GAMES

For several years now, Japanese developers have realized that there are bigger markets outside Japan — namely, the U.S. and Europe. Isn’t that limiting?

In his new “Itagaki’s Thought” column, former Ninja Gaiden designer and currently Valhalla Game Studios developer Tomonobu Itagaki is looking at the bigger picture.

“I’m doubtful about the Japanese game industry’s stance these days,” he writes. “Many say things like, ‘How do we sell games to Americans?’, ‘What games sell well in Europe?’, and ‘How we should face the world as Japanese?’”

“However, to me, that just seems to be narrowing down one’s own market,” he continues. “I would like to ask, but what about Moscow? How about China? Mexico? Or even Sicily? Brazil?”

According to Itagaki, “I’ve always been of the belief that there’s no nationality to entertainment. You need to make a game for everyone on Earth, one that anyone can enjoy. I have lived for a long time thinking this way, and it’s only getting stronger.”

Bet those living outside the U.S. and Europe are happy to hear that at least one game developer understands that the audience for games is truly global.

Valhalla Studios also has interview with some of the studios’ programmers — all of which were programmers or lead programmers at Tecmo.

Valhalla Game Studios | Itagaki’s [Valhalla Thanks, Matt!] [Pic]

Tired of stodgy corporate games made by The Man and his minions? We’re playing the 31 best indie games for a change of pace —- and so we can judge them. Today, Heroes of Newerth.

In A Sentence
Inspired by the incredibly popular Defense of the Ancients Warcraft III fan mod, Heroes of Newerth is an online-only multiplayer action strategy game that has you controlling a hero to help defend your base and destroy your enemy’s.

State Of Completion
The PC game is currently in beta.

Thoughts
Like League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth is a stand-alone online-only take on Defense of the Ancients.

In the game, players control a hero among a team of player-controlled heroes, assisting little automated units as they try to take out the other team of heroes’ base. As you play a match you can use experience and gold to level up, add abilities and purchase items.

HON includes 60 heroes to choose from, each of which can take quite awhile to master, so it’s a game that you’re sure to enjoy for quite awhile, if you’re into the basic premise.

Answers We Demanded
Kotaku: What was the inspiration behind your game?

James Fielding, Lead Designer on Heroes of Newerth: Heroes of Newerth was inspired by DotA – All Stars. We’re huge DotA fans at S2, and saw its potential. We wanted to make a game that seized that potential and really launched that style of gameplay to new heights. That’s where the gameplay inspiration comes from, anyway. We have certainly taken the gameplay in new directions as well, with new mechanics, but our visuals are definitely worth mentioning here as well. The inspiration for our art comes from a variety of sources – we’re all a bit nerdy, so often when brain storming visuals for heroes we reference a ton of “nerdy” culture, quite often from our favorite books, TV shows, and movies.

Kotaku: Name your favorite book, movie, album and game.

Fielding: – Favorite book is probably a series of books – the Wheel of Time series. I’m still making my way through them actually, but really enjoying it.

- Favorite movie is probably The Shawshank Redemption, though that’s a hard one to answer for sure. I don’t really have any favorite album’s – I’m more of a “find the song I want and get it” kind of guy.

- My favorite game would probably be Dark Reign 2, an RTS by Pandemic Studios from 2000 – it’s the game that introduced me to the concept of competitive online play. I’d played games online for years before that, sure, but never really competitively.

Make sure to check out the rest of the Independent Games Festival finalists as we head toward the March awards show.

We cover mostly productivity-related iPhone apps around these parts, but if you’ve got a little one who could use some educational—or just distracting—games, MetaFilter founder, blogger, and dad Matt Haughey has rounded up 14 kid-tested, parent-approved iPhone games for kids.

It started out innocuously. We were waiting for a table at a restaurant, my daughter was about two years old and fidgeting. I checked the App Store on my iPhone for a kid genre, found a fake phone game, and let her go to town on it. It saved the day and bought us 20 min of quiet time. Since then I’ve downloaded a lot of games and educational apps for my daughter (who is now four and a half) and I’ve been meaning to write up the ones I think are worth a few bucks and have stood the test of time, and here they are.

They’re not all free (most are a couple of bucks), but they’ve saved the parents in the Haughey household from many a long wait with an impatient kid. If that sounds like something you might appreciate from time to time, head over to the post for his full run-down. Got a little experience of your own hunting down great, kid-friendly iPhone apps? Share your favorites in the comments.

We cover mostly productivity-related iPhone apps around these parts, but if you’ve got a little one who could use some educational—or just distracting—games, MetaFilter founder, blogger, and dad Matt Haughey has rounded up 14 kid-tested, parent-approved iPhone games for kids.

It started out innocuously. We were waiting for a table at a restaurant, my daughter was about two years old and fidgeting. I checked the App Store on my iPhone for a kid genre, found a fake phone game, and let her go to town on it. It saved the day and bought us 20 min of quiet time. Since then I’ve downloaded a lot of games and educational apps for my daughter (who is now four and a half) and I’ve been meaning to write up the ones I think are worth a few bucks and have stood the test of time, and here they are.

