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Comment count is 8
Riskbreaker - 2014-04-25

I do wish Suzuki would make a new arcade-style game. But that's hardly ever going to happen.


infinite zest - 2014-04-26

Yeah something as simple as a new Space Harrier on a next-gen system would be awesome.


infinite zest - 2014-04-25

I didn't have time to watch the whole thing, but is the gist of it "hey everyone, sorry for not finishing something you stopped thinking/caring about 10 years ago?" Yu Suzuki's kind of the Dr Dre of the gaming world.


Scrimmjob - 2014-04-26

Actually sat through all of this, pretty interesting. What an over ambitious project. Things like the weather being algorithmically generated, based on a 2 year span of actual weather patterns in some town in japan. Things that were brand new in this game are more or less taken for granted in open world games today, so it's no surprise that it seems a bit lame looking back.

Maybe I'm remembering it through rose tinted glasses at this point too. I never played the second one, and I haven't touched the first in over 10 years.


infinite zest - 2014-04-26

It was incredibly ambitious, especially for its time, and there's many other games out there that are much better fodder for "bad game" jokes. If it were a novel, it could hold the status of A Confederacy of Dunces, another work that was finished posthumously, or Dr. Parnassus, a movie that seemed doomed following the death of Heath Leger.

I never played the US version but had the Japanese one before it was officially released in Japan, and the graphics were absolutely mind-blowing, and in my opinion still look better than some games on much more advanced systems than Dreamcast. I didn't really know what I was doing because of the language barrier, but it was one of the first games where I could figure it out based simply on character interactions: try playing a 16-bit RPG in a language you don't understand without a walkthrough and you'll understand; those would be nearly impossible without trial and error whereas Shenmue would kind of help you through without hand-holding.

Most of the funny Shenmue moments I see are of the American version, where the voice acting was laughable at best, ruining even the most serious moment. To be honest, I'd rather play through a sandbox game about a 1980s kid searching for his father's killer than a mobster or a gangster like in GTA, but those games eclipsed Shenmue and then it's just like "sorry.."

George Lucas said that they had initially planned on Star Wars being a flop, but he had the whole story somewhat finalized before filming began on Episode 4. That movie made no promises of sequels or prequels, but because of its success, those were made. Shenmue did the opposite, making promises it couldn't keep before programming was finished, and years before the first one was released.


Sexy Duck Cop - 2014-04-26

No. NO. Shenmue was terrible back in 1999. Saying otherwise is putting beer goggles on rose-tinted glasses that also have the powers of hindsight. And yes, I accidentally made that sound kind of awesome, but my intent was to make it sound lame so interpret accordingly.

Shenmue pissed me off on a personal level because it wasn't just bad, it was hubristic. It was 'too good' to be a good game. It cared more about Yu Suzuki's mid-life crisis and gimmicks than entertaining the player. The story was godawful, there was (literally) less than half an hour of actual combat in the entire sailorfucking game, and you had to GET A JOB AND SHOW UP TO WORK ON TIME FOR MONEY YOU CANNOT SPEND.

There has never, ever, in the history of video games, been a bigger "fuck you" to the idea of fun. And it wasn't in service of some grand philosophical point or some sweeping epic narrative. The entire story could've been shortened to "Do you know where Lan Di is?", followed by "Not here, obviously." No, Shenmue was just a 9 year-old babbling off ideas that sound awesome without 30 seconds of consideration as to whether or not they'd actually work.

I mean seriously. You had. To stack. Crates. For. A living.


Scrimmjob - 2014-04-26

yeah, you had to move crates for a living, but then on your lunch break the rastafarian hot dog vendor would teach you a new jump kick!


oddeye - 2014-04-27

Dude, entire games are built around stacking crates in a semi realistic manner, just check out Gaming Mills first and probably best video. Racing around on a fork lift did get tiring and was a dubious way AT BEST to catch a killer that had likely fled the country a month ago, I'll grant you that.

It's the little touches that made the game for me. Collecting little figures, drinking coffee, getting hit in the face with a kid's ball being turned into a QTE, etc.

This game would have ate up a billion dollars if the creators had access to that kind of money and it would still not be finished IMO. In terms of ambition this game is like 40 Peter Molyneux's rolled into one.


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