TV or legitimate streams. Answer 2: They're so desperate to kill Korra off, it was given a fourth season well past the point where most other shows simply would have been cancelled. Man, I wish Megas XLR had an online-only Season 3. Korra fans are like Joss Whedon fans: they don't seem to function unless they imagine that there was some sort of conspiracy against the object of their affection. The Korra game suffers simply from being a budget title and being judged accordingly. Korra fans won't settle for any Korra-related dialogue that isn't "BEST THING EVER" or "Asami and Korra are totes a couple now!". |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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I'd enter the contest, but I don't have any Sony systems (nothing against them--personal opportunities just came up for me to get Xboxes and Nintendo systems and not have the budget left for a PlayStation system). Maybe I'll send one in anyway, but I have a question:
Those Speak-N-Spell toys. Would those be considered video games? I was horrified of them when I was little. Regarding the Halloween games: No mention of the Luigi's Mansion series? I didn't expect to see them, and while I've never played them, the first game did a lot to differentiate Luigi as a character from Mario. Nintendo also created a program for the first game to make ghosts transparent without showing any body parts behind other body parts. (For instance, a ghost seen in profile would have one arm visible but not the other.)
So is the character of no charge, or do you trade in the keychain for her? (A keychain that says "FREE" on it seems like it'd be a magnet for snarky comments like that, only I'm sure most would be better than mine.)
Adventure Time: Hey Ice King! was made by WayForward, which has had a history of making good games based on licensed properties. Otherwise, as far as movie tie-ins go, the developers' hands are tied. The games are only made when the studio making the movie makes a license deal with a game developer, and then they get limited information about the movie, even with NDAs. The developers don't have much time to make the game, and sometimes the studio breathes down the developers' necks to make sure the game is faithful. That being said, it is perhaps no coincidence that Shadows of Mordor was released between Hobbit movies. The circumstances are different though, as the source material is a book written nearly a century ago, so the team had plenty of time to make the game and refine it to their liking.
Since you mention a lot of Shonen Jump titles, I'd like to add the Jump Stars series to that. Its merits as a game without the Shonen Jump theme can be seen in its massive amounts of imported copies of people who don't follow any anime or manga. Worth mentioning is that the CEO of CyberConnect2 is a huge Naruto fan, and it shows in the Naruto Storm games. He even cosplays when he does convention panels.
Outside of WayForward, these are recent ones I can think of: SpongeBob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom seems to be well-liked, both within and outside the SpongeBob fanbase. The Simpsons: Hit & Run and The Simpsons Game, while they made no attempt to be originl or innovative, were solid games. It helps that the story and dialogue were written by veteran Simpsons writers, so the games felt authentic too. South Park: Order of the Stick has been said to be something of a masterpiece. I don't know much about it, but Trey Parker and Matt Stone personally supervised the whole thing, and they've made it public that they aren't too happy about previous South Park games. I found a Nicktoons Racing arcade machine at a local bowling alley. Clearly it was designed for kids, but it was a competent kart racer. Felt a lot like Mario Kart Arcade GP. If you like MKAGP, you'd like Nicktoons Racing. I don't know if Disney Infinity counts, but that Phineas and Ferb characters are in there would make it at least partially a tie-in to a western animated show.
Reminds me of how Genndy Tartakovsky continued to pitch Ilana as the protagonist of Sym-Bionic Titan even after knowing that toy companies are VERY hesitant to accept an action show aimed at boys with a female protagonist when Lance could've passed off as the protagonist extremely easily. Tartakovsky makes awesome stuff, but...man, that stubbornness bit him hard. They need to take off their artist hats (berets?) and remember that merchandise money is the lifeblood of these shows. I would never advocate messing with the toy distributors if you ran a show, but Littlest Pet Shop (the 2012 one) did get away with it: A toyline depicting the pets with frosting and sprinkles on their head came out at about the same time as an episode meant to promote that toyline. Instead, the episode was incredibly unflattering, showing the pets becoming psychotic after eating too much sugar and them having frosting and sprinkles on their heads as war paint readying themselves to kill each other with the guest pet egging them on. |
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Beatdigga
Posts: 4491 Location: New York |
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That's the thing. I don't blame Nick one damn bit! I would have cancelled the show around Season 2 or forced them to make major rewrites to try and get some commercial lifeblood in the show, and I kind of wonder if they were bound by a contract that kept them from doing so. The latter is pure speculation on my part, but if you had a show that was making no merch money and the creators were doing every thing humanely possible to break marketing rules and piss you off, wouldn't you want to cancel it? I would. This is a budget cash grab, and the timeline pretty much says "Here, fart out a game in time for season 4 and you can have some money for a project you actually care about." There's no conspiracy here, it's just a bad game for a show made by two really, really stubborn writers. When you troll your toyline into cancellation, you deserve the ax!
Order of the Stick was amazing. It's written as well as any actual South Park episode (something Korra lacks), and the gameplay is based on really solid turn based mechanics, which the active button presses reminding me of the Mario and Luigi games a bit. I recommend it to any fan of South Park or turn based RPG's. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Oh, does it play like the Mario & Luigi games? Those always had interesting battle mechanics to me. Since I'm also a fan of South Park, Order of the Stick sounds awesome then.
