Throughout this year I’ve been hearing from Japanese game developers who are concerned that their country’s gaming reputation, once the leading force in game development, has been surpassed by the work of game creators in America and Europe.

Last night in San Francisco, a handful of top-shelf Japanese developers working under the label Platinum Games announced that they have teamed up with Sega to put Japanese game development back on top.

They hope to do it with:

• A bloody black-and-white early 2009 Wii game called “Madworld,” that comes from a lead creator on “Resident Evil 4“
• A 2009 DS sci-fi spaceship-managing role-playing game called “Infinite Line” from a philosophical designer who helped make “Steel Battalion“
• A guns-on-her-hands-and-feet, witches-vs.-angels Xbox 360/PS3 2009 game called “Bayonetta” from the creator of “Devil May Cry“
• And a mystery game from Capcom pioneer Shinji Mikami.

They’re calling it a comeback for Japanese gaming, and they’re not afraid to tell me what they think has gone very wrong with the development scene in their company.

Read more…

“Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver” is one of my favorite games.

So when “Afro Samurai” senior designer David Robinson said he not only credits some design decisions for the anime-based hack ‘n slash “Afro Samurai” to “Soul Reaver,” but he also worked on “Soul Reaver,” I was excited.

“Afro is largely built on the flavor of Soul Reaver — the dark brooding story, the anti-hero character,” said Robinson. “A lot of the constructs come from how beautiful that game was.”

I’m sold! But I was curious how “Afro Samurai” came to be, as it’s a new step for Namco Bandai. It’s coming from the Japanese publisher’s first wholly-owned studio in the United States. Robinson’s been working on “Afro Samurai” for just under two years, and he started with just a staff of five.

Now, they’re up to more than 40, as development nears the final lap. I probed Robinson about working with Samuel L. Jackson, who has done voices for the anime and the game.

So what was it like being part of Namco’s first American team?

Read more…

San Francisco — With “Wii Fit” already out in Japan but still months away from release in Europe and the U.S., throngs of GDC attendees lined up to attend a talk by one of its developers yesterday afternoon.

Takao Sawano, Deputy GM in Entertainment Analysis and Development at Nintendo, talked about his work developing the Wii Balance Board peripheral for “Wii Fit” in a session titled, “‘Wii Fit’: Creating a Brand New Interface for the Home Console.”

The hundreds of people in the audience listened attentively as Sawano-san spoke in his native tongue (English speakers used headsets connected to a translator). He talked about how “Wii Fit” came to be in the first place, the features of the software and the possible future implementation of the Wii Balance Board as a new controller.

As simple as the design looks, creating “Wii Fit” was not an easy process. When Sawano-san was tasked with creating the hardware for Shigeru Miyamoto’s vision, he thought, “We’ll sell a few, but there’s no way that this will become a hit product.” However, after overcoming major design challenges with the Wii Balance Board, over 1.4 million units have been sold in Japan since its December 1 release.

Some highlights from the talk include:

• Miyamoto had planned “Wii Fit” long before the Wii’s launch.

• Early prototypes of the Wii Balance board included rumble and a connection to the Wii remote.

• The program includes a Body Test, where you can measure BMI, weight and your “Wii Fit” age quickly and easily without inserting the disc. After the first time the game is inserted it will install the “Wii Fit” channel via the game disc.

• In the Aerobics section, you can choose running courses that don’t require use the Wii Balance Board; instead the player holds the Wii remote in hand or in pocket and runs in place. You can be joined by another person with a second Wii remote. New content will be added “to keep players coming back for more.”

• Also in Aerobics, players can change to the TV and the speaker in the Wii remote still counts for you as you exercise and watch TV.

• “Wii Fit” is slated for release in Europe on April 25 and in North America on May 19.

Read on for the details…

Read more…

Nostalgia frequently clouds my judgment whenever I’m talking about old games. I love them, I collect them, I generally hold them in higher regard than most new games that are released. But, even I’ll admit, sometimes I’m wrong. Some games just don’t hold up against the test of time, and going back and playing them is just a test of my patience.

