Sword & Sworcery is a great iOS game for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is its amazing soundtrack. Jim Guthrie, the creator Sword & Sworcery‘s soundtrack, is at again with a new album that was released on December 21. It’s called Children of the Clone and you can get from iTunes or more »

There’s news out of Japan today that could potentially be either good or bad for JRPG fans. It turns out Tecmo Koei now owns Gust Corporation. Prior to the acquisition, Gust was a private, independent and rather small developer and publisher of niche Japanese games. They always tended to be pretty, colorful and often quite cute. Now, who knows what will happen.

Gust is primarily known for two series. One is the Atelier series…

Attention potential PS Vita early adopters! Your game library just took a pretty big hit. As we all know, both of the Sony consoles available right now, the PS3 and PSP, have the ability to play Game Archive games. That’s what they’re referred to in Japan. Here, we like to think of them as PSOne Classics or TurboGrafx-16 ports. So you can hop on the PlayStation Store, pay between $6 and $10, and download some of your favorite golden oldies. That may not happen with the Vita.

Sony has a Japanese Vita FAQs website online now that addresses important questions…

The final piece of the puzzle is now in North America, thanks to Atlus. For the first time, Persona 2: Innocent Sin is being released in English. Which means people with the right platforms can experience the entire Persona experience, from Shin Megami Tensei: Persona to Persona 4, in all its glory and see just how the series has grown from its roots. This fact alone will make it easier for JRPG fans to overlook some of the less desirable aspects of this classic game…

NIS America has just released Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland in North America and, while it has been six years since the first Atelier adventure was released outside of Japan, the series still is a mystery and unknown force to many gamers. If you haven’t seen it yet, you’re missing out on a rather unique JRPG and life sim experience. The Atelier line of games focus on creation, rather than destruction, and typically revolve around day to day life and activities instead of some grand, save the world scheme. They’re also quite accessible, so if you find yourself interested after learning more about this line after reading, you’ll have no problem leaping in to Atelier Totori, Atelier Rorona or Atelier Annie…

With Tales of Xillia being released on September 8, 2011 in Japan, it seems only appropriate this week to look back at the Tales series. It’s a fantastic group of RPGs from Namco Bandai that, for some reason, never seemed to get the respect and attention it deserved outside of Japan. However, with Tales of Vesperia‘s success and the forthcoming North American release of Tales of Graces and rerelease of Tales of the Abyss, that could change…

Sony is not going to be happy today. See, somebody’s just figured out a way to crack open its latest baby, the Xperia Play. The Xperia Play is a smartphone with the ability to play original PlayStation games on it, and until now people had to make do with the PSOne games Sony was releasing via the PlayStation Suite. I say until now, because an Android developer named Yifan Lu found a way to get the phone’s included emulator to recognize game files not acquired through Sony.

What makes Yifan Lu’s work special is that it’s actually based entirely on the PlayStation emulator Sony has built into the Xperia Play…

With a tagline like “High tension comical action game,” you know Rapid Angel is going to be something special. It was originally a Japanese-exclusive PS1 game, but Monkeypaw Games has picked it up so anyone in North America with a PS3 or PSP can experience the adventure. It’s an original, anime-inspired game with five unique storylines, five characters that each play differently and multiple endings. The game does have a few quirks, with some opponents easily catching characters off-guard or some awkward attacks, but for the most part it’s a bright and original adventure.

Rapid Angel stars Natsumi, Ayane and Haruna. They’re couriers who work for a company called, you guessed it, Rapid Angel….

Yakiniku Bugyou is a Japanese grilling game affiliated with the Gyu-Kaku chain of restaurants that originally came out on the PlayStation back in May, 2001. With a description like that, it’s pretty easy to see why it never originally received a North American release. Thankfully Monkeypaw Games, known for giving PS3 and PSP owners access to PSOne imports, saw its charm and decided to release it on the PlayStation Store. While this is a niche Japanese game, it’s also completely playable and enjoyable even if you have no idea what the game is trying to tell you…

We’re now in the generation of hard drives, SD cards and even the occasional memory stick when it comes to backing up game saves. It almost makes it hard to believe that a few years ago the standard method was memory cards, plastic blocks gamers would shove into consoles or controllers so they could save their game progress. At the time, memory cards were the thing. They offered a sense of freedom gamers hadn’t had before, allowing them to take their game progress on the go with them, not bound by on-cartridge memory or those loathed passwords.

Some companies decided that maybe they should take memory cards a step further. Not only have these devices hold onto our valuable game data, but allow them to be game playing devices as well. The results were Sony’s PocketStation for the PlayStation and Sega’s Visual Memory Unit for the Dreamcast. Sony’s PocketStation crashed and burned, while the VMU could be helpful, but never really reached the iconic status Sega hoped for. This week, let’s learn a little more about both of them…