July 2010
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June 2010
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We Built This (Retro) City: VBlank on RCR's...
Unveiled earlier this month, Retro City Rampage is a love letter to 8-bit games and 80s/90s pop culture, written on top-down Grand Theft Auto stationary and addressed to WiiWare. The downloadable title has you exploring an open world, taking on missions, and stumbling over dozens of gags appealing to the NES generation — those kids who grew up on ninja turtles and Snoop’s Doggystyle...
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Tales of Innocence English patch released →
It’s rare to see an English patch for a Nintendo DS game completed, but after spending nearly nearly two years and “thousands of man-hours” on the project, Absolute Zero has released it v1.0 translation patch for Namco Bandai’s Japan-only RPG Tales of Innocence.
Along with translating menus, items, story text, and no doubt many other elements, the Absolute Zero’s...
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WatchTotaka’s Song found in X-Scape. Yes, it’s that catchy melody Nintendo composer Kazumi Totaka likes to hide in every game he works on (e.g. Animal Crossing, Luigi’s Mansion, Mario Paint, etc.).
I mentioned this tune’s discovery last Friday, but Pyro873 posted this clip with instructions for finding it:
Save the fake doctor from planet Mapate — he’s wearing...
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Sound Boy: NCSX Deal of the Week →
NCSX is offering new-in-box units of the Sunsoft Sound Boy, an external speaker for original DMG Game Boys. This item is perfect for chiptuners! Perfect for making the Game Boy a tiny bit louder, in case you’re playing for… I don’t know, a very small crowd in a room with you. Maybe a crowd sharing a couch with you. If the TV isn’t on.
If you’re more interested in...
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Lone Wolf: Caverns of Kalte released →
I’ve always considered LoneWolfDS — a series of ports for John Dever’s Lone Wolf gamebooks — as one of the more unique, polished homebrew projects for the DS.
I’ve previously described it as “a more involved and satisfying Choose Your Own Adventure”, as you create and customize a character that you take through branching narrative options, combat...
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Nintendo 3DS mock-ups/concepts, redux
Now that Nintendo has revealed its hardware design (or at least a prototype of it) for the Nintendo 3DS, the demand for fan-made system mock-ups with dual analog control schemes and sliding screen mechanisms has died down.
But since the 3D effects the handheld promises are difficult to capture and communicate in screenshots or videos — Nintendo’s promo trailer relied heavily on CG...
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Sin & Punishment 2 reviewed, MonkeyPaw interviewed
Sorry if this trend is irritating you, but Eric pointed out to me that two more of my recent Joystiq posts might be up the various alleys of TC readers.
First is my super-long interview with John Greiner, who used to be the president of Hudson Entertainment and now runs MonkeyPaw Games, a company devoted to localizing and, in some cases, remaking Japanese games for Western audiences. I...
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Jake Hunter lights up DS again →
Arc System Works has announced a fourth DS game in the Saburo Jinguuji adventure game series (not counting the five DSiWare cases): Detective Saburo Jinguuji: Red Butterfly (Tantei Jinguuji Saburo: Akai Chou), coming to Japanese retailers September 30.
I wish I could tell you what the new game is about, other than the detective’s ongoing love affair with cigarettes, but basically all...
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X-Scape is X-Returns in Japan
Keeping up its tradition of renaming all of Q-Games’ DSiWare releases for different regions (e.g. Digidrive and Intersect, Trajectile and Reflect Missile, Starship Defense and Starship Patrol), Nintendo retitled X-Scape — 3D Space Tank in Europe — as X-Returns for Japan.
It’s a title that makes sense for a couple reasons
Japan missed out on the R&B quartet of the...
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Love Plus+ turning away pirates' advances?
I detest using question marks in headlines, but it will have to do this time as all I’ve been able to read on this matter are machine-translated reports and forum posts from Japan. Apparently, Konami employed a particularly cruel anti-piracy measure in Love Plus+ that prevents those who are playing downloaded/copied ROMs from ever hooking up with the virtual girl of their dreams.
From...
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G.G. Series coming to the States! →
A surprising title popped up on the ESRB’s rating information site today: G.G. Ninja Karakuri Den (or Ninja Robot Legend), the Haggleman-esque platformer from Genterprise/Suzak’s budget DSiWare series in Japan.
“This is a strategy game [?] in which players control a ninja who jumps and dashes around each level while collecting coins and avoiding enemies. Some enemies can...
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DSiWare's 'push' with the 3DS
Speaking at an analyst Q&A at E3 last week, Nintendo CEO and president Satoru Iwata elaborated on his company’s plans to improve the DSiWare platform with the 3DS. From what I’ve seen, hardly any gamers or even DS owners pay attention to the service in its current form, and many excellent DSiWare releases have gone ignored.
Nintendo acknowledges that and knows it needs to make...
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Love Plus+ picks you up when you're down
There are a lot of things in this world that can get you down: people dying, money troubles, unemployment, thoughts of inadequacy, birds with oil all up in their feathers, and many other matters that leave you feeling helpless. Maybe you can’t get over Xseed not localizing Game Center CX 2. Or perhaps you’re just a dude who came from circumstances, I don’t know.
Konami knows...
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3DS screens rounded up →
Still linking out to Joystiq content, but I think this is an important resource: it’s every collected screenshot of every announced 3DS game! It’s been really difficult to find all this stuff in a convenient location, so Randy Nelson did for 3DS what I did for DS and Wii, collecting everything for ease of viewing.
Two important points in here: first, pay special attention to the...
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Nintendo 3DS's GPU: DMP's PICA200
This post/news is too tech-oriented for most people to care about, but I know a lot of technophiles are wondering about the GPU (graphics processing unit) powering Nintendo’s upcoming 3D system. Contrary to those rumors we heard months ago, it’s not Nvidia’s Tegra chip.
A small Tokyo-based firm named Digital Media Professionals (DMP) announced today that Nintendo has chose...
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Bangai-O Spirits for $8.76 →
Forget about that E3 nonsense, here’s the best gaming news of the week: Amazon has Treasure’s spectacular Bangai-O Spirits for $8.76. It’s one of Treasure’s best games, it’s one of the best games on the DS, and it’s one of the weirdest shmups ever. It’s the only shmup I can think of where using a bat to hit a soccer ball at a robot ninja is an...
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It's a DS and Wii media rodeo! →
I finally got around to uploading all the trailers and screens from Nintendo’s E3 lineup, which I couldn’t do during E3 because I was either at E3 or stuck on hotel wi-fi.
I thought it might be useful to have a one-stop location where you could watch all the trailers for stuff like Professor Layton and the Unwound Future (which comes out the day before my birthday, because Nintendo...
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Updates on Space Agency, Sakura Note
Remember Space Agency, the proposed “space action RPG” from Audio Inc. and Akira Ueda (director of Contact), which featured a pitch trailer that JC and I played a minor role in localizing?
Though we haven’t heard anything about the project picking up a publisher in Japan or the West, the developer hasn’t given up on it. In fact, Ueda recently tweeted that it could work...
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“Voice Recognition, Everything” by...
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