Tag: Namco Bandai

Growing up when I went to the arcade, I gravitated towards the driving games. I played the crap out of Pole Position and any other racing game I could get my mitts on. Only a few years later, driving games sort of fell out of popularity and they left the arcade sticking me with nothing but fighting games.

While everyone was checking out all the shiny new games at E3, we somehow missed this oddity. The guys at Namco Bandai are working on a brand new Pac-Man TV show. And it’s no ordinary 2D stuff, it’s got a whopping 3, count ’em, 3 dimensions.

I knew there was a reason I loved Japanese games. Here’s what might be the strangest game to come stateside since Noby Noby Boy and the Katamari Damacy series. Namco Bandai’s Muscle March is one of this week’s releases on the Nintendo WiiWare shop, and it’s truly an odd-ball.

Now I’ve not been shy in saying that the Gravity Gun in Half Life 2 is my all-time favorite video game weapon. So when I heard about Namco Bandai’s new Xbox 360/PS3 third-person gravity manipulation shooter Inversion, my curiosity was definitely piqued.

In even more game localization news, the atmospheric adventure Fragile is set for release outside Japan. The moody title follows Seto, a young boy traversing a ruined world in search of other people–any other people. Certainly a darker theme than the anime-inspired visuals might at first evoke, but Fragile is painted in dark strokes that suit the story’s underlying despair.

The Sky Crawlers should be beautiful–the combination of Production I.G.’s visuals from the animated film and the Ace Combat team from Namco Bandai should be a home run every time. The problem isn’t the Wii game’s beauty, but the simple reality that, at first, there seemed to be no reason to release it outside of Japan.

Katamari Damacy is one of those game franchises that just seems pretty much perfect. It’s highly addictive and incredibly fun, particularly considering the games are based on a simple gimmick of rolling a stick ball around and collecting things (like cows, cars, and maybe even cabbages).

What do you get if you combine the charm of Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy with the gimmicks of classic Pac-Man and Kirby, and also the recent Prey the Stars? Not a mess, as you might think; that does sound like quite a combination, doesn’t it?

At this week’s Game Developers Conference, a number of incredible new (and old) additions were announced for the Wii’s downloadable game services, but the one that really gets me going is this: arcade titles will be added to the Virtual Console lineup.

Nintendo DS devotees have long hoped for a Katamary Damacy game on the versatile handheld, and since every other company in the history of gaming has jumped on the trend of remaking games for the current handhelds, it’s long been a disappointment that the franchise has been absent from Nintendo’s juggernaut.

The Katamari Damacy games are beautiful, addictive… and kind of a pain in the butt. You’ve got to get all this stuff, and the King of All Cosmos is so specific, and then there are all the cousins.

Katamari Damacy is an undeniably awesome franchise, but it’s also a little on the weird side, so it’s not exactly surprising that Keita Takahashi’s next project is a little unusual. Noby Noby Boy puts the player into the shoes role of an unfortunately shaped something charged with eating and stretching your way through a minimalist world.