Japan

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 10.26.07

by

Skies 2 on Wii?
This may be old, but it’s too amazing to not mention. EGM reported a rumor that Skies of Arcadia 2 is in development for the Wii.

An interview with Will Wright
Will Wright may be a genius. His games are all brilliant, despite always leaving me feeling empty and suicidal. When he speaks, people listen. And then complain if he offended their company loyalties.

Will thinks the Wii is the only next gen console. It’s noble of him to defend ingenuity but I think the higher ground is to simply dismiss next gen chest thumping entirely. In my experience, generations are measured in time and progeny, not progress. My father does not consider me to be in his generation simply because I am as slow, weak and annoying as he. →  Read the rest

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 10.5.07

by

Dream team created to make MMO
One of the three guys behind Fallout and 17 ex-Blizzard guys all in one development team? You know these are going to be amazingly well crafted fetch quests that change absolutely nothing in a static MMO world. And think of the grinding!

Halo 3 is the biggest event in human history
The release of Halo 3 makes John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald look like footnotes in history. The moon landing is dwarfed by Bungie’s newest game, which sold approximately thirty thousand times more than any other product ever created. There are now significantly more copies of Halo 3 than wheels, and just about the same number of grains of sand.

This game topped the charts in Japan last week, proving that in a tepid market environment an American game can actually sell well in the East. →  Read the rest

PS1 games you may have missed: Non-RPG edition

by

Believe it or not, I like a few PSX games that aren’t RPGs! Of course, several of them are still hard-to-find (because I like to like things nobody knows about).

Unfortunately, I do not have copies nor solid recollections of all of them. But I can tell you about a couple more to look into that I’ve left of the upcoming list: Tomba! and Einhander are both solid games that are a good deal of fun. Tomba! being an action/adventure, and Einhander being a solid Square-made shoot-em-up.

However, on to the games!
Yes, aliens did give the ancient Greeks their superior technology and philosophical insight.

A solid co-operative game as well as an action-adventure game of some depth, Herc’s Adventures is an entertaining romp through ancient Greece. It’s a spiritual successor to the SNES game Zombies Ate My Neighbors. →  Read the rest

Gaming Meccas of Japan Pt. 2 — Akihabara, Tokyo, Japan

by

Every hobby and every religion has their sacred place. Baseball fans have Cooperstown. Gamblers go to Las Vegas. Catholics go to the Vatican. Maple syrup lovers go to Canada. For us, the nerds, the geeks, the otaku, we have Akihabara. It is here that we can fulfill our wildest, dorkiest dreams. If we feel like buying the newest video game, Akihabara. If we have a craving for that awesomely drawn manga, Akihabara. And, if we just must be called “Master” by a cute little maid while we have our morning coffee, you got it, Akihabara. There are very few places in the world where a video game lover can come anytime of the year and feel at home. And just like home, Akihabara also has plenty of porn.

The downside to the place also called Akiba is that it is in an inconvenient location for most of the world’s electronically inclined. →  Read the rest

A deeper look into Nintendo’s bling

by

Nintendo’s recent ascension to become the second largest company in Japan has been making news on a few sites which track the business aspect of video games. While it is true that a company’s market capitalization (basically a measure of what the stock market thinks a company is worth) has grown by leaps and bounds of late (as will happen when the price shoots up as much as Nintendo’s has) some of the underlying financial numbers are even more fascinating than the headlines.

By market cap, Nintendo is substantially larger than Sony (Nintendo is worth about $75 billion, to Sony’s $47 billion). In truth, this metric is only one way to judge the size of a company. What’s another, you may ask? How about sales, I answer. Sony’s sales are leaps and bounds higher than Nintendo’s. →  Read the rest

Nintendo is waiting for shoes to be eaten

by

So guess who is the second largest company in Japan as of now?

NCL, otherwise known as Nintendo.

That’s right, the same Nintendo that countless people asked to drop out of the hardware business for the entirety of the Gamecube generation.

I’m sorry, but I have to vent a little about this one. There came Nintendo with its crazy ideas that everyone scoffed at, while Sony was praised for making “sexy” consumer products, quite possibly one of the most asinine descriptions I have heard in the world of business. Everyone had their mind set on the victor, and apparently sluggish Gamecube sales surely meant Nintendo had no money in the bank.

