It's like clockwork. Every month, a handful of emails hit my inbox from readers with a singular purpose: What should I do on my trip to Japan? There are endless things to do in Japan that run the gamut of traditional to modern to fascinating to banal. What unites these emailers is that A). They're g...

The latest bullet hell Cave arcade shooter to get an Xbox 360 port is Ketsui. Already boasting a DS port, the 360 version will offer an exclusive "X-Mode" that allows for lock-on targeting. Ketsui ~Kizuna Jigokutachi ~ EXTRA is slated for release in Japan on May 28. Developer 5pb will be porting the...

When I first arrived to Tokyo, I noticed that, come the end of winter, weather forecast screens (in trains, on TV, wherever…) would start adding an extra line under the main sun/cloud/water-drop pictograms. Since the new icons usually depicted lovely little pink flowers or trees blowing in the...

Swiss bank UBS (stay with me) placed an order of 3 trillion yen (US$31 billion) for Capcom bonds. Make that, mistakenly placed an order. The bank intended to place an order for 30 million yen bonds in Capcom, but instead a substantially larger order was placed. UBS does not describe the mistake as "...

The latest Ryu Ga Gotoku 3 (Yakuza 3) ads don't just feature gameplay, but a bigger selling point — well, for us at least. The game's ridiculously tanned Toshihiro Nagoshi skips stones with the game's hero Kazuma Kiryu and talks about the PS3's "power of expression." Kazuma Kiryu says how impo...

Enterbrain, publisher of game mag Famitsu, has complied its game software sales data for last year in Japan. Which game was the biggest seller? Which games bombed? All that, and more. (By "more," we mean those in-between games that did okay. Hooray for them!) Here's the crunched numbers: 1. Monster ...

Hostesses? Boring! Guys getting hit with a gas tank? So not boring. This batch of Ryu Ga Gotoku 3 images packs a walloping punch. PS3 exclusive Ryu Ga Gotoku 3 hits Japanese retailers February 26. galleryPost('ryugagotoku3screens', 3, 'Yakuza');...

Tokyo police say that sex crimes against underage females via gaming and social networking websites more than doubled in 2008. According to a 2008 Metropolitan Police Department Survey of 130 sexual abused girls under 18 years of age, 82 of them were victimized via such sites. In contrast, however, ...

Japan is in no rush to get back to its regular video game hardware buying habits, with sales cooling across the board. Even though we have a bunch of new releases, they aren't spurring sales. Hardware rankings stay as-is, with the Nintendo DSi still grabbing the biggest slice of the hardware sales p...

Famitsu Editor-in-Chief Hirokazu Hamamura has looked into his crystal ball and has opinions about how Dragon Quest IX will do in 2009. And it'll do mega, he forecasts. According to Hamamura, "March [DQIX's launch month] will be bigger than the year-end sales war. Even side-stories (such as Dragon Qu...