Full box art after the jump.

GTA San Andreas Has Mutants [Kotaku Australia]

...I was in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I played a cracked-out rap star who had his lyrics stolen and the person that stole them became a star. So I went on crack and by the end of the game I get my reputation and my mansion back. You start off as a kid in South Central LA, you build up your rep and then you get a gang. It's definitely some crazy shit.

The Vice City games are the worst shit ever — in a good way. It's so intentionally wrong that you've got to get into it. You go, "Oh my God, if I'm out of money I just rob a liquor store." Inside this world, all the things that you think about, you can do. Does that make you want to do it in real life? No. To me it diffuses it. People say video games make kids violent. I don't think so. It can be an outlet for that aggression. It's a masculine thing. Human beings have some weird blood lust, it roots back to us being animals. It's ill, though.

Somebody knows what they are talking about and that somebody is Ice-T.
How Music Saved [Guardian]

The vast majority of Japanese devs have an arcade background, and if an arcade game is going to be a hit, it needs to work, it needs to be tight and snap. If you put in a coin in a buggy game that locks up or freaks out, you'll complain to the arcade manager, who will then complain to his boss, who will then complain to his boss, who will complain to that game's publisher. Shit's gotta work. While the arcade scene is very much alive in Japan, it's not in the States, and most developers are coming in with a strong PC gaming background. If shit's broken, patch, patch, patch! "Japanese games have very few collision problems — hands, arms going through walls, etc," says Capcom producer and former localization head Ben Judd. "When western gamers see in-game collision issues, they don't care as long as they're having a good time. That's just not acceptable for the Japanese." Things like A.I. and programming is where Western devs really shine, while Japan picks up the slack on things like textures.

Other things that separate Western and Japanese games, points out Judd, include such seemingly small things like "Japanese player typically don't like controlling two thumbsticks are once — they get sick" and "Japanese players like a strong tutorial." Japanese players, says Judd, prefer that characters are skewed slightly younger and have more anime-style qualities, while Western gamers favor 30 year-old bald men. "RPGs are popular," says Judd. "Players don't typically like the first person point of view and want to see their character. It makes it easier for them to support that character." No wonder Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto has found a welcome audience in Japan.

While Japanese games have been localized to varying degrees of success on a consistent basis since the early-to-mid 1980s, Western games, save for the oddity here or there, haven't. This is nothing new, and Capcom has been bringing Western games over to The Land of the Rising Sun for sometime, even working with Blizzard to localized Warcraft III. "But it wasn't until GTA III that the company really saw the potential of Western games," says Judd. Even though a heavily censored GTA III was slapped with a dreaded CERO Z rating (the equivalent of ESRB AO), the game was a hit, fueled by US hyper carry-over as well as controversy in Japan. San Andreas moved something like 500,000 copies! Just as there are Western gamers who salivate at the idea of grinding through Japan-Only RPGs, there are Japanese gamers who cannot wait to tear through BioShock or Halo 3. Thing is, there doesn't seem to be as many of these Japanese gamers...

For Judd and his team, the challenge is selling Bionic Commando, a game developed by Swedes and clearly geared for a Western audience. One reason that game is getting made is because Western journos kept harping on a new Bionic Commando during Capcom press events and interviews! The original game, Top Secret: Hilter no Fukkatsu (Top Secret: The Return of Hitler) wasn't a huge arcade or home hit in Japan, but the NES console port with its endearingly cruddy English localization became a cult hit. "For the Xbox Live Arcade and the PSN Bionic Commando, the question has been how much to push Hitler," says Judd. "People in Japan know Hitler no Fukkatsu more than Top Secret or Bionic Commando." Then again, while releasing a Hilter game for the Famicom was apparently totally fine in the 1980's, it's not in today's world. Instead of releasing a Hilter no Fukkatsu remake on the Japanese PSN and XBLA, Capcom's releasing a re-localized version of the localized Bionic Commando remake. While Judd is fairly confident that Bionic Commando: Rearmed will do will with Western gamers, he's upfront about how it'll do in The Land of the Rising Sun. "Bionic Commando: Rearmed will have a tough time in Japan," says Judd.

"We don't really have a team in place to localize English games," says Capcom's Gearoid Reidy. "We're either outsourcing games we're publishing like GTA or God of War to be localized or trying to tie-up loose ends in-house." Capcom is staffed with a team of native English speakers like Reidy and Judd who are both fluent in English and Capcom and who have extensive experience in localization. What about vice versa? Besides Japanese staffers who are proficient in English, there isn't a dedicated in-house team of Japanese native speakers acting as translators. That's not to say the outsourcing firm does shoddy work, that's not to say that at all. The outsourcing firm has handled most of Capcom's Japan English game releases. "The problem is that there's a delay," points out Reidy. "Since they are outsourced, it takes a bit longer than if we had an in-house team doing English-to-Japanese translation." Judd would like to create a team of Japanese native speakers doing translation work in-house. "It really depends whether these games are successful or not," he says. With Capcom publishing Grand Theft Auto IV in Japan later this year, there's a pretty good chance they will be.

