Taiwanese YouTuber John Huang has created this awesome stop motion tribute to Street Fighter:

Check out his YouTube channel for other anime and video game themed stop motion videos, such as the Dragon Ball Gundam Battle and Mega Man vs. Transformers.

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“Nanikore” travels to Sendai and meets Umeji Narisawa, a 99-year-old woman who plays video games every day:

Narisawa’s game of choice is Bomberman for the original NES. She started playing it 26 years ago, after noticing how much fun her grandchildren were having when they played it. Playing Bomberman for a couple hours a day soon became part of her daily routine.

Her years of bombering have made her an expert at the game; she’s cleared all 50 levels of the game countless times. Some days she beats the game twice.

Playing Bomberman every day helps keep her mind sharp. Pressing all those buttons has also kept her fingers nimble (and capable of threading a needle).

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Sega has created what is sure to be one of the strangest video games ever invented. It is – quite literally – a pissing contest:

“First, an infrared sensor detects when a person approaches, and changes the screen to the game ready display. Next, microwaves hit the stream of urine when the person urinates, and it reads the reflected microwaves to detect the speed of the urine stream. The volume is then calculated by the speed and duration of the urination.”

Since the volume of urine is calculated from the speed, the average amount can also be calculated. In this demonstration the volume is measured for a game to display individual rankings, and Sega are now developing a game for players to compete against people who have used the toilet before.

“We are looking to drinking and eating establishments to install this game first. The advertising screen in it can be refreshed if it is JPEG data, for example, if the bar is being used for a party after a wedding it could show the faces of the bride and groom. That would be pretty funny if the faces of the bride and groom appeared in the toilet. Customers are coming up with quite a few interesting ways to use it.”

Hopefully, within a year, half the bars in Tokyo will be equipped with this amazing device.

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It has been a couple years since the end of Japan’s Billy’s Bootcamp craze. Nevertheless, it seems that somebody’s made a Bootcamp game for the Wii, and Billy Blanks is now starring in commercials for it:

Billy’s voice has been dubbed over in Japanese. It looks like they are marketing it as an exercise game for children.

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Some American fans of the Phoenix Wright series of lawyer video games are creating a stage musical:

With a great amount of work done by the fan “Pleading Eyes”, the four main acts of the game will be conveyed through 30 original songs. There is no word whether the fifth act will be adapted.

Before you ask when the cease and desist requests will be rolling in, you should know that they have received Capcom’s blessing on this project and are speaking with the company on licensing the final product.
While it has been in development since 2007 (before Japan’s version hit the stage, in fact), there is currently a demo reel on their official site, as well as a panel scheduled for April 2011 at I-Con 30, where they will show off an animation for one of their songs.

They got the idea from Japan, where the Takarazuka Revue put on a Phoenix Wright:Ace Attorney musical back in 2008.

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This project began in Summer 2010, I (Brad Crawford) flew out to Japan and spent the entire month of July chasing leads and filming all over the country. I went from Tokyo to Osaka, all the way to Fukuoka on my own dime. However, I was unable to complete all the necessary interviews and capture the entire story. This trip allowed me to make certain contacts and discover the overall arc that this film will follow.

What I want to do is go back with a small crew and proper equipment to round-out the documentary with interviews from key subjects such as Daigo Umehara, Satoshi Numata and communicate with the Japanese public about gaming and arcades in general. EVO 2011, the worlds biggest fighting game tournament, is taking place for the first time in Japan in the spring of 2011. Our goal is to attend and film this event as part of the documentary.

We are also looking forward to interviewing more corporate figures including spokes-people from major game companies such as Capcom, Konami and Taito etc…

This coming November 13th, 2010 we will be attending the Canada Cup, Canada’s Newest and most exciting fighting game tournament. Attendees include Justin Wong, Mike Ross, Ryan “Gootecks” Guitierrez and Daigo Umehara making his fist Canadian appearance. Covering this event will create a great compare/contrast point on gaming and its culture differs from one country to the next. We hope to see some additional Japanese players attend this event to get their perspective on the gaming scene in North America.

The filmmakers are independently creating this documentary using financial contributions from internet users. As of the time of this post, they had raised about $2,000 of their $9,000 goal.

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“Mezamashi TV” shows off an iPad application that uses a headband to measure neural concentration. If you concentrate hard enough, you can get a girl to turn around. If you are able to relax your brain, you can then receive a kiss:

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It looks like Softbank is planning to bring social games like Farmville to Japan:

Zynga, the online gaming company best known for its Farmville Facebook game, has received a US$150 million investment from Japanese Internet company Softbank.

