Bad Timing

This was going to be a post about the five games I plan on purchasing this fall.  That could sound a bit slim, but really, with the amount of unplayed / unfinished / unopened games I have, it is the only rational thing to do.

But as soon as I realized that I'd be listing "Yakuza" - coming out next Wednesday - as the first game on the list, it occured to me how pitiful many companies are at timing release dates.  For the amount of time it takes western developers to finish games that have been repeatedly delayed, eastern developers seem to make up for it by delaying North American releases for months, just to have some really, really crappy voice acting and localization thrown in.  Europe gets it even worse, and that is becoming the largest game market.  This at least shows some forward thinking on the part of a company like Konami that releases Metal Gear Solid titles in the larger market firsts.  It also probably helps that some crappy non-games will outsell quality titles in Japan, so why rush into a crap pile when you can make the money first elsewhere.  Anyway, starting with the most recent, Yakuza, here are some genuinely bad moves in releases timing:

1. Yakuza - I am one of the few who enjoyed the Shenmue games, and this seems like the olive branch to fans of the series for having it killed at the hands of Sega of America (more on that below).  But this game was finished and released in Japan quite some time ago.  It is all Japanese characters, in Japan, doing Jappy things.  Why delay this so long just to add lousy voice acting?  Once again there is a summer devoid of really great console releases (PC and PSP were actually pretty good in this regard) and when do they release it?  September 5th (or 6th since nobody ever actually sells the games the day they are shipped), the very first day of my autumn semester.  Great work Sega.  Maybe I'll get around to playing this in December, and hopefully the price drops by then.  If you can't release the damn game when I have time to play it, you're not getting full M$RP on it.
2. Resident  Evil 4 - For the amount of (over)hype this game received, you'd think it has sold five million copies in the U.S. alone.  Much like the actual quality of the game, "not even close."  The release date in January on Gamecube worked because there was absolutely nothing else out that month, as GTASA, Half-Life 2, Halo 2, and MGS3 had just been released about eight weeks before.  Releasing it on the PS2 at the same time as The Warriors, Shadow of the Collosus, and Soul Calibur 3?  Dumb.  I bought it right when it came out in one of those Toys 'R Us 3-4-2 deals, but I wish I hadn't. 
3. Soul Calibur 2 - This is another case of a localization that took way, way too long.  It came out in March 2003 in Japan but took nearly six months to get it out in the U.S.  It takes that long to translate some text and one-liners in a fighting game?  Further ruining the release timing on this game was the useless crap it had, and its pricing relative to a superior product.  People think Soul Calibur 3 came out too soon and was a rush job, but that is not the case.  Soul Calibur came out in Arcades in 1997, and then the superlative Dreamcast version came out in 98/99 to coincide with the Dreamcast launches in each territory.  Soul Calibur 2 came out in arcades in early 2002 and should have been a console release later that year.  But thanks to Nintendo, Namco went and added a useless character to each console version, plus a genuinely awful Todd McFarlane character in addition to Spawn in the Xbox version.  The game was unbalanced, the extra characters sucked, and it took too long to come out.  Soul Calibur 3 coming out in 2005 was not the problem - three installments in eight years does not even come close to milking a franchise, particularly for fighting games.  But it took them so long to get SC2 out, and it came out two weeks after VF4 Evo which was far superior in gameplay, had a ton more features (and they were actually useful features), and cost $30 less.  SC2 ended up being one of the most underwhelming software releases ever.
4. Shenmue II - Only Sega could be this stupid.  Take a franchise that cost a lot of money to make, and cancel the Dreamcast release in the one territory where it could sell decently - North America.  This was the final blow that proved how little Sega cared for their fans, and ultimately ended up as a hilarious backfire on them.  It came out a year later on Xbox with no worthwhile upgrades, horrible voice acting, and released on the same day as one of the most anticipated games ever - GTA Vice City.  You could write essays on this one, but hey, I had already played it a year before then since it actually cost less to import the European PAL version and all you needed was a utopia boot disc to play it.  Nice work, dumbasses.
5. Devil May Cry 3 - I just remembered this one out of order, but it is easy to list what was wrong:  they released it sandwhiched inbetween Gran Turismo 4, Tekken 5, and God of War.  This is one of those cases where you'll say you'll pick the game up later and then never get around to it.  Maybe if I see the SE for $9.99 somewhere.
6. Onimusha 2 - Take the sequel to a high sellling, original IP and release it on the same day as:  Madden NFL 2003, SOCOM, the network adapters that worked with the two aforementioned titles, and Super Mario Sunshine.  Brilliant timing.

Capcom dominates the list, with Sega a strong second.  Woefully unsurprising, this is.