Oh, how video games have changed. Back in my day (read: the late-90s), the Japanese video game industry ruled:  the battle of Nintendo versus Sega raged on and gamers everywhere devoured uniquely Nipponese flavors in titles like Mystical Ninja, Shenmue and Seaman.

Around the time of Microsoft’s Xbox debut in 2001, the winds began to shift. FPS titles cornered consoles (Halo) and PCs (Counterstrike) and frequently made news for their violence, thus further increasing sales. Western developers also began funneling Hollywood pop culture into cinematic titles like Grand Theft Auto, and the task of emulating film set the industry on a quest to conquer immersion over all else. Singularly silly, task-driven and point-based games of yore seemed a shadow of their former selves in an increasingly Western game market.

This week I happened to play two very Japanese games – Yakuza 4 and the PSP Parasite Eve sequel The 3^rd Birthday – and my time with these contemporary Eastern experiences made their contrast with today’s Western games more pointed. In Yakuza 4 I was scored for my skills in beating up street punks in a neon-colored Tokyo stand-in. I guzzled real-life-sponsored energy drinks and collected yen from opponents to play pachinko and visit hostess clubs. I haven’t yet found a stat screen that details each character’s blood type, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Yakuza 4 is more Japanese than most, but the extent to which the game mirrors reality is not only separated by its setting and theme. The focus on high scores, mini-games and melodrama is slowly becoming an alien concept and harkens back to an arcade-machine era future generations might never know.

The 3^rd Birthday is equally “gamey.” Fashion-conscious series heroine Aya Brea is thrust into a future New York City overtaken by a virus that is inexplicably named The Babel. The 3^rd Birthday doesn’t employ vastly different gameplay techniques from any American or UK title, but it is uniquely Japanese in the way that it constantly beats you over the head with its “game-ness.” Believe me, I wish there were a better word for it. Everything in the game is unapologetically lifted from science-fiction and horror films, but the clichés are even stranger than their Western counterparts because they are Eastern facsimiles of popular Western stereotypes.

If you aren’t already a fan of Japanese franchises or culture, I’m surprised how easy it is to avoid Eastern titles altogether. For every Bayonetta on the shelf, there are four Grant Theft Auto clones or Tom Clancy games, and for your average sometime-gamer it’s easy to see which makes for a more comfortable choice.

Japanese titles have become an acquired taste, associated with anime, manga and the self-professed American otaku. And Japanese games have become a line that divides game culture. At this moment, a number of factors divide gaming culture and they don’t have to be bad. The games industry is expanding and along with it the concept of what makes a “gamer.” Nostalgia is romantic, but when businessmen play Angry Birds on the train and soccer moms play Kinect after dinner, dividing lines are an important part of moving forward. I miss playing lots of “wacky” games as much as the next guy, but there’s no need to bemoan the decline of Eastern game dominance while it continues to play such a crucial role in creating a diverse industry.

Another editorial piece that has, sadly, become an orphan. I think there’s a demand for thought-provoking articles that arise directly out of the experience of playing a game, and I hope to one day find the right place for work like this.

Many console gamers who picked up Crysis 2 on Tuesday likely faced a big surprise. Years of playing corridor shooters like Call of Duty and Halo have honed first-person shooter skills that are akin to skeet shooting – the bad guys pop up, and it’s your job to shoot them before they disappear. By incorporating a number of multi-tiered sandbox areas, Crysis 2 offers an alternative to this worn-out corridor strategy by giving us choices. But for fans of a single-minded genre, so much choice can be daunting.

Being suddenly immersed in a world that extends beyond what’s right in front of you is alarming, and I spent my first few hours of Crysis 2 trying to figure out what the developers wanted me to do. The protagonist, Alcatraz, sat crouched on a rooftop overlooking a New York intersection blocked off by the possibly-evil CELL corporation in an attempt to capture him. Surveying the scene and pinpointing enemy positions, I struggled to decipher how to go about my killing. Surely they want me to tackle my enemies in a particular way that utilizes the variety of stealth and armor skills inherent to my futuristic “Nanosuit.” But after a number of failed attempts to dispatch my foes, I became angry. How can I kill everyone without a single strategic position? How can I survive if I’m not supplied with the proper armor and weapon to take on an army of bad guys?

The answer was much simpler than I imagined: I don’t. In Crysis 2 you’re free to take whatever route you want, kill someone or don’t; there is no one preferred strategy for success. I didn’t have to stand in the intersection, absorbing bullets and picking off an entire organization at once; I could duck and run and attack only the foes I deemed dangerous on my way to my goal. Once you realize that you don’t have to do anything, you can do anything. And that’s a freeing feeling.

