Splatoon 2 is coming and since the first game did incredibly well on the home turf, there's some collaborative efforts to celebrate the launch of the game.

Tower Records

If you are wondering why Japan's first Splatfest theme is Rock vs. Pop, it's because of the Tower Records summer sale! You might even have noticed their logo written in an inkling style throughout the demo. Frozenpandaman on Reddit took a bunch of pictures of the iconic Shibuya store, that kicked off the event with the release of Wet Floor's EP "Inkoming!"

You see many more pictures here.

Kyoto Aquarium

Kids can also learn about real squids at the Kyoto Aquarium at the "Suizokukaan" event. At the dolphin basin, kids split into two teams and try to gather as much water as possible in two containers, by either using Splattershots or buckets. Everyone with buckets risk getting drenched while trying to collect the falling water and once the game is over and the score is tallied up, the losing team gets drenched... then everyone gets drenched. I'm sure they have some of those big dryer rooms at the entrances, but you should probably bring some spare clothes just in chase.

Check out a video of the event below:

Of course there is also all sorts of merchandise to purchase.

All in all a great summer vacation trip for the family

(Via Famitsu)

Fanart

Unsurprisingly, tons of fanart sprung up, especially after the reveal of Pearl and Marina. I think it was less than 20 minutes after the Splatoon 2 Nintendo Direct ended that I started seeing the first drawings from all over the world on twitter and it hasn't stopped. As with the first game, some of the most ink-redible artists can be found in the game itself. Miiverse may be gone, but Splatoonverse lives on.

Don't forget that the Splatfest is this weekend and stay off the hook!

From Bandai Namco and Granzella, the Disaster Report people, comes the first long trailer for their upcoming survival game "City Shrouded in Shadow".

In this, you take the role of the male or female protagonist in town in peril as monsters and heroes duke it out. Expect to see Godzilla, Ultraman and Evangelion Unit-01, just to name a few. As a regular human it's your objective to survive the chaos and drama.

Game comes out in Japan on October 19th. No western version announced yet and it might end up as one of those games that get stuck in copyright limbo and never released here. Personally, I'm holding out for an Asian English version, as Bandai Namco have had success with releasing some of their other games in this manner.

Characters:

Ken Misaki (Male Protagonist) (voiced by Takuya Satou)

A protagonist. A young man who lives in the city where this game takes place. On a certain rainy night, he encounters a variety of giant shadows after seeing a strange flash. He was trying to go to the park, where an important person was waiting, when a giant shadow suddenly appeared and began to destroy the city. To rescue the girl waiting for him at the park, he makes a bolt towards the giant shadow trampling the city.

*The player can decide this character’s occupation (businessman, student, etc.), initial clothing, and hair style.

*You can change this characters clothing and hair style during the game.

*You can choose to play as a male or female protagonist from at the start of the game. You can also change their name.

Miharu Matsubara (Female Protagonist) (voiced by Satomi Akesaka)

A protagonist. A young woman who lives in the city where this game takes place. After witnessing a strange flash, she encounters a giant shadow destroying the city. In the city exposed to the giant shadow threat, she will meet a variety of people. People who ask for help, people who will lend a helping hand, people who take advantage of the chaos, and people who will take aim at her life…! She must survive while getting caught up in the vortex of everyone’s expectations in the extreme conditions caused by the giant shadows.

*The player can decide this character’s occupation (businessman, student, etc.), initial clothing, and hair style.

*You can change this characters clothing and hair style during the game.

*You can choose to play as a male or female protagonist from at the start of the game. You can also change their name.

Yuki Kouno (Heroine) (voiced by Reina Ueda)

A young girl who was supposed to meet the protagonist at the park when the giant shadows appeared. The heroine of this story. Along with the hero, she will survive the threat of the giant shadows that appeared in the city. She has a bit of a timid personality, and in this unprecedented disaster caused by giant shadows, places great confidence in the protagonist. She is usually somewhat carefree, kind and sociable towards others, and is the type of person who cannot ignore those in need.