Well I guess they did after all. And I guess their crazy ideas worked pretty well too. You can disagree with what they are doing, but the fact that so many people put themselves in what seemed to be a state of self-imposed denial because (god forbid) the “kiddie” games company wasn’t being beaten to a bloody pulp has been one of my biggest pet peeves of the last seven years. →  Read the rest

TGS 2007 — Fear and Loathing in Tokyo

by

Living in Japan allows me a certain freedom when it comes to my nerd-hood. Video game playing is all but encouraged, anime is the norm, and if you were to tell someone your life goal was to build and paint model robots, they would smile understandingly at you. Japan is indeed a land in which technology and entertainment hold hands and lovingly caress one another. As I type this, I am coasting at a leisurely 175mph on a bullet train as I watch scenery adorned with lush greenery and neon zoom by. One of the many nerdy perks to living in Japan is the knowledge that once a year, all of the big names in gaming (minus one) will converge in Tokyo and allow the public a glimpse of their brand new wares. →  Read the rest

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 9.21.07

by

PSP outsells DS in Japan
Square’s Final Fantasy VII spin off for the PSP, Crisis Core, sold half a million copies last week. It also sold PSPs. Possibly not all of the 95 thousand Sony sold in the week, but likely around 80 thousand, which is how many more units were sold than the previous week. Sony’s business strategy should be clear – simply release a spinoff of one of the most beloved games of all time once a week and the PSP will handily outsell the DS in Japan 1.2 to 1.

Or, to quote someone from a forum I read:
“If DS stopped selling and PSP continued at this rate, it would catch up in 139.7 weeks (May 21, 2010).”

Does anyone else feel nauseous?

Home delayed till Spring
Good for Sony. →  Read the rest

The Hardware Honeymoon Is Over, Bring On The Games!

by

I just took a quick peek at the Japanese console sales charts and I think it is safe to say that the newness is starting to fade from this generation of consoles. This is by no means a doom and gloom statement, it just means that now some game developers need to step up to the plate and convince people to buy into all of the new hardware floating around.

Microsoft will again be the loser in the Japanese console market. The Xbox 360 just does not have titles that Japanese people are interested in. Halo 3 will most definitely boost sales in the United States and Europe but not many Japanese gamers play Halo. I am positive I will be able to walk into any store here on the day Halo 3 is released and walk out with a copy of the game if I so desired. →  Read the rest

Fishing for Quarters – Remembering arcades

by

Being a kid of the Eighties and Nineties, I spent a ton of time feeding quarters into arcade games. We at videolamer may rain praise upon our little console buddies but we rarely talk about their much larger, and these days dumber, brothers, the arcade machines. If it were not for these coin-gobbling behemoths, consoles would not exist. There would be no Pac-Man to munch on stuff, missiles to command, or Tron…to do whatever it is that Tron does.

We owe a lot to these big guys and sadly, like all overly-huge things such as woolly mammoths, dinosaurs, Sony, the RIAA, and The Ultimate Warrior, they are becoming extinct. Not many people visit arcades these days, and for good reason. What was once a bustling, multi-genre industry has deteriorated into a handful of companies making fighting games, shooting games, racing games, and beat games. →  Read the rest

Dreamcast Mania! – Canceled games: Came out on other consoles

by

Finally, the much requested follow up to the canceled Dreamcast games deal I wrote a few weeks ago. For those who missed the first, I am taking a look at games that were slated to be released for Sega’s last system that got the axe for one reason or another (well, probably for the very specific reason that the console was discontinued). Special thanks to Christian for handling a few of these. Even I get tired of making stuff up about games I’ve never heard of.

Super Monkey Ball
What was it?
The first game in the best monkey based Marble Madness clone series.

Would it have been good?
The game didn’t rely on great graphics and the Cube version was indeed fun. It would have been an excellent Dreamcast game. →  Read the rest

Square Enix and the Merch

by

Man Square Enix, you just live to piss me off, don’t you? Apparently you’ve opened your merchandise store to the west, and rather than being a force of awesome, you’ve filled it with lousy merchandise and worthless jewelry so teenage otaku have something to go with their black nail polish.

Let’s look at the subcategories on the side navigation bar. We’ve got specific links for every Final Fantasy from 7 to 12…. oh wait. FF9 isn’t there. Sorry Zidane; guess you weren’t emo enough pal. The rest of the FF’s, as well as all of Dragon Quest are each lumped into a big series category. Just great.

I guess we can still look at what they have. Hmm. Seems the other FF’s have nothing to offer me but figurines of summons. →  Read the rest

Sony’s Jamie Macdonald lies to Spong

by

Digg led me to a hilariously bad review of Bioshock today. The site the review is on is called Sony Defense Force and, luckily, the entire site is hilarious. It may be a parody but it’s hard to tell, especially after the All I Want For Christmas is a PSP debacle.

Browsing the SDF page, I came across this gem of a story: PS2 still outselling Wii in all Major Markets. The bloggers own comments are excellent – “Looks like Wii won’t even be able to catch PS2. Get ready for another Sony dominated generation.” More importantly, the quote from Jamie Macdonald is an obvious lie:

“Jamie Macdonald: Could I just point something out – that PlayStation 2 is still outselling Wii in all the major markets.”

Unless he delivered this interview from last year, he is wrong. →  Read the rest

Dreamcast Mania!: What did we miss? – Capcom VS SNK 2: Millionaire Fighting 2001

by

What happened – I don’t actually remember if there were even rumors of Capcom VS SNK 2 coming to American Dreamcasts, but considering we got the first game, it seems likely that there were. CVS2 would hit the Dreamcast, but only in Japan. In my experience it was one of the most widely imported titles in the West, to the point where some DC groups talk about it like it was a regular release.

