5pb teases new project with former Cave producer Mako Asada

[Eaglet]

In order to make a good game in any genre you need to at least have a basic idea of how to play something from the given genre.
As evidenced by Asada's demonstration of the SDOJ 360-port (don't know if anybody remembers this) - he doesn't.

[bcass]

In order to make a good game in any genre you need to at least have a basic idea of how to play something from the given genre.
As evidenced by Asada's demonstration of the SDOJ 360-port (don't know if anybody remembers this) - he doesn't.

Have you ever seen any of the other Cave team members play their own games?

[mastermx]

so I'd be surprised if he's competent at basically anything.

A bit harsh don't you think? So much hate, so little respect...

[KAI]

Have you ever seen any of the other Cave team members play their own games?

At least the other members don't go out there saying things like "I suck at shmups".

[mastermx]

I believe this is a cultural Japanese thing. Trying to stay humble.

[Eaglet]

Have you ever seen any of the other Cave team members play their own games?

None of the programmers, only Daisuke Matsumoto (bombah).
I do know that they (IKD and YGW) have been competent players at one time or another though.

I believe this is a cultural Japanese thing. Trying to stay humble.

No. He truly does suck. At least he's being honest.

[trap15]

YGW can clear Pink Sweets, so there's that.

[casualcoder]

People always love to pick favourites. The thing is if a company like cave disbands and all of its members run off and become potato farmers you lose that representation in the larger community of game developers. The less you see of these people, the less you see the types of games they've worked on. Cave has almost singlehandedly kept this genre legitimate for the last 10 years so I would be careful to wish away any member of any recent shmup development team even if it were not a favourite.

[Eaglet]

It's not about picking favourites (even though YGW is awesome, obviously) but more about the fact that literally nothing that have made CAVE's games good, interesting etc. has come from Asada.
His career is littered with a lot of strange decisions.

[casualcoder]

That may or may not be true. It's hard to say exactly what he was responsible for one way or the other. Bad decisions have been made by many people across many companies so I don't know if Asada deserves such responsibility for whatever the backlash is about. I suppose I'm seeing a lot of people pointing fingers at developers across the board, often resulting in good, creative people leaving the industry. I can't say how many of those people should be leaving the industry but I figure bad decisions will speak for themselves and the industry will eventually stop hiring those types (remember, Yagawa was considered as producing one bad decision after the other if it weren't for Ikeda bringing him on board due to his own personal fondness for his production style).

I certainly would be disheartened if I looked at the community I was developing for and heard mostly negative comments. Deserved or not, I just don't think people have as much authority on commenting as they think they do in the absence of some over-arching evidence of someone ruining something that was great to begin with (such as MercurySteam's handling of the Castlevania brand, alienating most of its core community).

I am a bit disappointed about how some stuff was done in recent years. The rush job on DSII, AKS original mode, DDP-DFK. But these are still great games that we may not even get in such fine detail ever again as the originators start moving on to other things.

[Eaglet]

Calling Asada a "developer" or "creator" is misgiving when talking about STGs.
He wouldn't know the first thing about developing an arcade STG.
His bad decisions are mostly market related.
I'm just going to leave it at that.

edit:
Just for the record;
New game = horse racing visual novel
You heard it here first.

[chempop]

My understanding is that if it weren't for Asada we wouldn't have the pile of 360 ports.
For that alone he is a shmup-angel-take-my-first-born-worthy-guy.

[colour_thief]

Just posting to call this:

It will be a shmup.
It will have a virt soundtrack.

I can dream.

[bcass]

Given that the gods of accurate ports didn't get their Cave port perfect (M2), people should probably give Asada a little bit of credit. That stuttering bug in Mushi Futari, that was never patched, is easily the worst deficiency in any Cave port ever.

[antares]

If you copy the Futari DLC to a USB stick the stuttering will never occur again.

[CloudyMusic]

I have the Futari DLC (and my profile, and everything else) on my hard drive and I've never once seen the stuttering issue with over 200 hours clocked on that game. It's strange.

[antares]

That's not strange, as most people never experienced it. Afair it only occured on certain 360 models / hdd combinations.

[CloudyMusic]

Ah, the way people seemed to talk about it, it sounded like an almost-universal issue.

To try and stay topic, I'll say that I'm cautiously optimistic about this. Yeah, Asada's not perfect, and he doesn't have a deep history with STGs, but as a producer (and not a developer/planner/programmer), he doesn't have to be. I'm mostly just hoping that there'll be some way to play this if it does turn out to be a STG. I am probably not going to buy an Xbox One any time soon, and I am sure as hell not importing one.

