Who’ll most likely use the shotos & scrubs :lol: Just kidding 
Nah if Gates’ is smart AND HE IS, the X-Box 360 will be able to run 2D games, and let us not forget X-Box 360 Arcade Live!
Microsoft needs to stop trying. It’s great that they’re getting Japanese developers to support the Xbox360, but the overall Japanese gaming community is STILL skeptical about supporting the system. Despite the large roster of upcoming titles (those to which appeal to the Japanese audience) many are complaining about the system’s pricetag & whatnot (eventhough the system will be sold at fifty bucks less than what it will in the States at the Japanese launch) and have their sights mainly focused on the PS3.
Even if the Xbox360 flops in Japan, the European & Korean gaming markets are blossoming more than ever & appear fairly supportive of the system (as well as the current gen Xbox) hence, if the support from Japan proves weak, Microsoft shouldn’t be finding themselves in too much of a rut (they’ve managed to survive with Xbox1). Well, as the old saying goes, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.” It’ll be a cold day in Hell before a foreign gaming console is accepted with open arms by the Japanese. If Atari & 3DO couldn’t do it, what makes Microsoft think they could?
How the hell are Atari and 3DO’s situations even remotely comparable with that of Microsoft? The rest of your post seemed reasonable (though without sources I have no reason to believe anything you said about Japanese attitudes), but that statement is fucking ridiculous.
IMHO, I think Gates could care less about 2-D games. If he even thought about it, wouldn’t at least one work properly on 360 at launch?
Is’nt NGBC gonna be on the Xbox 360?
I wasn’t comparing the companies statisticswise (of course Mircosoft is much larger corporation with much higher credibilty, that’s common sense) but rather their consoles success in the country. There’s no denying that all three companies have flopped horribly in Japan (& Microsoft’s an even bigger corporation than Atari & 3DO) system/consolewise. I guess it’s ridiculous to compare Sony & Nintendo (eventhough Sony’s a much larger corporation) as far as the gaming market is concered. Is it ridiculous to admit that a foreign system has yet to hit a stride in Japan?
As far as your comment on doubting the Japanese’s attitudes towards domestic systems & games, why don’t try visiting some gaming sites regarding the matter (or Xbox for that matter) & see some of the comments they’ve had to say for yourself?
I was trying to pick up a video card at Best Buy tonight and saw a guy playing Call of Duty on the demo 360 set up. Those graphics are BUFF. Normally I get motion-sick watching FPS games (headache-city), but I really recommend people check out what it looks like if you haven’t already… I was actually able to enjoy the graphics, which is pretty much a first for 3d games. =\ [And yes, that’s why I play 2d games - it’s called ‘simulator sickness’.]
It sounds like they’ll be getting to compatibility for the 2d fighters. Since admittedly nobody’s going to be buying an XBox 360 to play CvS2 or MvC2 - you’re going to be buying it to play The New Hotness - it makes a lot of sense that they focus on making the 360 great first, and patch up on a rolling basis later in order to increase backwards compatibility. shrug
Microsoft is probably the most dedicated of the previous above-mentioned companies who’ve competed in the Japanese market. Give it all time.
No, but the situation is so different with Microsoft than with those other companies that you can hardly compare them. When Atari was on top the market was completely different; no console had yet become a worldwide success, and Japan had not yet shown itself to be a viable console market, so the importance of succeeding in that market was debatable at that point. The Jaguar and 3DO both had bigger problems facing them than Japanese attitudes to Western consoles; they were both crappy consoles that failed even in their home countries.
Umm, you DO realize how much $$$ Bill Gates has, right? He’s on a mission. He wants to DOMINATE the market across the WORLD! He will do WHATEVER it takes in order to ENSURE that his console does better than the other 2. Case in point: if he has to buy Japanese 3rd parties in order to gain Japanese support he will. THIS is why everyone’s assumption that Microsoft is screwed is BS. They actually have the best chance at success.
It’s the takeover of all things Microsoft. They want to fill your room with their products. Computers, and TWO video game consoles. 
Japanese won’t support an Xbox because:
They’re racist. 
Or, they are incredibly proud… Well, I don’t know the best way to word this but they are not going to go out of their way and break their backs to buy an American made system over a home made one unless they do something incredibly huge like sowing up the rights to the Dragon Quest series or something of that nature.
