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NVIDIA’s Shield portable console – Cool, sleek and technically illegal in Japan

Powered by the world’s fastest mobile processor and billed by its maker as “the ultimate gaming and entertainment portable” the Nvidia Shield is in many way the realisation of thousands of tech fans’ nerdiest dreams: a genuinely powerful portable built around a home console-quality controller with a potentially vast software library. Offering gamers the chance to play games like Borderlands 2 and Skyrim anywhere from their bedroom to the toilet, the Shield at once steals both Nintendo’s “play with the TV off” Wii U thunder and makes Sony’s plans to have all forthcoming PlayStation 4 titles also playable on Vita seem like a copycat move, so it’s little wonder that the console has received a ton of attention the world over.

Currently only available in the US and Canada, lovers of all things sleek and shiny here in Japan who couldn’t wait any longer for an official release have laid down their cash (and with the portable retailing for US$299 that’s nothing to be sneezed at) and imported a Shield for themselves.

Little do they know, however, that simply by powering the thing up within the Land of the Rising Sun they’ll be breaking the law.

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Wii U’s Mario Kart 8 shaping up nicely, makes us grin like idiots

We have to admit that we may have lost a little faith in Nintendo over the past couple of years. The Wii U is a curious piece of hybrid hardware that has yet to see any truly groundbreaking titles, and the company’s uncharacteristically zealous foray into the world of 3-D technology with its most recent portable took us off guard. But 2014 is shaping up to be a good year not just for Nintendo but for Wii U owners.

Unveiled a few months ago, Mario Kart 8 looked to be more of the same and left many wishing Nintendo would stop adding wacky accessories to its cartoon go-karts and just give us classic Mario racing like we had on the SNES, but videos taken at the recent Gamescom event in Cologne show just how nicely the game is shaping up to be, with beautiful tracks and karts as well as brand new game dynamics. Suffice it to say, our interest has most definitely been piqued.

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JoJo’s All-Star Battle Train to promote Jojo’s bizarre new fighting game

On August 29, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure All-Star Battle will become available on PlayStation 3. It’s a fighting game that features all of the major players from the immensely popular manga series JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. How popular, you ask? This beat-‘em-up video game is currently the top-ranked game on Amazon, thanks to the huge numbers of pre-orders, it’s so highly anticipated. One might think that a game such as this doesn’t need any more hype, but those who know JoJo know that this particular franchise will stand for nothing less than extremes!

Starting on August 26, one of the trains on Tokyo’s looping central railway, the Yamanote Line, will be plastered both in and out with characters from JoJo’s new fighting game!

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This new Tetris speed record will leave you open-mouthed 【Video】

Ladies and gentlemen, put down your smartphones, close your Nintendo DSes and power off your controllers. Even if you once thought that you were “kinda pretty good” at Tetris, you should know now that you will never, ever win.

Shared on YouTube earlier this week, the following video shows Japanese player keroco blitz through the game’s “clear mode” and send 40 lines of blocks to digital oblivion in an epic 19.68 seconds, setting a new world record in the process. Doesn’t sound so fast? Check this out.

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Right now at the Pacifico Yokohama Convention Center, Japan’s largest video game developer conference, the CEDEC (Computer Entertainment Developer’s Conference) is in full swing. In order to gain a clear understanding of the type of people who make the industry what it is, the event’s organizers also conducted a survey that covers just about everything from marital status to time spent tied to a desk each day. The results give us a sneaky peek at the demographics and professional lives of the people who bring us the games we love, so we couldn’t help but share.

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March over to Yahoo! Games for the beta release of Dragon Quest Monster Parade!

Dragon Quest is a long-running series of role-playing video games with a sizeable selection of spin-offs, novels, manga, and anime adaptations. Most people recognize it for its mascot, the mostly harmless bouncing blue slime, a googly-eyed monster present in each of the title’s many incarnations.

Although Dragon Quest is usually categorized as a console game, the newest title to be added to their list of very special spin-offs is an online PC game playable through Yahoo! Games. It’s called Dragon Quest Monster Parade and is sure to draw the attention of slime lovers everywhere! Curious parties can try out the game’s open beta test starting in just a couple days, and anyone who registers to play early will get a special present from makers Square Enix!

