Posts Tagged ‘gaming’

Japanese media coverage of the Tokyo Game Show

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.

• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)

Japanese Arcade Mania

Two of the biggest names in the English language Japan blogosphere, Brian Ashcraft of Kotaku and Jean Snow of JeanSnow.net, have teamed up to create a book about Japanese Arcades and gaming culture:

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!

Video: 8-Bit Yamanote Line

YouTuber VodkaYNVGw has uploaded this very cool NES-style video of Tokyo’s Yamanote Line (cool 8-bit musical representations of each station’s melody are included):

If you liked this video, you might also like VodkaYNVGw’s “Yamanote Line Outer Tracks” video.

NES Theremin

A Japanese YouTuber has uploaded this video of a Theremin (an electronic musical instrument) that he created from an old original NES (Famicon):

Details on the project can be found on this site (Japanese).

Japanese Middle School English comes to the DS in April

If you’ve taught middle school in Japan before, you’ve seen this book: New Horizon. Coming April 24th, from Paon, Japanese schoolchildren will be able do textbook activities sans paper and pen, on their DSes. Even more interesting, is that kids will be able to do listening practice, in addition to writing practice, without the need for CDs or a dedicated portable audio player. I’ve taught in middle schools here, and what I hear from kids is that they don’t typically own iPods or the like.

It makes me jealous. When I was young, technology hadn’t yet advanced to the point where we could do anything this cool with our studies. Hopefully, since a lot of children don’t usually enjoy studying English, putting it on a DS and giving it the illusion of being a game, they’ll give it a try, possibly learning more than they normally would.

Japan Boom in East Asia

Here’s a pretty interesting FTV news report on the current popularity of Japanese language and culture in East Asia:

A quick summary of the Shanghai portion of the video:

• -The couple interviewed at the beginning of the segment says they are buying anime stuff because they’ve watched and enjoyed anime since they were children.
• -We are shown a Japanese anime/game store in Shanghai, which is usually crowded with young people on the weekends.
• -A 22-year-old Chinese guy allows the reporters to come to his apartment, which he shows them his love of Japanese culture by playing Wii and singing along with some popular Japanese songs. He also likes Samurai-era Japanese history, talking about Tokugawa Ieyasu in Japanese.
• In addition to the anime/gamer scene, events where Chinese people studying the Japanese language and Japanese residents of Shanghai gather in parks to practice what they have learned and socialize.
• A Japanese language school in Shanghai is shown, with individual classrooms named after areas of Tokyo [Odaiba, Roppongi, Ikebukuro, etc.]. Sometimes classes involve one-on-one conversation with Japanese teachers, but the school also has its students watch anime for listening practice. Many of the students interviewed mention anime and games as their motivation behind studying the Japanese language.

And a summary of the second half of the video, which takes place in Taiwan:

• A narrator mentions that about 55,000 Taiwanese people took the Japanese Language Proficiency test last year.
• Apparently there is a Japanese language study boom going on in Taiwan, and many mothers are signing their children up for private language schools like the one shown in the video. We are shown some of the typical lessons held there, which include playing karuta (a game in which players attempt to slap and capture cards representing certain words or phrases), singing, and dancing. As part of the total immersion environment, the kids all pick Japanese names for themselves. The school claims it can teach kids to read and write Japanese within a 2-3 year period.
• The mother of a little girl studying Japanese says that it is not uncommon for Taiwanese children to study both Japanese and English these days.
• Interest in Japanese culture and work/business are given as the two major reasons for the current Japanese language boom going on in East Asia.