*The player can decide this character’s initial clothing and hair style.

*You can change this characters clothing and hair style during the game.

*You can choose her relationship with the protagonist, such as “lover” or “friend.”

Hideyasu Ootsuka (voiced by Ryouta Takeuchi)

A web news writer covering the giant shadows and trying to get a scoop. He is a seemingly crude man who appears troubling at first glance. He is usually writing articles for the web news, mainly covering sub-culture and gossip, while also revealing corporate and government fraud, as well as doing extortion-like things. He has an extreme attachment to money, and doesn’t dislike danger if it means getting a scoop. He will also try to use anyone. He keeps an eye on whether there is some sort of cause-and-effect relationship between the protagonist and the appearance of the giant shadows.

Risa Kashiwagi (voiced by Yuuko Kaida)

A journalist who mainly covers social problems and subcultures, and contributes articles to news websites. She meets the protagonist and company when she gets rolled up in the disaster caused by the giant shadows. She is a woman of action with a sharp mind, and an adult who can be attentive and kind to those around her. She will save the protagonist and company from a crisis every so often. She is acquainted with the web writer Ootsuka, but heavily despises his dirty money and selfishness.

(source)

Hey kids! Remember the PC?

In the wake of the NES and SNES Mini, there's a new player in town and it's got 640K of ram... More than enough for anyone!

Introducing the IBM Compatible Mini!

Relive the golden and relevant age of PC gaming with this tiny IBM compatible, jam packed with 20 of the retro classics you want, +1 one all-new, "never released" game: Star Fox 2 (running on ZSNES)

Title	Screen Shot
Alley Cat
Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty
Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel
Wing Commander
Commander Keen 2: The Earth Explodes
Doom
Final Doom
Ultimate Doom
Lorna
Xenophage: Alien Bloodsport
Pool of Radiance
Stunt Car Racer
Crysis
Raptor: Call of the Shadows
3D Pinball: Space Cadet
Master of Orion
Blood
Duke Nukem
Jazz Jackrabbit
SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony
Star Fox 2 (Running in ZSNES)

Enjoy hours and hours of nostalgic retro PC gaming without the hassle of making boot discs and loading your mousedriver up into high memory.

Sorry, this is satire

Thanks to the internet and general globalization, people around the world have access to and play more or less the same games. There are some outliers, like in China where PC gaming and the mega-giant Tencent is the dominant force, South America where it still can be impossible expensive to get the newest official consoles and games and South Korea where gaming addiction has become such a massive problem that the government instituted the "Shutdown Law", preventing kids under the age of 16 to play games between 10 pm and 6 am.

That being said, I think it's interesting to go back and look at what retro gaming was like back in the day, before the internet and before people really started documenting and recording games. After digging around on YouTube, I've found a number of interesting videos showcasing retro gaming from around the world. Most of these aren't translated and my findings here are mostly subjective or anecdotal, so please feel free to correct me in the comments below or tell us about retro gaming in your country.

Denmark

People think the "video games crash" was a massive deal, but that was only really something that happened to Atari and all the American clone consoles. Here in Denmark we were fine, because like the rest of Europe we had the Commodore 64. My first computer was a Commodore 64 with a datasette tapedeck, which I got in '89 around the time when it was on the way out, so it was impossible to find official new games, since most stores and consumers had moved on to the Commodore Amiga 500. While Denmark is mostly known for such video game contributions as Hitman and Kane & Lynch these days, some retro gamers might be familiar with the clunky Sword of Sodan, which like many other Amiga games was also ported to the Mega Drive.

One character that every Danish retro gamer probably know is Super Oswald. This was a simple game that appeared on a weekly TV show where people could call in, control the character via their phone and win prices. Eventually Oswald was replaced by the even more popular Hugo, who since have gotten some international renown.

