The sad demise of arcade games continues, even in former stronghold Japan. While on the one hand it’s nice that we can now play the best games at home, it still sad to watch an ending era. I remember when arcade games offered the pinnacle of gameplay and graphics, so much so that console ports tended to involve compromise.

Now? Japanese arcade developers are turning to the ageing Naomi (released in 1998) and ugly Atomiswave arcade boards so they can sell arcade games cheaply. Such a shame, though if Stern can keep pinball manufacturing alive I’m sure we’ll also see arcade machine stalwarts for a while yet.

To get to the point, Edge interviews three arcade developers in Japan, one of which is only a single guy (down from three). A quality feature article as usual from Edge. (Thanks roushi!)

Wired has up a great article full of thought provoking quotes from various Japanese game design luminaries.

"Walking on the E3 show floor today," Sakurai said, "how many shots did you hear
fired? It seems like America is mired in the shooting-game genre. You can’t just
bring that to Japan and tell consumers, ‘This is a shooting game. Enjoy it.’"

He has a point. I wonder what proportion of chart-topping games have guns in them? Not that it’s aways a bad thing (see Half-Life 2) but a little more variety wouldn’t hurt.

Just look at ‘em all. I had no idea Night Elves were so popular. Surprising to see that Orcs are the least played class too. There are also numbers for average playing time, Guild sizes, class popularity, grouping vs. soloing… interesting stuff.

Remember the last one? This one’s rather longer, rather more polished and rather good! Nothing more to add really, too damn hot here.

Gosh, it does look rather like it. There are some truly amazing sights out there in space, I can only thank the people who presumably have to sift through piles of boring space photos (ooh look, it’s another patch of stars!) to come across the cool ones. (via the delightfully quirky Anomaly Resource)

Hot sunny weather for weeks here in the UK, then all of a sudden Glastonbury starts so it just has to rain, doesn’t it? Poor sods, it’s almost like nature is keeping up with tradition. One year Lemon Jelly started playing Nice Weather for the Ducks, and what do you know it, the skies opened up seconds later.

Still lookin’ good. It’s neat how they’re taking cell shading a step forward with some of their graphics techniques. It’s about time we got another great looking cell shaded game to join Wind Waker and Jet Set Radio. The gameplay sounds somewhat more varied than Spiderman 2 also - I loved swinging around the city but the missions got old fast.

Sadly, it’s for experts as might be evident from the picture. Still, despite the rubbish graphics of the actual game, that’s one very cool application of technology. The future of EyeToy? (via Boing Boing)

I love co-op. Even games I didn’t enjoy much alone become great played cooperatively, such as Serious Sam. Knight Games has a great list of RPGs that support co-op. There are more than I thought although he missed out the superb System Shock 2.

When played with others it’s not nearly as scary though it’s fun specialising - I went psi while two other friends went marine and hacker respectively. It was great fun although I discovered the psionic guy gets near zero psi-hypos for the last quarter of the game, strangely (and annoyingly).

Accuse me of Xbox 360 fanboyism all you like, I’m hot for PGR 3. I had a lot of fun with PGR 2 both offline and on, PGR 3 will hopefully be at least as good and far prettier. Fully modelled interiors is an insanely cool first for racing games and the game looks great in action too.

It’s also worth following the dev diaries over at the official site if you’re interested in the game, there are some fun development anecdotes and the occasional early screenshot in there. Bizarre have had a great web community for ages, it’s nice to see them extend that from just a forum into a full site with dev diaries and everything. It’s always nice when a games company does the web community thing well, let alone at all.

Seems like it to me, and to some degree that’s fair enough given that Opera has offered much of what Firefox offers for years now. The thing is, while it seemed quite fast and feature-laden last time I tried, Opera isn’t free. You’ve got to cough up or suffer ads.

They’ve certainly got more business sense than Netscape ever did (for example their mobile stuff is doing well) but fact is they’ll never be as big as even Firefox because the only business model open to them limits their market. And, well, that’s tough really.

Deeply silly Star Wars parody with a serious message (organic food is good, mkay). Tofu-D2, Chewbrocolli… good stuff. Watch it. (via linkbunnies)