To: Fahey
From: Ashcraft

HELLO FAHEY.

So! Today, I got a postcard in the mail from immigration. A while back I applied for permanent residence here in Japan. Permanent residence would mean that I would never have to renew my visa and could stay here as long as I like. Sounds good! (However, it would not entitle me to the right to vote in national or local, which is reserved for Japanese citizens only.) Basically, it would help ease worries that a refused visa could, you know, split up the family — a very scary thought. Granted, this hasn't been approved. I have to go to immigration, and then they will tell me yay or nay. According to the post card, must go there in the next few weeks. Kinda nervous! Hope I got the permanent resident visa...

Was talking to fellow Japan resident and buddy CheapyD today from CheapAssGamer about the game drive for troops. CheapyD's a good dude — still need to take the guy out for sammiches or something at E3. Last year at TGS, he treated Crecente and I to a sumo match in Tokyo and then bought us all booze later. For a guy named Cheapy, he's surprisingly not cheap.

Wait, maybe he is cheap and generous. I imagine you can be both, no? Well, Cheapy is!

What you missed last night
Hard proof that Tecmo Japan is lying?
One of these special incentive DoA4 contracts is fake
Tecmo Says Team Ninja Exodus Rumours False, Calls Out U.S. Media
Sporepedia and Spore Xbox 360 controller
EA monitoring naughty Spore creators
MGS4 database
AMD Graphics Chip More Powerful Than Every Game Console Combined, Says AMD

Phew, yesterday's Final Fantasy Remix album cover? Man, that was brutal. My eyes still hurt at the mere thought of looking at that! This, this right here is quite nice. Here is the CD cover art for The World Ends with You CD soundtrack, which is also getting an iTunes release. It goes on sale next month.

Side note: Shame that this game didn't do better.

Subarashiki Kono CD [Famitsu]

Peter Moore isn't just a game exec. He is a rocker. And as a rocker, he knows the importance of things like Rock Band. And what is that?

It really came home for me when we were in Munich for our global marketing meeting and we took over the Hard Rock Café for the night and had a Rock Band competition... There were a hundred of us and it was like a real rock concert. It was a blast. I stood back and I thought that this was an incredible cultural phenomenon... The crowd were going wild, but all we were doing was playing on toy guitars, toy drums and singing badly into a microphone. Now the beer might have had something to do with it, I don't know, but it was a great social thing. And I said, 'Boy, this product is going to change the way we think about games.'

Boy was he right! Rock Band also changed the ways game execs can embarrass themselves at E3 press conferences.

Peter Moore Interview [CVG via videogaming247] [Pic]

Yesterday, Itagaki vs. Tecmo commenced with Itagaki's lawyer submitting into evidence the contract he had supporting his completion bonus for Xbox 360 title Dead or ALive 4. Tecmo's lawyers submitted a somewhat identical-looking contract, differing in that it did not support Itagaki's claims that he was entitled to a completion bonus. Hrm. Someone it seems is lying, and other evidence seems to indicate that Tecmo isn't exactly being truthful about overtime — which is a totally separate case altogether.

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Anthony Puzo - son of Mario Puzo, author and creator of the Godfather - has begun legal proceedings against Paramount Pictures, accusing them of stiffing him over royalty payments he's owed in connection with the recent Godfather game. Puzo says that a deal was struck between his father and Paramount in 1992, whereby the now-deceased series creator (and by succession, his kids) would receive a "significant share of the revenue of any audio-visual products" associated with the Godfather, but then accuses Paramount of failing to "pay the Puzo Estate the sums due it in respect of the Godfather game". I don't know what Paramount are getting at, but if I was dealing with the family of the guy who created the Godfather, I would not mess with their money, and I would not mess with their respect.

Son of "Godfather" sues Paramount over video game [Reuters]

Sony is rarin' to crack down on PSP piracy. According to Sony Computer Entertainment of Europe bossman David Reeves, PSP piracy is a global problem, and that's bad. But Reeves also points out that piracy is pushing PSP sales, and we guess that's good. Here's what David has to say:

There is a piracy problem on PSP. We know about it, we know how it's done. It sometimes fuels the growth of hardware sales, but on balance we are not happy about it.

Plus, minus, frowny faces. We're sure David Reeves will get this all figured out. JUST YOU WATCH, BUSTER!

There Is A Piracy Problem [MCVUK]

The upcoming issue of Japanese gaming mag Famitsu has the first details about the Raiden IV home port. The game will be hitting the Xbox 360 and will feature the standard arcade game, plus two new stages, LIVE and the ability to share replay saves with online buddies. There's even an option for vertical ("tate") for those with swivel arm HD TVs who want that true vertical shooting experience. Game shoots up Japanese Xbox 360s this September.

