Street Fighter IV Gets!

Today I picked up the PS3 version of Street Fighter IV. It came out today in Japan. You unlucky people in North American won’t get it until next week.

As a bonus I got some DVD which I haven’t had time to look at. I’ve been too busy playing.

I also picked up an awesome Hori fight stick.

It feels just lick playing at the arcade. The base is metal so it has a good weight to it. It doesn’t slip or slide on a table thanks to some huge rubber feet on it. The buttons and stick also feel really nice. I’ve only played just a little bit, but so far it’s really fun.

The graphics are so nice.

The only bad part so far is the menus are all in Japanese. Usually fighters have both languages available. You can set the audio to English though. I’ll just have to get my wife to help me with some of the menus the first time.

Rambo, what mean expendable?

Yes it seems with the latest Rambo movie, John Rambo is indeed making a comeback in Japan. I saw this brand new arcade machine at the Namco Game Center in Diamond City.

Yes, Sega has gone and made a new Rambo game. It’s your typical light gun game, just with a whole lot more Rambo awesomeness. When I first saw it I thought I had traveled through time and gone back to the eighties. However the copyright date 2008 stamped here and there brought me back to the present. My only question is why is this tiny child playing Rambo, and why are his parents letting him slaughter Russian and Viet Cong soldiers. Oh absentee parents today.

Looks Great

In the latest issue of Famitsu they cover the early new from Tokyo Game Show, which is still happening right at this moment. I think this is the only way that print magazines can compete with the speediness of the Internet, a weekly publishing schedule. The news is so fresh, current and new that most of the websites pull info from this magazine. You can always tell, because lots of Japanese game info appears on Wednesday. Which is coincidentally the day that Famitsu subscribers get their magazines.

On another note, this issue had pictures of the upcoming PS3 game Yakuza 3. All I have to say is this game looks amazing!

If you ever wanted to know what Japan is like you should try playing this game. I played the first one, and really want the second one. The area in which you play the game is based on the real city in Japan. You can go to real stores and buy real items that are actually sold in Japan.

Plus there are lots of other activities to do on top of the story, like going to a hostess bar like in the pictures above. This game looks great! Go here and you can see a video from TGS: Gamersyde. Yes, all of those stores in the video are real. So are the drinks shown in the drink machine.

Cave Story

I’ve been playing this Japanese indie game by Pixel. It’s a super fun Metriod style game. You roam around caves fighting monsters and bad guys. It’s all very retro and really fun. The graphics styled after NES/Famicom type graphics.

What’s unbelievable is that it was made by one person in his free time. It took him over five years to make it. I’m playing a PSP version that someone ported, but there also is the original PC version and a MAC version as well. You can get them at the Cave Story Tribute site. The best part is they are all free. They have both English and Japanese versions. The PSP version is here. Check out the trailer below to see the game in action.

Game Training

This game just came out in Japan for Nintendo DS. It’s called “Boku no TV Game Kentei”. Some people might be familiar with the brain training games on  DS. Well this one is training for playing video games. What you do is basically take quick test in different types of video games, and then a mark is given depending on how you did. It’s quite fun, and mostly playable for non-Japanese speakers, except for a couple of parts. You can check out the website here, Boku no TV Game Kentei.

Metal Gear!

This week in the mail, after waiting almost two weeks, I received my copy of Metal Gear Solid 4. I ordered the Hong Kong version from Play Asia. It was a little bit cheaper than the American version, and still all in English. I’m happy to report that after playing up to the third mission, it’s incredibly fun! The graphics are simply amazing as you can see in the video below.

EDIT: I finished the game and it was truly fantastic. It was a great way to finish the Metal Gear story after almost 25 years of playing Metal Gear.