Canned Dogs

Niconico douga has announced today that they are starting a new video service called spike niconico channel which will be for games that are being distributed by spike in Japan. It currently has trailers games such as Bioshock and Tomb Raider, and they hope to expand to have gameplay videos and interviews.

Now I’m sure it’s completely unrelated but on the same day, niconico has started deleting tons of gameplay videos of Nintendo-owned games due to “requests from the copyright holder” such as the videos of people playing modified versions of Mario and Pokemon, and the videos of fully automatic Mario which had been pretty popular, and especially the recent one of the gumi kyoku. (it’s still up on youtube)

As a result of the deletions, the total number of videos viewed across all videos in niconico douga has dropped by 20 million views today.

I don’t know if it’s just Nintendo or if they’re planning to eventually remove all gameplay videos from the site, but this sucks.

Zakzak reports that the increasing oil prices recently are starting to hurt the 30 billion yen gachagacha/gashapon industry as rising costs for the production of the plastic containers to keep the gashapon in are starting to thin their profits.

Even the biggest gashapon maker Bandai who has about 65% market share has changed the 65mm containers that they’ve always used to 50mm containers since April this year so as to save costs.

Yujin which is under the other major gashapon maker Takara Tomy who owns 35% market share is also considering switching from their usual containers that use a combination of both soft and hard plastics to using containers made of only soft plastics to save in costs.

The gashapon market had been expanding at every year hitting a peak of 33.5 billion yen in 2005, but shrank to 30.5 billion yen in 2006, and with the problems of increasing oil prices also adding to the problem, gashapon makers have no choice but find ways to cut costs.

Eroge brand Abogado Powers has updated their site revealing their first game Sukusuku mizugi as their first comeback title for release in July. They’ve also announced that they’ll be releasing two other games. The first game looks incredibly… generic.

I was going to write about pixy but a quick google says that Heisei Democracy already wrote something about it so I don’t have to do anything! Though, I wouldn’t be too surprised if pixy was dying even if p2p and piracy weren’t prevalent…

DTM software maker Internet has announced that they will be releasing a Gackt version of Vocaloid called Gackpoid in June. A sample song that was made using Gackpoid is available here. Nico douga had previously announced Gackpoid during April fools day, I didn’t think it would be real…
Via: ITmedia

The ultimate ero manga (NSFW)

Otaroad blog reports that Lass’ latest eroge 11eyes is starting to get sold out in stores in Nipponbashi. I haven’t seen many negative comments on the story for 11eyes (unlike Tsuyokiss 2), maybe I should try it out next week or something.

Komatsunaya has released a Hatsune Miku typing game called Byoukan Vocaloid Typing free for download for a limited time. You’re supposed to type every letter from A to Z and the lower your score the better.

I was watching the incredibly funny Pangya Japan Cup finals today and they made a surprise announcement that the online fantasy golf game Pangya will be having a collaboration event with Hatsune Miku. Details for the event will be announced on the 22nd.

Japanese movie review site Chou eiga hihyou has given the upcoming Higurashi movie the awesome rating of 10 out of 100! The movie will be officially out on the 10th of May, it seems really hopeful now that the movie will be a huge success!

The reviewer says that the original game was attractive because it seemed like a love comedy with cute characters at first and slowly became violent and gruesome, but in a live action movie, such situations have already been done to death and it doesn’t seem to be anything special. And stuff about how you have to play the game to enjoy the movie.

Tanaka Romeo’s Jinrui wa suitai shimashita is one of the 5 novels nominated to be “Books that college students should read” by college students from 30 literature clubs across 25 colleges in Japan. An open debate was held on the 4th of May to decide the best of the 5 nominated books.

The other nominations were Childhood’s End by Arthur C Clark, 1000 novels and the bugbear by Satou Yuuya, Shio no machi by Arikawa Hiro (author of Toshokan sensou), and Seinen no tame no dokusho club by Sakuraba Kazuki. Childhood’s End won the award in the end.

Tanaka Romeo is one of the scenario writers for Key’s Rewrite.

And while we’re at it, Tanaka Romeo’s Cross Channel should be nominated as one of the eroge that all humans should play.

The Frontier Works website has announced that they will be expanding Umineko no naku koro ni onto other media starting this summer. I hope they aren’t going to announce an anime, it still feels too early in the story to have an anime already.

Akibablog reports that KFC has told the Akihabara branch to stop dressing Colonel Sanders in a maid costume apparently, so he has been returned to his original self.

Catching up with small stuff.

Sekai de ichiban NG na koi (eroge) was a lovely game. I wanted to write a post about the great characters and story, but after several bad attempts at writing a post I gave up and decided to just have a small mention about it here.

Clannad has been announced to be one of the anime to be featured at the TBS anime festa 2008 and considering how Air, Kanon, and Clannad were all shown in TBS anime festa first before starting on TV soon after, the possibility of Clannad after story starting in October has become a lot more real.

Clannad on the 360 will have downloadable content (not free). The downloadable content will be Hikari mimamoru sakamichi de which was a collection of side stories sold as a book. More money for Key!

Evangelion 1.0 movie DVD makes record sales selling 219,000 copies in its first week, more than any other Evangelion DVD to date, and also making it the current best selling DVD for 2008. This definitely shows what the power of Ayanami’s naked body can do (!?)

A second live-action Higurashi movie has been announced, no details have been revealed yet on what chapter of Higurashi the 2nd movie will be about. They aren’t even going to see if the first movie is going to be a flop yet!?

Ass flashing Asuka Sawamoto (30) previously claimed she was 22 and that the mass media made a mistake saying she was 30. So now the mass media gets back at her with all sorts of proof from the police and from her blog that she really is 30 years old.

Approximately 120 people from the police, the local government, and local volunteers have started patrolling the road on Akihabara amidst complaints of street performances that have been going overboard. And because of that, all the small performances that could be seen around in Akiba have decreased greatly.

Every Sunday or public holiday, the main road in Akihabara is closed from traffic so pedestrians can walk freely on the road, and people have been using this extra space on the roads for stuff like live performances or impromptu photo shoots.

However, there have been an increasing number of people that have been abusing it such as the ass flasher woman and the guys that were using the street to have BB gun and water gun battles and getting into arguments with the police, inciting complaints from pedestrians and shops in the area.

Also, ass flasher Sawamoto Asuka (30) has been released after spending a day with the police and posts on her blog saying that she really is 22 as she always claimed, and that all the news reports about her being 30 were wrong. She supports this claim by saying that she wouldn’t get any work as a self-proclaimed gravure idol if she was 30.