First Raiden IV 360 Details [Arcade Renaissance]

Via Newsweek comes word that Electronic Arts mainstay Neil Young has left the company for a yet unnamed "new project." During his 11-year run at EA, Young managed Maxis during Sims 2, lent his talents to games like The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and headed up EA Los Angeles, where he supervised Medal of Honor and Boom Blox. Recently, Young was heading up small-team-focused EA Blueprint, which will now be headed up by Westwood Studios founder Louis Castle. Hit the jump for the internal EA email describing Young's departure.

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OK. We get it. You like the Spore Creature Creator. Just don't like it too much too soon, OK? It's poor form to gorge yourself on garlic bread before the main course arrives. I say this because, having just popped on to have a little browse on the Sporepedia, I see there are already over 350,000 creatures on there, a number that'll already be higher by the time you read this. Really, 350,000? Don't you all have, like, jobs?

[Sporepedia]

Why didn't you enjoy Haze? If you've actually played it, and aren't just accepting that the game's a load of crap because the internet told you so, feel free to watch this week's episode of Zero Punctuation and choose from one of dozens of reasons Yahtzee catalogues to agree with. Oh, and if you're wondering why the video progress bar is only 2/3 of the way through when ZP finishes, don't. Just...press stop right away.

Zero Punctuation: Haze [The Escapist]

So what if Microsoft's attempts at luring the Japanese market with JRPGs on the 360 turn out to be futile? Let's enjoy it while it lasts! And what better way to enjoy it than to look forward to Tales of Vesperia, which brings a much-needed dash of bright green and blue skies to Microsoft's otherwise drab-looking 2008 lineup. To help moisten your anticipatory glands, then, here's a ton of gorgeous new screenshots.

When Lucasarts dropped the axe on 75-100 employees recently, we spoke with a number of the freshly-sacked workers, one of whom spilled the beans on a number of projects Lucasarts had in the pipeline. Some as developer, some merely as publisher. Some of the projects named include KOTOR 3 (with BioWare), Battlefront 3 (with Free Radical) and another LEGO Indiana Jones game (with Traveller's Tales, obviously). If you were hoping at least one of them would be unveiled at E3, however, you can start making plans for mid-July again: Lucasarts have announced that not only will they not be announcing any of those (rumoured, mind you) titles, they won't be announcing any new titles at all. Why? There's "too much noise" surrounding the show. Apparently.

LucasArts tees up new Star Wars titles, addresses layoffs [VentureBeat]

Things are going from bad to worse for Tecmo. First Dead or Alive creator Tomonobu Itagaki announced he was leaving and suing Tecmo, while a totally separate lawsuit has been filed against Tecmo by Hiroaki Ozawa and co-plaintiff Tatsuki Tsunoda. Ozawa is the Tecmo Labour Union leader and Ninja Gaiden 2 lead engineer, while Tsunoda is the Ninja Gaiden 2 level design lead. Two key Team Ninja members! That alone does not bode well for Tecmo. But, this isn't just a story of two guys trying to get some overtime, but also apparently of deception, falsified statements and a dead, beloved company president. There's concrete evident in the plaintiff's claims — so concrete that it could very well be the silver bullet for Tecmo's current upper management.

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I fired a couple of questions at (soon to be former) GDAA CEO Greg Bondar following his resignation from the organisation. Greg kindly provided a prompt reply.

For now, Bondar will be moving into consulting, which he says offers less reliable, but better, pay. It was this opportunity, and a desire to "focus his energies elsewhere", that prompted Bondar's decision, though he did acknowledge that recent events played a minor role. He's also wrapping up a short-term project for a third-party.

While Bondar was unsure of who would replace him as CEO, he did confirm that president Tom Crago will handle his duties in the interim.

Finally, I asked Bondar to reflect on the changes the GDAA underwent and what it achieved during his 18-month stint. Here's what he had to say:

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No weekly PC sales charts this week. In their place: a monthly sales chart. The NPD group have released a list of the ten best-selling (at brick-and-mortars retail) games for the month of May, a list which while still lacking hard numbers does give us an idea of how well certain games performed. Like Age of Conan, which was the month's biggest-seller despite only launching halfway through. Or the bottom-feeding budget compilation "15000 Games", which scrapes into #10 despite failing to make any of the individual top-10 charts for the month. Guess it's a slow-burner.