One of the most consistent game publishers back in the day was Taito. Just hearing the name should bring back memories of dragons, legends, renegades and elevators for some older gamers. They brought to life some of the greatest games and characters ever to be seen. While their name may still appear on new games, they may never reach the height of popularity that they enjoyed in the 1980s. And since Taito was acquired by Square Enix in 2005 they are no longer their own company.

One of the titles that their name has appeared on recently was a mini-game collection, released in the States by Majesco, called “Furu Furu Park.” This particular collection of mini-games cultivates some of the most well known Taito properties and repurposes them into a mini-game collection for the Wii. I was curious to see how the re-imagined versions of some of my favorite games of all time worked as “party games.” So I played both the “Furu Furu Park” versions of these games, as well as the originals and put them to the test to see if nostalgia would win out against “innovation.”

Read more…

There really is no better way to spend a Saturday night in the city than dragging my girlfriend around New York’s Lower East Side looking for video game toys.

While she may have gotten little out of the experience, I was able to find this great little collection of “The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess” action figures. I try my best to stay up on Japanese gaming toys as they are released, at least for import, but I hadn’t seen these come up at all, so I had to make them mine.

My haul included four 4″ posable figures: Link, Princess Zelda, the Usurper King Zant and a Wolf Link/ Midna combo. The set ran me $30 at J1toys.com (the store’s name is actually a web address - it’s so late 90’s). While, they might not the highest quality, they are all really well done. They appear to be officially licensed from Nintendo by Yujin, and are part of the SR Series (the rest of the little booklet that came with the set is in Japanese). As an added bonus, the Link figure can hold his sword and shield in either hand, and you can have the figure represent your preferred version of the game.

They have a high level of detail for all of the characters will look great collecting dust on my shelf with my multitude of other game-related toys and tchotchkes, only to be taken down and played with when I feel like acting out the final GameCube “Zelda” game.

Hit the jump for a full gallery of images of the figures.

Read more…

Remember “Dead Rising“?

How could you not: Capcom’s zombie action-adventure title was one of 2006’s bestsellers, enamoring gamers with its classic storyline and everything-is-a-weapon, sandbox-style gameplay.

Another thing the Xbox 360 exclusive had were amusing and fun-to-get Achievements. How did they come up with them?

Game designer Goda Hidehiro gave us his answers via e-mail (which were translated from Japanese). Here’s an excerpt about the easiest Achievement in the game:

Hidehiro: It would be “Freefall” or falling 16 feet. I imagine that those Achievements are achieved without the player knowing about them. I’m glad that [one] serves as a good hook to draw people’s attention, so that the player might think, “This game has some weird Achievements.”

Read on to learn about Hidehiro’s favorite Achievements, why he thinks gamers are obsessed with Achievements and what he’d like to see in “Dead Rising 2.”

Read more…

It’s clear that mobile phone games aren’t just for the casual gamers anymore, with publishers translating more and more franchises to your cellular phone. But rather than port over a tinier (and usually crappier) version of an existing game, Order of Shadows is a completely new title in the Castlevania series exclusively for your mobile phone — and it doesn’t suck.

Read more…

The Katamari franchise is not only known for its innovative gameplay (rolling a giant sticky ball around the world to pick up objects, from teapots to cats to people to mountains), but also its ridiculously catchy soundtrack. Like past Katamari games, the soundtrack for the upcoming Beautiful Katamari (Xbox 360) will have tunes with elements of traditional video game music as well as songs that feature the voice talents of popular J-pop singers. But this time around, the soundtrack is all created and sung by J-pop stars of the ’80s, along with new songs created by the developers and old songs from past games.

But why the ’80s theme now? “We wanted the songs in Beautiful Katamari to have more energy and understandability than in the previous game,” said the developers. “We also wanted to get back to basics by using sounds from the first game in the series, Katamari Damacy. In order to do this, we came up with a key theme for the soundtrack — the “80s” — and used J-pop ’80s stars to create music to go along with this fun and energetic game.”

Make the jump for the full track listing…

Read more…