Oh yeah, on X-Play they interviewed a bunch of Japanese gamers weither or not they were going to buy an Xbox 360. They didn’t find one person in Japan willing to buy it, in the last scene three gamers gave the system a big thumbs down…
But with Xbox 360 they are doing what they can to win over the Japanese audience. What they can within reason, there’s no way they can acquire exclusivity to say, Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy but they can hire people behind huge franchises like those to make new games/franchises for them which is what they are doing. They also can’t turn a blind eye to the rest of their Halo 2 FPS fanbase and just focus on Japan because that would be suicide. They probably won’t win too many gamers in Japan at the launch(most games that come out during a launch for any system are not that ‘spectacular’ as I’m sure your all aware of) but time will tell if their strategy works.
I wonder if the Japanese play Halo. If I remember correctly, there was a Halo tourney over there that involved money.
And I think I stand corrected somewhat. So the MS spokesperson did say all games would be backwards compatible–eventually. But also consider this: the game library is pretty huge and it would take the MS tech gurus a long time and lots of money to go through all games to make them backwards compatible. I think this might be a hollow promise–we might not see all games making the cut if MS decided to just drop it. Then again, MS is doing a little more than Sony did, which was nothing when some of their PS1 games were found incompatible with the PS2.
Because Sony would have to make a new PS2, and how many people were gonna buy a new PS2 to play MK Trilogy?
There’s like what, 10 PS1 games that don’t work for the PS2 that nobody plays and MK Trilogy, whoopee do. :rolleyes:
Huh? MK Trilogy works fine on my launch day PS2, I have the “PS greatest hits” version though so maybe that one was modified to ensure it worked on PS2.
As for everyone still bitching about the list, just be patient… all the games will be there eventually. The guys on the Xbox team are very passionate about this system.
Keep in mind that Microsoft IS trying their best this time around to make their console a success in Japan & don’t seem to be prospering (Gates stated from the beginnining that he’s in it to make money, not lose money). Microsft’s doing the best with what they have. Heck, the DC had wierd games but still managed to graze the Japanese audience & yet the Xbox can’t? The Neo-Geo console systems have managed to do better (with their outrageous pricetags) & yet the 3DO was a system designed in Japan.
Even so, what does your argument have to do with the true topic at hand. Are you perhaps in bit of denial? Has it ever hit you that perhaps the Japanese just DON’T LIKE foreign systems & games? Microsoft’s not even necessarily doing anything wrong (this time around), but you simply cannot get an audience that never had a feeling for a foreign console to like yours. What do Atari, 3DO, & Microsoft have in common? Well, you can already figure that out from here.
I know about all of that (Mistwalker, etc) but the Japanese audience still doesn’t seem intrigued. I suppose only time will tell. Just don’t be surprise if the 360 turns up a flop in Japan.
WTF? Are you Bill Gate’s son or something?
Internet research aside, what I’m seeing on the shop floor make the 360 seem very undesirable. The problem with looking at things from a statistical point of view is that you can lose focus. Simply, though there may well have been 200 titles announced, many will be multiformat. Secondly, no FPS or Tom Clancy in sight? Well excuuuuse me if I don’t need to look at a fucking list to figure out that there will be a Halo 3, more Splinter Cells and more Rainbow Sixs.
I’ve read an interview with J Allard where the interviewer put it to him that the 360 has been rushed out and as such so have many of it’s games. He basically tied himself in contradictory knots trying to excuse it. That;s way more refelctive than stats for many reasons. One, stats come from a source, which could be biased. Two, stats will only be taking into account certain variables.
Let me give you an example. The city that I come from is Birmingham UK. It’s a fact that around 50% of Bham is non-white, which is cool because it’s nice to have different cultures together, and the governent know this and always boast about being multi-cultured. However walk around almost anywhere in Bham (I live in an area called Bournville, where Cadburys are based) and you will see about 1 non-white person for every 15 whites. The reason? Most non-white people live in only a handful of poor areas. So, if the stat was “What % of Bham is ethnic minorities, NOT including Sparkhill, Turves Green (add a few more areas)” the answer would be more like 6-15%. But the government wouldn’t like to admit that they cram all the ethnic minorities into shitholes, so they just say “50% of Bham are ethnic minorities” rather than “Half of Bham is white, and the other half over there is ethnic!”
I’d also appreciate you not giving me negative rep. just because I don’t like Bill’s latest business venture.
Edit
I just realised this; One of the game I played was a fucking FPS! So much for you and your beloved facts! It was Call of Duty 2.
Ok, this is the other launch games…
Amped 3 - Whoopee a sports title
Call of Duty 2 - FPS, but I thought there were none!?
Condemned - a horror action game. I have to admit, I can neither praise or insult this game as I don’t know about it.
FIFA 2006: Road to the FIFA World Cup - Yay football (soccer)
Gun - Dunno, but c’mon, it’s called Gun!
