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Microsoft’s forthcoming Xbox One console will not be released in Asia until late 2014, despite the fact that it will launch in the West in November this year, it was revealed last night.

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Sony promises no restrictions on used games for PlayStation 4 – releases cheeky video to rub it in

Jack Tretton, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America, thrilled gamers today when he declared that the company will not impose any restrictions whatsoever on used games. Suffice it to say, the crowd at E3 went wild.

Seconds after the announcement had been made, a video appeared on Sony’s YouTube channel that simultaneously shows how easy it is to trade games with friends while poking fun at competitor Microsoft. Check it out after the break.

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New ultrasonic foam device ensures Japanese continue to give their beer far too much head

When it comes to food and drink, there really is no “right” way to enjoy it. Just as some will cringe at the very idea of munching on raw fish dipped in a little soy sauce, others will stare in horror and disbelief as their housemate smothers a baked potato in peanut butter (you know who you are). But when it comes to beer, as many foreigners visiting or living in Japan will no doubt attest, the fondness Japanese have for topping their drink off with an enormous amount of foam sometimes borders on the absurd. “It’s delicious!” Japanese colleagues tell me when I ask why a third of my beer is head. It may well be tasty, but when it takes three gulps of naught but white froth to reach the beer itself, you have to wonder if this is all some kind of hilarious practical joke that the entire country is in on.

But what about when drinking at home? Without a bartender to ensure that beer arrives with a thick head, how can the thirsty foam lover achieve the same results? Enter the Koku Awa beer pourer from Green House.

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This US$21,000 future chair will increase productivity, bankrupt your company

We can see why this futuristic pod… chair… thing is called “The Emperor,” because there’s no way you wouldn’t feel like some powerful sci-fi movie villain hunting the rebels from your battle cruiser’s control station when sitting in it. But if you can actually keep your power fantasies from distracting you, this chair guarantees increased productivity and maximal office comfort.

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Rumour: PlayStation 4 camera to be sold separately

A telltale sign in a promotional video for Sony’s PlayStation 4 controller has led video game fans to believe that the camera peripheral for the company’s upcoming console will be sold separately from the PlayStation 4 itself, contrary to initial expectations.

While this may seem like little more than a minor inconvenience at first, if found to be true the rumour may point to a key difference between Sony and Microsoft’s console strategies, as well as potentially having ramifications for how developers approach either platform.

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Despite being something that few in-house PR teams would ever hope for the general public to associate with their brand, following CEO Satoru Iwata’s announcement that his company would not be giving its usual presentation at next month’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, the term “Galapagos syndrome” has been cropping up with alarming frequency online alongside Nintendo’s name.

The video game giant has long been known for its quirky sense of individuality and for forging paths into uncharted territories, but at a time when its flagship console is largely being ignored by consumers and both Microsoft and Sony are poised to flaunt new, technically far superior hardware at the upcoming trade fair, some are concerned that the house that made Mario is becoming something of a recluse.

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The internet is abuzz this morning after an individual going by the name of Reckz0r claimed to have broken Microsoft’s security and gained access to as many as 48 million Xbox Live accounts.

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Despite being a country where firearms are incredibly rare and licences to own them notoriously difficult to obtain, there nevertheless remain thousands of gun nuts in Japan. Thankfully, the majority of firearm fans here are content to spend hours poring over photos and technical diagrams of weapons, occasionally visiting shooting ranges or watching videos of pretty girls squeezing off a few rounds while dressed as French maids.

For those who prefer to have something to play with at home, there are airsoft guns from makers such as Tokyo Marui, which feature a shockingly high level of detail and come with all manner of bells and whistles in an attempt to recreate the experience of firing the real thing without the risk of death, serious injury or being arrested. But as aesthetically pleasing as these firing replicas are, one key element was always missing: sound.

Enter: Bakuon Gun-Sound replicas.

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Remember Google Nose? No, we don’t either, because it was just an April Fool’s joke. But, naturally, a Japanese company has taken the idea way too seriously, and is set to release a bizarre new plug-in device for your smartphone.  Read More

Adobe and the Case of the Missing Chill Pill

It wouldn’t be going too far to say that Photoshop is the best friend of many creators. As such, it’s understandable that there’s a lot of interest in the most recent announcement from Adobe, the software’s creator. The company announced on May 7 that they would be changing all of their products to cloud services with monthly fees.

As such, the company has set up a public blog for Japan, where they answer questions submitted by users concerned about how the changes will affect them. And that’s how the trouble began! After the same question was submitted over and over and OVER, the following exchange appeared on the site, brimming with unrestrained frustration. Read More

In the Future Your Own Hand Will be Your Smartphone (With the Help of 5,000 Pounds of Terrifying Machinery)

Minority Report it is not, but Masatoshi Ishikawa – namesake of Tokyo University’s renowned Ishikawa Lab – brought us one step closer to the future when he recently invited Japanese press to witness the lab’s newest creation: a projection system that can track and display an image on a moving object.

