What are your favorite game developers in the following categories:
Professional game developer: 6 or more commercial game releases
Rookie Game Developer: 5 or fewer commercial game releases
Non-Commercial Game Developer: No commercial game releases
Please no more than two(2) names each. You can include the company’s website.
Here Are Mine
Prefessional: Natsume (natsume.com)
Rookie: Harmless Lion (harmlesslion.com) (site down at the moment)
Non-Commercial: Mausland (mausland.de)
It’s not easy. More than half a decade ago I would have said Squaresoft, but Squaresoft doesn’t exist anymore. I don’t mean about the Enix merge, but the fact that almost all the people that made the games I loved aren’t there anymore. The people who made the Chrono games and Xenogears are all gone, for example.
Still, here are some notorious names, in no particular order:
Capcom These guys are really the bottom of the barrel when it comes to plot, consistency, innovation or coming up with new stuff (I’m looking at you, five thousand versions of Street Fighter 2) but since I don’t go into their games expecting any of this, they never let me down. Now get to work on a goddamn BoF6 already even if I still haven’t played BoF5.
Nipon Ichi Jesus fuck make something that’s not a lameass excuse for what could maybe be called an TRPG already! Their games, as games, usually suck, but the characters and the dialogue can somewhat up for it, at least for one playthrough. They are also evil sons of bitches who know I’m a completion whore and include LvlMotherfucker enemies to slave me away for hours.
Gust Probably NiS’ bastard children or something. I like the Atelier series.
Tri-ace Why, oh why did you have to fuck up Radiata Stories? It was AWESOME for the first half and then YOU BLEW IT. These guys make gross mistakes, but their games are very much worth the trouble. When is VP2 coming out anyway?
Monolith Soft AKA: The Square refugees who kidnapped most of the Xenogears staff and made Xenosaga. I was loving these guys until they tried to make Episode 2 more understandable for a wider audience. Fuck that shit, you better make up for that in Episode III. And goddamnit get someone to make a non-sucky battle system.
Natsume Have they ever released anything that isn’t Harvest Moon? Not that I care, I love HM. Rock on guys, I anxiously await every new opportunity to lead the life of our beloved manwhore farmer Jack year after year.
Taito What happened to them? I assume they got swallowed by some other company that brainwashed them and made them release Lufia 3 and 4. I miss Lufia 2.
Squeenix I still love these guys, even if they haven’t done that much to impress me lately. Some promising stuff is coming up and I still have to play DQ8, so we’ll see.
TYPE-MOON H-Games with good plot, truly the ultimate paradox. LOCALIZE YOUR GODDAMN GAMES! Bah, MirrorMoon is doing it already (<–Is waiting for the Tsukihime patch).
CyberConnect2 I’m a .hack whore.
Will Wright.
That man is a genius. When people look back 100 years from now on the first few decades of PC gaming, I firmly believe they’ll view Wright as the Mozart or Da Vanci of the era. I can’t imagine what game he’ll be working on post-Spore…
I’m sure console gaming would have different nominations.
Konami, Capcom, Squaresoft/Squaresoft’s ultimate form Squeenix, and Valve are lav. <3
Street Fighter 2 was pretty much the first game in it’s genre that tried to make a perfectly balanced 2D fighter, and the end result was indeed the most balanced 2D fighter. In fact, the innovation from the original SF2 is so great that it’s ridiculous. If you don’t believe me, pick up SF Anniversary collection and play Hyper SF2; it’s a version where you can play as any version of any character. Now, try out ‘Normal’ Guile and see things like his Jabx5 Dizzy into Jabx5 combo, which does some 80-90% damage. Now, try out ‘Champ’ M. Bison, with his Psycho Crusher that CROSSES UP, and his Scissor Kick with absolutely no recovery time; did I mention that Scissor Kick into just about any move is a Dizzy? And that the same combo will REDIZZY? SF2 has come an incredibly long way, and people STILL play it competitively in the US AND Japan. I wouldn’t even begin to rag on them for doing what they’ve done, if I were you.
Also, I’m pretty sure Mr. Saturn or someone else told me that the BoF series is kaput, so don’t count on any new ones.
The same team developed every single game; I think it’s safe to say that Lufia just hit the Piñata one time.
Capcom definatly has those unbalanced track record. For every SFII, Viewtiful Joe, RE4 or DMC you got DMC II, SFII-23263163211, RE Dead Aim, Outbreak, etc. It’s like they’ll dabble around until they just stumble on a game that fucking pwns… then drive it into the ground. Konami seems to be getting more and more like that, too.