Saudi-Arabia

I've only really been made aware of Arabic retro gaming over the last couple of years thanks to Instagram and if I've learned anything, it is that people in Saudi-Arabia are massively nostalgic for Captain Tsubasa. I assume that there might have been the TV show and a massive amount of merchandising. While I don't think there were any official translations of the Famicom games, I've seen several Arabic translations in various romsets. The MSX also seemed to have been relatively popular there as there's a bunch of original Arabic software, including a digital version of the Quran and this strategy game (?) below. I recommend checking out Old Gamer on YouTube for an Arabic AVGN-style retro gaming reviewer.

Taiwan

Taiwan is probably most infamous in retro gaming for it's massive amounts of bootlegs, mostly for the NES and mostly from a company called NTDEC/Asder. While they did have a handful of original games for NES, it was Funtech that tried to put Taiwan on the map with the Super A'can, which unfortunately was a commercial failure. Interestingly enough, some of the best games on the system, such as Sango Fighter, were ported to MS DOS. Low Score Boy on YouTube explains the history of the platform in this video.

Russia

After the fall of the U.S.S.R, Russia opened itself up to a brand new swath of American stuff like Lewis Jeans, Coca-Cola and video games. A company called Steepler jumped at the chance to become of official publisher of Nintendo in Russia and their market was flooded with the aforementioned Taiwanese bootlegs. A Russian AVGN guy by the name of Kinamania on YouTube has made this very interesting and well produced documentary about the Dendy; the Russian NES. Don't forget to include subtitles for this one.

This is some of the more interesting retro gaming videos from around the world that I've found so far. Please let me know of others or of interesting retro gaming facts from your home country.

As expected, those kind of Japanese Vita developers are flocking to PSVR, bringing us bountiful new experiences that we can look forward to in early 2017

The big one is that Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 finally gets its VR and PlayStation Pro support. The new update looks to have a bit more going for it, rather than the basic demo of last year, where you just poked girls with the controllers while they said "no" over and over again. Now you'll get to hang with them all over Zack Island. Here's the official word:

Enjoy Three Paradises in VR

“VR Paradise” works together with Owner’s Paradise, allowing you to play Gravure Paradise, Event Paradise, and Photo Paradise in virtual reality. You can enjoy various situations by unlocking gravures, events, and poses in Vacation Mode. You can enjoy some gravures from the very beginning regardless of whether they were unlocked in Vacation Mode.

PlayStation 4 Pro Support

When playing Gravture Paradise and Photo Paradise in “VR Paradise,” you’ll be able to enjoy PlayStation 4 Pro-supported beautiful visuals. You’ll be able to clearly see the girl’s expression, really highlighting her cuteness!

Note: PlayStation 4 Pro support is limited to VR Paradise.

The VR patch is out tomorrow!

Namco is making great use of import friendly Asian method, where you don't have to try and get your games rated for the west, but still can sell to English speaking video game enthusiasts. To this end there's a new trailer for the Asian English version of Summer Lesson 2nd Contact DLC that adds new costumes and new events to experience.

Also, an Asian English version of The Idolmaster: Cinderella Girls Viewing is coming soon. Finally you'll be able to navigate the fully translated menus to figure out this beast and enjoy virtual concerts.

Finally, the Fate/ series is hitting PSVR with Fate/Grand Order VR feat. Mashu Kyrielight. I honestly know nothing about the Fate/ series so here's what they wrote over at Gematsu.

Type-Moon is working on Fate/Grand Order VR feat. Mashu Kyrielight for PlayStation VR, the company announced at the Fate/Grand Order Winter Festival in Nagoya. It is due out in Japan in 2017.

Twitter reports from the event say the “Fate VR drama” game is not a virtual reality version of the Fate/Grand Order mobile game, but rather something where players meet Mashu Kyrielight. It seems that players will have their own room and travel to various stages with Mashu.

