PixlBit

Valkyria Chronicles and Ni no Kuni alone are worth getting a PS3 for.

Nintendo went with the Wii's choice in design consciously. They knew it would be useless to compete head-on with Sony (and Microsoft, to a lesser degree) in specs, so they went for cheap and widely available. It worked, although the third parties pushing ultra-expensive cinematic experiences didn't bite.

An optimal environment would be Nintendo's first-party combined with Sony's third-party community, which includes both Eastern and Western developers, but I think in order to get the benefit of such a pairing, it would have to be on Nintendo's terms rather than Sony's terms. An unintended consequence of Nintendo going third party, at least from the standpoint of gamers lusting after Nintendo's catalogue without having to buy the hardware to play it on, would be the inevitable narrowing of Nintendo's focus down to one or two cash-cow franchises that would occur. Much like Sega of today is pretty much all about Sonic, Football Manager, and Total War these days, with almost all of its other franchises on indefinite hiatus or stuck in Japan,  Nintendo would be pretty much nothing but Mario and Pokemon. Almost every third party developer nowadays trades on a small handful of successful cash-cow properties, with anything that isn't a blockbuster abandoned by the wayside. Even EA pretty much runs on annual Battlefield, FIFA, and Madden anymore.

On a related note, I know a lot of analysts are really pushing for Nintendo to move into the Android/iOS space, but I don't think Nintendo would be very successful in that space. The economics of the mobile market would set Nintendo up to fail. Freemium and 99-cent games have created a race to the bottom in the mobile space.  Mobile players piss and moan if the price goes up any more than that. The market rewards them with games that are accordingly low in production values and design that are little more than blantant cashgrabs. The mobile space may be a far bigger ocean than the hardcore space, but flood any ocean, no matter how big it is, with shit, and nothing but parasites can survive in there.

I have yet to touch Dark Souls, but I do of course have Demon's Souls. I like it because it's a throwback to old-school dungeon crawling such as I enjoyed on the Atari 8-bit computers. Those computers were great gaming computers and had a few rather good RPGs. I may as well take the plunge on Dark Souls II.

What I meant is that it's ingrained in US culture. Even those of us who are less uptight about sexual content are subject to it, to a certain degree. Gears of War had gratuitous blood and gore, nobody batted an eye. Mass Effect had a sex scene but little violence, Fox News had a cow. Even the ESRB ratings reflect this. A game with gratuitous blood and gore is on the top rack in Wal-Mart with a M rating and would be advertised heavily by Microsoft or Sony as the must-have game of the holiday season. A game with explicit sex scenes, even with zero violence, would be an automatic AO rating and would not even be approved for release by Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft. It's a cultural thing in this country. We've always glorified war and fighting and been ashamed of sex.

It's part of the American Puritan/Calvinist mentality. "Suggestions of sex - evil; gratuitous violence - good."

Lollipop Chainsaw is great. Probably my favorite Suda 51 game to date. It's not Bayonetta, but I like its style and it plays well enough.

Agarest War is from Red Entertainment, the folks who made the hugely popular Sakura Wars games on Saturn, Dreamcast, and PS2. The PS2 Sakura Wars is one of my favorite games of all time. These games aren't quite up to that standard, but they aren't bad, either. I will admit they have the obnoxiously bobbing breasts in the visual novel scenes, but other than that, I don't see why people would bitch about it.

This makes a Vita purchase more compelling.

I downloaded the PS4 version today. It's apparently free for PS+ subscribers. I played around with it a bit, but sadly I didn't get it. And I usually love sim-style games.

I do hope that the PS4 makes a splash in Japan. I prefer my game library to be well-rounded with titles from the East as well as from the West. There were good games from the big Japanese developers on the PS3, but you sadly had to look for them. That said, Namco has become one of the best publishers in Japan, with some of the best output I've seen from that company. Even there, though, they're not embracing the PS4 immediately. The next Tales game, Zestiria, will be on PS3.

I think I remember that first BaD. I wasn't a part of it. At this point, I call it good if I can manage a Blog a Month. :)