After playing Chromehounds, a friend and I both expressed our sense that it was an "accidentally American" game– a Japanese title with a lot of appeal to the semi-nerd "western" gamer. The more we discussed the issue, the more we charted the murky dichotomy of "western games" versus Japanese games.

It’s easy to think about the kind of games that are unlikely to come out of the Japanese games industry:

• A highly realistic flight simulator,

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