On Feb. 25, a fire broke out in a Las Vegas condo. In it, the body of James Lacella, 48, was discovered. According to investigators, Lacella had been dead for days prior with a bullet in his head. The fire was apparently a cover-up. ABC Las Vegas affiliate KTNV reported that police were able to…
Games have long been included as extras on Blu-rays/DVDs—though the quality of said games tends to rank somewhere between the worst Facebook game and shovelware flash titles. But when Macross Frontier The Movie: The False Songstress was released on Blu-ray in Japan back in 2010, Artdink and Bandai-Namco went a few steps further to create…
Tomorrow is White Day in Japan. I’m supposed to give sweets to women who gave me chocolate on Valentine’s Day. Feeling proactive, I made cookies this weekend for my wife, my mother-in-law, and my sister-in-law—only to discover that my sister-in-law had made cookies for me and my family! These are some of them. You can…
With Sony’s PlayStation Suite, Xperia smartphone owners can enjoy PlayStation titles on their handsets. Starting today, Sony revealed the 21 PlayStation 1 titles that can be downloaded for ¥600 (US$7.30) a pop on the Xperia NX and Xperia acro HD via PlayStation Suite. They are: Addie no Okurimono：To Moze From Addie, Arc the Lad, Bealphareth,…
Photographer Holger Mette created this Tokyo time lapse video over the span of last month with only a Canon 5D mk2. The result is spectacular. Mette aims to shoot other cities as well in timelapse. For more, check out his travel blog Tokyo in Timelapse [Japan Probe]
Korean boy band Dong Bang Shin Ki (DBSK or “Tohoshinki” in Japan) unloaded a laser light SPECTACULAR during a broadcast on local television. While the show took place in 2008 (so old!), it’s recently become a meme in Korea, where it continues to amuse the internet—especially of late. The show inspired Photoshops and comparisons to…
Do you like sci-fi anime Neon Genesis Evangelion? Do you have thousands of dollars burning a hole in your pocket? Have I got a deal for you. Gainax, the company behind Neon Genesis Evangelion, is offering life-sized plugsuit wearing statues of Eva characters Asuka Langley Soryu, Kaworu Nagisa and Rei Ayanami Each figure costs ¥430,000…
While it was once one of the most popular and well received series in gaming, Dynasty Warriors seems to receive more and more negative feedback with each iteration. This is not due to radical shifts in gameplay and/or tone—as many game sequels are accused of doing—but rather the exact opposite: Negative comments center around Tecmo…
To promote Street Fighter X Tekken, Capcom roped in a handful of women to cosplay as the fighting game characters. Dubbed “Miss St. X”, the women are bikini models and starlets. One, however, stands apart when wearing funny shoes and throwing big, heavy balls. See, Rina Ohtsuka, who is cosplaying as Tekken‘s Nina, is a…
As a game journalist living and working in Japan, the question I’m most commonly asked is, “What game can help me learn Japanese?” The answer: Slime Forest Adventure. Set up like a traditional JRPG, you go around the world, battle monsters, and try to rescue a princess. The story is simple and the graphics are…
No wonder a former Japanese Olympic snowboarder is so into otaku (“geek”) culture. It seems there a whole group of snowboarding otaku, decked out in unabashedly nerdy attire. These photos are from the ski slops of Nagano Prefecture. Besides the cosplaying snowboarders, there are geeked out snowboards, called “ita-board”. They feature anime and video game…
Western games are getting increasingly popular in Japan. But they’re still a small slice of the pie. Just ask ZeniMax Asia’s Tetsu Takahashi. ZeniMax Media, of course, owns American developers id Software (Doom) and Bethesda Softworks (The Elder Scrolls) as well as new Japanese studio, Tango Gameworks, with Shinji Mikami (above). Mikami, best known for…
It’s a period of time in nearly every Japanese boy’s life. Sometime before preschool starts and shortly after it ends, kids become enamored with Ultraman. Some never outgrow their fascination with the towering superhero who flies to earth to kick monster butt. I don’t blame them. Ultraman is badass. Ultraman debuted in Japan during the…
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A pair of Team Fortress 2 modders have taken the game’s bones, a bunch of angry Scottish men and the classic Hudson game Bomberman and turned it into something wonderful Their TF2 mod, called TF2 Bomberman, keeps the original game’s core principles of bombs and a maze while putting you in control of Team Fortress…
Reader Jonathan Hansen, who we actually featured a couple of years ago for his awesome “classic” art, thought we’d be interested in seeing his new Monkey Island tattoo. Given the scale and the subject matter, you’re damn right we’re interested. This flesh-based epic took over three years and fifty hours in the chair to complete.…
Matt Rhodes is one of my favourite concept artists in the business. Why? Because his style, using bright, colourful cartoon characters for games that are often very dark and serious in tone, is a breath of fresh air in an industry where a lot of art ends up looking exactly the same. We’ve featured his…
Signalling just how radically the way we read and learn about video games has changed over the past decade, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales now says he has the world’s biggest network of gaming sites on the internet. Which is a bit of a stretch; unlike his commercial rivals, Wales’ Wikia system for games – which…
While Minecraft developers Mojang have put a legal dispute with Elder Scrolls publishers Bethesda (well, Bethesda’s parent company Zenimax) to bed, the settlement has come at a slight cost: there won’t ever be another Mojang game called Scrolls The terms of the settlement mean that the trademark Mojang has for the game won’t cover any…
Two of America’s founding fathers, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, will be starring in the upcoming Assassin’s Creed III. It’s not, you know, their first time in a video game. They’ve been in plenty, some serious, some less so, but my favourite in both cases is 1993 adventure game classic Day of the Tentacle, in…
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