Kameo Elements of Power - I played it, it was unimpressive
King Kong - Multiformat amongst other things
Madden NFL 2006 - Yay more football
NBA 2K6 - Yipee basketball
NBA Live 2006 - More basketball, oh Microsoft, you’re spoiling us!
Need for Speed Most Wanted - Nice, an interactive version of Pimp my Ride!
Perfect Dark Zero - WTF? An FPS, but someone said there were none!
Project Gotham Racing 3 - Actually, this should be good. But it can’t load a lot of the textures as you get closer to them.
Quake 4 - Oh, now this IS weird. Another FPS? Sounds like someone made a mistake!
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2006 - Sports again
Tony Hawk American Wasteland - Sports
So there you have it. A list of FPSs, sports titles and racing games. Then a mystery horror game by Sega - not really gonna sell the system is it. And a game called Gun. Only one of those games is Japanese, I dunno about Gun.
Great. Oh, and Kameo is average, at best. Now, I know you can’t say if the launch titles will make or break a console, but it surely makes a mockery of your so-called facts.
Oh, and no Tom Clancy? I think Ubisoft beg to differ, with Tom Clancy?s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
In my opinion, PS3 will still be winning the console wars come the new generation release. Xbox is catching up, but as it stands, PS3 still holds the crown for best everything except for the FPS Genre. Saying that, just because Xbox has a hold of 1 genre doesn’t mean Sony will just hand over the crown since it’s winning in 5 of the 7 major genres (Action, Sport, FPS, RPG, Racing, Strategy and Puzzle/Board Games). In the console wars, I’d have to give Puzzle/Board Genre to Nintendo’s GameCube, FPS to Xbox and everything else pretty much to PS2. It’s a little unfair as to say that the Xbox also has many sports games, but here lies a bit of a bias opinion. I look mainly at the exclusivity of each system more then the total as since the only real difference is graphics and since most people can’t really tell the difference anyways unless someone who knows told them about it, they’d be none the wiser. If you were to look at multi-platform releases, the only major release that hurt Xbox was the port of Resident Evil since it was said to be EXCLUSIVE to the Xbox and was recently ported to the PS2, fine-tuned and made even better (minus the graphics which as a gamer feel is the least important aside from replayability and fun-factor which i find to be really at the mercy of opinion and preference). The only thing in my mind isn’t whether either 360 or PS3 are capable. I believe whatever is done on the 360 is probably do-able on the PS3 (if not equal, then by more or less in the graphics department only) just as is shown now during the 128-bit era. The only thing I see going for Xbox right now is that it’s 360 devkits are noticably lower then that of the PS3’s and that hurts since new developers are desperately trying to get into the market now and cost is a big issue. Main reason for most people getting a PS2 in the first place was backwards compatiability, but now that the playing field is a bit more even, I’d still have to say Sony will lead even if it’s just by a little. They just have better support then Microsoft has at the moment.
Now to play the statistics game…
Best-Selling VIDEO GAMES (console) by Genre:
30.1% Action
17.8% Sports
9.6% Shooters (FPS)
9.5% Children & Family Entertainment (Puzzle/Board/Trivia Games)
9.4% Racing
9.0% Role-Playing (RPG)
5.4% Fighting
Statistics taken from none other then the Entertainment Software Association and from that you can see just how well each company is doing by what people enjoy the most (reflected by sales). Action is a broad category, so Platformers and Adventure games fall into that category. As of the moment, Xbox is primarily made up of the 3 top selling genres: Action, Sports and Shooters appealing to about 57.5% of gamers. That’s not bad you must admit, but then PS2 comes in eating at the Action, Sports, Racing, RPG and Fighting game categories (not including Children & Family Entertainment even though DDR is also very popular and they have almost every Shooter Xbox has except for Halo). PS2 appeals to 71.7% of the gamers overall… Looking at the main selling points of both systems, Sony wins out without fail just because they have the likes of Square-Enix and Capcom, arguably power-houses in the video game business for more then just 1 or 2 titles. Who does Xbox have that’s exclusive to them? I don’t think Mr Itagaki and his Team Ninja can rival Square or Capcom just yet. Namco is still pushing out better stuff for Sony then for Microsoft so that doesn’t really help. Microsoft is getting a lot of new developers, but in the business what they want are the old ones, not the new. Risk is going to get you killed in the video game industry unless you are extremely good or simply get lucky, because timing is always an issue.
Well… getting hungry, so I’m going to just leave more intense arguments to someone else for the moment and stop here, but if anything I’ll come back and post some more long discussions nobody wants to read =p
News flash, Xbox sucks. And so will 360.