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My second to last job before now (where I'm unemployed) was a call center - Stream International in Beaverton, OR. Due to something of the nature of the place, and the stress level, we got hour breaks instead of half-hour breaks. Thus, we had time to savor our lunch and, perhaps most importantly, goof off some. In the breakroom, hooked up to a fairly large TV was a soft-modded original Xbox, with an emulator running on it. Amongst the various MAME roms on there was Street Fighter Alpha 3.
I'd had some prior experience playing Street Fighter Alpha 3 against the AI, but I never really played much against people. Most of the fighting games at my local arcade - Family Fun Center in Wilsonville, were 3D games, and were generally left alone in favor of the Light Gun games. So, consequently, when I started playing Alpha 3 against my co-workers, I got my ass beat, and good. Still, I kept at it, and kept at it for a year, constantly getting smoked, but slowly improving with my main guy - Ryu. Not Ken - I can't intentionally do a Dragon Punch motion. I am fairly good though at doing a Hadouken motion - and thus I can pull off the Shinkuu Hadouken fairly reliably.
After a year, I've been improving, and can win a few matches against people. However, I'm not that good at the best player there - K. K came in the same time I did, and was in my same training class. K is, obviously, his nickname. This is in part because he is Hawaiian, and his first name is just tricky enough to pronounce for Haoles like me that rather than listen to us constantly mangle it, he asks us call him K.
So, anyway, I've improved over the last year, but what I can't do is beat K. So, at about the year and a quarter mark, I come in at lunch, and K's on his break, at the machine. I sit down and we start in a match. There's no line so we can just play as we wish. I stick with Ryu, and K bounces around between his go-to, Gokui/Akuma, and various other characters. As we get to the end of K's break, we've got a bit of a crowd forming up behind us, though nobody really wants to play yet - it's midday, and there's nothing on TV to watch, so we're the best show in the room. We get to the last match before K has to leave, and I still haven't won a match yet. I win a round here and there, but never a match.
So, we get to the last match before K has to get back on the line. K switches back to Akuma, while I still stay on Ryu. I win the first round, K wins the second. The last match goes until, basically, both of us are down to the last dregs of our life bar. K goes for an jumping attack, or jumps forward, or something like that - I don't remember the precise details, and I land a Shinkuu Hadouken, and win the match. We get a smattering of applause from the peanut gallery for my win, K and I shake hands, and K returns to his shift. The next guy sits down and I'm so buzzed from my last match, and trying to wrap my brain around what happened... that I lose. XD
I saw K not too long ago, at Ground Kontrol in Portland. I was playing Street Fighter IV on the big screen, and wasn't doing great. To be honest, this is in part because I was playing on an Arcade stick. I have no prior experience playing on an arcade stick, and have played fighting games on a D-Pad for most of my life. Consequently, and I know it's bad form to blame your controller, I don't have the muscle memory for playing on an arcade stick. But, hey, if I win, that's something I'll hopefully be able to build up.
Thank you for reading my wayyyy too long entry - which probably could have been it's own column. ;-)"
Let me put it this way. Next time you go to Target, or K-Mart, or even Best Buy, particularly this week, when Etrian Odyssey comes out, tell me if you can see any copies of any games from Atlus, or NIS, or Square Enix games aside from Final Fantasy titles. And these aren't necessarily publishers who publish constantly iterating annual sequels, like Activision or EA. Dragon Quest only comes out every few years. Same with Final Fantasy. There was a 2-3 year gap between Persona 3's release and Persona 4, though it seems smaller because of the release of Persona 3 FES.
Big Box retailers know that Madden and Call of Duty will sell. They're less willing to take a chance on some more obscure series like Phoenix Wright, Etrian Odyssey, or Persona - especially with anime-style art and, in the case of Persona, a Mature rating. And it's not like those series would go away in Japan - Used Games are perfectly legal there, and those series do fairly well there. It's just American fans, smaller American publishers and developers (responsible for local domestic titles and translation and localization of foreign releases), and American jobs.
And that's it in a nutshell - used games save jobs, from the translator at Atlus USA, to the small game developer who gets a physical copy of his game in stores, to the publisher of the small developers game, to the clerk at Gamestop who puts it on the shelf. All of this because used game sales pad out Gamestop's bottom line."
Hell, even in the US, $250 can be pricey to some income brackets. For me, the price of the 3DS is also the price of a car payment. Also keep in mind that the economy is still in the crapper, and there are still massive numbers of unemployed people out there, some of whom are gamers. I don't even own a Xbox 360 yet, and that's a higher priority to me then a 3DS."