arne360

A couple of weeks ago I headed to Japan for about ten days, give or take. I don’t really write about personal (non-video gaming) subjects here on the blog, so if you want to know more about the trip, just check out my Flickr stream about the trip. On to video gaming related stuff…

My first purchases were at the Yodobashi Camera store right by Osaka Station and my hotel and included Mother 1 & 2 and Archaic Sealed Heat — which I just found out will likely be released in North America soon. Drat!

I also spotted the ultra nice gametech cases that I had been coveting for quite some time and found a pattern I liked. Somebody import them please!

In my last full day in Tokyo — and in Japan for that matter — dcharlie from NeoGAF was nice enough to take me around to Akihabara for some video game browsing which lead to video game shopping. I didn’t go looking for anything in particular and didn’t even expect to pick anything up. I know, I must have been out of my mind to think that. It all started after spotting a copy of the not-so-great yet limited Club Nintendo copy of “Game & Watch Collection. That reminded me of the Bit Generations series for Game Boy Advance which Nintendo released in 2006. After about 5 stores, we found one that sold five of the seven games at the bargain price of ¥500. I had no luck finding dotstream or Orbital unfortuntely. I’ll have to find a way to complete that collection at some point. We noticed that it does seem like a lot of the stores are starting to pare down their GBA stock quite a bit.

The rest were fairly random purchases during the walking around (Raiden Fighters Aces, OneeChanbara VorteX and a cheap copy of Senko No Ronde Rev. X — which came to the US as WarTech). Sad thing is, I don’t have a Japanese Xbox 360, just figured I would get one eventually. I think…

Spotted this off of Joystiq today and knew it was worth the repost…

Flickr user Matthew Johnston has put together a pretty sharp photoset showing key Liberty City landmarks and their real-world versions around New York City. I still haven’t spent much time at all in Grand Theft Auto IV yet but this is great stuff!

Matthew Johnston’s “Sightseeing in Liberty City” photoset

I have to confess that last week I purchased Arcana Heart. I was completely in the dark that Atlus was releasing this game here in the United States. Not that it mattered, I never heard of it. Until XiaNaphryz posted his thread (with a somewhat sensationalist title) on NeoGAF, although the content was admittedly taken from a well-researched Penny Arcade thread, that sold me to the game with the in-depth information.

Although some of the design choices do have a dubious otaku quality, hence all the schoolgirl age anime characters, the game design (mix and match character and arcana) and the sheer insanity of the character design — girl with devil wings? witch with a demon staff? 10 year old scientist hell bent on taking over the world while riding in a giant anthropomorphic blog of water/jelly? — are well worth feeling a little dirty. I just haven’t gotten to the point of looking at the move list and doing something other than button mashing whilst playing it.

In the absence of any real update, I present to you the Xbox Live Status Advisory System chart. Courtesy of Keyser Soze on NeoGAF.

We launched a new online ad campaign today and, let me tell you, it was cooked up by some extremely creative, enterprising people. Or maybe they just read NeoGAF far too much. We’ll never know. We do know that NeoGAF (kinda, sorta) still loves the cats. Several other sites, like Wii Fanboy and Go Nintendo like them too. Good show!

Grab your own Geometry Wars: Galaxies lolcats code at the GWG Cats site.

Image courtesy of John Harker (NeoGAF).

Like many people I had to wait until Monday to play the BioShock demo that went up on Xbox LIVE Marketplace on Sunday, but when I finally got it booted up, the demo delivered in spades. The demo clearly starts at the opening of the game and it’s clearly the most logical place to start both from a story perspective, a gameplay perspective and so you can enjoy the water porn in full effect as you are dumped into the ocean. It only gets better from there.

While the area shown in the demo feels fairly closed and linear with seemingly only one direction to go next, the experience is absolutely immersive and there were a few jump in your seat moments. It was all just enough to get the heart pounding ready to push forward until it was all over after an incredibly suspenseful interlude. The end of the demo was followed by a short attract-style video that showed the different plasmid abilities and how to use them creatively in a game that just capped off how amazing BioShock had played throughout the demo.The demo and ending video perfectly served to increase my own anticipation for the release of the game next week. I wasn’t the only one as stories of the street date being broken by a retailer sent NeoGAF into a frenzy with folks calling stores and cooking up wonderful schemes to get other stores to break the street date so they could get their copy. Of course the story made the internet rounds, hitting up a number of blogs, before retailers got wise and they stopped sales. I didn’t manage to get a copy after calling all of one store. I can wait though.