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Tokyo Robot Can Think, Learn, and Apply Knowledge: Nothing to Fear Here!

It seems every time a news story about robots appears, someone inevitably freaks out, screaming about Skynet or the Matrix. Well, this time, they might be right!

While it lacks the dexterity and sweetness of other robots, this one can not only assess and comprehend its surroundings but also learn through the Internet! (Oh, please keep it away from Wikipedia. It’ll conquer the world in a month.) Read More

For Butter Lovers: Easy, Greasy Japanese!

Toast in Japan is taken seriously. If you order the “breakfast set” at a restaurant in Japan, you will probably be confronted with one of the thickest slices of toasted bread you’ve ever seen. If you manage to peer over it, you might spot a boiled egg and a small, sad amount of salad cowering there.

At the supermarket, some popular toast spreads which come in a squeezy tube are chocolate, cinnamon, melon and “french toast” flavour, but for many people, toast means butter, and the more butter, the better. For butter-lovers, the new Easy Butter Butter-Former will transform hard butter straight from the fridge into soft and cotton-like butter threads, ready and easy to be used. Sound too greasy to be true? It probably is.

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It as been reported that engineers at Japan’s fast breeder reactor plant Monju made a mistake during testing of the plant’s emergency power generator, which subsequently resulted in the release of black smoke and the ringing of the plant’s fire alarm.

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Beef Up Your iPhone With This Iron Man Mark VII Armor Case

Crank up the Black Sabbath to 11 and bust out your iPhone, this one’s for all you Iron Man fans out there.

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Hyundai Ad Uses Suicide to Promote New Car, Causes Outrage and Sadness in the UK

As much as we might bemoan their very existence when they interrupt our favourite TV shows or appear ad nauseam prior to YouTube clips, when done well ads can be genuinely entertaining. With each shot written, debated, edited and otherwise laboured over sometimes for hundreds of hours, successful ads become pop culture in their own right and are often of higher quality than the shows whose commercial crevices they are stuffed into.

An ad recently aired in the UK, however, become a talking point for all the wrong reasons when it depicted a man trying to kill himself by breathing in the exhaust fumes produced by what transpires to be a particularly environmentally friendly type of vehicle: Hyundai’s iX35.

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We Visit the A ple Sto e in Myanmar: Where Everything is a Little Off (In a Good Way)

RocketNews24 writer GO is an avid Apple fan and user of all things whose names possess a lower case “i” or the word “Mac”. As such, whenever he’s travelling it’s comforting for him to find an Apple store nearby. He can feel relieved that there’s a place to go if one of his gadgets gets out of sorts, and it’s fun to see if there are any differences in other countries.

So after checking out the f@cebook clothing store and Ronald McDonald Duck, he was pleased to see something resembling Apple’s unmistakable logo. GO rushed in, not knowing what lay in store.

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Green With Envy? Super Mario Muscles in on His Brother’s 15 Minutes of Fame

Poor old Luigi just can’t catch a break. Often only taken out of the box when a second player joins the game, forced to stand idly by as his brother Mario gets to smooch the princess, and reduced to the role of comical, vacuum-wielding scaredy cat in his haunted house adventure games…

Even in this, “The Year of Luigi”, wherein creators Nintendo put the man in green under the limelight, it seems that Luigi’s red-capped brother has managed to get his famous face onto what is supposed to be a special edition Nintendo 3DS celebrating all things Luigi.

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Models, Music and Mindbending Colours Celebrate 10 Years of Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills

Opened almost two decades after it was originally imagined by real estate tycoon Minori Mori, Roppongi Hills — a self-contained mega-complex in the middle of Tokyo complete with office buildings, shopping malls, parks and trendy apartments — has become home to thousands of well-to-do businesspeople and Tokyoites, as well as a metropolitan mecca for those craving designer labels and fine dining.

In honour of Roppongi Hills’ 10-year anniversary, a number of celebrations are being held both online and off. The most creative and eye-catching by far, though, has to be the Tokyo City Symphony, an interactive online synthesizer produced as part of the Love Tokyo project. Combining music, 3-D projection mapping and a 1:1000 scale model of Tokyo with Roppongi Hills’ iconic 54-storey Mori Tower at its centre, visitors to the site are invited to project psychadelic patterns and colours onto the tiny, intricately-detailed model city in order to create original “symphony” music. The effect is nothing short of hypnotic. Read More

The Xbox 360’s successor may well be just around the corner, but Microsoft has a serious problem on its hands in Japan. According to sales figures published by Japan’s Dengeki Online, even last week’s top-selling Xbox 360 game, Gears of War: Judgement, only managed to sell a paltry 347 copies in total. In a country where sales for Nintendo’s handheld 3DS reached almost 60,000 units in the exact same period, it’s clear that Microsoft’s console is struggling to keep its head above water.

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