Expect wonderful Qix-style gameplay, but with a modern day, Geometry Wars-like re-skin, for a mere 800 Microsoft Points. We're still hunting down additional details on Qix++ from Taito and its owner Square Enix, but expect lots of levels, plenty of line-drawing and frantic arcade gameplay. Looks like Taito is also readying a PSP version of Qix++, should you prefer to wait for that.

As a fan of the original and it's sequels, I'll be earmarking Points for Qix++. Will you?

Regardless of your feelings about Taito's arcade classic Qix, it appears that Microsoft will release the modern-day update to the game on Xbox Live Arcade next week. At least in Japan, Qix++ is scheduled for a December 9 release, priced at 800 Microsoft Points. We wouldn't be surprised to see North America and Europe and every other continent follow suit.

12 月の「Deal of the Week」他、最新のXbox LIVE マーケットプレース情報！ [Xbox Japan via GamerBytes]

The revision takes some ¥4.9 billion off their net income - about $53 million US - in the first half of this fiscal year (which spans April 1 to March 31). Originally, Square had been planning on 7.5 billion yen in the first half of this fiscal year; it's now predicting ¥2.6 billion, and for comparison's sake, at this time last year it had pulled in ¥6 billion.

Square's income picture for the year fell commensurately; it was lowered from ¥15 billion for the entire fiscal year down to ¥10 billion.

The entire filing [pdf]is available through Square-Enix's investor relations site if you're into this sort of thing.

Here is the ad. Yummy instant ramen!

Now, here is the Bubble Bobble theme song. Kwinky dink or highway robbery? YOU DECIDE.

Update: We have contacted Taito, and according to a company spokesperson, the Bubble Bobble song has been licensed out for the commercial.

韓国の三養ラーメンのCMソングが『バブルボブル』のテーマ曲のまるパクリな件 [はちま起稿]

Yeah, yeah, taste isn't a temperature. That's been discussed before. Still, this tea service design won some damned tea-off for 2009, and should class up your joint if you are so inclined to buy it. Or serve tea to guests, a lifestyle decision I'm betting is well outside our readership demographic.

Space Invaders Tea Vessel [Gamergrrlz via Gizmodo]

Looks like they're also teasing other Taito classics yet to come for the iPhone, judging from the collage image (shown here). Based on the other two teaser images, though, we can probably expect Bub and Bob to make their way to the App Store before Chack'n Pop.

For further evidence, observe the sketch of Bub taunting "Guess Who's Coming Next!" and a painfully adorable image of Bub (or is that Bob?) snuggling an apple to the line "Together at Last..."

Go check it out if you can stand the cute.

Taito tease iPhone Bubble Bobble, more classic revivals [Offworld]

The new game has you controlling the laser cannon with your finger, breaking it free from its fixed horizontal path to let you sweep the thing around the screen. While auto-fire is the default, you can set it to allow you to start and stop the cannon's shots.

With the promise of evolution both in the title and the design, can this latest Space Invaders drum up the attention that the original failed to achieve?

Loved
Space Invaders Reimagined: On some level I hold games like Space Invaders sacrosanct. Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac-Man, they're all proto-games representative of a genre they either created or popularized. Trying to reimagine them makes no sense because countless other titles have already done that in the evolution of the genre they represent. These new versions are often pointless and annoying to retro-fans like myself. But there are times when it works. Space Invaders Infinity Gene is one of those moments.

Infinity Gene works because, while it stays anchored in the aesthetic of the original Space Invaders, it ditches just about everything else, turning the heartbeat pace of the steady shoot-em up into something frantic and ever evolving. While the game's enemies include a wide range of shapes and ships, the familiar iconic space invaders always loom, slipping in and out of the background in pulsing lines. The weapons too evolve from a single horizontal dash to energy waves, twin guns, gravity bombs and curving lock-on rays.

Infinite Space Invaders: The game initially comes at you in a series of increasingly long levels, 19 of them in total. But as you play you unlock evolutions which give you new weapons, new music, new art, and a few new levels. The really amazing thing about Space Invaders Infinity Gene, though, is its ability to draw inspiration from your iPod Touch or iPhone's music library and create new levels. I tried this a half dozen times so far, playing through Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire," Vampire Weekend's "A-Punk" and Jimi Hendrix's "Once I Had a Woman," to name a few. Each level was different enough to convince me that something new was going on, that the levels really were born of a Hendrix guitar solo and Cash's gravely voice.

