Every once in a while, it’s nice to look back at a developer or publisher to learn more about them and acknowledge the good they’ve done in bringing people worthwhile games to play. A major player in Japan is Marvelous Entertainment. Surprisingly, people may not realize that Marvelous may have even had a hand in more »

Title: Katawa Shoujo Price: Free System(s): Windows, Mac, Linux Release Date: January 4, 2012 Publisher (Developer): Four Leaf Studios (Four Leaf Studios) ESRB Rating: N/A, 18 and over since it does have adult content, sexual situations and smoking. Pros: Realistic storylines and depictions of relationships, detailed character art, doesn’t in any way make fun of more »

EA recently released its remake of NFL Blitz, a game that drained me of a college education’s worth of quarters in the ’90s.

Very likely due to restrictions placed on it by the National Football League, EA removed one of the most enjoyable parts of the game: late hits.

January’s a great month to sit at home and relax, enjoying the various presents you received back in December and staying in out of the cold. Granted, winter this year has been pretty mild, but the sentiment is still the same. It’s a month to kick back and start planning what you want to do more »

When people think of import games, they usually look to Asia. After all, Japan is the birthplace of many successful games and series and Korea is making quite a name for itself when it comes to free-to-play MMOs. However, Europe has a few surprises as well, and one of the import series its known for more »

The Phantasy Star series weren’t always MMO games, or even action RPGs with lite MMO elements. There was a time when it was akin to the Final Fantasy series and the name was brought up when referring to challenging and intriguing turn-based RPGs about heroes facing off against evil and insurmountable odds. So before we more »

We see Namco Bandai bringing us new Naruto PSP games all the time, but have yet to see a Bleach: Heat the Soul game appear overseas. Somehow, it doesn’t seem fair. Thankfully, the PSP is region-free and fighting games transcend language, which means its fairly easy for people to import and enjoy a game like Bleach: Heat the Soul 7. However, while it is a good fighting game that is visually impressive, represents the Bleach series well and is fun to play, it doesn’t make the same strides forward as previous Heat the Soul entries. The result is a game that, while good, is okay to pass over if you’ve already purchased or played Heat the Soul 5 or 6…

With visual novels suddenly starting to appear more often outside of Japan and Aksys’ latest risk undertaking the translation and localization of Fate/Extra, it seems like a good time to look at one of the best known and most popular visual novels out there, Type-Moon’s Fate/stay night. This first commercial already famous doujin creators of Tsukihime managed to be such a success, despite its original release as an adult bishojo game, that it ended up crossing over and becoming an all-ages hit, as well as inspiring a manga, anime, light novels and additional games….

So, Hatoful Boyfriend. Yeah. Way to go proving those Japanese gaming stereotypes right Japan!

Here, I’ll translate the title. That should be enough to give you an idea of the crack-tacular adventure you’re going to embark upon if you play this free, recently translated into English, dating sim. Hato means pigeon. Hatoful is a combination of “Hato” and “Beautiful”. So basically it’s Pigeon-Beautiful Boyfriend.

Did I just blow your mind? I knew I would…

Sometimes, import games and consoles aren’t the right gift. I mean, the language barrier could be too much to overcome. Plus, they’re usually twice as expensive as a game from North America. That doesn’t mean you have to settle for easy to find items though. There are tons of fun little gadgets and goodies from Japan that don’t need any translation to love! And, so you don’t have to sift through all of them, I did!

So here we go, with a pretty brief look at six different items that would work as gifts for the picky people on your list who won’t be satisfied with a gift that’s easy to find and from their own country!