Giant Bomb’s Quick Look at Tetris Axis. There’s actually a pretty nice comparison of this Hudson Soft-developed game against Nintendo’s own superb Tetris DS over at Kotaku, which also goes into why it’s so hard to find a damn copy of the latter nowadays.
This video, though, is still a nice and thorough preview for most of the game’s 20 different modes, complete with Giant Bomb commentary and AR crotch towers.
This releases on Sunday for $29.99 — possibly the first time a Nintendo-published 3DS game has debuted at that price? I hope this becomes a trend with 3DS titles…
Tetris: Axis trailer shows off the 3DS game’s 20+ modes like Jigsaw, Stage Racer Plus, and AR Shadow Wide.
I was going out of my way to not be interested in this game, not just because its title sounds like some supernatural plan by the Red Skull to engulf the world with block shapes, but also because Nintendo is just publishing the game, not developing it (Hudson Soft handled those duties). And non-Nintendo Tetris games, with a few exceptions, tend to be middling, if not butt.
While the recent dismantling of Hudson Soft into a source of cell-phone game IP was disheartening, it didn’t really feel like the death of the company. But now, the dream is unquestionably over.
Takahashi Meijin is leaving the company on May 31. In a post on his 16Shot blog (which is also ending), he apologized for the abruptness of the announcement, and said that he doesn’t plan to leave the game industry.
Toshiyuki Takahashi, a PR executive who joined the publisher on August 21, 1982, became famous (earning the nickname “Takahashi Meijin,” or “Master Takahashi”) for his remarkable ability to press a button 16 times per second — a valuable asset in Star Soldier and other shooters. And, though Tiny Cartridge readers either knew this already or learned it from the fact that I post about him all the damn time, he was the inspiration for the Shooting Watch toy and the Master Higgins character in the Adventure Island games.
This feels like the end of an era to me — one of the heroes of the Famicom era leaving the post that he held for so long. It’ll be weird to see Takahashi Meijin at another company. Will he still be the Meijin? Will he still be rapidly pressing buttons in public? Or will he become another executive?
“Cave People Live Outdoors!” from the Bonk: Brink of Extinction soundtrack by Disasterpeace. Seven tracks from the cancelled XBLA, PSN, WiiWare, and 3DS game have been posted on Bandcamp and can be freely streamed.
And… it’s pretty good! I didn’t have too much confidence in the game before hearing this, but this music totally evokes Bonk, and makes me really want to play the new game. Perfect timing on my part. :(
Takahashi Meijin teaches you how to play Milon’s Secret Castle. Even if you’re not interested in playing Hudson’s weirdo NES game, you will love the way he dispenses his game tips — with a big, hand-drawn castle and a Milon sprite on a stick.
The long, long list of projects Eric and I would undertake if we had the money and time now includes a show in which we do puppet-show style demonstrations of various games.
Natsume’s Omega Five, an XBLA shmup coming to Nintendo 3DS next spring in Japan, according to Famitsu.
I don’t remember this co-op title from when it came out for XBLA in January 2008, but it seems to have received generally positive reviews — 1UP, however, called it “too hardcore for its own good “and [not] anything special”. I hear the music, composed by Hiroyuki Iwatsuki (Pocky & Rocky, Gundam Wing: Endless Duel), is great at least.
This would be great as a 3DSWare release, though I have a feeling it’ll come out as a retail cart, three or four times more expensive than its $10 XBLA edition. I hope that doesn’t become a trend with XBLA/PSN-to-3DS ports. It’s bad enough already that $0.99 iPhone games are releasing on Nintendo’s download platform for $5-$8.
Ten years of Hudson’s Summer Caravan in about ten minutes. Magweasel posted a rather lovely article about the annual shmup contest, including this list of games used early in the competition:
The first installment of Hudson’s all-Japan competition/tour was held in 1985; Star Force was the official game of the event. That was followed by Star Soldier and Starship Hector in the next two years, but Hudson switched formats to the PC Engine from 1988 onward. The game they chose for the ’88 Caravan: Power League — apparently not a tremendously popular decision, so they went right back to shooters starting in ’89.
In 2006, Hudson revived the Caravan for a Bomberman game, and in 2007 the Caravan was focused mainly on the WiiWare game Star Soldier R.
Lost in Shadow’s North American and Japanese covers compared. The Stateside boxart definitely conveys that Peter Pan feel this shadow-based platformer has, but hachi machi that is ugly. And the boring title text isn’t doing the packaging art any favors either.
Even with its strange text that sounds like a synopsis for one of Stephen King’s Dark Tower novels (“I rode the creepy tram toward the large tower that stood before me. With no idea of what awaited me.”), the Japanese box far outclasses its U.S. counterpart. I guess Hudson Entertainment thinks images of towers, however beautiful, won’t compel Americans to pick up Lost in Shadow.
Lost in Shadow’s E3 trailer. I thought this was now called A Shadow’s Tale? This title has been switched like four times now. Who know’s what’s going on over at Hudson…
Anyway, this video shows that Hudson has worked a lot to fill the game with puzzles, enemies, and bosses in the past few months. This definitely looks a lot more fleshed out (and fun!) than what we’ve seen in previous trailers.
Also, you get to listen to more of the game’s beautiful theme song, “Hinagiku” by Gutevolk. If you get a chance, definitely track down the 2002 album this tune originally appeared in, The Humming Of Tiny People. It sounds like an album Tiny would like, too!
New gameplay trailer for A Shadow’s Tale. The shadow bugs and puzzles look fun enough in this video, but I’m more excited about the bit at the beginning, in which Hudson reveals that Gutevolk, a.k.a. Hirono Nishiyama, is lending her talents to the soundtrack.
I’m unsure if she’s contributing more than the game’s theme song “Hinagiku” — which you can hear in the trailer and in her 2002 album The Humming Of Tiny People — but Hudson is planning to release an OST for A Shadow’s Tale in Japan. You can hear more of Gutevolk’s silvery music on her MySpace page.
Hudson announced Jaseiken Necromancer: Nightmare Reborn, a fantasy/horror RPG coming to Japan’s DSiWare service next month, in the latest issue of Famitsu with this weird, Giger-esque artwork.
The downloadable game is a follow-up to Jaseiken Necromancer, a Japan-only PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 title released in 1988. That probably doesn’t mean much to the 95 percent of you who’ve never heard of the RPG, so here’s a super creepy commercial that will get you up to speed:
Odd Japanese boxart for A Shadow’s Tale (a.k.a. Lost In Shadow, Tower of Shadow). What’s so strange about this, you ask? If you click the image for the full packshot, you’ll see that the English text at the bottom reads, “I rode the creepy tram toward the large tower that stood before me. With no idea of what awaited me.”
What’s this “creepy tram” all about? And why would Hudson allow a machine-translated phrase to appear on the cover of its game? It’s a great box otherwise!
[Update: OMG, commenter Nerg points out that the description is eerily similar to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. Could that “creepy tram” be Blaine the Mono?]
