SEGA announces a Platinum partnership. Happy Days!

SEGA
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[quote]SAN FRANCISCO & LONDON (May 15, 2008) ? SEGA? of America, Inc. and SEGA Europe Ltd. today announced a worldwide partnership with PlatinumGames Inc., the development studio recently formed by the team behind some of the most successful franchises in the video game industry. Under the agreement, PlatinumGames will develop three ground-breaking new SEGA titles – MADWORLD?, Infinite Line? and Bayonetta? ?covering a variety of game genres with innovative design concepts that explore the depths of today?s best-selling platforms. A soon-to-be-announced fourth title, being directed by legendary gaming icon Shinji Mikami, is also part of the agreement.

?The creative forces at PlatinumGames bring a new level of imagination into the SEGA family at a pivotal time in the video game industry when the demand for quality, originality and fun has never been greater,? said Tatsuya Minami, President and CEO, PlatinumGames. ?These new titles will contribute meaningfully to SEGA?s brand, while adding a new level of depth to the strategic portfolio of games in our library.?

?This relationship underscores SEGA?s continuing drive to bring high-quality content to Western audiences, pushing current standards of innovation in gameplay by introducing fresh, original IP that plays to the strengths of the individual platforms,? said Simon Jeffery, President and COO, SEGA of America.

MADWORLD, the first title set for release in Q1 2009, is an inventive third-person action game exclusively for Wii?. Produced by Atsushi Inaba, MADWORLD has a unique black and white style depicting an incredibly sharp backdrop that straddles graphic novels and 3D worlds. As players battle opponents, they must master the use of various weapons and items found within their environment, such as chainsaws and street signs, while entertaining sports commentary adds to the third-person gameplay. With its irreverent humor and over-the-top violence, MADWORLD will deliver a unique core gaming experience currently missing on the Wii system.

Infinite Line (working title), a role playing game exclusively for the Nintendo DS? portable handheld system, takes place in outer space and gives players the ability to control, build, outfit and customize more than 150 spaceships. Infinite Line stretches the DS hardware to the limit, offering over 200 characters and the ability to control multiple spaceships at any one time. Releasing in 2009 and currently being produced by Atsushi Inaba and directed by Hifumi Kouno (from developer Nude Maker), Infinite Line is one of the most complex RPG titles developed for the DS to date.

Bayonetta is a stylish and cinematic action game, directed by Hideki Kamiya, set for release in 2009 on the Xbox 360? video game and entertainment system from Microsoft and PLAYSTATION?3 computer entertainment system. A witch with powers beyond the comprehension of mere mortals, Bayonetta faces-off against countless angelic enemies, many reaching epic proportions, in a game of 100% pure, unadulterated all-out action. Outlandish finishing moves are performed with balletic grace as Bayonetta flows from one fight to another. With magnificent over-the-top action taking place in stages that are a veritable theme park of exciting attractions, Bayonetta pushes the limits of the action genre, bringing to life its fast-paced, dynamic climax combat.

For more information regarding the partnership between SEGA and PlatinumGames please go to www.sega.com/platinumgames

For press information and assets please visit segapr.segaamerica.com.

About SEGA Europe Ltd.:
SEGA? Europe Ltd. is the European Distribution arm of Tokyo, Japan-based SEGA Corporation, and a worldwide leader in interactive entertainment both inside and outside the home. The company develops and distributes interactive entertainment software products for a variety of hardware platforms including PC, wireless devices, and those manufactured by Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. SEGA Europe?s web site is located at www.sega-europe.com.

About SEGA of America Inc.:
SEGA? of America, Inc. is the American arm of Tokyo, Japan-based SEGA Corporation, a worldwide leader in interactive entertainment both inside and outside the home. The company develops, publishes and distributes interactive entertainment software products for a variety of hardware platforms including PC, wireless devices, and those manufactured by Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. SEGA of America?s Web site is located at www.sega.com.

About PlatinumGames:
PlatinumGames Inc. is an independent entertainment development studio located in Osaka, Japan and is dedicated to making high quality, next generation games for a variety of hardware platforms. Previously established as ODD Ltd. in February 2006, the company changed its name to ODD Inc. in July 2006. In October 2007, ODD merged with SEEDS Inc., a company established by ex-key members of Clover Studio Co. Ltd, a subsidiary company of Capcom. Thereafter the company changed its name to PlatinumGames Inc.[/quote]

This is some of the best news I?ve read in a awfully long time , I know some like to make out SEGA and NCL is a partnership made in Heaven , but to me Capcom have always been the corp. that?s most closely resemble the SEGA ways even down to the money worries and Studio structure .