[bcass]

The Xbox One is region free, so you won't need to import one, should you ever decide to buy one.

[brentsg]

edit:
Just for the record;
New game = horse racing visual novel
You heard it here first.

Hello Kitty riding a virtual racehorse, with plenty of cutscenes and a virtual dating element sprinkled in. Imagine the awesomeness!

[TrevHead (TVR)]

If you copy the Futari DLC to a USB stick the stuttering will never occur again.

Thx for the tip, it would be nice to get rid of the juddering even if it only happens a couple of times in each run (often just before a boss fight)

As for the topic on hand, I never understood why so many ppl don't (like) Asada, but I never took any interest in what roles and impact the individual devs had on CAVE's games outside of Yagawa or IKD.

[Pretas]

Given that the gods of accurate ports didn't get their Cave port perfect (M2), people should probably give Asada a little bit of credit. That stuttering bug in Mushi Futari, that was never patched, is easily the worst deficiency in any Cave port ever.

Agreed. Gulti are the true gods of accurate ports. If only they were allowed to work on more games than Raiden Fighters.

[neorocker]

Asada's just a producer, makes sure the money goes to the right places and revenue happens. Calls executive shots and for changes for things to cash harder.

[Skykid]

Asada's just a producer, makes sure the money goes to the right places and revenue happens. Calls executive shots and for changes for things to cash harder.

So is he responsible for Cave being in the poorhouse?

[mastermx]

According to an interview with asada I read a while back, he wasn't just at first working on the business side of things. He was also a programmer for cave.

[nasty_wolverine]

According to an interview with asada I read a while back, he wasn't just at first working on the business side of things. He was also a programmer for cave.

Remember, those who dont cut it, are promoted to management.

[bcass]

According to the interview rancor translated, Asada first started at Cave as a games tester. In the same interview he states that he had programming duties on the Mushi, Galuda II, and Deathsmiles IIX 360 ports, so he wasn't just some faceless manager as some people are incorrectly assuming in this thread.

Source: http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=35789

People should read it. It sounds like they were all severely overworked (often working on 3 projects at once), which he himself blames for the bugs.

[adversity1]

Just a few points checked against the book text:

When I first got into the world of programming games ↓
When I first got into the game industry

When I first joined Cave my job was to test completed games. ↓
When I was still an underling, my job was to test completed games.

This was during the XBOX 360 releases of Mushihime-sama, Galuda II Black, and Deathsmiles IIX. Not only was I behind the scenes programming these games, but I also had to attend our matsuri events as well as attend press conferences and game conventions. ↓
This was during the XBOX 360 releases of Mushihime-sama, Galuda II Black, and Deathsmiles IIX. I was participating in vendor events as well, so the period between the Tokyo Game Show in September and the release of Deathsmiles IIX in May was really hard on me.

[gray117]

According to the interview rancor translated, Asada first started at Cave as a games tester. In the same interview he states that he had programming duties on the Mushi, Galuda II, and Deathsmiles IIX 360 ports, so he wasn't just some faceless manager as some people are incorrectly assuming in this thread.

Source: http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=35789

People should read it. It sounds like they were all severely overworked (often working on 3 projects at once), which he himself blames for the bugs.

Taken on face value, and from a western perspective, he comes across extremely poorly - a loosely explained jumble. Now in all fairness there's probably something akin false modesty going on here. Programming duties? Maybe something more akin to scripting, to be honest this is probably more the kind of thing you'll see 'designers' getting into, not 'programmer', he's not writing tools or new parallel systems - not to say there's not important work to be done, but there's no possible way he'd be holding down a fully involved code job.

... 2 to 3 projects? Fair enough there's some organisation there, but this is not everyone, and frankly that's utterly normal for a smallish developer to have at least 2 projects (current and next one) if not more (ports, and several possible future ones in case one gets canned) - again I'm not saying this is easy, but this is exactly why you have producers.

From a business standpoint? Baffling, especially if true, who in their right mind would see this as an attractive partner to jump into bed with? Go find a grown up who has the ability and authority to take care of themselves, projects and staff.

[bcass]

All the Cave 360 ports are generally very highly regarded, except by a tiny (tiny) hardcore minority. On the face of it, I'd imagine that would seem like an impressive line-up of releases to have overseen. I imagine that's what made him look like someone worth partnering with.