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Bow-shooting Chinese cutie gets suspicious reaction from world Netizens

China – and to a large extent, Japan – seems to have an unhealthy obsession with any woman of above-average attractiveness performing some action that attractive women aren’t typically known for.

The Chinese media has serialized this concept to the point that we’ve seen them make a fuss over “hot girl cops,” “hot girl soldiers,” heck, even “hot girl bus drivers.” It seems like any time a cute girl does anything other than breath, Asia goes completely crazy.

And now, just when you thought the concept couldn’t jump the shark more spectacularly, we now have “hot girl archer.”

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New Pokemon anime taking it back to ’96, Coming this October!

Were you one of the millions playing the battery life out of Pokémon Red, Green, or Blue back in the late ’90s? If so, your days fishing for magicarp have probably taken a backseat to a 9-5 job and changing diapers. Perhaps you feel a little disconnected after the several iterations that followed the original games over nearly two decades and feel that the poké balls have been passed to younger generations?

If any of this applies to you, the people behind Pokémon want to say they understand and have prepared a special treat in store. Coming 2 October to TV Tokyo a new anime series will begin titled Pokémon the Origin and follows the storyline of the original set of games.

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New online game has players fulfilling the needs of endless waves of schoolgirls, it’s freaking hard and could you help you study Japanese

Growing up as a young girl isn’t easy, the problems both big and small, mental and physical seem endless. This coming-of-age dilemma is the basis of a new online game put out by girls’ manga magazine, Ribbon. Although, instead of a schoolgirl you take the role of a school nurse’s assistant charged with helping an onslaught of children unhappy with their smells and suffering nosebleeds in School Nurse’s Office.

Don’t let the cutesy artwork of the game fool you, this is deceptively challenging! At least zombies only want one thing.

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Nintendogs coming to a PlayStation Vita near you?

…Wait, that’s not Nintendogs!

No, ladies and gentlemen, the house that made Mario hasn’t finally buckled under the pressure and decided to publish its first-party games on rival platforms. The above screenshot is actually from a completely new title designed specifically for Sony’s portable: PlayStation Vita Pets. Soulless rip-off or an evolution of the pet sim genre? Find out after the break.

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Doratastic! Nintendo of Taiwan just unveiled a genuine collector’s item

It seems like just about every other video game released these days also appears in “collector’s edition” form featuring all manner of inserts, plastic trinkets and overly elaborate packaging, with publishers cashing in simply by dropping the term “limited edition”. Usually this results in a few thousand people having the same cheaply-produced goods piling up in their game grottos that will seldom be worth much more than they paid, but in the case of the Taiwanese release of Doraemon: Nobita’s Number Adventure for Nintendo 3DS, there’s a certain item up for grabs that might just be worth a few extra pennies in years to come.

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Are these the five weirdest video games of all time?

Observed by those who don’t play them, video games may all seem a little bit peculiar. Mushroom-eating plumbers stomping hammer-throwing turtles, ultra-violent military shooters whose protagonists bound across battlefields shouldering rocket launchers while hurling grenades and taking bullet after bullet to the chest, and of course the hordes of zombie titles that, like their lumbering stars, simply won’t die. For those accustomed to the rules of these digital worlds, though, this all makes perfect sense.

There are occasionally, however, a few titles that even the gaming elite would recoil from wearing an expression somewhere between “ermahgerd” and “turd sandwich”, and YouTube-based ZoominGames believes they’ve identified the cream of said crop. So let’s take a look at the channel’s “Top 5 Weird Games” one by one and see if they’re really they freaky affairs they’re made out to be. Oh, and did we mention that all five happen to have been made in Japan…?

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Like many people who grew up in America, when I hear the word “Asahi,” the first thing I think of is beer. Of course, beer also happens to be the first thing I think of when I hear “breakfast,” but that’s a story for another time.

