This I don't agree with:
zak wrote:And an important part of that fanbase's creation is the way future fans hear and get hold of the games. I'm saying that part of what makes them so great is that they're rare.
I understand what you are saying, but I would never list rarity as a positive aspect of one of these masterpieces when reviewing them. When looking at a game with a critical eye, trying to discern what makes it work, what makes it greater than other games that came before it, practical issues such as cost and availabilty are irrelevant. The game stands outside of all these petty concerns. The game is immortal. [/preaching]
I wholeheartedly agree with this:
zak wrote:A game that sells for
64.99$ on ebay is different from the one you pick up from your local store. It creates a sort of myth arround it.
Also, excellent point:
There's no guarantee that exposing your game to a large marker will make it sell. Look at companies like Looking Glass or Bioware that made great ground breaking games and sold them all arround the world, and still went under. Large market exposure doesn't guarantee anything.
Cave's been making games for a long while and I'm sure they'll continue to. Yeah so maybe they're playing it safe by just focusing on the japanese market, but it's working.
Only Bioware never went under.
The question is not why Cave doesn't release compilations of their older titles in the West. They never release anything in the West and with good reason: a tiny minority of foreigners play their games, and they import the Jap copies anyway. Besides, even if they went about releasing their games in the West, it would be nearly impossible to get retailers to carry them because of tiny print runs, and you STILL wouldn't be able to grab a copy from your local game store--you'd have to go online either way.
There's also the marketing angle. Cave doesn't spend any money advertising their games in Japan. No magazine ads, nothing. The arcades do that for them. In the West there are no arcades. What will Cave do? Spend a million dollars paying off IGN or GameSpot?
Forget about the US and Europe. There is no hope. The only way to get Cave to localize their games (and do you really want to have all those amazing covers and artwork butchered by a bunch of useless localization people?) is to educate Western gamers to how those games are properly played and what they can do.
This happens in the arcades in Japan, but in the West there are no arcades, etc. etc.
So again, forget about localizations. Maybe one day in the distant utopian future...
The REAL question here is why they don't release ports of their older games in Japan itself (and I am talking about individual titles here, compilations are not really necessary: 5,900 yen is a bargain for a goddamnn masterpiece which you'd normally spend 40,000 to master in the arcades).
This is also a question I can answer.
DP and DDP were ported to the Saturn and the PS1. Guwange, Dangun, Progear and Esprade were never ported. From DDP DOJ onwards (with the exception of Ketsui) all their other shooters have been ported, or will be ported in the near future.
So the question is now why those 4 titles were not ported soon after the time of their arcade release.
I don't have the answer to that. But I do know that it would not make economic sense to port them now. Re-building the engines of those 4 games to run on the PS2 takes a lot of time and work. Because those games have been thorougly beaten by most of their fans in the arcades, their sales at this point in time would be far less than if they had been ported closer to their arcade releases. So Cave would see no profit, or very little to make it worth the effort. Besides, they'd rather make new games than spend the time porting old ones. Also, Cave doesn't even own the rights to these titles (Atlus and Capcom do), so that's one more problem they'd have to overcome. Finally, these four games do not run on the same hardware, so it's not a matter of just building one engine and using it for all 4. For example, DDP DOJ and Espgaluda run on the same hardware, so after Arika built the engine for DOJ it was relatively simple porting Galuda.
I don't know what happened with Ketsui. I read somewhere that they wanted to do it but there were some technical difficulties.
In short, it's just not possible, not worthwhile for them do re-visit those older games. As far as simply playing and enjoying them is concerned, they are perfectly emulated anyway, with the exception of Ketsui again--damn that fucking game to hell!!!
It's awesome. When I go back to Tokyo I will spend quite a bit of money on it and hopefully review it.
Jesus, this is my longest post here I think. That's what you get for mentioning Cave in the insomnia forum!!