Fate/Grand Order VR feat. Mashu Kyrielight will be playable at Anime Japan 2017 on March 25 and 26.

Because it doesn't have to be all lewd, Namco was actually also showing off Ace Combat 7 at the Taipei Gameshow 2017. It looks disorienting to spin around like the guy does in the video, but it'll probably be a lot of fun.

In a desperate bid to remind people of Battleborn, Randy Pitchford took to twitter earlier today to announce the creation of a subreddit, dedicated to pornographic images of characters from the failing game. (Mirror)

*Mod Edit to remove link to page full of no-no bits. Pitchford's tweet said "VERY NSFW, but I have received reports that BattlebornRule34 is now a thing on Reddit. LINK WITH CAUTION:"*

The Gearbox CEO who saw his game absolutely steamrolled by Overwatch even before it was released, made the announcement a mere 9 hours after he created the creation of the SubReddit and Reddit users were quick to point out his motherfucking bullshit in a number of posts that quickly rose to the top of the board.

It is well known that Overwatch, which sees adoration from pornography connoisseurs and gamers alike, remains successful because of Blizzards excellent designers and business sense. Even the recent announcement of the game's first officially gay character, which was expected to be met with "gamer outrage" from several outlets, has been massively supported by advocates of the LGBT community and people who were already having cheeky wanks to Tracer x Widowmaker SFMs... Something which Gearbox's "hobby-grade e-sports" title has been unable to capitalize on.

More on this story as it unfolds.

Fans of video games from around the world are eagerly anticipating the Nintendo Switch, but why is this console such a big deal? To understand the hype, we'll need to go back in history and look at the beginning of all video games.

Video games began in 1971 with the invention of Computer Space. Prior to this revolutionary new idea of putting video and games together, computers were only really used for boring stuff like bombs and accounting and because of that, the inventors came up with the idea of basing the game on one of the most popular trends at the time; Space. Space was invented by popular television programs like Star Trek and the Moon Landing and was so popular that it lured people into the pinball amusement centers to try out this newfangled contraption, even if it had a boring word like Computer in it's title. To further draw in the crowds, there was also produced a flyer where a nice lady was standing next to the machine, alluding the possibility of meeting a nice lady if you were playing Computer Space.

Computer Space was a runaway success and soon everybody started making their own video games. Even though they more or less all took place in space, the consumers didn't care; They simply couldn't get enough and the industry as a whole saw massive growth until one fated game changed it all.

In December of 1982, the very first movie licensed game was released: E.T. The Extra Terrestrial. These days, everybody knows that movie licensed video games are all terrible, but back then it was such a massive shock that people stopped playing video games all together. This event became known as The Video Game Crash, where computers went back to only being used for boring stuff and games went back to being board and card games.

By 1983 a Japanese card game company called Nintendo decided to enter the stage. Nintendo has always been notoriously slow on the uptake, putting out old hardware with terrible network services, but this poor business sense all began in the middle of the Atari Shock when they decided to release a video games console, right as everyone had agreed that video games were shit.

Perhaps realizing this, Nintendo did everything to hide the fact that it was just a video games console. They gave it the name Family Computer and designed it in a way that made it look like some kinda weird walkie talkie set, where you in fact only could talk into one of the controllers.

Nintendo continued their scam across the sea in 1985, by rebranding their video games console as the Nintendo Entertainment System and redesigning it to look like a VHS player in order to trick consumers into buying it. Because it was significantly cheaper than other VHS players and because Twitter hadn't been invented yet so people could warn each other about it, Nintendo managed to put units into several homes across the United States. Just when the jig was about to be up, a hero in red with an iconic moustache came along to save Nintendo and all of video games.

In 1987 another Japanese company by the name of Data East invented the iconic Karnov. This international superhit began it's life in the arcade where it revitalized an entire form of entertainment, but it was Nintendo who was lucky to secure a port on their deceptive video games machine, which not only made it acceptable to like video games again, but also encouraged people to own video gaming machines in their home.

