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Marvelous focuses on PSP development in fiscal 2011
It shouldn't come as much of a surprise, given the company's recent executive pay cuts and low sales figures, that Marvelous Entertainment is looking to cut costs in fiscal 2011 by reducing its lineup of games slightly. Siliconera points out a slide from the company's latest earnings report (Japanese PDF downloadable at the bottom of the window) that shows only ten releases for the period between April 1, 2010 and March 31, 2011. That's down two from the previous year. The biggest move comes from the DS lineup, which is reduced from six games to just one. Also unsurprisingly, Marvelous is putting emphasis on PSP games. PSP development was the segment of Marvelous's game business that paid off in the last year, and the publisher is putting out more games there -- four -- than anywhere else in fiscal 2011. That includes the RPG Fate/Extra and the humiliating fighter Ikki Tousen: Xross Impact, as well as two currently unannounced games. The rest of Marvelous's lineup includes the already-released No More Heroes: Heroes Paradise on PS3 and 360, Harvest Moon: Twins' Village on DS, one unknown PS3 game, and two unknown Wii games. [Via Siliconera]
No More Heroes: Heroes' Paradise footage is light on gameplay, heavy on badassery
Japanese publisher Marvelous just uploaded a quite lengthy and quite new trailer for the Xbox 360 and PS3 port of No More Heroes. It's all in Japanese, but it speaks the universal languages of crazy bosses and near-naked-babe quite well. Aside from that, it also shows how much better the game looks compared to its Wii counterpart -- all of those Ps really make a difference. Be sure to check out the last few seconds of the trailer, which show us the Japanese version of the game just may not be censored after all. The original censored Wii game certainly didn't have that much blood in it!
No More Heroes initially planned as a 360 game
Speaking to MCV, No More Heroes director Suda 51 said that in the earliest stages of planning, his game was going to be made for the Xbox 360. It was his producer at Marvelous Interactive, Yasuhiro Wada, who suggested the Wii instead. "Originally, I'd wanted to make this game for Xbox 360, actually. Wada-san had information about the new Wii and how the new controller would work before it came out, so that's why he thought I should produce the game on that format." It's important to remember that back then Suda wouldn't have known about the controller, or really much of anything about the Wii, while the 360 was a known quantity. A very small quantity in Japan, but still something that could be developed for. Of course, once Suda found out about the Wiimote (and, though he doesn't say it, the smaller cost of game development on the Wii) he was on board. Really, though, if No More Heroes tanked in Japan on the Wii, a system that people have, imagine the 360 sales.
Japanese Wii software sales for 2007: How did Wii publishers fare?
The year is almost over, and we could probably debate for hours about which games were the best, but in the end, money talks. So, how did Wii games actually sell in 2007? A kind NeoGAFfer compiled a list that shows how much each Wii game sold this year in Japan, based on Media Create figures up until December 2nd. It's also important, though, to consider how Wii game publishers did this year in Japan (check the stats in the image above). Nintendo certainly had a great year, with over 8 million sales for 17 games. Square Enix also did pretty well for itself with Dragon Quest Swords (the only game released by the company for the Wii before the December 2nd window). As for the other third parties, however, the median game sales seem somewhat poor. Yet, considering the amount of shovelware released this year, it's hard to say that some of them didn't deserve it. Check the list of game sales here to decide for yourselves. You may notice one major disappointment (yes, we're talking about Zack and Wiki) or two, but how many other third-party games, in your opinion, really deserved to sell better than they did?