Sammy.
Most of this might as well be in Chinese for all I can understand. Even if there IS a great improvement, it was developed over… how many of them are there anyway? Even if it became “The Perfectly Balanced 2D Fighter”, that’s the kind of development you’re supposed to do during development, not by releasing a shitload versions in a trial and error scheme. Are you telling me that every single one of them has some significant element unique to it that could have not have been included in any of the rest and justifies the purchase of every version?
Yes. Let me put it to you again:
Street Fighter 2 was more or less the first game that tried to do what it did. Do you really expect them to get it right on the first try? The first of anything is NEVER the ultimate, best form. There are almost no fighting games that get released ONLY ONCE, unless they suck (and ones that get released only once usually suck a lot; see almost EVERY SNK game and you’ll see what I mean).
If you must know…practically every game had something drastically changed to offer. I’m not citing things like new normal moves because that would be far too ‘chinese’ for you to understand the drastic effects of small changes in special moves. But, be assured, a lot of different things about everyone’s normals and specials were changed in every game.
Championship Edition fixed a lot of dizzying problems of the original game (It used to be that some characters could dizzy with one hit!), and allowed you to play as the boss characters, as well as do mirror matches.
SF2 Turbo (also known as Hyper Fighting) fixed serious balancing issues, especially with the new added boss characters. This game also was the first game to introduce new special moves, which was quite a huge deal.
Super SF2: The New Challengers reworked the dizzy system so that it wasn’t so simple to get dizzies off of repeated fireballs and medium attacks. It also added in four new characters. A lot of characters’ move priority, walk speeds, and jump speeds were drastically changed, especially Blanka.
Super SF2 Turbo (Known as ST, which is the final version of SF2) fixed balancing issues with new characters (specifically T. Hawk), introduced a lot of new moves again, and was the first SF game to introduce supers. For added variety, you were also able to pick the Super SF2 (also know simply as the ‘old’) versions of all the characters too, for variety and preference (though a few things were tweaked; for example, T. Hawk’s 360 throw didn’t do like a third of your life anymore, but all his old normals and their specific properties remained intact).
No fighting game EVER, EVER gets it right on the first try. Most of the first SNK fighters were complete jokes; I still think that the only good SNK fighters released in the last decades were Samurai Showdown 2 and Mark of the Wolves, but both of those are sequels (Mark of the Wolves was like, the FOURTH game in this game). Street Fighter Alpha 2 was made as a direct response to how shitty SFAlpha1 was. SFAlpha3 was like a completely different game, but that one faded into obscurity because there were so many glitches. Capcom Vs SNK 2 is haunted by the worst glitch ever, called “Roll cancelling”, which allows you to make any special move you do INVINCIBLE for a short time, degenerating the entire game into ridiculous standoffs of watching who moves first. The final version of Street Fighter 3 still left at least one character in bad enough shape that no one uses him in competitive play. Marvel Vs Capcom 2 has got to be the worst flop of a fighting game EVER, with only eight out of 50-some characters being decent. Guilty Gear, while it’s well on its way, is about five or six games in and STILL trying to get it right.
In summation, I’m not being rude…but I think as a casual player, you really don’t understand how significant the changes are, and you don’t understand that you can’t catch EVERY SINGLE THING in playtesting. No one predicted infinites in the crossover games. No one predicted 5 hit dizzies and psycho crusher redizzies. No one thought that parrying would be so effective that they’d had to stop flashing the screen BLUE for like an entire second after you did it. Who the fuck could have seen Crouch Cancelling, Kattobi Cancelling, Whiff Cancelling, or Roll Cancelling coming? I bet you wouldn’t have, nor would you have ever found them out or noticed them if YOU made those games. Don’t be so quick to say such things like “They should have gotten it right the first time.”
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been clearer: I wouldn’t expect anyone to get things right the first try, that is obvious. By the third game however, you are already in the zone where having major mistakes means you’re pushing it.
It’s true that I cannot fully appreciate the relevance of each change because of my inexperience, but likewise, I think you might be just a little too close to them to realize some things. There is a difference between releasing games and releasing patches, and that is the amount of significant new material; by your description for example, I see no reason for why the content in SSF2 and SSF2T couldn’t have been included within one game.
What I’m trying to say is that: There are more versions than those that should have been necessary.