However, there’s also an Asashi Newspaper in Japan. And while the news outlet has no connection to the identically named brewer, that didn’t stop it from recently handing out the kind of parenting advice you’d normally expect from a dad who’s also a violent problem drinker, suggesting that parents “accidentally” smash their kids’ video game consoles in order to keep them focused on their studies.

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Some games make us so mad that we fling our controllers across the room in rage, forgetting for a split second that it’s rarely, if ever, the hardware’s fault that we lost.

But sometimes we get so angry with a game, at being pwned online, at losing for the nth time to that end-of-level boss, that we decide to hang up our controllers for good. Which is exactly what a number of gamers in Japan seem to have done if a collection of photos doing the rounds on Twitter today is anything to go by.

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We’re already thoroughly excited about the launch of Sony’s newest home console, the PlayStation 4, but news reaching us today suggesting that the Japanese electronics giant has yet another trick up its sleeve has set us buzzing anew.

Since the PS4’s grand unveiling earlier this year, Sony has been keen to push the fact that the console will be fully integrated with its portable platform, PlayStation Vita, ensuring that all developers make their PS4 games fully playable remotely via Vita. It would seem, though, that rather than just a cool extra feature, Sony is planning to make PS4/Vita crossplay a cornerstone of the PS4 experience, with industry sources suggesting that a special PS4/Vita bundle will be made available for US$500 by the end of the year.

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Capcom PlayStation 4 graphics technology more lifelike than a rich otaku’s robot girlfriend

We already know Sony’s PlayStation 4 is going to be great. We’ve already reserved a space for it under our TV and earmarked a couple of our old consoles for sale in order to pay for it. But this new footage from Capcom’s PS4 game engine has us eying our firstborns, wondering if it’s really worth hanging onto them when we could sacrifice them to Dark Lord Taro Aso to have him spirit us a brand new PS4 ahead of launch.

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I’ve never done the math, but I can confidently say the amount of time I spent as a kid standing in line at an arcade to play the classic fighting game Street Fighter II totals somewhere in the dozens of hours.

As a result of all that waiting around to dragon punch people, the game’s soundtrack is permanently hard-wired into my brain. I’ll occasionally find myself unconsciously humming the various Street Fighter II character themes, and while the specific title may be different, I’m sure gamers everywhere have certain pieces of background music stuck in their heads, too.

What separates YouTube user Smooth McGrove from the rest of us though, aside from a glorious beard, is his ability to near-perfectly replicate every single note of the arrangement from iconic video game tunes, using nothing but his own voice.

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Konami confirms autumn release for Winning Eleven 2014, releases new trailer

Earlier today, video game heavyweight Konami Corporation unveiled a new page on its official website dedicated to the newest instalment in its popular football series World Soccer Winning Eleven 2014 (or Pro Evolution Soccer 2014 in the West), along with a new trailer showing the game off in all its ultra-realistic glory.

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While many critics are pointing to the underwhelming performance of Nintendo’s Wii U platform as yet another sign that the video game giant should beat a hasty retreat from the hardware industry and instead become a multi-platform publisher, recent news from the house of Mario suggests that there’s plenty of life in the old dog yet.

With dozens of new first-party titles arriving in the next 12 months, the Wii U is gradually beginning to pick up steam. But when President and CEO of Nintendo Satoru Iwata made reference to a brand new The Legend of Zelda title for Wii U in a recent interview with Britain’s The Guardian, people really started paying attention.

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Capcom Japan offering limited edition ‘blood pillow’ prize to Phoenix Wright fans

Upcoming Nintendo 3DS title Gyakuten Saiban 5 (known in the English-speaking world as Phoenix Wright: Dual Destinies) may still be a couple of months away from release in the West, but gamers in Japan are already charging their portable consoles in preparation for its launch this Thursday.

Developer Capcom, too, is helping fans get back into detective mode after their brief hiatus by asking visitors to the official Phoenix Wright website to investigate a crime scene and spot the contradictions in three witness statements. Those who can successfully solve the puzzle will be entered into a prize draw to win one of 50 ‘blood pillows’ designed to transform any sleeping gamer into the victim of a grizzly cartoon murder.

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