News from Play Asia

Welcome to this week's Movie/Music news roundup, containing all new Japanese and Hong Kong Video and Music releases from this week listed at Play-Asia.com. Around 400 new items are covered in this week, including new J-Pop, Anime as well as Japanese, Hong Kong and Western movie releases and much more.

Here's a summary of all new releases that were published between Saturday, March 3rd and Friday, March 9th. If some specific item that you are looking for is missing, please don't hesitate to contact our customer service with your request.

J-Pop Music releases (188)
ENKA Music releases (24)
Anime Soundtracks & Drama CDs (21)
Video Game Soundtracks (7)
Hong Kong Version Music releases (3)
Blu-Ray Disc Movies (4)
HD DVD Movies (3)
Hong Kong Version Movie releases (14)
Japanese Movies (20)
Non-Japanese Movies / Japanese Version (67)
Anime DVD releases (23)
J-Pop DVD releases (27)
Misc. Japanese DVD releases (2)
Idol DVD (5) ...

The latest numbers are in and a massive improvement for PSP and PS3:

DS Lite: 111, 814 units
PSP: 66, 156 units
Wii: 57,972 units
PS3: 44,000 units
PS2: 15,364 units
Xbox 360: 3,379 units
Game Boy Micro: 805 units
Game Boy Advance SP: 738 units
GameCube: 303 units
DS: 112 units
Game Boy Advance: 25 units ...

Heres the top games:

1). Gundam Musou 170,725 units (This week) 170,725 units (Total)
2). Super Robot Taisen W 137, 851 (This week) 137, 851 (Total)
3). Monster Hunter Portable 2nd 137,851 (This week) 843,132 (Total)
4). Wii Sports 39, 639 (This week) 1,130,376 (Total)
5). Professor Layton and the Mysterious Village 33,957 (This Week) 220,673 (Total)
6). Wii-play 31,702 (This week) 976, 288 (Total)
7). Unou no Tatsujin Soukai Machigai Museum 2 27,236 (This week) 1, 201,812 (Total)
8). Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 27,236 (This week) 1,201,812 (Total)
9). New Super Mario Bros. 24,545 (This week) 4,193,532 (Total)
10). More Brain Training 22,854 (This week) 4,039,850 (Total) ...

Remember when you were little, and that kid who stole your Grimlock figure tried to run away, but you caught him and beat his face in until he wept for mercy? And your parents made you say sorry, but the first time you said it you were all "...sorry...", and even though he snorted through his busted teeth "dath okay" they just looked at you sternly and said "now say it like you mean it"? And you did?

That's what Microsoft are doing. Sorry, just took me a while to get there. After their Old Spice/Xbox Rewards extravaganza got off to a shaky start and some people got messed around, they came out and said "sorry". Good, but not good enough it seems. They could do better, like sending everyone who experienced "difficulties" logging into the competition two free XBLA games (Joust and Robotron) along with a very polite letter apologising for the errors.

Awfully good of you, Microsoft. Now run along, and make sure it doesn't happen again.

via kotaku ...

At the Nintendo keynote address delivered by the company's creative guru, Shigeru Miyamoto, the Mario creator spent much of his talk lecturing game developers about the creative process.



However, amid tales of getting his wife to play Wii Sports and focusing on entertaining not only players but also those around them, there was one nugget of new information.

Miyamoto divulged that he was working on a new Wii Channel for Miis. Whereas the current Mii Channel focuses on the creation of the cartoonish avatars and occasionally swapping them with friends, the new Mii-centered channel will sport a so-called "popularity contest," where users from all over the planet can showcase their Miis across the Internet.

Miyamoto did not mention a name or release date for the new channel.

via gamespot ...

When Square Enix started work on Final Fantasy XII for the PlayStation 2, it was determined to have a short-term turnaround for the project, according to Taku Murata, Square Enix's head of research and development.

He told a packed room at GDC during a session titled "Final Fantasy XII Postmortem" that the company had employees working on a variety of specialist subtasks. He said, "We wanted to avoid a long-term development period, [and] to solve that problem we just hired so many employees that you can't imagine." In the end, the game was five years in development.

There are three core aspects to the Final Fantasy franchise, Murata said: innovation, quality, and volume. "We thought about what we needed to focus on, and in the end we decided we needed a seamless battle system, and this was at the core [of the game]."

He added that although this might not sound like a major innovation, since many other games on the market at the time were already using this kind of system, for Final Fantasy, it was a big step with many possible pitfalls. Murata explained, "That's because role-playing is about inputting commands, so those who are not good at action games can also play."

FFXII had a huge amount of non-player characters as compared to previous installments of the franchise, Murata revealed. The game had approximately 1,000, as opposed to 300 in Final Fantasy VII, and a meager 200 in Final Fantasy X.

The number of monsters remained static, with 250 beasties in XII, the same as VII, and slightly more than the 200 in X. There were also fewer bosses than in previous games, approximately 30 in total as compared to 50 in the two previous games named.

At the end of the session, Murata referenced the announcement in January that the company would be licensing Unreal Engine 3 for future games. Murata said, "We have a team that is going to use this wonderful engine, but we need to work out how to use this to create our games," adding that the process would take some time to integrate.

He wouldn't be drawn on which particular titles Square Enix would be utilising its recently acquired engine on, except to say that an announcement would be made "soon."

via gamespot ...