Perhaps hardcore PC players who experienced the first Crysis already knew what to expect, and my difficulty with a more complex method of play probably is fuel for the pro-PC/boo-console fire. Still, I was struck by how much my success in Crysis 2 required almost a total recoding of my brain. The PC gamers may lament that it’s not a fully-fledged sandbox like its predecessor and developer Crytek’s other franchise, FarCry, but even consumed in smaller doses Crytek’s approach to open-ended gameplay is largely unheard of in today’s console FPS.

Freedom from strict directives is remarkable only in the FPS genre; action games have no problem thinking outside the box. Third-person sandbox titles like Grand Theft Auto and especially Assassin’s Creed not only offer choice and experimentation, they encourage it. So why is arguably the most profitable game genre the one sector that seems to discourage change and chance? The answer probably lies in the ‘profitable’ part of that description.

If the linear Call of Duty style rains money every year like clockwork, there is little impetus for big companies to take risks. With the high cost of a AAA game, the success of a game like Crysis 2 is essential in proving that not every FPS needs to ape that successful franchise in order to sell. The day will come when Activision runs the COD franchise into the ground with its annual installment plan. Let’s encourage the move to change and experimentation now, so that we can look forward to a time when there’s a whole FPS landscape that extends beyond what’s right in front of us.

A video game piece I wrote for Bitmob that didn’t quite fit with the focus of the site. Homefront is a first-person shooter set in an alternate future where North Korea has invaded the U.S.

I’m almost reluctant to add to the media blitz that Homefront was and is getting. Even with low scores and plummeting stocks, the game managed to sell 300,000 copies on its first day, so to a degree it would seem the publicity has paid off. But, after being personally subjected to an overwhelming number of posters and billboards, hundreds of balloons, an anti-Korean rally, and a long schoolbus ride to a barbed-wire-laden warehouse, I was disappointed to find that behind this velvet curtain was a pretty flimsy product. Maybe Homefront will be the game that gets the ball rolling on an important issue that has been brewing for a while: game pricing.

Kaos Studios was smart to attach itself to a wholly original idea – implausible or not, and putting the power of Academy Award-nominated screenwriter John Milius behind it doesn’t hurt. But the premise is wasted on such an impossibly underdeveloped campaign; it’s almost like Milius wrote “North Korea invades U.S.” on a napkin and called it a day.

Kaos’ shooter isn’t the first game to re-neg on its promises (see the ever-fresh wound of the Molyneux/Fable debacle for proof of that) but this burn was unique in that it was a title that appealed to a game audience that is largely overlooked. Alternate history, as a genre, has ardent supporters but aside from Fallout and Singularity its ranks haven’t been stocked particularly well. In that light, Homefront’s undelivered promise only intensifies the sting that results from its brevity.

Sixty bucks and all I get is a three-hour campaign?

You don’t hype a three hour tour.

Homefront’s single-player is surely not worthy of its price tag, so what else is in the box? The game includes a multiplayer mode and it’s lightyears more focused than the campaign, but mulitplayer-only experiences like Battlefield 1943 run around 15 bucks. If the studio had released a multiplayer-only title, they would have been welcomed to the table differently. Instead, we’re left wondering how much developer weight was actually put behind the single-player campaign, and why the quality seems so inconsistent with the seemingly-great weight the publicity team put into hyping the mode over the past year.

Now that a sharp divide has evolved in the value of game content, making every game the same price not only hurts the consumer, it also directs the development process towards creating a viable product rather than a singular experience. As more and more players purchase titles purely for their multiplayer components, I might go so far as to suggest completely separating single player and multiplayer experiences through independent purchases.

No matter how it is sold, it seems clear that the value of each mode is rarely analogous to the amount of time developers invest in them. Call of Duty campaigns are five to six hours long, and no one bats an eye because they know the multiplayer will afford them hundreds of hours in entertainment. At the same time, enormous resources are spent on creating multiplayer for games like Bioshock while all anyone wants is to be told a cohesive story. Instead of feeling obligated to deliver both, why don’t developers make a greater effort to give players what they came for?

Perhaps there’s something to be learned from the casual games market. While many console gurus malign the low pricing of iOS games, at least games are variably priced based on their worth. What’s the answer? Publishers would be smart to figure it out before all games go digital, because I expect that flat rate of sixty dollars is going to feel a whole lot heavier without a physical product in hand.