There are some people in the business who, for whatever reason, are really opposed to merchandise. I'm guessing the Avatar/Korra guys are like that. I have to wonder if they don't understand about costs (they're both pretty expensive shows to make) or they don't care (and they don't mind their show getting canceled if it means they don't have to see merchandise for their show). You have this notion of selling out with a toy line, but really, you've sold out the moment you've decided you want to work in television. There is nothing inherently wrong with selling out either. Charles Schulz milked Peanuts for everything he could, and the comic strip's quality was never compromised. There is absolutely nothing to lose with Korra toys either. The toy makers work independently of the show staff, and they're not going to try anything that will damage the show's public image because the toy company has its own reputation to keep. The worst that'll happen is losing a few fans who may have jumped onboard because of a lack of merchandise, but they weren't really fans to begin with, just anti-commercialists. I really hope the Avatar/Korra guys don't turn out like Bill Watterson, getting completely fed up with people approaching them for licensing deals and ragequitting on the world. (This is just my opinion, but I feel like, as great as Calvin and Hobbes was, Watterson's rather extremist views on commercialization burned some bridges for him.) |
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DKL
 Posts: 1957 Location: California, USA |
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Quite frankly, Korra's last boss fight was better than some games I've paid $60 for. That said, apparently there is a video out there that goes over all the game's mechanics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZWM5v89-U (also, wow Saur is in the comments (with dat hate)... his Wonderful 101 videos are amazing) You can do all the stuff that I was attempting to do, it's just that my execution sucks lol That said, the South Park game was the best Paper Mario I've ever played. |
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Stuart Smith
 Posts: 1298 |
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There seems to be this stigma with merchandising in the west. Even within anime fans you can see it. I've seen so many anime fans turn up their nose to a show like Gundam, or Yu-Gi-Oh, or Pretty Cure just because they're merchandising shows. As if the very idea that if a show is meant to sell toys it can't possible have other redeeming qualities. The real kicker is most of the time, these are also people who turn around and eat up certain late night anime which has a lot of figmas and CDs and other merchandise being pushed. As for creators themselves, I can definitely see it. Some creators get a bit too auteur that they want their vision uncompromise, and see any marketing as a means of their perfect vision being ruined, and that they are above such things. They should probably remind themselves they're making cartoons for Nickelodoen and Cartoon Network, not an indie film festival. This wouldn't be first time Tartakovsy did something like this. Apparently he was offered another season for Samurai Jack, but he turned it down because he insisted on having a movie to finish it. Since Cartoon Network was against more movies after the Powerpuff Girls movie bombed, they refused a movie deal. Rather than accepting another season, Genndy walked. -Stuart Smith |
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enurtsol
 Posts: 14837 |
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Heh, for years we've always wondered if Calvin and Hobbes would be remembered as fondly classics if Bill Watterson had let his publishers do as they pleased:
It's not very often that N. American animation directors can wield as much power as their Japanese counterparts. Even Studio Ghibli are known to rein themselves back:
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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I remember reading that about Watterson. I was quite the fan of Calvin and Hobbes when I was younger, and I tried to obtain as many of the books as I could. Even now, I'm always interested in reading more about Watterson and any of his works, and I'll pick up any new books that come out.
He's become so paranoid that when he finishes a painting of the forest he lives in, he will burn it to make sure there's no trace of it left to steal and sell. He'll also only agree to an interview if there is nothing written down during the interview. (That I cannot explain.) And really, the Calvin peeing stickers I'd see everywhere and other bootleg merchandise popped up because the demand for it exists, and the demand is huge. It's either his characters get devalued (I don't think they have) because of official merchandise he'll get money from and he can regulate, or, as is what's going on, his characters get devalued because of bootleg merchandise he won't see a penny of and has absolutely no control over. He was naïve and saw the wrong people as the bad guys.
Are you serious? That's what actually happened with him and Samurai Jack? Though I do hear the movie is still being made; it's just stuck in development hell. When you're making a TV show, you're going to get executive meddling. Unless you're James Cameron, you're not going to make the show exactly how you want it (and even then, he gets executive pressure), not counting things that would actually go wrong during production. I would've thought Tartakovsky would have known, having been in the business for so long, that a refusal to compromise means getting even less of what you want. |
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Etrien
 Posts: 525 Location: Tokyo, Japan |
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As a child of the SNES era, I have a tendency to break out things like Castlevania IV, Super Ghouls n' Ghosts, and Zombies Ate My Neighbors. But, while not a whole game, I'll always be especially partial to the Threed section of Earthbound for capturing that childhood Halloween feel. Even the music to Threed just fills me with nostalgic Halloween joy. |
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ani12
 Posts: 165 |
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Really, people are rating the Korra game that low? I've been playing it for a little while, and it's not even close to that bad. I'm finding it very good, honestly.
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Beatdigga
Posts: 4491 Location: New York |
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I'd be lying if I said I knew exactly what Korra's creators were thinking. What we do have is third hand accounts and commentaries.
To wit - The creators of the show were apparently upset that none of the initial line of Avatar toys had any of the female characters (because it's proven that female characters usually don't sell very well in toylines). That probably contributed to their trolling. Nick was extremely reluctant to greenlight Korra at first. According to this interview - http://avatarthelegendofkorraonline.com/nickelodeon-suspended-production-on-the-legend-of-korra-because-korra-was-a-girl/3187/
I'm pretty sure that contributed to toy companies looking at the show and telling Nick they weren't interested. Pretty much everything that the creators of Korra have done since then (the heavy focus on a rather poorly done love triangle they had to jettison in Season 3, as well as a heavy focus on romantic relationships in general, something only Naruto of all things really rivals it in as far as boy marketed material, except Naruto was actually better at keeping it from taking over the plot) is breaking rules in how to market shows to a teen crowd, which is probably why the main people watching the shows are adults that download it. And you know what? That doesn't make the show's creators noble or champions of artistic freedom. It makes them unsuccessful because their show lacks any sort of way to connect with the primary target demo, especially in merchandise. And all they have to show for is a really bad game and toy companies unwilling to work with them. They showed those heartless executives! You're not supposed to be all about the money. But it kind of helps if you target your key demo as opposed to breaking all the rules for the sake of breaking them. That felt good to get off my chest. |
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