I praised Recap to high heaven in my latest essay -- now it's time to tear him a new one.
Recap wrote:It is the Japanese who have owned the concept of the video-game, even if some Western countries still pretend to resist this notion. Reality speaks that, save for a particular sector of the industry (related to those genres associated mostly with the PC platform)
lol. But dude, that "particular sector of the industry" also happens to be fucking awesome. So not only do you fail to acknowledge this, but you don't even make an effort to explain WHY you think that this sector should be disregarded. You ADMIT that this sector is a sector in which the West dominates, but you don't bother to explain to your readers why this sector should be viewed as irrelevant and be completely disregarded.
As it happens, that "particular sector of the industry" happens to DOMINATE IN THE ENTIRE STRATEGY/TACTICS GENRES AND ALL THEIR SUB-GENRES -- WHICH IS TO SAY IN ROUGHLY 50% OF ALL THE VIDEOGAME GENRES EVER. Compared to what Americans and Europeans (mostly British) have accomplished in this domain, the Japanese have done next to nothing. With the exception of Koei's games, all the other Japanese strategy/tactics games I've ever played (and I've played LOTS) have been made for retarded children, with complexity to match. The Japanese, basically, occupy the same position in the strategy/tactics genres that the Americans or the Europeans occupy in the various arcade genres -- I.E. THEY SUCK.
And note that in all the above I am talking strictly of 2D GAMES. Recap has a problem with polygons -- so fair enough. I am not going to go into this now, though I will go into it some other day. But even if we stay firmly on the ground of 2D games, the Japanese simply have absolutely nothing to put next to:
Civilization
Alpha Centauri
Railroad Tycoon
Panzer General
Merchant Prince
Master of Magic
Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty
Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness
StarCraft
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2
Total Annihilation
Cossacks
Syndicate
Sim City
UFO: Enemy Unknown
... every single one of which is a masterpiece, with Civilization being simply the best game ever bar none (as I will be explaining at length in an essay in the second volume of my Videogame Culture). And I could easily list a few dozen more if I tried.
So the problem with Recap is basically this: he evaluates games roughly on 60% aesthetics 40% mechanics, instead of 50/50, which would have been the ideal. Josh, for example, used to be the opposite of Recap: he used to evaluate roughly on 40% aesthetics and 60% mechanics, but lately he has moved into the middle, I would say. And of course it goes without saying that I myself am situated smack-right in the middle.
But the problem with Recap goes even further than this. Because if the game is not Japanese he will not give it a chance at all. I mean, it is bad enough that he evaluates even Japanese games with a strong bias for aesthetics (his Arcana Heart review, if it ever comes, is guaranteed to be laughable, for example, because he doesn't like the game's grafix), but he won't evaluate Western games at all.
And I mean, that's fine if he doesn't want to do it -- no one should be FORCED to play games he doesn't want to play, much less review them. But avoiding playing Western games is quite another thing FROM SLANDERING THEM.
And besides, the problem goes even deeper than this. Because if you pretend to review Japanese strategy games while being completely ignorant of Western strategy games, your reviews will suffer as a result -- and not only because you might miss connections between them, but above all because you will no doubt end up crowning some mediocre Japanese game as the "best ever" or whatever, while there will be dozens of Western efforts that will trump it, but which you will not even be aware of.
In the event, however, I can see from Recap's review archive that he is not a big fan of strategy games at all, because he has hardly reviewed any of them, so it's not such a big deal. The games he does review all belong to genres in which the Japanese dominate, so ignoring Western efforts does not have an appreciable negative impact on most of his reviews.
Still, all of that is no excuse to slander an entire sector of the industry, and especially one that is 100% totally awesome. And here Recap simply has no excuse. He can say that "Gears of War is not a videogame so I won't review it", but he can't say the same thing for any of the stuff I listed above. The only thing he can say is "I don't like the grafix", which is as lame an excuse as it gets.
Still, the honest thing is TO SAY THIS. To admit it to himself, first of all -- and then also to his readers. In the above editorial he simply sweeps all these games under the carpet WITHOUT PROVIDING ANY EXPLANATION.
And that, dear Recap, is a gross case of intellectual injustice.