The two companies plan to form a joint venture, Zynga Japan, that will develop and distribute social games across Japan, they said in a statement.

Softbank, which holds the iPhone monopoly in Japan, has been beating out competitors in the battle for new subscribers.

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72-year-old Japanese announcer/actor Shiro Suzuki has a hobby that is unusual for his age group. He likes to play video games. He loves the Resident Evil (Biohazard) series of games, and is quite proud of his mad gaming skillz.

Here is he getting a very high score on Resident Evil 4 that is apparently almost doubled the required point total to be considered a “pro”:

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GREE says a fishing game they developed has been copied by DeNA for their mobile social gaming platform Mobage-town, which has the largest user base among any mobile-only social network in Japan (14.5 million at the end of June 2009 vs. GREE’s 12.6 million at the same time). Specifically, DeNA is accused of having copied elements like the game’s top page or the fish-catching game mechanics.

GREE seeks an injunction and damages, saying DeNA is violating copyright and unfair-competition laws. Japanese media are reporting that both companies have been negotiating over this issue for months now until GREE finally decided to take the rival to court today.

As you can see from the demonstration in the video, the fishing games are very similar. The Mobage version looks like it is a bit more complex. It would be hard to imagine that the Mobage developers were not at least “inspired” by the GREE game.

(Disclaimer: FTV aired a commercial for GREE less than 5 minutes after this news report. )

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The first part is a general look at the show from NTV. They visited the show on a media-only day and were impressed by how many foreign reporters had come to experience Japan’s newest video games. They pointed to the evolution of home gaming systems as the highlight of this year’s show. Project Natal for the XBox 360 is given special attention, with the reporter joining the game’s creator for some wacky dance moves. Later, we are given a look at the presentation of the PS3′s new motion controller and the PSP GO. Towards the end of the clip, the reporter plays around with the gravity grabber, a projector game called Twinkle, and a object grabbing game that is supposed to help with medical rehabilitation.

Six and a half minutes into the video there is a FTV segment about the Tokyo Game Show. FTV places its emphasis on portable games for the PSP GO and mobile phones. Game companies are noticing that many people are now iPhone and iPod Touch owners, so they are trying to break into that market. The number of mobile phone games featured at the show has grown from 110 in 2008 to 168 this year.

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drunk game

The goal is to try to keep Nakagawa awake during the press conference by “poking” him with the 5 key at the right timing so that he doesn’t miss any of the reporters’ questions. If he does, you lose. His approval ratings are displayed in big white print at the top of the screen–I don’t think they ever get super high, but the idea is to try to keep it from falling to zero. [via Tokyomango]

It’s kind of a metaphor for Japanese politics in general too…

In case you somehow missed the big news, you can find out more about this guy here.

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The title translates as “Turnabout Trial: Truth Brought Out.” Apparently this is a musical based on the video game series, performed by the Takurazuka Revue (宝塚歌劇団, Takarazuka kagekidan), an all-female musical theatre group based in western Japan. The group is pretty famous in the Kansai area where I live, but I’m not sure if it’s popular in the rest of Japan and I’m pretty sure it’s almost unheard of overseas. Of course both male and female parts are played by women, and the whole look and feel of the shows dangle dangerously if not outright plummet into the depths of “camp.”

The interesting thing is that the Takarazuka Revue’s target audience is mostly women, which I find to be largely split between those in college and those aged 60+. While I know that the Nintendo DS has broken into markets previously impenetrable by video games, I am wondering how much appeal/name recognition this title has with Takarazuka’s audience. But then again, the Japanese Capcom site seems also to be aggressively pushing the production, so maybe they’re trying to pull in more males into musical theater?

I’ve always been mystified by the Takarazuka Revue concept, but have never been interested enough to see it for myself. Perhaps the video game crossover angle will finally push me over the edge next month when it opens on February 5.

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First up is キャプテン★レインボー (Captain Rainbow), an adventure/action game for the Wii featuring a cattlecall of b-list (perhaps rather, c-list) Nintendo celebs. Early on in the game, you run into Birdo, who is probably most notable as the egg-spitting transvestite mini-boss from Super Mario Bros. 2. Chris Kohler at Wired.com perhaps best summarizes the encounter (and the mood of the game as a whole) with the following scene:

Birdo is seen by the island’s robot police officer as he/she comes out of a public toilet. (The line he delivers as he comes out: “Wow, that was huge. That was like giving birth.”)

The officer throws him in jail for using the ladies’ room when he’s clearly a man. Birdo asks you to go to his/her house and find “evidence that I’m a woman.” So you do. This is how it happens. As you walk into Birdo’s bedroom, you hear … a buzzing. The pillow on her bed is vibrating and buzzing. You walk up to it, and Captain Rainbow looks under the pillow to find … an item that’s censored out on the screen. It’s covered up with a question mark. “Proof that the owner is a woman,” it says, leaving it at that.