Kouji Igarashi (modern Castlevania titles), Shigeru Miyamoto (duh), Sid Meier (Civilization), Will Wright (SimCity), Yuji Horii (Dragon Quest), Hironobu Sakaguchi (duh), Akihiro Imamura (Silent Hill), Yuji Naka (Phantasy Star), Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil), Keiji Inafune (Mega Man), and the entire team at Treasure (Contra, Gradius, early Castlevania titles, Radiant Silvergun, Ikaruga, <I>others</I>), in no particular order. No, I can’t pare the list down any more than that. Hell, I may even think of more later. Those are the people that, when they make a game, I buy it regardless of any reviews I’ve read. I’ve been disappointed once or twice, but rarely.
Konami (Suikoden) has finally redeemed itself with Suikoden V. I just hope the trend continues into the next generation.
You should really stop playing video games then, cos these days, just about every game is a sequel that refines an already existing system with a lot of potential. In fact, I would laud Street Fighter 2 for being the only game that truly explored its full potential. Guilty Gear is definitely on its way, though unfortunately, I can’t say I enjoy it as much as other fighting games.
Well, let’s look at the ‘amount of new content’ released on each new release, beyond simple special moves and the like. What sort of content to you simply deserves ‘just a patch change’, and what actually dictates a completely new version? I’ll say that for changing things like Normals, Special moves, and for slight balancing issues, those would be simply for ‘patch changes.’ Although I think it’s ridiculously hard to get a character right on the first try, and that balancing shit is necesary and while necesitate a new release, I’ll omit all those things. Well, let’s look again…
First version: World Warrior.
Second Edition: Champion Edition. This game featured four new characters. I’d say that’s probly a good reason for a new game, huh?
Third Edition: Turbo (Hyper Fighting). This one is probably the least deserving of a whole new cart, but the reason they did is because people were hacking the shit out of Street Fighter Champion Edition games and making crazy shit (Like those Street Fighter 2 Rainbow Editions where you can do air moves and homing projectiles and stuff). The game was a response to that, adding in new air moves, and upping the game speed overall.
Fourth Edition: The New Challengers. This game also had four new characters.
Final Edition: Super Turbo. This game, first of all, was on completely different hardware, which is a great reason they could make both “The New Challengers” and ST into the same game (since I know you asked that). They also implemented Supers, a completely new element of gameplay in Street Fighter 2. Oh, this game ALSO had one extra new character, and that was Akuma.
So out of ALL ot those games, I’d say only one of them wasn’t an incredibly drastic change…but on the OTHER hand, there are a lot of people who might disagree; Hyper Fighting is generally accepted as the only other Street Fighter fit for competitive play besides ST. Overall, I’d say they handled their shit quite nicely.
You should really stop playing video games then, cos these days, just about every game is a sequel that refines an already existing system with a lot of potential. In fact, I would laud Street Fighter 2 for being the only game that truly explored its full potential. Guilty Gear is definitely on its way, though unfortunately, I can’t say I enjoy it as much as other fighting games.
This is something I’ve repeatedly complained about. A good chunk of nowadays RPGs are the sequels to the sequels of something, reusing the same systems as their predecessors instead of attempting to introduce a significantly different new model. NiS is still failing at making their games not-retarded, for example.
So why is it fair for RPGs to do all this when SF can’t? Because even if you make two games exactly alike from the technical point of view, you still have two games with individual stories, characters, scenes, voice acting, graphics and all that shit. Since SF focuses on the gameplay, the changes need to be made in the gameplay.
Third Edition: Turbo (Hyper Fighting). This one is probably the least deserving of a whole new cart, but the reason they did is because people were hacking the shit out of Street Fighter Champion Edition games and making crazy shit (Like those Street Fighter 2 Rainbow Editions where you can do air moves and homing projectiles and stuff). The game was a response to that, adding in new air moves, and upping the game speed overall.
Fourth Edition: The New Challengers. This game also had four new characters.
When you see this, you say “Hey good, now I can play without worrying about [hacked move]” and in the next game you say “Hey good, now I get new characters too”. When I see this, I say “Hey good, now I can play without worrying about [hacked move]” and in the next game I say “Hey wait, If they were going to add more characters why not do it on the last release?”.
That’s about as clear as I can put it. I simply believe that there were more versions than needed, and I’m not going to argue this further because there’d no point to it.
