The Asian Power Hour

Here's an interesting new game coming out for the DS in Japan which does something with the microphone besides having players blow into it. Dragon Tamer: Sound Spirit is basically your standard Pokemon monster battling game, but in order to get new dragons, you record sounds from different instruments and sources with the DS mic.

Well...this makes me extremely happy. I waltzed by Arcade Infinity in Diamondbar the other night hoping that their Guitar Freaks V2 machine would actually be working, and lo and behold, V3, the newest installment of Konami's long running Guitar Freaks series is finally in the US! I marveled to some of the fantastic new songs, including カルマ and 全力少年, and got to play session round with some dude named Axel, no kidding, his first, legit birthname was Axel. Now that's cool.

Something interesting I noticed that was removed when Arcade Infinity imported V3 was that they removed ALL the networking capabilites of the machine, including:

VS Net Battle Session
Custom ID Card (via Konami eAmuse Pass)
Single and All Machine Rankings
Custom QRCode webpage creation

This was probably done in order to not have their asses sued, this is a pretty big possibility as whenever someone plays a game, a giant screen in English says:

FOR SALE AND USE ONLY IN JAPAN
IF YOU IMPORT THESE AND USE IT
IN THE US SO THAT PEOPLE OUTSIDE
JAPAN CAN ENJOY THIS GAME, WE
WILL SEND STEVE OVER
TO RAPE YOU.

Well, maybe not exactly that, but pretty close. See you at Arcade Infinity!

Official Guitar Freaks V3 Website, check out some of the music! Don't worry, it's kind of in English

This is bit of old news, but I couldn't help posting it when it was brought to my attention by one of my friends last night. This is a video of the song "Tempation of Sonata" by the Korean pop singer, Ivy. Watch it closely...does it remind you of anything? Perhaps Final Fantasy VII Advent Children by any chance? Hmmmmm? Yeah, my jaw was basically on the floor when I saw this.

Tempation of Sonata

I thought to myself....How the hell did she not get sued by the army of Squenix lawyers yet. And then I found out that a Korean judge ruled that this was copyright infringement and yanked the video off TV on April 6th. Good thing for us that the internet exists! Ivy is apparently a huge pop star in Korea, we're talking about the height of Britney Spears popularity, and of all the things she could rip off, it was Advent Children.

I guess this just goes to show the extent that gaming has pervaded Korean pop culture. Welcome to Korea, a country where pro Starcraft players are just as big celebrities as actors and people worship the ground Blizzard employees walk on. I've been told by a friend in Blizzard that all he has to do to get free drinks or get into clubs in Korea is to flash his badge...now that's creepy, and I asked him for a copy of his badge.

A side by side video comparision of Advent Children and Temptation of Sonata

All I can say is....

Freaking awesome. Watch the video now. And crank it.