The original Dead Rising took place in a shopping mall, explained Inafune, and because Japan doesn’t have American-style malls, the team had to go on a trip to research them.
This week in Japanese Twitter is our weekly roundup of tweets from Japan’s most famous game creators
Child of Eden will be more than first-person Rez according to the game’s creator, Tetsuya Mizuguchi. He elaborated on his ambitions for the game through a series of tweets today.
Nintendo made a splash with fans at E3 by unveiling new versions of their beloved franchises but revealed very little in the way of new properties. That may be about to change. According to Japan’s Sankei Newspaper, when asked about Nintendo’s “next game” at a June 29 Nintendo stockholders meeting, Shigeru Miyamoto replied, “We need new game characters soon, maybe we can move forward on that next year.”
At the same meeting, when discussing Apple and the iPad, one stockholder brought up the possibility of Nintendo producing software for the device when he asked, “Other companies are continuously bringing out interesting devices. What about supporting them with Nintendo software?”
Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata responded, “Nintendo’s software and hardware are the same thing. Other companies don’t share Nintendo’s values or traditions when it comes to creating devices. We are absolutely not thinking of doing that.”
E3 attendees don’t always have all the fun. Before the booths in LA could even be fully taken down, Sony gave PlayStation Move its public debut this weekend at Japan’s World Hobby Fair, a bi-annual event that features the latest games, manga, and anime. We were on hand to check out public reaction as well as the two featured games, EyePet and Kung Fu Rider.
The World Hobby Fair is free to the public and the games on display usually cater to a younger demographic. Judging by the length of the lines at Sony’s booth, interest in the device isn’t particularly high. ModNation Racers attracted twice the attention of Sony’s motion controller. Meanwhile, Mario Galaxy 2, a game that’s been out in Japan for nearly a month, had the longest lines of the show. Those that did try Move walked away looking impressed, and the reason for the relative apathy towards the device remains unclear.
Apple has announced that sales of its iPad, launched in the US sixty days ago and internationally (in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK) last weekend, has reached over two million.
This announcement reveals that not only did the iPad outpace the iPhone’s launch in its first twenty-eight days (the point where it managed to sell a million), but that it has actually managed to over double sales compared to the original iPhone, which took seventy-four days to reach a million units.
The Halo: Reach multiplayer beta ended just days ago and already we’ve learned of the full game’s release date: September 14. That release date applies worldwide with the exception of Japan, where it’ll be out a day later.
The news was made in spectacularly quiet fashion, hidden in a press release (via MCV) about the impressive turnout the Reach beta saw. More than 16 million hours were played in the beta by 2.7 million people, amassing 1.1 billion kills in that period of time.
“It’s exceeded our expectations,” said Bungie community director Brian Jarrard. “Our only real perspective going into this was the Halo 3 beta test, which had about 800,000 people. We knew there were a couple million copies of ODST out there, but we really didn’t have any specific information that let us know what the population might be like.”
It’s hard to find good help. In an interview with the Financial Times (registration required), Capcom president Haruhiro Tsujimota said that the company would only develop new IP in Japan, and use foreign studios solely for ports and sequels. Previously, the company had been using non-Japanese studios to develop new properties and franchises- in contrast to other Japanese publishers like Square Enix, which has pursued a strategy of acquiring foreign studios in their entirety.
The announcement comes on the heels of disappointing sales of California-based Airtight Studio’s Dark Void and nearly a year after Bionic Commando, developed by the now defunct Swedish developer GRIN, failed to meet expectations.
Twitter is growing in Japan. What was the hot buzzword of 2008 in the United States is only now becoming commonplace on the other side of the Pacific. Each week, we’ll be scanning the Tweets of various Japanese industry figures and translating the best of them for you. Don’t worry if you don’t recognize the names. We’ll include some of each creator’s most famous games next to their tweets.
It’s a slow week for Twitter in Japan. The country is just coming off a week-long string of holidays called Golden Week and people are still getting back into work mode. This week, Yoichi Wada discusses foreigners at Square Enix, Kojima shows off his new toy, and HIdeki Kamiya says he doesn’t like Bayonetta porn.
The newest project from Toshihiro Nagoshi, Sega stalwart and director of the company’s Yakuza, has a real name now.
Nagoshi revealed in Japanese game magazines this week that his latest project, a PSP game unofficially titled “Project K” until now, is now named Kurohyou: Ryu ga Gotoku Shinshou, which we’ll loosely translate as “Black Leopard: A New Yakuza Chapter.” The game also has an official release date now — September 22 in Japan — and Sega’s announced that gamers who preorder the title over there will receive a copy of “Young Kamutai Magazine,” a fictional travel guide to the game’s equally fictional fictional setting of Kamurocho.
As discussed earlier, Kurohyou is a new action game that borrows Yakuza’s setting to tell a story about Japan’s modern underground street punks. Kengo Kora, a Japanese actor who’s appeared in lots of films over there, will provide the voice of hero Ryuya Ukyo.
Media Create has published the latest hardware sales figures from Japan.
