Japan

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 10.26.07

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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.

Double Fine to bring us METAL* based game Brutal Legend
Tim Schafer may not be Will Wright talented, but he is Ricky Gervais funny. Still, his new title Brutal Legend makes me apprehensive. →  I’ll read you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 10.5.07

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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. Microsoft still didn’t sell many 360s so it’s likely most Halo 3 owners bought the game in order to read the manual and gawk at the pictures on the back of the box. →  An article approaches.
- Read
- Run

PS1 games you may have missed: Non-RPG edition

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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. As you might expect, you collect various increasingly ridiculous pieces of weaponry and utility in your adventures. Unlike in ZAMN, there are three unique characters in Herc’s Adventures, each with a different standard and charge-up attack. →  The Read Star

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

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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. Once you are in Japan, it is easy enough to find, but getting to that little series of islands in the Pacific Ocean is usually the kicker. →  Holy crap, show me more!

A deeper look into Nintendo’s bling

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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. During fiscal year 2007 Sony recorded over $34 billion in net sales, while Nintendo brought in $7 billion. So in terms of sales, Sony is more than four times the size of Nintendo. →  Devil May Read 2

Nintendo is waiting for shoes to be eaten

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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. →  Castle Readigami 2

TGS 2007 — Fear and Loathing in Tokyo

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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. This year is no different and I decided to make the pilgrimage from my home in rural Kyoto to the fluid craziness that is Tokyo and The Tokyo Game Show to see what was in store for gamers in the near future. →  Readout 3: Takedown

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 9.21.07

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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. I’d rather they take the extra time to polish Home than release it early. Nintendo’s Reggie recently mocked Home by saying something glib like, “I think that exists already, it’s called Second Life.” →  Max Post 2: The Fall of Max Post

The Hardware Honeymoon Is Over, Bring On The Games!

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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. It is a shame for MS that they can’t find some way to connect with the inhabitants of this little island country because the 360 is a very solid console. →  Ring of Read

Fishing for Quarters – Remembering arcades

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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. Consider this my tribute to a more innocent and carefree time.

All of my life I have liked video games. →  [link only works on even seconds]