Introducing Ketai Sousakan 7 (Mobile Phone Investigator Seven), a Japanese TV show where an anti-social high school freshman and his friend, a talking and walking mobile phone named Seven fight cyber crime. Strangely enough this TV show is getting a Nintendo DS adventure game where Keita, the human character, and Seven chat and [...]

Since Uraken first began DJ’ing, his electronic music has been described as powerful and uplifting. In addition to appearing at live performances, beginning in 1996 he organized a monthly event called “Hardcore Kitchen.” The first of its kind in Japan, it introduced Tokyo to the UK Hardcore scene. The musician has since [...]

When looking at the magnitude of music composed by Yuzo Koshiro for the Etrian Odyssey series of role-playing games, its breadth amounts to a small kingdom of sounds. The original soundtracks for the first two titles make up five discs. In addition, a drama CD, two Super Arrange records, a piano collection and [...]

In May of this year, the Tokyo-based band The Outer Rim published their self-titled debut album. Composed primarily by bassist Jeff Curry, the musician imagined the spoken drama that bookends the music tracks, which are performed by professional videogame voice actors, as a dark and brooding outer space tale reminiscent of James Cameron’s [...]

There were so many renditions of classic game tunes performed at this evening’s EXTRA Hyper Game Music Event at Shin-Kiba’s Studio Coast that it was hard to keep track of them all. The yearly event organized by 5pb Records assembles game composers to perform their own songs and revive classics from yesteryear by way [...]

The “extra” in DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou Black Label Extra stands for X mode, created specifically for the Xbox 360. X Mode is designed for beginners and introduces Piper, a new elemental doll. This might not be a feature core shooters are going rave about, but I can see why 5bp added this in. [...]

5bp is getting into plunging into other genres of video games in a big way. Aside from their bread and butter dating sims, 5pb has some Cave shooters and Item Getter in development. This Nintendo DS game emphasizes alchemy and item creation by allowing players to draw sprites for their custom created items. Items [...]

Before hearing about the Xbox 360 ports of Ketsui and DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou Black Label, I wasn’t aware of 5pb. After looking at their list of adventure-style roots I’m pretty surprised they decided to tread into new territory with arcade shmup ports.
 
At least their first titles will be well equipped with a replay mode [...]