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Greg Bondar has resigned from his position as CEO of the Game Developers Association of Australia, in order to "pursue other opportunities", according to an email announcement sent out today. Bondar leaves after just 18 months at the organisation.

Bondar's resignation has come as a surprise to me. I was putting together questions about Game Connect AP after the mini-uproar over speaker fees, which Greg said he'd be keen to answer (though maybe not so much now). To further emphasise the suddenness of his decision, while his last official day as CEO will be July 12, Bondar will be taking vacation leave starting tomorrow.

Regardless, I wish Greg all the best in his future endeavours.

DISSIDIA: Final Fantasy? 50 percent done. So says the game's character designer Tetsuya Nomura in the upcoming issue of Japanese game mag Famitsu. This shouldn't come as a huge surprise as only half the cast has been revealed. That, and Square Enix does like to take its sweet time putting out its games. There's no rush, we guess.

Dissidia Final Fantasy [Videogamerx via PSP Hyper via PSP Fanboy]

Last night's vids showing Snake snapping pics of MGS4's "Beauties" while they moaned with...delight (?) in the background was some creepy viewing. Or compelling. Whatever floats your boat, man, I'm not judging you. As an encore of sorts, here's a bonus clip. Aforementioned creepy moaning is still there, so those perched within office cubicles beware, but it's now interspersed with...a catchy J-Pop dance routine.

As previously posted, Tecmo issued a press release calling out the foreign media for that rumoured talk of some three dozen Team Ninja member Tecmo exodus. The Japanese press release released today is slightly different and has been "localized" so to speak. [Note: A previous press release Tecmo USA released didn't have mention of Itagaki's "sexual harassment suit" while the Japanese was quick to point it out.] Today's press release is the second one Tecmo Japan has released in the last two days that addresses the mass exodus rumours. Yesterday's was a two sentence affair stating that the Western media rumour was not true. Today, which you've already read the English version of, is slightly longer and quite humble. Hit the jump for that:

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While the Wii's Clone Wars game fails to even light my excitement furnace's pilot light, the DS game is sounding much more promising. Mostly because of this:

Jedi Alliance is designed, from the ground up, as a stylus driven game. Player movement, combat, Force powers and puzzle solving all driven by the stylus. The unique form factor of the DS has given us a great opportunity for the first time ever to give players direct control of the Lightsaber.

So Ninja Gaiden/Phantom Hourglass, but with Jedi? That'd be lovely, thanks. Another neat addition to the game is drop-in, drop-out co-op play: you'll always be fighting with an AI opponent, and at any time a friend can jump in and assume the role of the "partner". Oh, and you can play as Kit Fisto. Which should really be the game's #1 selling-point, but then, who am I to tell Lucasart's PR how to do their jobs.

Interview: Star Wars: The Clone Wars [IGN]

Hey! People aren't just using the Spore Creature Creator to make penis monsters. Creative kids are trading cocks for controllers — just look at what Kotakuite zOmbi's friend Eric made in the Spore creator editor a few minutes ago. Yep, that's right, Eric made an Xbox 360 controller.

*applause*

Xbox 360 Spore Controller [Spore.com Thanks, zOmbi!]

Penis creatures, creatures that are, well, fucking themselves, it's all a laugh. All to be expected when a company lauches a tool that allows the great unwashed to make living, breathing animals that look like genitalia. But be warned! These heady days of free love, where anything goes and your vaginasaurs are free to flop around the floor unchallenged by the censor's blade, will soon be coming to an end. EA have begun cracking down on some of the naughtier creations uploaded, sending a "please stop or we'll ban your EA account" email to PC Gamer's Kristen Salvatore for her Boobalicious creation. This after we were promised we'd be able to fly a peniscar into vaginatown! We were promised!

BUSTED! "Boobalicious" Banned! [GamesRadar]

Upon hearing the news that Oz animation studio Animal Logic had opened a gaming studio, Animal Logic Interactive, in Los Angeles, I couldn't help but be sad. To me it seemed the government's lack of support for developers had finally manifested itself in a way we could all appreciate.

Jason Hill of Screenplay managed to get in contact with AL's CEO Zareh Nalbandian to find out exactly what motivated the company to go with LA over Melbourne or Brisbane:

"We felt that there was a rich pool of talent ... that we have more options in Los Angeles at this point of time than we have elsewhere."

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Tecmo is not pleased. It says that rumoured talk of some three dozen Team Ninja members bolting from the company along with Tomonobu Itagaki and filing suit against Tecmo, reports of which originated at 1UP, are false and inaccurate. "No such action is taking place at the company", reads an official statement forwarded to Kotaku.