This is just a brilliant deal and can see both corps working wonders together ?. Mad world just looks vibrant and fresh (so of like Sin City) and Bayonetta sounds so promising and cool , as a big Steel Battalion fan I?m just made up to have SEGA/Nude Maker making a next game .

Hope Shinji Mikami game is one the 360

This brilliant news and I hope a sign of things to come. Now I hope SEGA can market the games properly , that?s no easy task

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I really thought Mikami would swallow his pride and stay at Capcom. Oh well. Devil May Cry merged oldschool Capcom with the next generation in a way I never thought possible. Shame it went downhill (quality-wise IMO), but he’d be partly why.

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Devil May Cry was Hideki Kamiya’s creation (the guy behind Resident Evil 2, Viewtiful Joe, and Okami). I believe you’re thinking of Resident Evil 4.

Kamiya’s next game, Bayonetta, looks awesome btw.

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It was probably moreso due to the fact that the original development team didn’t work on DMC2~4…

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Sega might be doing some smart decisions here. Between this and the partnerships with Silicon Knights and Bioware…let’s wait and see.

In all fairness though I think Platinum might represent the sort of games I hope will evolve - “game-y games”. Too gameplay centered. And yes, for me at least, there IS such a thing as too much focus on gameplay.

I don’t care if it’s a satire - games like God Hand could be so much more then they actually are if other elements were given attention.

I’m with Denis Dyack (president of Silicon Knights) when it comes to a need for change in order for the industry to be taken seriously. I do believe games can be the 8th artform.

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Videogames already are an art form, but they sure as hell wont get any closer to being recognized as such by holding them to standards of existing storytelling mediums. I admit I’m quite surprised (in a good way) that Steven Spielberg seems to have some genuine understanding and respect for that, if Boom Blox is anything to go by. I have not played it yet (still no Wii, but soon) but it sounds very ‘pure’ and uniquely digitally interactive.

And while I may understand what you mean by too much gameplay Gehn, I could never agree, at least not in such general terms. For that is the absolute center of the issue, these are GAMES! In a sense this medium brings the cycle of play and learning full circle, storytelling began as an interactive experience… recreation, instruction, preservation of history and wisdom all in one. Myths were born of untold individuals adding their own moral spin to those stories.

On a case by case basis, yes there are many examples of ‘gameplay’ getting in the way of the overall experience. But there are at least as many examples of superfluous narrative getting in the way of said same experience. It’s not a matter of anything being objectively bad, or “too much”, but rather that there are very very few good rules that have been found as yet. This is the most complex medium EVER, because it can - and does - incorporate any and EVERY discipline from any and every other medium, EVER. And then some…

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While I understand where you are coming from, one of the great things about games in my opinion is the lack of need to conform to any specific format.

Would Tetris, for example, be a better game because it had a narrative? I don’t think it would - mechanically, it’s still one of the most perfect puzzle games ever created.

In order for games to be taken more seriously as an artform, the games that strive to be creative through narrative means need to mature. And the critics of those games need to study art beyond games, much like true movie critics do.

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My comment wasn’t about the conflict between story and gameplay for airtime, but about the lack of interest in intertwining the numerous aspects that make the final product.

I’m not saying every game needs to have a story with philosophical implications, or anything. I’m saying the context of the gameplay needs to be improved.

Completely agree. And that is why…

…take Rez as an example. Even though it features no introduction to the actual beginning of the gameplay, it takes but a few seconds for you to be well aware of the measurements that define your game world. You know your limits and you know what you need to do. It’s a simple game. It doesn’t put you in this complex world, filled with characters and multiple paths and cutscenes. So it doesn’t get burned.

However when you start looking at a game like Devil May Cry with it’s stupid one-liners, clich?s, (arguable) sense of style and characters you begin to think why did they bother with it’s game world. The quality of everything that wraps up the gameplay is so questionable that it ends up hurting the final product. For me at least. The game would be just as good with stick figures slashing each other.

I’ve developed tough skin over the years (so I could enjoy gems like Ninja Gaiden etc), but every time I play a game that gets both the gameplay and the game world right, I question myself as to why I play the other games in the first place.

If you aren’t going to grant a certain level of detail and believability to your game world (this encapsulates a myriad of aspects [art, narrative, music etc]) you are certainly not creating art.

Much like the first motion pictures, these games are but thrill rides. That doesn’t mean we can’t have “fest for the senses” movies in the year 2008 (we have, many) , but you can deliver them with a little more finesse. Context is everything.

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Oh, I agree… but that’s like assuming that every writer that’s ever written a book should be capable of creating great works of art. It just doesn’t work that way. Some people/teams are good at doing gameplay. Some are good at telling a story. Very few get it all done right.