Hated
Nonsensical Evolutionary Tree: There's a lot going for Space Invaders Infinity Gene, but the game's namesake evolution tree isn't one of them. On paper it sounds like you'll be choosing evolution paths, like in a role-playing game, as you progress through the levels. That's not really the case. Really the tree is just a handy way to show you all of the stuff you've unlocked, none of it really building on each other to create re-playability or different paths.

There are few games worthy of a permanent spot on my iPhone's increasingly bloated screens, Space Invaders Infinity Gene is one of them. It's not just because I have an affinity for Space Invaders, it's because I feel that the ability to play unique levels based on whatever I happen to be listening to at the time will keep this game from ever feeling dated.

Space Invaders Infinity Gene was developed and published by Taito for the iPhone and iPod Touch on July 27. Retails for $4.99 USD. Played all game types in both single player mode and multiple music-created levels.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

The remake of the classic features a customizable "evolutionary tree" and the ability to play original stages based on your own music. It sort of looks like it's getting the shmup treatment.

Published by Taito, the game won the 2008 Japan GameJam Competition, but can it win the cold, stone heart of a Kotaku reviewer?

Loved
Aesthetic: Rough Cookie, the developers behind Star Defense, did a fantastic job of blending a cartoon look with a toy-like design in a way that isn't overly Boom Blox creepy or LEGO cutsey. Plus the main character is a cow. There's also goats and ducks. And water; water that sloshes around the screen, moving everything floating in it when you tilt your iPhone. Waterways is as much fun to watch as it is to play.

Puzzling Challenges: The basic idea of Waterways is that you have to get the cow to a valve on the other side of the screen to shut down the level's water. To do this you tap a path for the cow to walk.
But the top-down 3D maze game has a twist: Water, lots of it. And you can raise and lower the water by opening valves or tilting the phone.
To navigate the byways of Waterways you will also have to raise and lower color-coded bridges by sloshing water into the color-coded sides of the screen with a tilt of your iPhone. As you slosh the water around, the water level drops. Eventually it will drop to a dirt floor, putting some areas out of reach and others within reach.
The concept, and the fact that as you play through the game the developers continue to build on it, gives Waterways a fresh approach to a stale genre.

Hated
Level Access and Save System: You'd think it would be hard to hate something that nearly doesn't exist, but I do. Waterway, for all of its wonderful game design and interesting graphics, seemed to forget that it's sometimes nice to play through a title from beginning to end without having to start over every time. When exited, the game's campaign mode resets itself. Apparently no matter how far into the game you are. You can go into Level Select screen to drop into a particular level, but playing that way forces you to manually switch between levels as you move forward. That's a really bad, easy to fix problem in this game.

Waterways is a colorful game, both in art design and concept. There are some fatal flaws that hamper the long-term playability of the game, but as a concept it's a unique and oddly soothing addition to the bloated world of iPhone games.

Waterways was developed by Rough Cookie and published by Taito for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Retails for $2.99 USD. Played through two-thirds of the game's levels.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

From July 17 to July 20, the arcade game is getting a location test at a trio of locations: G-Port Las Vegas, Taito Station Akihabara and Taito Station Machida.

The release date for Cyber Diver is still TBA.

A total of three new stages are being added to Space Invaders Extreme with tomorrow's new downloadable content, along with the requisite new enemies and bosses to add that extreme flavor. Perhaps the most exciting news is also the least extreme: two emulators are included in the pack, consisting of both the original black and white Space Invaders and the 8-bit color Space Invaders 2. Sure, you can play those two versions on countless devices using programs readily found on the internet, but that's completely beside the point.

The point is, this is probably as extreme as Space Invaders is likely to get any time soon, and it all happens tomorrow, provided you have 240 Microsoft points to spare.

Minter and Llama Soft are responsible for the "colorful and synthetically organic visualizer backgrounds" in the XBLA version of Space Invaders Extreme, giving players a chance to protect Earth from invading aliens while also hallucinating legally. That's with up to four players, by the way, as the Xbox 360 release features multiplayer and co-op modes.

