Archive for the “Games” Category

Last month, Ignition Entertainment sent me a copy of Lux-Pain (DS) for review. It was originally developed by Japanese studio Marvelous and uses a visual novel framework in concert with adventure elements. The following are my thoughts about the game after finishing the first four episodes and 5 1/2 hours of play. (I read online that there are 21 episodes in total so I still have much more of the game to play.)

The Basics:
You play Atsuki, a 17-year-old whose family was killed by Silent, a parasite spawned from hate and despair. Operating as part of anti-Silent group FORT (Force for Obliteration of the Rising Terrors), Atsuki goes undercover as a high-school student in Kisaragi City in an attempt to discover the original vector of the Shanghai Incident, which infected 10,000 people in just 3 months and led to thousands of crimes and suicides.

Navigation between areas consists of selecting highlighted regions on an isometric map. Once you enter a dialogue scene, you see shadows of the characters you’re talking to on the top screen. Color changes ripple up through the shadows in response to your dialogue choices and when a yellow gas appears, that means there are Shinen (thoughts) to be read. A “Signum Anima” warning shows up and activating it initiates a mini-game where you have to scratch the touchscreen in order to reveal the hiding Shinen worms. These warnings can also appear when entering unoccupied rooms.
Read the rest of this entry »

Both Shogakukan’s Weekly Shonen Sunday and Kodansha’s Weekly Shonen Magazine began publication on the same day 50 years ago – March 17, 1959 – and they have been doing anniversary celebrations over the past year including the release of a joint issue on March 19, 2008, and the production of two crossover video games: a DS baseball game, Sunday X Magazine Nettou! Dream Nine (website), on Feb. 26th and a PSP fighting game for the PSP called Sunday VS Magazine: Shuuketsu! Choujou Daikessen! (website) on Mar. 26th.
Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday I attended a Naruto fan event with some members of my anime club that was held at Ubisoft’s San Francisco office to celebrate the upcoming release of “Naruto: Rise of a Ninja” for Xbox 360. It’s the first game in the franchise to be developed by a non-Japanese studio and we got to play the game with other fans, eat some snacks, and later go out to dinner with some of the employees. After playing a couple hours of it, I think it’s a pretty solid game.
Read the rest of this entry »

[via Engadget]

Akibablog has some photos of “Sony Sauce” (a pun of the katakana for the word “source”) made by a company called Bulldog. It mocks the Sixaxis’s Emmy win-that-wasn’t and plays on the console’s resemblance to a George Foreman grill. The “20GB” version has been discounted from 499 yen to 399 while the “60GB” has an open price but has a recommended sales tag of 599 yen. Ken Kutagari’s proud face on the front just to seem to give it a little bit of officiality, doesn’t it?

NOTE: image not from the upcoming game.

According to ANN, Ideafactory is making a Ouran Host Club romantic adventure game targeted at women for the PS2, due to come out in spring 2007 in Japan. I guess this isn’t exactly a case of life imitating art but more like games imitating anime and manga since Renge, the host club’s self-imposed manager, went to Japan because she was a fan of a relationship game (a parody of Tokimeki Memorial) featuring lookalikes of the host club’s members. I hope the characters have the same voices and I wonder if Haruhi would be available as a love interest…

Only THREE days after Haruhi DVD 1 was released (July 28), Akibablog found a used copy of the limited edition version going for 13440 yen at a Trader store, almost double the original “wrapped in plastic” price (6930 yen). Even worse, the limited edition Asahina Episode 00 package was going for 14490 yen, a 200% increase over the original sale price of 4830 yen from its launch on June 23, about six weeks ago. I am familiar with the principal of supply and demand but this is absurd. Read the rest of this entry »