For me, DMC’s gameplay was very well done (for the most part) and the story was simply there to just provide an excuse to slash demons with cool looking weapons, but they were smart enough to keep the story to a minimum to prevent it from intruding in on gameplay. But take something like Jeanne D’Arc on PSP. Good SRPG gameplay, but horrid, horrid story that gets shoved in your face at every turn. My only gripe in those situations is for developers to learn their strengths and weaknesses and focus on the strengths.

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Indeed you are correct, but Mikami was still the executive producer and DMC was originally envisioned to be a Resident Evil game. You could argue that this is why it ended up becoming so special in its own right.

But really, if you want to deny that Mikami was a remarkable person at Capcom, go ahead. His work on the RE series and this went a long way to making it the success it was.

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[quote=“Abadd”]

It was probably moreso due to the fact that the original development team didn’t work on DMC2~4…[/quote]

Weird how that happened. Industry politics aren’t really my cup of tea.

I really cannot believe how bad DMC2 was compared to the first. It left me wondering if it really was the sequel.

DMC4 has that minimalistic art style you were talking about a few years ago in that the lack of realism in the models due to the style really shows. Maybe it’s just me (Dante looks like a plastic model).

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[quote=“Geoffrey Duke”]
But really, if you want to deny that Mikami was a remarkable person at Capcom, go ahead.[/quote]

Why would I want to do that? I loved Resident Evil 4.

And I’m not too sure how much creative control an executive producer has on a project, but I’d guess it’s not that much, so I’m still confused why you think Mikami’s lack of involvement in the DMC sequels was the reason for their decline in quality.

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Responding to the general aether of the discussion from my last post here… I think part of what I’m trying to define is that, more than simply the rule of mediocrity - which is clearly the main portion of the ‘problem’ regardless - and the general lack of well understood principles: there’s still a very profound schism in the attitudes of many people, even those who love and create these games. Aside from the huge challenges in finding innovative ways to merge story and mechanics, there’s rarely any evidence to be seen of even a rudimentary attempt at such, one side has clear priority and the other is given the minimum effort to meet minimum expectations.

Basically, we may be waiting for our Citizen Kane of videogames, something that grabs a mainstream and yet elitist kind of attention firestorm, and ratifies the medium as something that can indeed play on peoples emotions and intellect in a way that is unique. Which we already know is true of course… but, in part because of the barriers to participation, which I know Abadd is very concerned with, there’s no way to prove that to most people.

And until that finally happens, the Holy Grail in question isn’t actually tangible. There isn’t really a climate of respect for the possibilities, there’s hardly even a hint of concern for progress on this issue to be found in the median expectations for this product. So it’s far far easier to continue mining other well established protocols from the most superficially equivalent art forms.

DMC4… seems like kind of a good example for me, of just that problem. I was quite looking forward to it, but in this case playing the demo made me lose interest. I still want to actually play the game and really judge sometime, but it just doesn’t seem like the kind of thing I’ll care about, and it’s hard not to judge everything by Ninja Gaiden now… though the mechanics are totally solid on the most basic level, it seems even more like a pure slaughterhouse than ever: even though you’re fighting the same things over and over again in both games, the critical difference that defines where the art truly begins for myself, is that playing Ninja Gaiden - at least for the most part - you don’t feel like you’re *in the exact same fight *over and over. Each setup promotes very different reactions to stimulus that, at the same time, has comfortably expected parameters.

So by those standards, DMC4 may meet the minimum expectation on both story and mechanical levels, even representing a somewhat even handling of them, but it fails to be any kind of a work of art as a videogame or anything else really. So maybe it’s like this… videogames are a victim of their own unique power, since they can engage so automatically on so many levels, and since the most automatic level is the easiest to achieve - that being keeping the player mechanically ‘busy’ - even fewer people are likely to analyze they’re true “enjoyment” of the experience.

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I don’t think we can expect the same sort of phenomenon as Citizen Kane. It may happen, but the way our culture works, the way we consume our entertainment is vastly different now than it was all those years ago. In my opinion, something Bioshock very well could be the Citizen Kane of the game industry. It shows how you can marry in-your-face FPS type action with a deeper, more philosophical story (and also takes “game-y” elements, i.e. the mission arrow, and really ties it in with the narrative to an amazing effect).

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You’re probably right Abadd… and actually Bioshock represents another part of the issue, again for myself at least. FPS’s are very particular for me, and something about the ‘feel’ of Bioshock just doesn’t work, at a purely mechanical level. And that reflects another angle on the issue of complexity, since by the same token videogames can disengage on so many levels as well.

Almost like chemistry, two people could be absolutely perfect for each other according to every measurable precedent, but if they just smell wrong then the rest is meaningless.