Another cause for all the excitement was the art direction in BioShock. There have been many quality games released since the last holiday season and while I can’t say I’ve played them all, like The Darkness for example, there haven’t been many I feel that have the deliberate thought and creativity that Gears of War brought to the table. BioShock is indeed one of these rarified games, art deco objectivist roots and all. This is my impression mostly just from the demo. I think 2K Boston/Australia (née Irrational Games, if you haven’t been following current news) knows this quite well and despite the fact that they couldn’t put together an art book for the collectors edition of the game, they did a great service to their fans and put an electronic version of the art book up on their Bioshock site, The Cult of Rapture.

Can I also say that I’m totally in love with the design of that site? No idea why, but I am… it’s hot.

Call me crazy, but on Thursday, July 12, I trekked down to Santa Monica solely to attend the C3@E3 event that Microsoft was hosting for bloggers, community sites and community members. There were some people I had worked with in various ways over the past two years that were planning on attending the event and I knew I wouldn’t have another chance to see them anytime soon. This was underscored by the point that I would not be attending E3 this year either, so it just turned out to be a mandatory thing for me to do. Despite first thing in the morning flights and an overall lack of sleep on either end of the trip, it was more than well worth it. I was happy to run into everybody I have ever interacted with and all the Microsoft folks too. Somehow everybody managed to look conscious through the night.

It was very important for me to meet Shigeo Tatsumi, who was attending E3 and was at the community event. I have talked to Tatsumi-san on several occasions over the past two years, which is partly what led to our intermingling of foreign piñatas in our respective Viva Piñata gardens. Obviously this was the opportunity I would have to talk to him, but not really talk to him because I don’t speak Japanese and he doesn’t really speak English. Thanks to our great translator Jennifer we were able to speak briefly and I’d seriously like to learn Japanese so I could have a bit more of a conversation than we ended up having. I definitely look forward to talking to and meeting Tatsumi-san again in the future. Be sure to check out a video recap of the “C3@E3″ event as captured by Tatsumi-san and his videographer for their Xbox Japan community site.

After meeting with Tatsumi-san is where the whirlwind of meeting people and talking about anything and everything started. Another guy from Japan I was looking forward to meeting was CheapyD from CheapAssGamer. I laughed at his retelling of funny behind the scenes tidbits when he was doing on-air interviews with the BBC and Bloomberg. However, he hadn’t imported a bottle of Pepsi Ice Cucumber for me, so he unfortunately loses quite a few points right there. Spencer from Siliconera (and from Greenwich, where I grew up, go figure), Ben from Opposable Thumbs and I went over our thoughts about the press conferences earlier in the week. Let’s see, my memory is a bit fuzzy a week later, but I also said hello to Chris (the other Chris) from ShackNews, Charles from GamingNexus, Howard from Popcultureshock and Ron from Destructoid. I also ran into Flynn (Fruit Brute) and David (Tiny Dancer) from GayGamer.net, which recently celebrated the site’s first anniversary — you can read the recap of their first ever E3 here. I also ran into Cameron, who is a game designer at Krome and is working on the recently announced Viva Piñata Party Animals, which I was not able to check out due to a lack of ESA pass. James, community manager at Insomniac Games — speaking of whom you check out Major Nelson’s podcast for a great head-to-head between these two. Robert, community manager at Infinity Ward, was demoing the super hot Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but I didn’t get a chance to even check that out. The night wound down and most folks headed over to the Gamecock party down the street while I joined Flynn and David for one more stop before essentially not sleeping the remainder of the night before my flight.

I know I missed about a million people, so apologies for anybody I may have missed, but it was an amazing trip that was well worth it. I hope to see all of these folks and more at the next E3, wherever they decide to hold it.

Images courtesy of the “E3 - C3@E3 Community Party” Flickr photoset by Gamerscore blog.