Right. And, the changes ARE made to the gameplay. You’d be surprised how much all these things that you say ‘require a mere patch change’ DRASTICALLY alter the way a game is played. Lemme put it to you this way…In the newest version of Guilty Gear, they made two seemingly minor changes to this one character named Eddie…basically, all of his moves push him back a little farther than they used to, and his helper (it’s sort of complicated; basically, playing Eddie is like playing as two characters because his shadow attacks and has special moves you can make it do, and the it can be attacked and removed from play for a short while) takes a little longer to come back after it dies. Sounds like not too much, right? Eddie moved down from #1 or #2 in the game to one of the lowest ranked characters in the game. This is just one of the many examples of how a small change can make a really, really huge difference. Quite frankly, you don’t see a lot of Eddie players these days anymore…I omitted them from my argument in the previous post to stress a point about your little ‘patch’ argument, not because I ALSO see changes in Normals, Specials, reworking systems and adding gameplay elements as irrelevant. LOTS of changes are made to the gameplay. I challenge you to go play the first version of a fighting game, and compare it to its most recent version.
…Did you ever think that maybe the characters weren’t conceptualized at the time they made the previous game? Lemme remind you again that The New Challengers didn’t just go “okay here, new characters” and that was the ONLY thing that was changed. That was actually the time when they really fixed up the dizzying system and how it worked, and when they added low vitality damage scaling, on top of tons of other character-specific things that I omitted because of the ‘patch’ argument you proposed.
That’s the beauty of a fighting game that you really can’t bring to other genres; you can almost ALWAYS make it better. Sometimes, it’s changing the gameplay elements, and making minor tweaks. Sometimes, it’s adding in completely new characters. Sometimes, it’s both. Street Fighter 2 did a whole, SHITLOAD, of both. Often, when new characters are added into the game, gameplay tweaks need to be made. When games don’t do this, the final results are usually disatrous.
Let’s look at Street Fighter 3, for example. There was supposed to be a fourth revision of the game that never happened. In the third version, there were five new characters put in the game. Three of them are some of the lower ranked characters in the game, and two of them the highest ranked characters in the game.
To conclude…I don’t mean this in a condescending way, but it’s really too bad you can’t understand this to its full extent; it’s constant revisions and looking for something you can do to improve the game constantly that makes games truly great. Street Fighter 2 is one of the most amazing 2D fighters, period, and most games that don’t make revision upon revision wind up being ridiculous (SFAlpha 3, CvS2, MvC2). If you take note of trends and consensus, you’ll notice that the most popular fighters, 2D OR 3D, have generally at least three versions to them (SF2, SF3, Guilty Gear, Tekken 5, Virtua Fighter 4, Soul Calibur 3, though SC3 could use a few more…). There’s a reason for this, and this is because you can never make a game quite perfect; your target audience will ALWAYS find something you can exploit about the game; they’ll ALWAYS find something wrong. To make a fighting game scene happen, you don’t do what SNK does and just release a completely new, retarded game every year (Notice how SNK just ISN’T popular in the US? It’s really not too much more popular in Japan, either…), you give your audience something to work with; it’s an input and feedback loop that’s completely essential to making a long lasting fighting game. Say what you will, but there’s a reason Street Fighter 2 has been a big tournament game since its conception in 1991, and is still going strong - it’s because it did EXACTLY what I’m talking about.
SG, which are your thoughts on Mortal Kombat (if any)? I thought the game could use a few more sequels in its 3D installments (i.e. didn’t like them), however I find the 2D MKs after MKII godaweful.
Another point is that one has to pay for the new versions (doh!). Or do some “playtesting” with a friendly neighbour.
Actually, SSF2 was the first one on the new hardware, not SSF2T. The CPS2 board was introduced to the Street Fighter series with SSF2, and continued to be used for many sequels, including all three SFA/SFZ games, the first three vs. Capcom games (X-Men vs. Street Fighter, Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, and Marvel vs. Capcom), and pretty much the entire Darkstalkers series. Street Fighter III introduced the CPS-3 system, though they retroactively used the CPS-2 system for “Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition.”
A lot of these companies/developers I’ve never even heard of. 
Uhm, [b]Konami[/b] is my favorite “developer”, not only because it produces a lot of games of my tastes, such as MGS, Castlevania, SH, DDR, but it also contributes to world causes.
Actually, Natsume made Lufia 2; their website says that atleast.
From Software: Armored Core and ACE for the fucking win. Tis a shame they never seem to get anything else right.
Black Isle (RIP): Fallout 2 and Planescape Torment. Does any more need to be said?
Banpresto: What can I say, I love giant robots. Super Robot Wars and ACE are just incredible.
Atlus: hmmm, what by these guys haven’t I liked? Nothing that I can think of off the top of my head. Gotta love Shin Megami Tensei, Crusader of Centy, Tactics Ogre, and Growlanser. Shinseiki Yuusha Taisen doesn’t look half bad, and in about a month and a half they are bringing Super Robot Wars Original Generation to the US market.