Canned Dogs

Starting on the 21st of May, all the secondary schools in the city of Yawata in Kyoto have officially started using the Nintendo DS as an educational teaching tool for the English language. They held a trial run with a smaller group of 3rd year secondary school students over a period of 5 months, and have found that the vocabulary of the students increased by an average of 40 percent over the test period. Seeing the impressive test results, they decided to officially introduce it to all 2nd year secondary school students in the city.

We can probably expect that the use of the DS as an educational tool will only increase if the results this year continue to be as impressive as with the test group.

The game that they are using is Chuugaku Eitango Target 1800 DS

Elf has announced the new release date for Dragon Knight 4 as the 29th of June. Man, that pretty much clashes with Tales of Fandom, Majo Shinpan and Zelda for me.

Apparently the Japanese government is considering a revision of Japanese copyright law in order to more effectively curb piracy. Currently, if the copyright holder does not sue the copyright infringer, the law is unable to do anything. However, they are trying to change the law so that the police effectively have the authority to make arrests for copyright violation based purely on their own judgment. This means that if this law goes into effect, it will make 95% of all doujin works illegal, not just Nintendo/Konami/Disney related doujin works.

ZUN wrote that he couldn’t beat the Touhou Fuujinroku demo in Lunatic mode without continues apparently, but he confirmed that it was beatable.

Scans of the flyer for Touhou Hisouten that was given out at the reitaisai: front, back

The official webpage for Touhou Fuujinroku is now up at the Shanghai Alice website. There isn’t anything special however, aside from the manual where you can see the different attack types and read about the new Faith system.

Eroge company Teatime has put up a new benchmark/demo for their upcoming 3D eroge, Love Death 2. It was already released last week, but only special members receiving their newsletter could access it.

Doujin circle Chinchilla soft house has announced that Clannad Spelunker 2 has been cancelled, citing lack of funds as the reason. They explain that a doujin game of the magnitude of Clannad Spelunker 2 would cost at least 2,000,000 yen to develop at the very minimum, and that they wouldn’t be able to afford even half of the development costs even if they sold every copy of Tomoyo Fighter Plus. They add on that they will focus all the funds they get from Tomoyo Fighter Plus onto Clannad RPG now that they have cancelled Clannad Spelunker 2.

On a side note, they also mention that many players have asked for Majokko Sayurin no Magical Quest 3, but a game of that magnitude would cost at least 3,000,000 to 4,000,000 yen. And also that they have not made a profit off any of their games since Makomako Panic.

And next I knew it was 7 am.

Elf has announced today that the Dragon Knight 4 remake will be delayed, a new release date has not been announced yet. This is pretty surprising, Elf has always been known for their good project management procedures and always meeting the deadline. As far as I can remember I think this makes it the first game in their 20 years of service that they have delayed because they couldn’t finish development in time.

Tasogare Frontier has updated their blog with more details regarding their upcoming game. Touhou creator ZUN will be writing the scenario and the game story will take place after Touhou Bunkachou but before Touhou Fuujinroku.

The game is basically bring made from the ground up by Tasogare Frontier using their experience from Touhou Suimusou, but it’s still at a very early stage in production right now and probably won’t be completed any time soon. They’re planning for it to be a standalone game and not an expansion to Touhou Suimusou.