prototypetom
Active Member
this isn't directed at you personally synce.
well gee whizz, other games use sex to sell. home run's all around you goddam scholars.
you're missing the point.
some tits and ass make a lot of sense in marketing a fighting game given the target audience. DOA's problem is they don't do anything much else.
Tekken can afford to push with busts of the Williams sisters because they also push this idea of a combo driven hardcore fighting game with tons of characters - mostly male. there's a balance, these tits (and anna in general) are opportunistic icing - and everyone knows it.
VF is trading on years of supposedly being this refined FG for connoisseurs. Aoi in a bikini - it's almost apologetic, arbitrary and completely benign. a half baked attempt to pick up a few pixelphiles before DOA5 came back to PS3.
As for Soul Calibur, half the press i read about that game was negative reaction to the increasingly gratuitous treatment of Ivy. but again, even this is balanced against a long history of games going back to Soul Blade which traded minimally on the female casts appearance. Originally a suggestion of nudity in the intro and taki's can I/can't I see peanuts skin suit. But hey, SC is hardly in rude health anyway.
common denominator = some kind of balance.
There's nothing wrong with fan service, there's nothing wrong with a cast of sexy characters and a cast of sexy/creepy outfits and bikinis. and there's nothing wrong with liking that. I play Lisa ffs, in her catsuit, its not like i'm phobic to boobs.
what is wrong is sex being almost the exclusive element in the marketing. DOA is a decent game, it has more substance than the bikinis describe - that needs to be represented, hard. anyone who says the sex angle DOA employs isn't effecting how this game's (not) picked up has their head up their ass. That or they live in Quagmiresville and it's all giggitygiggity good around here yo'.
In my experience, since the DOAX games, EVERY time I have EVER mentioned DOA to gamer friends or shop staff to some degree there's a reaction like I was talking about a Carry On film. And i mean that literally, its not opinion, it's observation. the reason is, these people played the DOAX games (or worse, just heard about them), and like any kind of titillation, it got old and they moved on once they got the dental floss and Cheerio bikini. and now, for them, DOA Proper is written off as, if not the same genre, the same entity. if you challenge that they just point at the latest bit of media from TN to perform a fatality on your righteous cause.
you would hope people in the FGC would of course look beyond all this, but don't worry about them, other factors are the battle for those hearts and minds if this isn't.
But TN isn't targeting those guys anyway, so again don't worry, they got this bro... TN are targeting the guys who'll more than likely lose interest after a couple of happy story endings. just the folks you need to populate a robust scene.
what's so frustrating to me about this vita game.... I haven't owned a portable myself since the game gear, but, as i understand it, this will be the first time there will be a fully realised and console compatible fighter on a portable. I can't think of anything more perfectly poised to appeal to people who take fighting games seriously - always be practising, always be fighting, be training on the train, etc. its there in front of them, on a plate, sat on a table made out of pure obvious.... but no, from the first promo video you'd think they'd just invented the portable softcore wank mag (which to be fair might be a hot seller - if we didn't have smartphones and internet full of free tits and ass). screw taking it easy, screw the weak defence, screw what other games do, I'm disappointed. I want to be part of a growth community, and I can see people making the effort here... i think TN could be doing more to help. So I hope this is just a teaser for the Japanese market, i'm getting prematurely flustered and we'll see something more appropriate for the other territories.
yeah, cool rant. some of it might be right.