The Game – If there is one thing Capcom’s massive library of fighters has taught us, it is that they never did get it right the first time. The first iteration always comes with its share of problems, while the final revision is often tweaked and polished to perfection. It happened with Street Fighter 2 and 3, it happened with Darkstalkers, and it happened with Capcom VS SNK. →  Read the rest

Dreamcast Mania! – EA

by

In my development of articles for Dreamcast Mania!, one theme has come up quite a lot – the lack of support from major companies like EA, Square and Konami greatly injured the Dreamcast’s chances of success. I agree that it certainly wasn’t a good thing, and I certainly agree that missing support from companies like Square and Enix in Japan was very close to receiving a death note. But when it comes to good ol’ Electronic Arts, I’m not so certain.

Hear me out with this one – the Dreamcast was released here in 1999. It died in 2001. 2001 is also the first year of Madden on the Playstation 2. Maybe my memory is foggy, but I remember that during the years of the original Playstation, it was NFL Gameday that was the big football game in town, while Madden was fairly shoddy. →  Read the rest

Pieces of a Perfect Game: Koei’s arduous slip into mediocrity

by

Good strategy games can be hard to come by on consoles. The only company that reliably produces games in the genre is Koei, and, as I’ve noted before, their recent track record is not so good.

Koei is now widely known for their willingness to recycle old work in the form of Dynasty Warriors – to put it more nicely, they haven’t fixed anything that isn’t broken in a while. Their lesser-known, but longer-running, Romance of the Three Kingdoms series is now on its eleventh iteration. I haven’t gotten the latest one yet, because by now I’ve figured it out (took me long enough): Koei has a secret recipe for the ultimate officer-based strategy game, but they insist on releasing it a piece at a time.

You don’t even have to look within the series itself. →  Read the rest

Dragon Questing yet again?

by

By now you might have heard the news about Dragon Quest 4, 5 and 6 being remade for the DS. Unsurprisingly, the news is being met with joy more than disgust, because unlike with the constant Final Fantasy remakes, two of these three games have yet to see even one western release.

But with all the celebration comes a sad but true joke that many in the community have made; we probably won’t see these Stateside unless Square can conjure up more Final Fantasy demos. After all the care and attention DQ8 got in its localization, the game sold rather dismally, at least compared to FF12. While RPG fans embraced it, the franchise still doesn’t have the mass appeal that FF has outside of Japan, thus they may not find it worthwhile to get these localized. →  Read the rest

Gaming Meccas of Japan Pt. 1 — Den Den Town, Osaka, Japan

by

Being a geek and living in Japan is kind of like mixing Ecstasy with LSD – it’s one hell of a trip. There are four places in Japan that should be on the must-see list for anyone who calls himself a nerd. The big one is Akihabara in Tokyo and I will be covering that in September along with The Tokyo Game Show. The third spot goes to Nintendo’s world headquarters in Kyoto but there isn’t much to see there because no one is allowed into the facility and tours are never provided. The fourth spot and topic of today’s installment is Den Den Town in Osaka.

Den Den Town can best be described as the poor man’s Akihabara. It is smaller in size, about four or five square blocks instead of an entire section of Tokyo. →  Read the rest

Microsoft E3 Presentation – Disney movies on Live!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

by

Boy did Microsoft’s E3 presentation bore me. Here were the highlights:

– Disney movies coming to Xbox Live
– Short trailers for some good games including Resident Evil 5, Lost Odyssey, GTA4 and the new Call of Duty
– Sales spin – the 360 is expanding the video game market by leaps and bounds
– G4 cutting away during important moments and generally confirming they are actually a local college station
– Many new Live Arcade games
– Scene It, the boring board game, now coming to the 360 complete with easy to use controller for grandma
– Jeff Bell proving there is no God simply by existing
– New grayish green 360 to celebrate Halo 3
– Speech on how awesome MSs third party support is that ignored that Japan largely ignores MS
– Gears of War coming to the PC
– OMFG Disney movies!!!11 →  Read the rest

Review — WTF aka Work Time Fun

by

I am a masochist, I have to be. There is no other explanation for why I go back to a game that urges me to put as many caps on as many pens as fast as I can. There is no reason to keep chopping wood so fast that when a helpless little bunny gets thrown on the cutting block I can’t stop my swing in time and that little bunny become a bloody mass of flesh and fur. Such is the “game” that is Work Time Fun.

In Work Time Fun, you play a temp in a job agency in Hell. Various demons staff the job search desk, all of them offering the least helpful advice possible. There are tons of boring, grueling jobs to choose from (over forty I think) and they range from being a bouncer at a concert to the examples I described in the introduction. →  Read the rest