As much as I want the mobile garbage gaming market destroyed, government regulation isn't the way I want that done.
Are you referring to self-regulation then?
It's not specific to Asian food, it's most restaurants in general. The hole in the wall is always the best food. Generally it means it's been there for a long time, doesn't spend it's resources on marketing and appearances, yet has been around long enough that it clearly has customers. Which means if nobody's going for the atmosphere, they're doing it for the food. The place that spends fortunes on appearances is generally trying to lure people in for atmosphere and is often more style than substance, pure marketing. They're usually average at best. Sometimes you get both, and those usually have a price tag to match. :) Whether it's a Chinese, Italian, or otherwise it usually steers me right. The nice pretty places generally have food that leaves me wondering "it's ok, but I paid that much for THIS?" But when I saw the (now gone :() Chinese place that looked like it hadn't been updated since the mid-1970's out of date, out of time, and looking worn I knew I wanted to eat there. And I was right. Best place ever. Great people that owned it too! Then another one, tiny strip mall, faded light boards that looks like exactly what you'd see in an open market in China - kind of dumpy, slammed on yelp. I knew it would be great. And it is! The fancy place owned by the famous chef with marble floors? Kind of average food for more money than the others. Same goes for pizza places. The old dumpy one will have the best pizza with top notch ingredients compared to the fancy new place that blew the budget on signage and buys low bid ingredients but convinces people it's good because the place is nice. (That's a whole different conversation, but it amazes me in food how many people have no idea how to decide what is quality and what is not, but will accept the one they're told is supposed to be good and is presented as upscale as actually being so, when it is in fact exceedingly poor quality.)
Maybe your environment is different than mine, but I do know of places like Sanamluang, Jitlada, Tangerine, Boiling Crab, BCD Tofu House, and Great Khan's Mongolian Barbecue that started out janky and kind of run-down, but they became so successful that the owners chose to remodel to something cleaner and hipper. They have some of the best-regarded Asian food in the area; they didn't let the remodeling change what they were. They have the capital to both serve good food AND have their interiors look good. Their prices never changed dramatically either; they're smart enough to know not to do that.
There are also western food places around here that have stylish and clean appearances on the inside but very nice food too, like Dog Haus, Everest, The Escondite, Millie's, Crazy Goody, La Vaquerita, and Islands. Most food trucks here have bright, colorful outsides with hand-drawn digital artwork too, and they are regarded as some of the best food Los Angeles has to offer too, such as The Grilled Cheese Truck, Jogasaki, Rounds, Cousins Maine Lobster, The Trailer Park Truck, Middle Feast, Schmuck with a Truck, Slap Yo Mama, and White Rabbit. Ludo is a street cone orange and is run by Jean Ludo, a Michelin-starred French chef who moved to L.A. and realized he gets bored easily if he stays in one place, so he switched to a food truck.
You know, I haven't had egg drop in ages....I can't even remember what style my place has, nor a point of comparison. It sounds good - I like spicy :) One thing I've found with most Chinese food though, unlike Japanese, is that "westernized" in most places is not too different from authentic. Some dishes (Goo Goo Gai Pan) that are western dishes are very different, but I also find them bland. Most "American Chinese" food is really not so different from the original. Yeah, there's the more culturally specific stuff like the chicken feet, but even in china that's not the bulk of the food. Personally, I can't quite go that far myself - I'm not a chicken feet kind of squid. ;)
Actually, there IS a big difference between westernized Chinese food and authentic Chinese food. For one, there is nothing fried in traditional Chinese food (except stir-fried), so that rules out orange chicken and egg rolls. There is also no dairy products used in traditional Chinese food, though I can't think of any major examples of westernized Chinese food with cheese in it.
What is the norm in China depends on the region. China's an enormous place, territorially, so there are diverse cultures, climates, religions, and histories between regions leading to a lot of different kinds of cooking. The kind Americans are most familiar with is Szechwan, which has the famous stir-fried beef and chicken. Hunan is also quite popular, with tofu-related dishes like mabo.
The chicken feet and beef tripe and such is not region-specific, but is eaten traditionally as dim sum for breakfast. There are things like taro bricks and pickled pork brains that I can't stand, but I know people who grew up with them love them.
Bizarre Foods actually goes rather in-depth into these kinds of foods. If you haven't seen some, I recommend you watch at least a couple of episodes, especially
Bizarre Foods America. There'sa reason he always goes to Asian districts: Westernized Asian food usually IS quite different. (Thai is the exception; instead of changing the food itself, they just give incomplete descriptions. For instance, you'll usually find boat noodles on the menu in a Thai restaurant. The soup base for boat noodles is curdled pig blood.)
I'm surprised about Japanese being sensitive to spices - this is the land of wasabi the single hottest food known to mankind that makes ghost peppers look tame. I love Indian curry. I LOVE spicy and even I can't take much of that stuff at ALL. And Chinese food has become quite popular in Japan, much of it, of course, spicy.