New media awaits you!

Nintendo's Next Wii Game Is Takt of Magic [Siliconera]

Taito rolled out dual-joystick-foot-pedal-controlled networked FPS Half-Life 2: Survivor in 2006. Now, Taito has announced another first-person-shooter for arcades.

Dubbed Cyber Diver, its described as an "original" take on the FPS genre with 5-on-5 networked play and a new game system that displays in-game battle damage. More details as they arise.

Takeshi's Challenge was designed by Takeshi and released by Taito for the Nintendo Famicom in 1986. It is hitting the Japanese Virtual Console on March 31.

Takeshi's Challenge followed a salaryman as he beat up yakuza, played pachinko and divorced his wife. Selling around 800,000 copies, it was anything by typical. The title screen read: "This game is made by a man who hates videogames."

The game did things like having players sing into the mic on the original Famicom controller for an hour. Doing this successfully causes everyone in the bar to attack you. In another part, players must hold down the select button for hours.

The final boss takes 20,000 hits to defeat. After defeating him, Takeshi appears on screen saying that the game isn't very good.

Read more about the game here.

和田氏「次の山はタイトーが作る」 [IT Media]

Cooking Mama Limited Corp. filed for the trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last week, securing rights to use the mark with all manner of video game related things. That includes software, joysticks, screen cleaning cloths being accessories for hand-held games with liquid crystal displays, you name it.

Obviously, Taito and Majesco are pretty happy with sales of Cooking Mama in its various incarnations. That's why we have Gardening Mama. Don't expect interested parties to stop there... but don't give them any ideas.

Crafting Mama [USPTO]

At Japanese arcade industry show AOU, SEGA and Taito showed off the prize goodies appearing in their crane games. The keywords here are "plush toys." Go on, have a look.

セガ、バンプレなどの新作が盛りだくさん！ 第15回プライズフェアをレポ!! [Dengeki Online]

The sequel, Exit 2, gives fans of escorting the helpless 240 new stages to play through. Mr. ESC will be joined by two new companions, "Macho" and "Dog," along with the cast of lovable losers from the first.

Price? A mere 800 Microsoft Points. A mere 0.3 Points per stage! That's value!

Exit 2 [Xbox.com]

Sure, players could enjoy older games for ¥50 and some new, deluxe titles charged ¥200 and up. But generally speaking, 1 play was and has been ¥100.

Game center Taito Station in Shibuya is raising per-play-prices for arcade games, medal games, crane games and sticker pictures.

New per-play prices are:

¥100⇒¥120
¥200⇒¥240
¥300⇒¥360
¥400⇒¥480

Why is the price hike a big deal? Even though ¥120 yen is the same price as a can of coke, there's more than just a twenty percent price increase. There's the matter of two extra ¥10 coins.

This is ground I covered in Arcade Mania, but arcade games in Japan have been ¥100 per-play since the Space Invaders boom of the 1970s — a boom caused ironically by a Taito game, and a boom so big that was so big that it caused a nationwide shortage of ¥100 coins. One coin play is woven into the fabric of Japanese arcade culture.

The mere fact that while American arcades increased prices (and the number of coins), prices in Japanese arcades have remained steadfast with its easy one-coin system has certainly contributed to the success of arcades in The Land of the Rising Sun.

Times are tough, and everyone everywhere is feeling the pinch. Though, adding two extra coins of different value seems like it will making arcade gaming at Taito Station more of a hassle than a pleasure.

Taito was acquired by Square Enix in 2005 so the gut reaction is point the finger. However, we don't know if the blame falls with Square Enix, Taito or simply the cratering global economy.

Competitors SEGA and Namco might be best suited if they see how this plays out for this Shibuya Taito arcade. The reaction on the Japanese internet has been less than favorable.

Smart money says, this price hike will do more harm than good.

Update: We just called venerated game center Taito Hey Akihabara, which has not raised its prices to ¥120 and up and is still charging standard play fees. Don't jump to generalizations that all Japanese arcades have raised their play fees — or all Taito arcades, for that matter.

*¥100 = US$1.12

渋谷タイトーステーション値上げ [Tekken Lord via はちま起稿]