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See more of Sine Mora in these new screens
While you'll see no more o' Sine Mora on PSN, you can see more o' Sine Mora's XBLA outing in the gallery below.%Gallery-141457%
Grasshopper and Digital Reality's Sine Mora now an XBLA exclusive
A slight change of plans for Grasshopper Manufacture and Digital Reality's upcoming downloadable shooter, Sine Mora: it'll only be downloadable on Xbox. The two companies announced today that the "diesel-punk" time-shifting shmup is now an XBLA exclusive, despite its original status as both an XBLA and PSN release. There is still no known release date for the side-scroller. That makes two upcoming XBLA exclusives for Suda 51's studio. The upcoming Diabolical Pitch is a de facto exclusive both because it's being published by Microsoft Studios, and because it's Kinect-based.
Grasshopper throwing a 'Game Campus Festa' for student Vita games
Grasshopper Manufacture hasn't announced any PlayStation Vita games, but it will gladly help students make their own, in what seems to be an ongoing effort to personally rebuild the entire Japanese game industry. The developer has started a "Game Campus Festa" program, in which it will assist students at eight schools in Japan with the creation of Vita software. In addition to providing guidance, Grasshopper also said that it will consider publishing some of the resulting games as downloads. We're interested in promoting student work as well, so here's a little advice to those taking part in the program. Put a lot of wrestling references in your game, and put the protagonist in a leather jacket if you want GHM to pick it up.
Grasshopper and DeNA form joint venture for Mobage games
Grasshopper Manufacture's relationship with mobile game company DeNA is extending beyond the production of games for DeNA's Mobage service. Well, sort of. Today, the two companies announced that they're forming a joint venture called Grasshopper Social Network Service, Inc., and will work together to ... produce games for Mobage. DeNA is looking to build up its catalog of exclusive games to help Mobage take off outside of Japan; Grasshopper is looking for "a new world of players" to experience the company's unique style. Grasshopper's other recent, high-profile partnership is with Digital Reality. Together, the two companies are working on Black Knight Sword and Sine Mora for XBLA and PSN.
Lollipop Chainsaw's 'total awesomeness' on display
When a video game trailer starts with a mohawked guy getting cut clean down the middle of his body, and surviving, you know it's a Suda 51 work. And from both of those facts, you can expect the rest of the trailer to be a weird experience, which this Lollipop Chainsaw clip certainly is. For example, in one scene, Juliet cuts a zombie's head off in the gym, causing the undead head to fly into the basketball hoop. That's the kind of thing WB is calling "total awesomeness" -- we think we'd want that kind of praise too if we'd managed to pull off a stunt like that.%Gallery-137867%
Suda 51 wants Grasshopper Manufacture to be like real grasshoppers
Grasshopper Manufacture revealed a major change in its development strategy during the Tokyo Game Show this year. Of the eight different games on display, the majority were downloadable titles, including high-profile titles like Sine Mora, Black Knight Sword and Diabolical Pitch. During the show, we managed to snag some time with Grasshopper's CEO, Goichi Suda, more commonly known as Suda 51. During our chat, we discussed Grasshopper's new direction, Sdatcher and even the possibility of a collaboration between Grasshopper and Kojima Productions. Suda's ultimate goal? For Grasshopper Manufacture to become more like actual grasshoppers.
Preview: Sine Mora and Black Knight Sword
PSN/XBLA titles Sine Mora and Black Knight Sword are the result of a new partnership between Grasshopper Manufacture and Hungarian studio Digital Reality. Of course, both games are strange, though only one of them is strange in the familiar Grasshopper Manufacture milieu. Both of them strongly suggest that this is a worthwhile collaboration. Sine Mora is a traditional side-scrolling shooter, developed by Digital Reality with assistance from GHM. "The art direction, sound design, music by Akira Yamaoka, it's all coming from Grasshopper," explained Digital Reality creative Theodore Reiker. "Digital Reality, we have a ten-member-strong team making the programming, the 3D modeling, and the game design." That art style is a steampunk-esque world of big, complicated machines, airships, and squat, gunmetal-colored planes against skies of bright Sega blue. It was originally a much darker game, but Reiker explained that Grasshopper and Digital Reality eventually came to a "consensus" that the game should look like Studio Ghibli's Porco Rosso.
