GoNintendo 'End of Day' thought - Localization woes

Talk about some crazy cat action at the warehouse. As most of you know, we adopted a cat just last week. Here we are a few days later, and one of the cats that roams the warehouse grounds just gave birth to 5 kittens! She gave birth on our deck without us even knowing, and now she’s taken up a makeshift home in the same spot. Tough to kick a mommy out of her spot, especially with new kids to worry about. Who knows what cat fun the next day will bring! See you in a few, short hours.

Earlier today, I was thinking about how much my life as a gamer has changed over the years. This is in relation to gaming exclusively, and nothing to do with my connection to the industry through this site. I don’t know what got the thought into my head, but I couldn’t stop pondering just how different my video game thoughts are today compared to how things were 10 years ago. Unfortunately, I have been focusing on one particularly negative aspect.

There’s no shortage of great games to play, that’s for sure. With that said, there are always going to be certain games that you want to play more than others. Back in the day, all we had to do was wait for those titles to show up. You’d follow previews and reviews in magazines, and then a few months later you’d wander into your local game store and take a copy home. Things are much different nowadays, as the industry has gotten even bigger. That means many more games to check out, as well as titles that aren’t ever going to see release in our part of the world.

Yes, there have been games that didn’t get localized since the NES days, but in today’s gaming world it seems like we talk about non-localized games a lot more. I just can’t decide if there’s one single element that is leading to this. First off, it’s much easier to get information on games all around the world, thanks to the internet. When we only had magazines to go off of, it was much harder to learn about games that weren’t already on the schedule for release in our territory. For every game that doesn’t get localized today, I’m sure there was an equal game back in the day that met the same fate.

Was I just blissfully ignorant back in the day, or are publishers being a bit more stingy with titles that see worldwide release? In particular, Nintendo has been pretty rough to deal with this console generation. I can count a bunch of titles that I wanted to see localized, but they were never meant to be. Some even made it over to Europe, but didn’t make the jump to North America. That’s all well and good for DS games, as I can pop them into a DS here and play them no problem. When it comes to Wii games, you have to go about some…*ahem* different methods to play those. Needless to say, it’s not the easiest way to play that content, and many of us gamers will go without those titles we’ve pined over.

Do you feel like localization is more of a fight in today’s generation than it was last console generation, or even further back? There’s certainly more begging for localization today, but that might be a product of having so many outlets to make the request. Still, I feel like companies aren’t really taking as many chances as they used to. Game making is a business first, and sometimes these companies just don’t feel like there’s going to be a worldwide market for their titles. Am I just being a whiny gamer, or are you feeling the pain of unlocalized titles as well?