They’re not all free (most are a couple of bucks), but they’ve saved the parents in the Haughey household from many a long wait with an impatient kid. If that sounds like something you might appreciate from time to time, head over to the post for his full run-down. Got a little experience of your own hunting down great, kid-friendly iPhone apps? Share your favorites in the comments.

The last time we talked NES hardware with you, it was a tip on how to repair a broken pin connector and get your old system working again. These hacks will take your old-school system to another level all together.

Over at Raphnet.net the personal site of a Linux and electronics enthusiast, Raph has put together a guide to moding your NES in all sorts of ways. His collection of guides covers everything from the simple—replacing the red LED with a blue one—to the complex like building your own reporgrammable NES cartridge to load with game ROMs. Some of his more clever hacks involve enabling stereo sound and a remote reset button. Check out the site for additional details, diagrams, and photos.

Last summer, a giant 1/1 scale Gundam statue towered over Tokyo’s Odaiba. That statue will be erected this July in the city of Shizuoka. How will it affect the local economy?

The city of Shizuoka guestimates that the statue is able to draw 900,000 visitors and 40 billion yen over the course of 300 days. The statue will also create 9,600 jobs for things like security, maintenance and the like. The duration of the statue’s stay in Shizuoka has yet to be decided.

The Production Factory for Bandai’s Gundam plastic models are located in Shizuoka — hence the decision to bring the enormous Gundam there.

Originally, the statue went up in Tokyo’s Odaiba last July for the 35th Anniversary of Gundam and was taken done in September. The statue was visited by over 4 million people. What kind of impact did that make? Check for yourself.

????????????????????? : ?????? : ?????? : YOMIURI ONLINE?????? [Yomiuri Online via ANN] [Pic]

Men may be the more stereotyped hardcore gaming gender, but a study of Everquest II players published in the Journal of Communication says that women regularly out-MMO men—but that women aren’t as honest about the hours logged gaming.

Those findings back up a study from the University of Southern California published last year, which said that women played “more intensely” than their male counterparts. In hourly terms, according to Scientific American the women surveyed played EQII an “average of 29 hours a week, versus 25 for the males.”

Hardcore players more than doubled those numbers, with women still in the lead.

But The Journal of Communication says that women tended to lie about (or lowball) their EQII addictions. USC’s study said almost the same thing, and we’re starting to see a trend here—Everquest II player surveys simply cannot be trusted.

Gal Gamers Geekier Than Guys [Scientific American]

Why limit your Magic 8 Ball’s answers to things like “Yes”, “No”, “Maybe”, when you could hack it to say anything you wanted?

Photo by greeblie.

If you’ve never taken a Magic 8-Ball apart before, you might be surprised to see the inside is mostly hollow with a simple cylinder that holds the murky blue ink and the answer die. Every time you turn the Magic 8-Ball over the die tumbles and then floats to the surface, one of the faces of the die presenting you with an answer to your pressing questions—Will Susan make fun of my Hello Kitty collection?

Modifying the Magic 8-Ball is a simple hack. You’ll need to open the ball and remove the die from the cylinder, then it’s only a matter of lightly sanding the die with a fine-grit sandpaper to smooth it and adding in your own text with a fine tip permanent marker—if you were really industrious you could even get your hands on some old printing dies and stamp the text right into the plastic.

Check out the tutorial at the link below for tips and tricks on getting into the Magic 8-Ball and reassembling it. Have a technique for hacking an old toy or game? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

They may not be getting a starring role in Left 4 Dead 2 downloadable content as we’d hoped, but the self-proclaimed Greatest Southern Rock Supergroup of All Time is providing more musical back up than we were expecting.

The Midnight Riders—or their management, we presume, since the band has been missing in action since October—have released their holiday single “All I Want For Christmas (Is To Kick Your Ass)” online, giving Left 4 Dead 2/southern rock superfans a new Christmas anthem to break pool cues and beer bottles to.

The fiction, explaining how the Midnight Riders would even conceive of writing a Christmas tune, can be enjoyed at the band’s YouTube page.

All I Want For Christmas (Is To Kick Your Ass) [YouTube - thanks, Chad & Jeremy!]

Every so often, your uncoordinated hands get wrangled into a game of barroom darts. If you’d like a better chance at victory instead of apologies, a few Stanford students’ webapp can analyze your game and provide your personal best-chance target.

As Wired’s write-up explains, darts is a game where the difference between hitting a 20 or a 1 is very, very small, and always aiming at the bullseye isn’t a good long-term strategy. Facing down his own non-expert tossing skills, Ryan Tibshirani wrote an app that analyzes 50 of your throws and figures out where you should aim for your best chances at a high score.

The webapp requires Java to run, and doesn’t account specifically for specialty games like cricket—although, in most games, a high score is never a bad thing. If you’ve got your own strategies for faking it like a billiards room hero, tell us about it in the comments.