No More Heroes for Mobage is a 'social assassination battle' game
No More Heroes for Mobage, an iOS/Android game for the Mobage service, looks an awful lot like No More Heroes, as revealed by the first screens. But it has some rather important differences from the original game -- like, of course, touchscreen controls. NMH for Mobage is a "social assassin battle" with unspecified coop and competitive multiplayer features, a departure from the strictly solo Wii (and later Xbox 360 and PS3) game. The new game is being published by Marvelous AQL. Mobage is starting up in North America -- with some other Grasshopper Manufacture properties, even -- so there's a chance Travis Touchdown will make it to our phones.
Diabolical Pitch trailer winds up, tosses exploding baseball
Not satisfied with hastily captured shaky-cam footage of Diabolical Pitch? We've got just the thing then, as Grasshopper Manufacture has released the official trailer we first saw during its event at TGS. Check out the flaming baseballs and action-packed power poses in the video above.
Watch lots of Black Knight Sword and Sine Mora footage
Apart from some announcements and trailers, we haven't seen much of Sine Mora or Black Knight Sword, two upcoming downloadable titles from Digital Reality and Grasshopper Manufacture. Until now, that is, thanks to a demonstration we received at TGS. In the video above, you will find over four minutes of gameplay footage, as demonstrated by Digital Reality creative director Theodore Reiker. After the break, find a generous portion of Black Knight Sword footage and a new trailer. Keep an eye out for our hands-on impressions of both titles soon. Update: The video embed for Sine Mora has been fixed.
Seen@TGS: Shoe-da 51
When we went to Grasshopper Manufacture's meeting room to interview Suda 51, our attention immediately went to his feet.
Diabolical Pitch gameplay demon-strated at TGS 2011
We haven't yet gotten our hands on Grasshopper's upcoming Kinect throw-em-up, Diabolical Pitch, but that didn't stop us from grabbing some shaky-cam footage of the first trailer and of someone giving the game a whirl at the developer's pre-TGS shindig. Check out the trailer above. A gameplay demo is all wound up after the break.
Grasshopper Manufacture bringing Frog Minutes, two more to Mobage worldwide
Mobile game company DeNA is bringing its social game service Mobage to the rest of the world, and three Grasshopper Manufacture games are coming along for the ride, the company announced at a pre-TGS showcase. One series you know -- Frog Minutes, the super-serene frog feeding game first released on iOS this year. The Mobage game is considered a sequel to the iOS release. The other two are new: Humans vs. Zombies and Alien Busters, both expected to be released in winter 2012. Akira Yamaoka joked that these are totally different from GHM's other bloody, zombie-filled games.
Grasshopper Manufacture's Kinect/XBLA game Diabolical Pitch revealed
During a pre-TGS event, "video game band" Grasshopper Manufacture unveiled Diabolical Pitch, the Kinect title first announced last year as "Codename D." And it is absolutely a game about a baseball player pitching and batting balls at oncoming monsters. Two players are shown at once lobbing baseballs, lifting one another up for health support, and even joining hands in a DBZ-like "fusion" pose for a special attack, against what looked like a vaguely disco-esque baseball field.
Report: Kimura, Wada leave Grasshopper Manufacture
Two of Grasshopper Manufacture's recent high-profile hires have left the company as of last month, Siliconera reports. Former Marvelous president Yasuhiro Wada and Little King's Story creator Yoshiro Kimura both left Marvelous and joined Grasshopper in 2010. Both had previously worked with Suda 51 as producers on No More Heroes. We're unsure what the two were working on at Grasshopper, but the company currently has plenty in progress. It's making Evangelion Sound Impact, Lollipop Chainsaw, Codename D, and, with Digital Reality, Sine Mora and Black Knight Sword.