So you bring what is in all likelihood Birdo’s vibrator back to the police robot, who accepts it, whatever it may be, as prima facie evidence that Birdo is a chick.

Next up is a perhaps less familiar but no less weird offering for the DS, a 15+ rated “touching” game, To LOVEる. What sets To LOVEる apart from its peers is the milk-squirting mini-game. The object of this mini-game is to squirt sweetened condensed milk onto a strawberry that the girl on the screen is holding and moving around. Inevitably, the player more often than not misses the strawberry and as expected, the girl is subjected to the inexorable dictates of physics.

Thanks to Kotaku for the lead to the video and fast forward to 3:07 to view the milk-squirting game.

As you can see from the image, the book is called Arcade Mania: The Turbo-charged World of Japan’s Game Centers. It covers a wide variety of Japanese game types, such as:

• Crane Games (claw machines!)
• Sticker-Picture Machines (purikura)
• Rhythm Games (DDR & drum games)
• Shooting Games (“schumps”)
• Fighting Games (street fighter and its buddies)
• Games of Chance (mahjong & pachinko)
• Dedicated Cabinets (racing games & gun games)
• Retro Games (Donkey Kong, anyone?)
• Card-based Games (popular with the little kids these days)

Each sub section has an history of its particular type of gaming, and there are mini-interviews with game makers and notable Japan-based expert gamers. These expert gamers explain why they’re obsessed with that particular type of game, and in some cases offer advice to would-be gamers (I’ll be trying out some of the claw machine game techniques mentioned in one interview).

What makes Arcade Mania truly cool is the beautiful style in which its pages are arranged. Almost every page is in full color, with lots of appealing photographs and screen captures of games that give this book a hip arcade feel:

Arcade Mania will be hitting Japanese book stores sometime in September, and it’s currently available on Amazon Japan. It does not come out in the United States until January 2009, so American readers not willing to pay shipping from Japan will have to pre-order it on Amazon. Anyone interested in Japanese gaming culture will enjoy this book!

The video games industry is seeing some real-life action and suspense this month. In early June, Tomonobu Itagaki, head of the Team Ninja development team at Tecmo, and the man behind titles such as Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden, recently announced his resignation from the company and has filed complaints against it for unpaid bonuses and against Tecmo president Yoshimi Yasuda. Two of his colleagues at Tecmo later followed suit with similar complaints of unpaid overtime. At face value, the cases may seem altogether unremarkable especially to those not particularly interested in Tecmo games or video games in general, but given Japanese reticence towards litigation versus the recent clamor for work-life balance, the possible ramifications may spread to other industries as Japan struggles with labor practices and workers’ rights.

For those of you who haven’t been keeping score, here’s a brief rundown of key events:

June 3, 2008 Itagaki announces his resignation and discloses complaints against Tecmo concerning unpaid bonuses and against company president Yoshimi Yasuda.

June 4, 2008 Tecmo responds to Itagaki’s complaints, stating that it has regularly paid Itagaki’s bonuses every year, and that the unpaid bonuses Itagaki is referring to are separate and were agreed to by previous management. [Japanese pdf] [Summary at Gamasutra]

June 10, 2008 Tecmo files for a gag-order on Itagaki, which would in essence prohibit him from talking about the company in any way to anybody. [Summary at GameSpot]

June 16, 2008 Hiroaki Ozawa and Tatsuki Tsunoda file a separate lawsuit against Tecmo. According to Game Watch Impress, the contents of the suit allege that Tecmo used a ringer to act as “Employee Representative” — Tecmo Union leader — in order to forge documents to avoid paying workers overtime. [Commentary in English here and evaluation of the documents here at kotaku]

June 18, 2008 Itagaki and Tecmo submit almost identical but conflicting documents regarding “special incentives”. [itmedia via kotaku]

From a more base perspective, this case pretty much has everything — a rock-star plaintiff, a ringer, forged documents, millions of yen at stake and even some violence and undulating bosoms! While I cling to slender hope that the cases may bring about some positive precedents, others in the industry have a somewhat more cynical take, and expects that in the end business will continue as usual.

Should Mr. Itagaki win his suit, it might have interesting repercussions. He could, with a little image make-over, be considered somewhat of an example for other, embattled employees struggling with Japan’s changing corporate atmosphere where employee rights are becoming more important. On the other hand, this being Japan, it is equally likely that, win or lose, everything will stay just as it is. Actually, that is far more likely an outcome. (original emphasis)