The success continued on the Super Nintendo with Fighter's History; Yet another game which laid the foundation an entire genre and starred the iconic Karnov.

As the years went on, the video game craze sorta fizzled out. Nintendo stopped getting new Karnov games and SEGA went out of the console business, which is a telltale sign that consumers really, really were starting to hate good video games.

It wasn't until several years later where Nintendo saw success with their Wii console. Despite the dumb name, it became a worldwide sensation thanks to the Data East Arcade Classics collection which featured Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja, wherein the iconic Karnov appears as a boss on the first stage.

There isn't a man, woman or child alive today who doesn't know who you are talking about when you mention that man in red with the iconic moustache what was on the Nintendos. He isn't just a symbol of heroism, but also of the entire video games hobby, which is why everyone is hopeful for the Nintendo Switch and the return.

...the return of that man.

It's no secret that PlayStation Vita pretty much has become the home of lewd games. I honestly expected most of the Vita devs to move on to PlayStation VR as the new home of lewd and Compile Heart's latest game actually seems like a perfect fit for VR, what with the scale and all.

As the name implies, Gun Gun Pixies has you playing as gun-wielding alien girls, fighting off other aliens on a woman's dormitory on earth. Taking inspiration from Mr. Mosquito and Demolition Girl, Compile Heart describes the game as: “This game was born from the thought of wanting to fight from a figure point of view” and “Peeping at a girl’s privates from a low angle is this game’s greatest enjoyment.”, so they seem pretty confident in the kind of game they are making. Amazing!

As usual with these kinds of games, it's probably a lot more vanilla than it sounds like. Compile Heart's pretty renowned for pouring their all into the presentation and not the gameplay aspect, so I wouldn't expect the shooting to feel good, but I gotta hand it to them; they certainly manage to come up with incredible new ideas for lewd games at a steady pace.

(via DengekiOnline)

Many have said that Rez Infinite is the game that made sense as the definitive VR experience, but now there is a new title in town, that is sure to shake the very foundation of what it means for a game to be a Virtual Reality game.

It’s time to get that permission slip from your parole officer again, because Gal Gun VR is coming!

The game was recently announced on Inti Creates NicoNico Live Stream and while there is no platform announced for it yet, I bet it’ll come to PlayStation VR first and PC headsets later.

Prepare your body for the unrelenting assault of schoolgirls and their unrequited love in Veeeee Arrrrrrrr!!!!

Gears of War 4 marks the 2016 return of one of the all-time greatest video game genres, but since that game is only available for Xbone and PC owners, what's in store for PlayStation gamers? I mean, even Nintendo has their own fantastic 3rd person shooter experience, in the form of Splatoon, but for Sony fans, it feels those sorts of games and experiences are completely uncharted territory.

No worries though; Master Takaki-san saved the character action genre once before with his Senrans and he is now ready to do it again for the 3rd person shooter genre on PlayStation 4!

Senran Kagura: Peach Beach Splash was recently announced and Famitsu had the scoop, with an online preview.

• 30 characters from the rich Senran Kagura universe, takes to the beach for a five-on-five water gun showdown.
• There's 10 different water gun types, including gatling guns, sniper rifles and dual pistols.
• A card system grants you new abilities and weapon skills
• In addition to the story mode, there will also be online multiplayer
• There will also be some form of PlayStation VR support, even though the specifics haven't been detailed yet
• The game launches in Japan on March 16. 2017
• Par for the course of Japanese games, the limited edition is announced way before the game gets an actual trailer. You can see what's in the box on the game's official teaser site.

Marvelous has already found their niche audience in the west and successfully localized the previous entries in the franchise, so even though nothing is officially announced yet, I'm sure they'll bring Peach Beach Splash over as well.

Screenshots:

Character art:

Gallery

Game box: