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DS Daily: Adventures through time
In the comments area of our recent post about the adventure game Lux-Pain, a discussion popped up about length in adventure games. Basically, they tend to be short. Some people avoid some adventures because of this (a problem that is exacerbated by the fact that most adventure games have zero replay value), and some accept it (understanding that an adventure game requires a great deal more dialogue than most other games).Where do you stand on this issue? Do you love adventure games, but wish they could be longer? Do you steer clear of them in general in an effort to get the most game time out of your money? %Gallery-36818%
DS releases for the week of September 22nd
Not only are there dozens -- well, almost two dozen -- games slated for release in the U.S. this week, but included in the list are a few particularly interesting titles. Kirby Super Star Ultra, though announced some time ago, comes seemingly out of nowhere after some recent wacky promotions, and My Japanese Coach finally makes it to shelves (we hope). Barbie Fashion Show: An Eye for Style Brain Quest Grades 3 & 4 Brain Quest Grades 5 & 6 Di-Gata Defenders Dinosaur King Disgaea DS DropCast Hi! Hamtaro Ham-Ham Challenge Kirby Super Star Ultra Lego Batman Margot's Word Brain My Japanese Coach My Little Pony: Pinkie Pie's Party My SAT Coach Nancy Drew: The Hidden Staircase Pipe Mania Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure Shaun the Sheep SimCity Creator Time Hollow
GC 2008: Konami news roundup
Konami sent out three new DS game announcements for Europe at the ongoing Games Convention, so we thought we would provide it all at once in digest format. Along with the announcements, there's a bunch of art and screens to look at as well. You'll find galleries after the break.Before we get started, however, check out that Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia art. It's easily among the best Castlevania art we've ever seen. Time Hollow, the time-traveling adventure game from Shadow of Destiny creator (and Suikoden IV producer) Junko Kawano, is coming to Europe this November! The magic-themed Animal Crossing-esque communication game Tongariboushi to 365-nichi no Mahou is being released in Europe as Enchanted Folk and the School of Wizardry. Winx Club Secret Diary 2009 -- pretty much Diary Girl in a Winx Club theme -- coming out in Q4 of this year. Media: new screens for Elebits: The Adventures of Kai and Zero and Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, in addition to the new games!
Time-traveling game now also a country-traveling game
According to reports from Nintendo Power subscribers who've received this month's issue early, Konami plans to bring its adventure title, Time Hollow, stateside this August, confirming recent rumors spurred by GameFly product listings.Time Hollow has you going back in time to fix small things that will affect the outcome of future events, like an accidental death or the end of the world. This is all accomplished with a magic pen that you control using, you guessed it, your stylus and touchscreen.The game didn't sell too well when it came out in Japan last month, so we haven't heard many import impressions for Time Hollow. If you've played it, we would love to hear if you can use your pen to hunt down dinosaurs, Ray Bradbury-style.
Another Week in Japan: Hardware and software numbers 3/31-4/6
Sony dominated the first (and last) five in the top thirty software chart, but aside from that, everything else was Nintendo. The DS had fifteen games to represent it, but even if you added up the sales numbers for all those games, the total wouldn't come close to what Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G sold in its second week.Pokemon Ranger: Batonnage was once again the best-selling DS game, but newcomer Tottado! Yowiko's Deserted Island Life (which is about famous Japanese comedians being stranded on an island) did well, also. In hardware, the DS was crushed for the second week in a row by the PSP, which had its sales boosted by Monster Hunter and Star Ocean 2.Hardware: PSP: 120,964 Nintendo DS: 55,190 Wii: 44,618 PlayStation 3: 11,303 PlayStation 2: 10,423 Xbox 360: 1,452 To see the software listings, just check after the break.
Another Week in Japan: Hardware and software numbers 3/24-3/30
The PSP might have dominated in Japan, selling as much hardware last week as every other system combined, but that doesn't mean the DS didn't do well for itself. In fact, Nintendo's handheld came in second place, selling around 60,000 units.The story is similar in software, as DS titles came no where near to matching the sales of Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G, yet there was still a lot of DS representation in the top thirty, as usual. New titles rleased last week that made the cut include Mobile Suit Gundam 00, which debuted in third, Vitamin X Evolution, Lux Pain, and Home Teacher Hitman Reborn!Towards the bottom of the software chart, New Super Mario Bros. reappeared while Taiko Drum Master hung stubbornly onto the thirtieth spot. To see how other games were rearranged, just check after the break for the listings.
Another Week in Japan: Hardware and software numbers 3/17-3/23
Last week was the week of new releases! Anticipating high holiday sales, many publishers made sure to release their games last week, with a total of fifteen ending up in the top thirty (seven of those being DS titles). With this slew of new releases, though, a lot of games were bumped off the chart to make room. Etrian Odyssey II and Soma Bringer, for example, did not survive the onslaught. Yet, somehow Mario Kart DS managed to move up a spot -- that game never ceases to amaze us.The top of the heap was none other than Pokémon Ranger: Batonnage, which completely crushed the competition in its debut week. Sim City 2 DS did well also, ending up in the number four spot. In fact, this is the best an EA game has ever done in its first week in Japan, with the exception of the FIFA titles. Time Hollow and Super Dodgeball are some other notable new releases, ending up in spots ten and seventeen, respectively.