According to Tecmo, only two employees have filed a lawsuit against the company. Tecmo claims that it notified "all affected employees that they would be appropriately compensated and is currently in the process of resolving the matter". It also goes on record as saying that reports that it had withheld information from shareholders regarding the lawsuit filed by Itagaki were, in short, hogwash.

Apparently, recent reporting on Tecmo's legal kerfuffle has caused "unrest" amongst company staffers, so the publisher and developer has asked us to "handle news reports concerning the above matters with care". It is our policy to handle all news reports as if they were a brittle nest filled with the precious and fragile eggs of a hummingbird.

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Oh dear EA, when will you learn? We like the games you publish, but for some reason, you don't want our money. Madness, I tells ya. True, $US 10 isn't exactly a haul, but it's $US 10 that will never be yours. Potentially, it could mean $100 or so EA will miss out on when the game is released.

Even if you try to trick the EA Store by providing US details, I imagine as long as you're using a non-US/Canadian credit card, you'll get this message when you hit confirm: "We are unable to process your order. Please verify your information and try again". The only upside is that you can download the trial. But even then, it's only 25% of the experience.

Seriously, why put an AU and NZ flag on the Spore landing page (above), but have both links going to the normal US site to advertise a product we can't buy? They may as well not be there.

I'm currently waiting for EA to get back to me with comment.

Update: Here's what EA had to say: "To clarify, Australians with Australian credit cards will not be able to purchase the full Creature Creator for the US/Canadian sites, however the full version of the Creature Creator will be available in Australia". The company will be making an "exciting" announcement about this in the near future.

Spore [Official site]

Read this: "The promise of a Wii Lightsabre game has hung in the air since the Wii hit the shelves. We think this is the game that delivers on that promise". That's Ken Fox, from Krome Studios, developers of the upcoming Clone Wars game for the Wii. Excited? Cool those jets. He also says this: "We've tried to make the lightsabre control as intuitive and fun as possible. It's not a Lightsabre simulator, but when you swing your Wii remote left to right; your character does the same. You use the thumbstick on the nunchuck to move your character and swing the Wii remote to swing your Lightsabre". Wait, that doesn't deliver on the promise at all! Unless the promise was for yet another third-party action game based on a Star Wars story, only this time with waggle. Which it wasn't! More info on the game below, which is a must-read if you want to see a man use the word "lightsabre" 20 times in a single interview.

Interview: Star Wars: The Clone Wars [IGN]

PSP programmers take note—Crytek is hiring. The developer of Crysis and Far Cry is looking to bring its wares to the PlayStation Portable in some form, looking for experienced PSP developers to relocate to its Budapest studio to work on an unspecified project. Odd choice for a platform, considering Crytek president Cervat Yali said the company was "suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis" earlier this year, as piracy on the PSP platform isn't exactly rare.

Crytek is currently working on something for the PlayStation 3, which has been rumoured to be an "enhanced" version of Crysis, that may also be multi-platform. Whether that's a PSP spin-off or something totally new altogether, we'll have to wait to find out.

PSP Programmer [Crytek - thanks, Andrew & EN!]

When tipster Peter sent me a small screenshot showing EB Games' rather ambitious pricing for pre-owned boxes of Metal Gear Solid 4, I though Pete and his copy of Photoshop were having a go. Yet, when I visited the EB site to confirm, guess what I found staring me in the face? I took the above snap in case you're having trouble.

A typo, obviously, but that doesn't stop it from being funny. I've included a direct link below, but don't be surprised if the error has been fixed.

Update: Yep, it's all gone now.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots: Preowned [EB Games Australia, thanks Peter]

According to an internal email forwarded to Newsweek's Level Up, long time Electronic Arts fixture Neil Young—pictured contemplating something—has left the company. Young had been at EA for over a decade, heading up EA's Los Angeles studio and, prior to leaving, the EA Blueprint division. The EA Blueprint endeavour was an attempt by the mega-publisher to create lower cost content with smaller teams based on original intellectual property.

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Atlus broke the bad news to Zoids fan(s) that its strategic RPG Zoids Assault for the Xbox 360 would be delayed to September. It also released a batch of new screenshots to, in its own words, "draw attention away from the game's brief delay". The press release continued to be surprisingly frank.

"Zoids Assault is going to slip out of late August and into early September - the 9th to be exact... Hey, are these new Zoids Assault screenshots? These are great! Let's focus on these instead," pleaded Aram Jabbari, Assistant Manager of Sales and PR, holding a set of awesome new Zoids Assault screenshots above his head.