The Damned collaboration: How Shadows of the Damned found its closing act
It takes a lot of people a lot of time to license a track for a video game. Among other things, that's what The Damned drummer Andrew "Pinch" Pinching learned in the fall of 2010 when he worked with Grasshopper Manufacture composer Akira Yamaoka on the title track from this year's grindhouse-inspired third-person shooter, Shadows of the Damned. According to Pinch, it took "about a hundred emails" before an agreement was even reached regarding the collaboration. "I kid you not, they are VERY thorough," Pinch explained to me via email earlier this summer. He was speaking to the GhM side of the partnership, which he described as "treading a different path in the games industry" from other dev studios. "I did a bit of research and found out about Suda51 and No More Heroes," Pinch added. "[He] was regarded as a bit of an edgy rebel, which appealed to me immensely. It didn't hurt that his games looked great as well." The end product of the collaboration was, as we now know, the excellent (and if I may say so myself, rockin') final track from Shadows of the Damned. But that wasn't always the plan, as Pinch told me. "Initially, they [GhM] wanted what everyone wants -- an old Damned track. In this instance, a track called 'Love Song,' which in hindsight would have fitted the theme of the game rather nicely." But "Love Song" wasn't meant to be, and The Damned pushed to create an original track for the game.
Shadows of the Damned soundtrack coming to Japan [update: available now internationally]
Grasshopper Manufacture announced the very welcome news that it will release a soundtrack CD containing Akira Yamaoka's full score on Shadows of the Damned. The pre-order soundtrack was nice, but incomplete; this disc will have all 21 tracks, including "Shadows of the Damned," performed with The Damned. In addition, GHM will release a guide book called "Kurayami Magazine," named after an earlier iteration of the game. It features a long interview with Suda 51 and original character designs. Both items are listed on the Japanese GHM store website, with the soundtrack available tomorrow and the book on September 9. Neither has been posted on the American store yet, and we're asking-slash-begging Grasshopper for more information. Update: GHM is selling the soundtrack on its international site now, limited to 1,000 copies. The first 300 will be signed by Akira Yamaoka!
Lollipop Chainsaw preview: Suck on this
Buffy the No More Heroes Zombie Slayer. That's the best way to sum up Lollipop Chainsaw at first glance. Featuring a Lichtenstein-inspired pop art HUD and over-the-top humor drawn from the Suda 51 vein, the game revels in the expected brutality of a zombie outbreak, but adds a dash of the unexpected with rainbows and sparkles following finishing moves and combos. Developed by Suda 51's Grasshopper Manufacture, the cult name-dropping doesn't stop there. Writer and director James Gunn (Dawn of the Dead, Tromeo and Juliet, Slither) created the script, while Akira Yamaoka (Silent Hill, Shadows of the Damned) is handling music -- but none of his work is featured in the current demo. Yamaoka said during our Gamescom presentation, "This game will be crazier than it is now." A terrifying thought, since the game already has the crazy dialed to 11. %Gallery-130904%
Grasshopper and Digital Reality reveal 'Black Knight Sword' for PSN and XBLA
Grasshopper Manufacture and Digital Reality are partnering for a second XBLA/PSN game, in addition to Sine Mora. Announced at a Grasshopper Manufacture event during Gamescom, Black Knight Sword is a side-scrolling platform action game that takes place in a sort of puppet play. The scrolling is made to look like the character is actually standing in place, and the background elements are constantly shuffled and replaced as if on a stage. In the above video, taken by Gamer365, Akira Yamaoka introduces the game. It's like you're at the GHM/Digital Reality party yourself!
High-profile voice actors for Shadows of the Damned in Japan
Grasshopper Manufacture's Shadows of the Damned is set to infuse Japan with its Hot Boner this September. To help ensure that Japanese fans of grindhouse gore gravitate towards the product, it's enlisted some real-world celebrities to accompany the already extensive list of gaming celebrities attached to the title. Tadanobu Asano, best known for his role as Kakihara in Ichi the Killer, will be lending his pipes to Shadows' profanity-proficient protagonist Garcia. Chiaki Kuriyama of Kill Bill: Vol 1 and Battle Royale fame will voice Garcia's kidnapped girlfriend, Paula, and Miyazaki veteran Tatsuya Gashûin will give voice to Johnson, Garcia's phallic freudian friend/weapon. Man, you'd think this was a Guitar Hero post on account of all this star power.