Translating is hard. Translating English to Japanese is harder. "You can't do direct one-to-one translations," says Tokyo-based localizer Matt Alt, who has his own localization company AltJapan. "You often have to capture the spirit of the original text." Programming-wise, changing English text into Japanese text can be tricky. "I've really come to hate the Japanese language," says Judd, who's not only a Capcom producer, but a licensed Japanese language teacher. "There are no breaks between words in Japanese," he explains. All Japanese words are mashed together, making breaking up in-game Bionic Commando text tricky. In English, text can easily broken up by spaces, but Capcom has had to go back and create a special program for breaking up the Japanese in-game text. "We've spent a lot of money on coding the Japanese text alone."

Some games just should not be dubbed. Besides the difficulty of matching up the character's lips, sometimes dubbing just doesn't fit. Take SEGA's localization of Yakuza, for example. That game needed subtitles. American voice actors trying to pass off as yakuza just sounds strange! Bionic Commando will not be dubbed for Japan. "Some titles," says Judd, "the Japanese just don't want the language changed." Shit Japanese Western game dubs become the object of ridicule for the Japanese internet. Who wants to hear cutesy anime voice actors try to act like badasses? Nobody! Bionic Commando will be subtitled in English. Besides, when you're looking at selling 100,000 Bionic Commando copies in Japan (as Capcom is doing) and you're consumers are Japanese gamers with a thing for Western games, what's the point of dubbing, really?

Even if the game is localized correctly, the Japanese market is tough to crack. "Japanese companies don't even know what'll be hits here," says Reidy. "Who saw Nintendogs or Monster Hunter and thought those games would be hits?" Some publishers feel that it's a market that needs pandering to. "Consumers need to know what they're buying," says Judd. So when Crackdown is given anime-style style poster art, it's not exactly a fair description of what's in the box and reeks of 1980's style game promotion. While Western publishers take advantage of things like podcasts and blogs, those really have not caught on in Famitsu-press-release-fed Japan. Bionic Commando has a Japanese blog, but it's updated only once a week. If users have any questions, their identity is censored by Capcom for privacy concerns and only their sterile question appears before developers to answer, creating a very sterile community interaction. Judd explains: "In Japan, we can't do community. It's considered a liability here." There are too many unknowns with community sites. What if an employee says or does something stupid? The lack of direct corporate control is dangerous. "We just waiting for Capcom to drop the hammer on our podcast," says Judd. "Lucky they don't speak English." Lucky, indeed.

Nothing says video games like plastered trucks. To promote the release of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Capcom is rolling out the above truck to rampage the streets of Tokyo and Osaka from today to January 26th to the 28th. It lights up at night! Bad ass, especially when compared to what Electronic Arts is rolling out across Japan for Sim City DS (below).

Even sadder when compared to the Tokyo city GTA bus racing through Shibuya, Roppongi and Shinbashi (hit the jump). Brian Ashcraft

GTA Rides
EA Ride [Famitsu]

Even though the title was released in the States back in 2004, Capcom is finally publishing Rockstar's controversial Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on January 25th. And they've got the launch party to prove it. Just check out after the jump what the festivities held at Shibuya's Club Asia for this 18-years-old-and-up-game:

• Girls with fake Peter Moore-esque fake GTA tattoos.
• A BMX stunt show. How 80's!
• Caution tape and salarymen.
• Hoodies. Yes, hoodies.
• A Japanese hip-hop star (the country's first rapper at that) with shameful sweaty pits. Wear one shirt, dude!
• Blind-folded AND seated basketball dribbling with traditional drum accompaniment.
• Non alcohol drinks with bad pun names like "GTA Coke. And I quote: "The recipe is a 'buzz' and coke cocktail." So clever.

Capcom GTA Event [Watch Impress]

In Grand Theft Autio: San Andreas , city locale Los Santos doubles as Los Angeles, and in-game strip club "The Pig Pen" is real life establishment "The Play Pen." The club's owners did what all the cool kids are doing and took Rockstar to court for violating the strip club's trademarked Play Pen sign. The judge ruled in Rockstar's favor, stating:

The court finds that defendants' use of the Play Pen trade dress and trademark bears some artistic relevant to the Game, and does not explicitly mislead consumers as to the source or content of the Game... they are entitled... to a First Amendment defense.

Next up, the Peanuts gang sues Rockstar for dirtying the image of beloved character Pig Pen with strippers and lowlifes. Good grief. Brian Ashcraft

More Here [Gamasutra]

Games and consoles never live up to our lofty expectations. In our collective gaming vocabulary, we typically pick out actual products to highlight these shortcomings. Doing so, we sully that original product, pegging it with all shorts of external negative connotations. Thus, instead of picking on the usual suspects, I propose picking on someone else. I propose Axl Rose.

For those living under a rock during the late 80's or early 90's, Axl Rose was the lead singer of a rock band called Guns N Roses. Recently, he's found vox work in GTA: San Andreas and was the inspiration for a Guilty Gear character. His band released a series of smash hit records, but lost the plot thanks to heroin and supermodels. Axl fired everybody that didn't quite GNR and has been working on the band's newest album, Chinese Democracy, for donkey's yonks. Recently, Rose told Rolling Stone, "we're working on thirty-two songs, and twenty-six are nearly done." Continuing, the controlling singer said, "People will hear music this year."

It doesn't matter when people hear this album, because people are going to let down. Chinese Democracy is a product of excess, indulged and bankrolled by a huge corporation. Same goes for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Duke Nukem Forever and the PS3 or any other titles, games, whatever. Granted, they could very well turn water into Kool-Aid, but will never meet the expectations and neither will Chinese Democracy. But, it's better than waiting for nothing.

Learn About GNR [Wikipedia]