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[Addicted to Chaos]

I recently was viewing the Segagaga site and stumbled upon an interesting fact about Japanese Retrogaming. It's the blurb at bottom of page two of their gaming in Japan feature;

http://www.segagagadomain.com/junk/retrogaming.htm

Anyways, I suggest reading this whole thing as it's mostly pictures with small blurbs and very interesting if you are a gaming collector.


Now back to my point. In that Blub it said that the Saturn in Japan was big unlike anywhere else, something I knew, as is Saturn Retrogaming. However, while PSX retrogaming is plentiful, they just don't sell!   Something I didn't know.

Now I'll mention that I love PSX gaming to this day still, and even though I love the Saturn better, I try not to let this affect my judgement between game quality on both systems (what I like, I like, then I even take a further step to ask myself if deep down it's because I'm biased too). But still, there has to be a pro Sega bias that I'm not aware to be realistic. I just wanted this out of the way.

Now what I want to know is if Japanese gamers are more hardcore for preffering the Saturn over the PSX and others elsewhere in the world are not as much (granted Japanese gamer had way more Saturn titles - something to keep in mind).

Simple question... or is it?

I know every time I read online in regards to the Saturn or Dreamcast, I always read something like it's "for more hardcore gamers!" Or something to that like? So... then all these sites are right? And not just trippin' hardcore on a full dose of Sega bias?...

[meppi]

Been doing a lot of thinking about this topic before I dared to reply and I must say, in the end I just don't know.

I think what we all call "hardcore gamers" between us is not the same group of people that the general public or even most publishers call "hardcore" in this day and age.
Having said that, under the terms we group them or us, I think we're speaking of a small group of gamers.
One that doesn't mind playing old or new games. Doesn't care about graphics too much and prefers art design over polygon count.
One who doesn't look down upon other types of games, be that motion controls or iPhone games for instance.

I don't think there are a lot more of these gamers out there in Japan compared to the rest of the world.
Certainly not today when you look at the weekly sales data which is filled with, for a lack of a better word "casual games".
Again, the same thing goes for the rest of the world.

What I do believe is that there is a larger gamer population in Japan that still loves the pureness of arcadey games design.
This goes to show when you look at the numbers of arcades (new and retro ones) in Japan compared to the west.

I'm not really sure what happened in Japan this past decade when it comes to games and the change in demographics.
It sure has taken the focus of console gaming and concentrated most of the attention to portables.
But it also seems that just like in the West, the old genres have had a huge decline if popularity.
ONly these past 2 years or even less have we slowly witnessed the return of the one on one fighting games for instance.

Not sure if a lot of gamers just stopped playing when games started to evolve around 2000 and upwards, or that they, perhaps like a lot of us on here started looking back at the good old days and went into buying classics they might have missed for the old systems.

In the 80s and 90's I would have agreed, I think, that Japanese gamers and taste in games were more hardcore then the overall western ones. But today, not really.