I didn't write that last paragraph. Here are new screenshots.

Silicon Knights president Denis Dyack has often spoken about the so-called "one console future", where the hardware biz will consolidate sufficiently so that there are no more platform wars.

Speaking to GameDaily, though, Dyack also said he thinks we'll see continuing consolidation in the games industry itself, with the big publishers eating up the smaller ones until there are only a few major companies left for all products, Hollywood-style.

Of course, bigger publishers are less agile, and this future for the business is pretty bleak as far as risk and innovation goes. Dyack said that studios will be challenged in maintaining their independence and creativity:

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Dragon Age Begins In 2009, Saboteur Slips
Dragon Age won't turn into Bioware's Duke Nukem Forever, will it?

Wii Fit Hula Hoop Girl Hits TRL
Wii Fit. A hula hoop. A girl. I really can't make this any clearer.

GTA IV's Lost Phone Music Feature
It's okay Rockstar, the game's feature-packed as it is!

Pyros Blow In The New TF2 Update
For those who love the Pyro with a burning passion. Heh. Passion.

Hey! These Spoiler Metal Gear Solid 4 Screens Are NSFW
I'm not 100% sure what I'm seeing here, but I do know it feels naughty.

Finding yourself flummoxed by all that Metal Gear history being bandied about in Metal Gear Solid 4's extremely word cut scenes? Konami and the PlayStation Store are coming to your aid, launching the Metal Gear Solid 4 Database a "free, downloadable interactive application that contains the official knowledge base of everything that is Metal Gear." It's sure to come in handy if you're a new recruit to the series.

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Dragon Age, the winner of multiple "Best of E3 2004" awards will indeed be shipping in the first quarter of 2009, according to Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello. BioWare's role-playing game was loosely dated by the EA boss at the William Blair & Company Growth Stock Conference yesterday, backing up the previously hinted at release window.

Riccitiello also pegged Pandemic's World War II action game Saboteur for a pre-April 1 release, according to a report from GameSpot, missing its planned 2008 release. That's a huge blow to fans of shooting Nazis, but we hear that the Nazi shooting still needs more polish. You can't rush this stuff, folks.

Saboteur, Dragon Age slated for Q1 '09 [GameSpot]

EA's "city-state" label structure can be a little tricky sometimes, in that I'll bet it's hard for them sometimes to pick what game goes under what label. For example, you'd probably guess that Skate might be an EA Sports label game, ad not an EA Games label game. EA Games global marketing VP Mike Quigley explains in a new interview with Gamasutra why you'd be wrong:

"That's a great question. Right now, again, that is driven by the fact that the game was made by Black Box, and the Black Box team is near the Need for Speed team, and those guys work together in Vancouver. That's just where we put it".

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Chip maker AMD has invested heavily into hyperbole research, proudly proclaiming that its new graphics chip, the RV770, is "more powerful than every generation of video game console ever brought to market combined". The RV770, demoed Monday, is capable of processing one trillion floating operations per second on a single chip, a feat that AMD says "punches a sizeable hole in the sensory barrier".

In short, that means things will look prettier and more realistic, giving game creators nearly limitless depths of brown to explore with space marine armour achieving nearly unimaginable levels of detail.

AMD has a brief tech demo that show off the RV770 at its official site, featuring a DOG from Half-Life 2 clone chasing graphics card mascot Ruby. You'll probably find it as rewarding as the corporate promise of "Cinema 2.0". That's definitely gonna catch on.

Cinema 2.0: The Next Chapter in the Ultimate Visual Experience Story [AMD - thanks, Fred!]

This artwork by Shawnimals toy line creator Shawn Smith adorned one full wall at the PR office where I went to check out Southpeak's upcoming Ninjatown strategy title for DS. The game's based off of Smith's cute little ninja characters and quirky designs, and it's slated for an October release.

I got a chance to give it a try, and I had a hard time putting it down.

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I saw a couple of Southpeak's upcoming titles today, including one that I didn't even know existed, to be perfectly honest. A development team of Russian Japanophiles - get this, their name is Gaijin - set out to create the most anime-styled action title they could, and came up with X-Blades, headed for PC and next-gen consoles in the Fall.

Like anime style? Like cel-shaded 3D cutscenes? Like crazy outfits? This one could be for you, maybe.

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Sierra Online just sent us a fact sheet and some screens for upcoming Xbox Live Arcade title Interpol. The puzzle game is set to hit the Xbox 360 this spring. The full Fact Sheet is on the jump.