Wasabi uses a different chemical compound to induce spiciness, and hence it's a different kind of spiciness. Wasabi contains methylthiohexyl isothiosulfanates, which mainly affects the nose and is short-lived, compared to capsaicin in chili peppers, which is a general irritant and is an oil and thus lasts longer. It's difficult to compare spiciness between wasabi and chili peppers, as a human's sensitivity between them are independent of each other, and the isothiosulfanates cannot be diluted with water as easily as capsaicin can and this can't be measured so easily on the Scoville scale.
If you ever geta chance, pick up a packet of instant curry from Japan. House is the one most often seen around here; you might be able to find them. They export to the United States and have bilingual packaging, in Japanese and English, for that reason. You'll see that the one labeled "Hot" is not that spicy.
What we have with mobile right now is basically what we had with the Atari 2600. The result made video games so toxic to the public that retailers refused to carry inventory. They had no value aside from a clearance table. Video games nearly ceased to exist. It was a huge fad, that imploded itself with a flood of low quality product and greating the impression that video games were simple time wasters. Nintendo fixed that with the Licenced products and tight leash (making a lot of enemies along the way.) Mobile has reset the stage for the same crash all over again. It's been big because the device to play it on is still new to most. I can 100% guarantee you, if mobile games remain what they are, that industry will crash. Hard. I just hope they don't take larger games with them.
In that case, the correct answer would be self-regulation. A big difference here, though, is that mobile gaming infrastructure is handled mostly by Apple and Google, two companies that don't really do video games and don't understand them that well. They seem largely unaware of the Skinner Box and addiction-related problems some mobile games have, or don't really care.
A big thing I found conspicuously missing from mobile gaming, however, is a ratings system. It's the only type of entertainment that doesn't presently have age ratings, either put directly on the products (TV, movies, comic books), sorted by the distributors (literature), or both (traditional video games). There are also no quality checks. What this results in is a wild west kind of environment if you're looking to play some mobile games. If you don't already know through word of mouth what a game's going to be like, there aren't any immediate signifiers that the game might contain some device-breaking bug or inappropriate content. I was looking for some recording apps the other day, for instance, and found one that requires you to give a five-star rating to the Google Play store in order to keep using it. Even a rudimentary quality check systen won't let you get away with that.
This is what I mean when I say mobile gaming needs some regulation in order to function as intended. When I said governmental regulation, I mean it in terms of, say, governmental regulation of gambling machines or governmental regulation of tobacco products.
No it isn't. There's so many misnomers and wrong conclusions in mobile. You're right, but not entirely. GB, GBC, GBA, all appealed to gamers. Yes Tetris was a time waster and most popular, but most of the sales were because it was an affordable real console. With real games. It was not until the DS that this market flood of "time waster" incidental gamers bought it. The right product at the right time, along with Wii and the Iwata Blue Ocean strategy caught all these people. At the time these people didn't have other time waster tech at their fingertips so that was a cheap fun thing to buy. Then smartphones and tablets came out and the crowed that just wanted time wasters had them at their fingers now. Nobody that wanted to play deeper games moved from handheld to mobile. The people that never wanted to play games but bought a DS because it was new and fun did. DS/Wii were a weird blip that inflated the market's numbers massively for a brief time. Analysts look to the fading numbers from console to mobile and see a trend where none exists. Those were new non-loyal customers who are going to drift from one thing to the next anyway. The GB/GBC/GBA market is still the portable market. In fact the "core gamer" market is larger than ever, it only looks like it's shrinking due to the DS/Wii era bump. And too much attention was paid to trying to make customers of that target group - Iwata himself noted that that the focus on casual gamers in that era was possibly an error, so at least he was aware of the issues it caused.
And no one should ever go to Vita. (<-owns a Vita. I should dust it sometime. Such an unloved piece of beautiful hardware.)
Well, there's
Gravity Rush 2 and the Dissidia fighting games.
The people who mainly play mobile games are unlikely to play traditional handheld games because of two things: 1) They're playing it for a different purpose than that of a traditional gamer, and 2) They have a more acceptable public image than regular video games, which are still seen as something either for kids or for socially outcast geeks and nerds. An adult man in a business suit won't look strange being on an airplane playing
You Have to Burn the Rope. The adult WILL look weird and awkward if he is playing
Tomodachi Life.
That being said, I think you are right--the traditional video game market is mostly unchanged as it is. What I think is happening, however, is that kids are moving increasingly towards mobile gaming. A parent might hesitate to buy a $40 3DS game, but they won't have second thoughts buying a $5 app game, or maybe it's free. The market of currently-existing gamers is pretty stable. The problem is that there is less fresh blood coming in.
Something I should point out is that the minimum price for the entire five seasons of
The Pinball Arcade is $140: $20 for Season 1 and $30 for each subsequent season. That being said, it is also one of the highest-budget mobile games, mainly because Farsight has to work with pinball companies to obtain licenses. Williams is the one most stubborn about it, requiring Farsight to pay an upfront fee (around the several thousand dollar range, I believe, and it keeps going up) each time they want to create a digital version of a Williams table. In addition, they buy the machine outright to make sure the digital version is as authentic as possible, and there's also additional licensing fees if the table happens to have a licensed theme, such as
The Addams Family. They're working on
Doctor Who at the moment, which is undoubtedly a heavy one.
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