LocoRoco director Tsutomo Kouno's Thursday presentation at the Game Developers Conference was billed as a postmortem on the development of his colorful PlayStation Portable offering, but the developer knew he wouldn't be able to make it through the event without talking about the sequel.

After recapping the game's creation from a single concept sketch on his PDA in spring of 2004 to a finished game in June of 2006, Kouno turned to a list of things he'd like to do for the next LocoRoco. Speaking through a translator, Kouno said he wanted to use physical calculations for drawing characters in the next game, as well as incorporate advanced crowd artificial intelligence (A.I.) into the game. The change in A.I. would be used in every aspect of the game from the way the LocoRoco blobs walk together to ways they could dodge various environmental dangers.

Other areas that Kouno said he wanted to improve on included the use of music in the game, and the visual effects. But perhaps most interestingly, he teased, "I'd like to use a new way of playing the game for the next version of LocoRoco."

He wouldn't talk about it during the session, but did promise attendees "a new and pleasant surprise."

Sony Worldwide Studios president Phil Harrison first confirmed the LocoRoco sequel's existence in a question-and-answer session at last month's D.I.C.E. Summit. It came up again in Harrison's GDC keynote speech earlier this week. In showing off the trophy room of the PlayStation Home service, Harrison's in-game avatar/tour guide paused in front of a giant LocoRoco trophy. However, there was no mention of trophies being made available for anything but PlayStation 3 games.

When a member of the audience asked Kouno whether the next LocoRoco would be a PSP game or a PS3 game, he said he knew the question was coming, but couldn't answer it. Instead, he promised, "I'm not going to betray your expectations. You can count on this."

via gamespot ...

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, was almost the last ever Zelda, Nintendo's manager of software development, Eiji Aonuma, said. Speaking through a translator, he told how the previous game, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, hadn't been hugely popular in Japan, although it had been reasonably well received in the West. One of the reasons for this was that the Japanese market in general was moving away from games, he said, and this was well publicised, and known as "gamer drift."

So, in order to make a successful game that would appeal to this disenchanted audience, and continue his beloved Zelda series, Aonuma said, "We needed a new style of gameplay to breathe life into the market."



Eiji Aonuma poses for photos before his talk.
Aonuma was speaking at GDC in a talk titled "The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Reflections in the Hourglass." The event was hugely popular, and before he started the talk, Aonuma posed for photos, and signed autographs while a long line of attendees filtered in hunting for seats in the hall.

The company found that Wind Waker's cartoon-like graphics were alienating the lucrative teen audience in North America, who would look games of that style and think they were for kids, he continued. With the Japanese market in the midst of the dreaded "gamer drift," and the North American market much stronger, Nintendo decided to give the US what it wanted--a realistic Zelda. He said, "We had to make a game that met expectations of fans in North America. If it didn't, it could mean the end of the franchise."

The decision was also made for Link to have the ability to turn into a wolf. "This kind of disruptive breakthrough was just what we needed for the staff to change their way of thinking."

But still, the game needed something more, something to make it truly innovative. It was around this stage that Aonuma was talking to Nintendo senior managing director Shigeru Miyamoto, who told him something along the lines of, "It's as though the Revolution (later renamed the Wii) was designed just for Zelda! Why don't you try making a Zelda for the Revolution?" In the end, believes Aonuma, the kind of direct control offered by the Wii Remote was exactly what was needed to breathe life into the game.

So the decision was made to bring the game to the Wii. "Creating a launch title was a first for the Zelda franchise and we had no idea what a challenge it would be," he told the audience.

The company also felt strongly that it did not want to disappoint all the GameCube owners who had been waiting patiently since the game's announcement back in 2002, so it decided to push the game back to 2006 to be able to release it on both formats.

Developers experimented with switching to a first-person session for Twilight Princess' combat sequences with Link's sword movements being controlled by moving the Wii remote. However, it soon became apparent that there was a fundamental problem with this idea... "Link is left-handed, so when a right-handed player swings the sword, it felt awkward...So we abandoned the idea." In the end, the problem was party resolved by flipping the world laterally in order to make Link right-handed.

Aonuma said he realised that the game was a success when, "I saw some of our female employees swinging a sword to defeat a huge monster. Then I was convinced Zelda had been reborn."

He also filled in some gaps on the upcoming Nintendo DS version of the series--The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. There will be a Wi-Fi enabled battle mode nicknamed Wi-Fi Hide and Seek. The game is a Pac-Man style chase, with two players taking on red and blue versions of Link.

Players must pick up "force gems" in order to see the positions of the phantoms on the board. However, carrying these also has a penalty--they will slow the player down, making it easier for the player to be caught. The other controls the phantoms, using the stylus to move them around to chase Link, and hopefully bring him down. Aonuma commented, "The more you play, the more you get to experience the other player's habits, so it's very addictive."

via gamespot ...

Software Association has begun sending out 'save the date' invitations for this year's E3, which will take place between July 11 - 13.

The invite states that E3 will offer "the opportunity to engage in one-on-one meetings with leading game company executives in an intimate setting, as well as network, socialise, and test pilot major company offerings".

All of this will take place in "an environment designed to ensure that you can get your business done efficiently and effectively".


via eurogamer ...