PixlBit

What I meant is that it's ingrained in US culture. Even those of us who are less uptight about sexual content are subject to it, to a certain degree. Gears of War had gratuitous blood and gore, nobody batted an eye. Mass Effect had a sex scene but little violence, Fox News had a cow. Even the ESRB ratings reflect this. A game with gratuitous blood and gore is on the top rack in Wal-Mart with a M rating and would be advertised heavily by Microsoft or Sony as the must-have game of the holiday season. A game with explicit sex scenes, even with zero violence, would be an automatic AO rating and would not even be approved for release by Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft. It's a cultural thing in this country. We've always glorified war and fighting and been ashamed of sex.

It's part of the American Puritan/Calvinist mentality. "Suggestions of sex - evil; gratuitous violence - good."

Lollipop Chainsaw is great. Probably my favorite Suda 51 game to date. It's not Bayonetta, but I like its style and it plays well enough.

Agarest War is from Red Entertainment, the folks who made the hugely popular Sakura Wars games on Saturn, Dreamcast, and PS2. The PS2 Sakura Wars is one of my favorite games of all time. These games aren't quite up to that standard, but they aren't bad, either. I will admit they have the obnoxiously bobbing breasts in the visual novel scenes, but other than that, I don't see why people would bitch about it.

This makes a Vita purchase more compelling.

I downloaded the PS4 version today. It's apparently free for PS+ subscribers. I played around with it a bit, but sadly I didn't get it. And I usually love sim-style games.

I do hope that the PS4 makes a splash in Japan. I prefer my game library to be well-rounded with titles from the East as well as from the West. There were good games from the big Japanese developers on the PS3, but you sadly had to look for them. That said, Namco has become one of the best publishers in Japan, with some of the best output I've seen from that company. Even there, though, they're not embracing the PS4 immediately. The next Tales game, Zestiria, will be on PS3.

I think I remember that first BaD. I wasn't a part of it. At this point, I call it good if I can manage a Blog a Month. :)

The Double Dragon game reminds me a bit of Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls, a 1:1 fighter which itself was based on DiC's Double Dragon Cartoon. I guess this game was originally a Neo-Geo game, and come to think of it, I think I saw it in a couple of Neo-Geo arcade machines back in the 1990s.

The folks who made Long Live the Queen made another Princess Maker-styled game called Cute Knight several years ago. I played that a little bit, but at that same time, I also found a download of the never-released English translation of Princess Maker 2, which was done by some Working Designs alumni, and I preferred PM2. Too bad more of the official Princess Maker games didn't make it over, because PM4 (PS2 era) looked really good.

But the game industry wants to be taken as seriously as Hollywood - which will never happen, the results of "mainstream" gaming can be seen in the poisonous sea of cheap mobile cash-grab games - and when gaming does try to develop its own narrative, people bitch about how poor the plot is. I personally think most of the best story-driven games are fine in the context of the games themselves. They'd make shitty movies, to be sure, but they work just fine as games. Same way most movies make for shitty games. But then, if I wanted that kind of experience, I'd just watch a movie.

I never did think PC games, by and large, looked appreciably better than console games myself. I have a Steam account but I mainly use it for stuff like Ys and the upcoming Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky games. Most of the games I enjoy playing are only on consoles, and for cross-platform titles, I find it's easier to just buy the game on PS3 or PS4. I only buy laptops nowadays in any case and am thinking of dumping Windows for Apple when my current computer bites the dust, so you can see that gaming is not a priority for me when it comes to buying a PC.

And honestly, I don't see much improvement for games on PCs. For me, artistry counts far more than pixels and framerates. 60 FPS is nice, but as long as the game isn't a slideshow or isn't a cheeseball mobile game that looks like it was drawn by someone who flunked out of his third grade art class, I'm good.