Zombies. They are everywhere, and Japanese games are no exception. However, while in the West a shotgun blast to the head seems to be the most efficient way of killing them, the Japanese have instead found the “natural enemy” of the walking dead: schoolgirls.
Suda51 (Goichi Suda) is one of Japan’s most famous game directors. In the West, this is due to his cult classic PS2/GameCube title, Killer7, or his best-selling Wii series, No More Heroes. In Japan, however, he first became famous for another game entirely: Super Fire Pro Wrestling Special on the Super Famicom.
When I first played Diabolical Pitch, it was at the Tokyo Game Show 2011. There at the Microsoft booth, I played this Kinect title in two-player coop mode with a beautiful Japanese booth babe. I had a lot of fun.
Written and directed by No More Heroes mastermind Goichi Suda and part of a popular horror series, its still a mystery why Fatal Frame 4: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse was never released outside of Japan. Maybe it’s because it didn’t fit the Wii’s family friendly image, or maybe Fatal Frame III didn’t sell as well as expected. Only Nintendo knows for sure.
The latest trailer for Lollipop Chainsaw reminds us that just one bite from a zombie is all it takes to spell doom. Unless, of course, you have a loved one nearby to cheerfully chop off your head and keep it animated… somehow.
In the high-school food chain, it always seemed like nerds or stoners would be the natural enemies to cheerleaders, not goths. Suda51 seems to think otherwise, judging by the trailer for the developer’s upcoming Warner Bros-published action game.
Suda51′s upcoming mash-up of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (movie version, mind you) and grindhouse horror flicks just scored some scary-sweet box art that Warner Bros. Games is sharing with the world.
What you’ve got to love about Suda51 is the way his avid embrace of junk culture and grindhouse aesthetic informs everything he does. The buckets of gore in all of his games, the lucha libre wrestling mask he used to do interviews in and the foul-mouthed, hormone-plagued tension in No More Heroes and Shadows of the Damned make them all more idiosyncratic than most other games out there. The newest trailer for his latest game, the PlayStation 3 and box 360′s Lollipop Chainsaw, puts all that on display again. You’ll get to wave your pom poms in March of next year.
Earlier this afternoon I announced four of the winners of our No More Heroes 2 competition. But there were five prizes up grabs. I need your help to choose that final winner.
To win a copy of No More Heroes 2 – and the Aussie exclusive Travis Touchdown t-shirt – we asked you to prove your assassin credentials. Let’s meet Kotaku’s geekiest deadliest killers.
