It's time for another good idea, bad idea...

So I've recently been revisiting some of the television programming of my childhood with one of the selections being 'Animaniacs' (look it up; watch it). One of the segments in that show was 'It's time for another good idea, bad idea' in which the good idea was in fact a good idea and the bad idea was farcical and idiotic. An example being:

Good Idea: Having breakfast served to you in bed.

Bad Idea: Having tennis balls served to you in bed.

Obviously option #1 results in (hopefully) tasty food and the latter (likely) results in a hospital visit. So today I thought we'd look at a couple of examples from recent or soon to be released games that more or less embody the spirit of being bombarded with tennis balls instead of getting breakfast.

Good idea: Releasing a handheld port of a game.

This is usually a pretty good idea as it allows for people to take your game anywhere and it exposes your game to a different market. This is pretty simple. Unless it's done in a completely half-assed manner (see also: many console to PC ports) having a game available on multiple platforms is a good thing.

Bad idea: Releasing a handheld port of a game that has more features than the console version.

This isn't necessarily a bad idea so much as it is a dick move as it really does nothing other than piss off customers who bought the (usually) initial console release of the game. The recent offender here is the PSP Vita port of 'Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3'. It has a replay mode while the console version does not. It's also worth noting that almost every fighting game released this console generation has a replay feature of some sort. It also has a hit box viewer. While you may have no idea what that latter feature is referring to let's leave it at it being a feature that is tactically very useful to have in a fighting games training mode and that it's also a feature that Japanese developers seem absolutely loathe to include in their products. Urge to kill rising...and moving on.

Good idea: Releasing a handheld port of a game.

We've already covered why this is a good idea and that hasn't changed in the two paragraphs since it was last mentioned.

Bad idea: Delaying the console release of the game such that it releases concurrently with the handheld version.

This is a bad idea as it both pisses off customers and kills interest in your game. Here the offender is surprisingly not 'UMvC3' or even a Capcom product but rather 'BlazBlue: Continuum Shift EXTEND' (BB:CSE) by Arc Systems Works. Now I used to be really big into this series but it's publishing schedule has of late left much to be desired. I'm fine going without a new version of a game, updated version of a game or whatever for decent periods of time. What I'm not OK with is largely arbitrary delays in releasing the game for different regions of the world (Europeans you have my sympathy as you have it way worse than Americans). In this case the console version of 'BB:CSE' which was released in Japan/Asia in mid-December won't see a US release until February 14^th. Why the delay? Well there is some time to localize content (translating stuff from Japanese to English). That is unless one is a clever clog and does that sort of thing concurrently with the rest of development in which case there's really no excuse for a multiple month delay to release the game in different regions. The rationale here is that the PSP Vita isn't being released in the US until mid-February and the 'BB:CSE' people thought that for some reason a dual console and handheld release would be a good idea. Why? Beats me. As in I have no clue why you'd actively try to screw over your console market in order to release the game at the same time on a platform that is likely going to bomb*. It really makes one wonder what some people are thinking. Anyhow, see you all next week.

*I truly think that the PSP Vita is going to tank in the US for the following reasons:

1. It's price point is ridiculous ($250-300 depending on which version you get, i.e. more than every console).
2. It uses exclusive memory cards with an even more ridiculous price point than the handheld itself. Seriously, these things are more expensive on a per GB basis than any other storage that I'm aware of.
3. It doesn't have Pokemon games, i.e. it isn't a Nintendo Gameboy variant.