Japanese adverts tell you why you want Time Hollow
The Japanese site for Time Hollow has some new content in the form of several different videos available. Focusing on gameplay and explaining the features of the game (we assume, what with not being able to speak Japanese and all), it seems there is something here for everyone. Also, there's a healthy supply of advertisements to see for the game.After watching the videos, we can only say one thing: we want a damn pen like that.[Via Go Nintendo]
DS releases for the week of March 17th
This week, there are a lot of DS games headed out all around the globe, but it's particularly a great week for those of you who keep your eyes peeled for interesting Japanese releases. Not the import type? That's okay -- there's a lot of other games to consider, and some that aren't even quite games, per se. Diary Girl Fantasy Aquarium by DS GoPets: Vacation Island Lost in Blue 3 Sega Superstars Tennis
Rumor: Time Hollow to travel to North America?
Hardly a confirmation, but the Gamefly listing for Time Hollow does raise a few interesting questions. Considering that Gamefly has been lucky in spilling the beans on some titles in the past, we're willing to entertain the possibility of the game hitting North America. We will not, however, entertain the notion that the title will release during the tail-end of summer. That is far too long of a wait for us.[Thanks, yanya!]
Cross-promote Cross-promote Revolution
Despite the fact that, as alluded to in the post title, this stuff is basically marketing for other games, we love it when game music turns up in rhythm games. It may have something to do with the fact that video game music is awesome, especially from companies like Konami that care enough about music to make whole games about it.This video is from the Japanese PS2 game Dance Dance Revolution Supernova 2 Super DREAM, and features original Time Hollow animation to go along with the game's surprisingly cool theme song. The song sounds vaguely Akira Yamaoka-esque (Yamaoka's works have also appeared in DDR games), though it was composed by Masanori Akita.
Where these Time Hollow screens are going, they don't need roads
If you checked out the demo for Konami's Time Hollow, then you probably felt a lot of the same frustration we did. The large amounts of Japanese text that permeated the Flash demo for the game really halted all of our progress in it, not to mention our excitement for the game after we'd seen many screens.But, wait. What is this? More screens? We're excited yet again! Glowing pen want.[Via Go Nintendo]
Try to play Time Hollow
Konami is now offering a Flash demo of their time-traveling adventure game, Time Hollow. There's only one problem: adventure games tend to have a lot of text in them, and all of the text in this one is in Japanese. You can think of that as an extra challenge if you want, maybe.We still think it's worth clicking through the reams of text to experience this demo, if only to have a look at the wonderful presentation of the game. The backgrounds are beautiful, and the music is lush (if a bit overwrought.) You'll also see a short cutscene or two showing the time-travel-pen gimmick.This thing looks to have had money poured into it, so we wouldn't be too surprised to see Konami selling it worldwide.[Via Famitsu]
Time Hollow's Japanese release date is irrelevant to time travelers
People who enjoy drawing circles around things should go circle March 18th on their calendars, because that's the day the temporal circle-drawing adventure Time Hollow will be released in Japan, according to the official website. Of course, if you have a magic time pen or something, you can just go into the future and pick it up. The updated site also features a swanky wallpaper in which Horo Tokio is in the process of changing your past from inside your computer.Famitsu has a few new screens of the game along with their announcement of the release date. In addition, Siliconera is reporting that the Japanese release of Dance Dance Revolution Supernova 2 will include the Time Hollow theme as a playable song. It's a big day for ... that one adventure game!
Take a minute to enjoy Time Hollow screens
We love the concept of Konami's Time Hollow, since it's a scientific fact that time travel is way awesome. Time travel for the purpose of righting personal wrongs is way Quantum Leap-some. Except, in Time Hollow, you are some feathery-haired anime kid instead of Count Bakula.The screens show a fairly standard-looking adventure game's 'investigation' style gameplay, but with surprisingly high production values. If Konami's willing to put a high budget on a graphical text adventure like this, maybe they'll localize it! We would like to experience the story for ourselves. We really want to know more about hero Horo Tokio's cat, who was prominently featured in the game's trailer. He has a character portrait! Does that mean that he has dialogue?
TGS07: Siliconera cracks open Time Hollow
We know that the Tokyo Game Show has been "wrapped up", but there's still plenty of news being posted that we feel we'd be remiss if we didn't pass on. Like this hands-on preview of Konami's Time Hollow from Siliconera, which sounds like a much more serious, supernatural take on the kind of environment-investigation puzzles found in the Ace Attorney series.Basically, the game involves you, as high school student Horo Tokio (a pun on "Time Hollow"-- "Horo" is a Japanicized pronunciation of "hollow", and "Toki" is Japanese for "time"), using a magic pen to draw circles around things you want to go back in time and fix. Key events are saved as "flashbacks" which you can then revisit and mess with using your tiiiiime pen. In the example scenario, you circle and fix the gears on a girl's bike so she doesn't die in a wreck. Charming!This game is set for a Japanese release in January of next year, which seems very soon for a newly-announced title. Hopefully Konami can use some of that same speed in producing a localized version.
TGS07: Time Hollow adds to the DS time-travel game genre
Coming right on the heels of Chronos Twins, Time Hollow is a game about a heroic cat who wakes up high school students from scary dreams. Welll, not really-- that's just our favorite part of the trailer (the green button on the website). From what we can tell, Konami's Time Hollow is actually a game about a high school student who, using a magic pen, goes back in time to fix tragedies that have affected his life, including the loss of his parents in a house fire.The game involves using the magic time-travel pen to investigate areas across time: as the IGN preview puts it, you can "cut through the present day to look at what the same area was like at times gone by." From the two seconds or so of in-game video buried in the trailer, it appears to be a 2D graphical text adventure, with hand-drawn environments to investigate.[Via Dengeki]
