Meh, Nintendo is still far and away my favorite developer, especially since a lot of my favorite developers have been in decline (Namco and Square Enix are doing pretty nicely by me lately, however) and I have zero interest in the EA/Acti/Ubi triopoly. I do have a PS4 and a Wii U and they get pretty equal playtime from me.
1. Yes, I like female player characters, especially when they're pretty. That aside, female characters are often more fun than their male counterparts. Don't know if it's sex appeal per se, because even in my teenage years my hormones could tell the difference between a real woman and a depiction of one, but I do like the aesthetics.
2. Kinda. I don't play online games (other than fighters) much and I don't talk much when I do. I mostly play online games with my wife anyway. "Male" players give me stuff, shrug. I don't return their banter. Nor do I return the stuff they give me, for that matter. If they want to give away their in-game goodies, that's their problem, not mine. :)
3. Don't really give a damn one way or the other. I don't think trying to pick up dates in online games is such a great idea to begin with, so more power to 'em. I can see where women might want to play male characters so as not to be bothered by guys trolling for female attention, although that's kind of a sad commentary on the environment in some games more than anything.
Octoroks and Ultros are classics.
I'd also give a nod to Octomamm(oth) from Final Fantasy IV. One of Yoshitaka Amano's more memorable enemy designs.
Shantae is pretty good.
In the pre-Internet area a lot of people ran Bulletin Board Systems out of their own homes, and you could dial the number of the lines their computers were connected to and access those sites. They offered shareware games on BBS's for download (some more unscrupulous sites also offered commercial games as well). You could download these games at any speed from 300 baud to a blazing 14.4 baud! (1/4 of today's dialup speeds of 57.6K, and a mathematically insignificant percentage of the speed of broadband). Wolfenstein 3-D shareware would take you two hours to download at that speed.
DMC 4 is a great game and better than DmC, but I do agree on one thing - Bayonetta and especially Bayonetta 2 are the gold standard in that genre and DMC4 isn't quite going to measure up to them.
The original Batman comics were pretty gritty, all right. Once the Comics Code Authority was established in 1954 comics either went underground or became kid-friendly if their copyright holders wanted them to have any kind of mass appeal. Batman was, of course, one of the latter. DC being merged into Warner Communications in 1967 only intensified the push to make Batman more G-rated.
I'm not really into superhero comics, so the only two Batman properties I followed with any regularity were The Animated Series and the 1960s TV series with West and Burt Ward, which was a stape of syndicated after-school TV when I was a kid.
I'm surprised EA and Ubisoft haven't tried this before, honestly. There was talk of big companies financing games like Shenmue III and BGE 2 from the instant the "Double Fine Adventure"'s Kickstarter was announced, and I don't doubt for a bit that there has been discussion in the boardrooms of EA, Ubisoft, Activision, Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft about the possibility of risk mitigation through Kickstarter for big games.
As it is, though, a lot of the enthusiasm for Kickstarter in the gaming community has cooled. Double Fine's final product - the very game that ignited the crowdfunding craze in gaming - was less than what enthusiastic gamers were expecting, and that was after numerous delays. Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded turned out to be a one-off deal. Star Citizen has secured hundreds of millions in crowdfunding but doesn't seem to have any release window. A lot of Kickstarter games have failed outright. At least Shenmue III has a better chance than most KS projects of seeing the light of day as a finished product. Sony has hopefully enough of a hand in its development that they can set milestones and impose accountability on Ys Net that they will actually get the game done. Broken Age was so troubled because Double Fine had no accountability to anyone, including the people that paid into their Kickstarter.
The simple fact remains, nobody was willing to finance Shenmue III without some mitigation of the risk. Shenmue II was a failure on Xbox, while Shenmue I has a reputation, somewhat undeserved, for having damaged Sega financially. That myth has been largely debunked but still persists in peoples' minds. People can cheer all they want at E3, but crowd noise doesn't equal sales, because E3 isn't really representative of the gaming market, it's just a big spectacle. I'd love to have a HD remaster but despite what you or I think, everybody with money refused to take the risk of even that, so here we are. Short of Yu Suzuki winning the jackpot at the Powerball or a state lottery in the United States, the game simply wasn't going to happen.
For Shenmue III, it probably pretty much is a last resort. Sega wouldn't fund it, MS wouldn't fund it (Shenmue II on Xbox, which was backed by MS, tanked). Sony and Ys Net wanted some kind of guarantee that the investment would be worthwhile. And when you get down to it, it is a niche game. E3 is honestly kind of a meaningless, empty spectacle in the grand scheme of things. When it comes down to it, FF7 Remake is guaranteed to far outsell Shenmue III when those products actually make it to release, because that game had a massive fanbase to begin with.
So as long as they aren't selling drugs or running prostitution rings to fund the game, I'm cool with them doing what it takes. :) And ironically, it's one of the few Kickstarter projects I am willing to back precisely because Sony co-backing it means it has a better chance of actually coming out than most KS projects seem to do these days.
I agree that people need to get a grip about Nintendo. They actually have some pretty decent Wii U games coming, and soon. They're probably also gearing up for NX. I'll probably be getting Starfox. Incidentally, though, that's also the same way I feel about the PS4 this fall, since the "no games" meme is common. The PS4 has plenty for me, like Persona 5 and Tales. :)
Square Enix: Wow! Haven't seen them in this form since 2006 or so, when Square Enix was nearly on par with Nintendo on my list of developers to watch.
On Shenmue III, I don't think it's a matter of Sony not having the money to fund it so much as they wanted to gauge consumer interest with the KS. There's always stories from the industry about how they bring content people are supposedly asking for only to have nobody buy it. In any case, I'm glad Shenmue III is getting made, however it happens. I might back it myself.
My game of the show would have been Fallout 4, if only FF7 Remake hadn't been announced.
Sorry, bud, but I'm incredibly excited about FF7 Remake. That shot right to the top of my list of most-wanted games.
Shenmue III was also a shocker and a game that I will be getting on day one.
I was also excited by the announcement of a NieR game made by Platinum Games (one of my favorite developers, also making Star Fox Zero).
Namco always has good stuff, Anything Tales I'm down for, Dark Souls III will be good. They also have Project X Zone 2 coming on 3DS. I actually rather liked the first game.
Sega was a complete no-show at E3.
Atlus had Persona 5, one of my three most anticipated games of this year. The other two being Fallout 4 and Tales of Zestiria.
People sure griped about Nintendo a lot this year. I liked what I saw of Star Fox, and Nintendo has a lot of games coming that they just didn't show at E3. Their E3 presence did kind of suck, but people need to get a grip. I thought them dropping Earthbound Beginnings like that was kind of cool and I hope it means Mother 3 is coming West as well.
