May 17, 2008. Japan gaming standards and American gamers.

You know, there's a big difference from how Americans and Japanese play games and in what they want to see in their games. We'll list them here for you.

The biggest annoyance is definitely the CGI cutscene in game advertising. This is Bayonetta, a new action game from Sega. Now this could be actual gameplay, but probably not. Sega loves CGI cutscenes. Why not use the ingame engine? Probably because it just isn't as good looking. Which leaves us wondering about the quality of the gameplay graphics.

Why do Japanese developers like to give you a rank for completing the game? We didn't like grades when we were in school, so do we really need them in our games? What's the point of finishing a game with a D grade or an A grade? And why is there an S grade?

Why do Japanese developers like to tell crazy stories about God and man and morality? Now Metal Gear Solid 4 is not on the 360 (yet), but its creator and alot of others like him love to preach about weird things that don't make any sense. Maybe they would in Japanese, but a society that has school girl panties in their vending machines is probably not a good place to learn about morality.

The Japanese are fascinated with girly men. Maybe they get this fascination from their girly men rockstars, but back in the 80s we had Boy George, and nobody straight went around dressing like him. Yet in Japan, it's a cool thing to want to look girly.

Lastly, we get to another dreaded problem with Japanese games. The teenage angst RPG. Again, we don't know why the Japanese are obsessed with teenagers who have the hots for each other, but can't express them. It was good in Final Fantasy VII, but then got annoying by Final Fantasy VIII. So why keep releasing games with this problem?

We thank Japan for giving us great games in the 90s and for providing hot Japanese women to oogle on the Internet, but something should be done about what gets put into these games circa 2008 because it's getting tired.