Fuji Television with GREE [J] and Synphonie have announced that they will offer the GREE feature phone version of the popular TV show “Ryouri no Tetsujin (Iron Chef)” as a social game, “Iron Chef for GREE New Challengers.” [J]

Fuji Television with GREE and Synphonie are jointly planning the design for “Iron Chef for GREE New Challengers,” which will become the first feature phone offering of a social game by GREE.
The game will emulate the progress of the familiar chefs, Michiba Rokusaburo, Hiroyuki Sakai, and Chen Kenichi who appear on the program.  Users, in their own restaurants, stock up on ingredients, do food preparation, improve their cooking skills while serving customers, and acquire many types of cuisine to achieve the right to challenge as an Iron man.  The frequent showdowns on TV kitchen stadiums reappear in the game, where users naturally think up and prepare food to match the theme, are evaluated by judges for points, and can get rare items as prizes.  Also, with competitions between users and teaming up to make delicious cuisine, the communication factor characteristic of social games is included.

original article on VSMedia [J]

Tags: Japan, Social game by Chiho Komoriya
No Comments »

Colopl [J] is planning to implement the sports game watching “Pro Baseball! Colopl Series” [J] to link with their cell phone geo-location game "Koroni-na Seikatsu" (Colony Life).  This will be their first attempt to collaborate with professional sports.  The “Pro Baseball! Colopl Series” is for sales of special Colopl Card linked game tickets for 16 planned matches (September 2, 2011 - October 9) of pro baseball Central League regular season games at Meiji Jingu Baseball Stadium sponsored by Tokyo Yakult Swallows [J].

Users subscribe to special Colopl Card linked tickets, and by entering the serial number printed on the back of the card into “Colony Life,” acquire restricted items that can be used within the game.  The special Colopl card and items’ original design perfectly fit the pro baseball theme, and as planned, Colopl users can also enjoy watching baseball as a fan.

Below is Tokyo Yakult Swallows player Aoki Norichika’s [J] comment from the company press release:

“With this plan, of course we expect the regular comers, as well as guests who don’t often come to the baseball stadium to watch our games.  To make the best of this, we would be very happy to see many more people realize the enjoyment of coming to watch baseball at the stadium.”

Colony Life☆ PLUS Official Guidebook 2011 [J]

Original article on VSMedia [J]

Tags: Japan by Chiho Komoriya
No Comments »

Yumemi has announced that they are joining forces with Booyah, maker of the American location information social game “MyTown” which has over 4 million users.  From now on, “MyTown” will be developed in Japan.

“MyTown” is a Check-in type of location based service with strong game components.  It is
tied to such corporations as Disney, MTV, Travel Channel, H&M, Adidas, P&G etc. and is said to be the most successfully monetized location game in America.

Yumemi is not going to simply localize the American version of “MyTown,” they are going to develop an evolved version exclusively for Japan.  The service is planned to be opened up this Fall.

original article on VSMedia [J]

Tags: Japan, Social game by Chiho Komoriya
No Comments »

The world's biggest social game Cityville just launched in Japanese, available exclusively to the Facebook platform. This is the first time a localized version of a US Zynga game has been launched in Japan since their entry into the Japanese market. Zynga is currently rolling out their biggest IP around the world, with their recent partnership announcement with Tencent to launch the Chinese version on the game known in China as Zynga City. Zynga is pushing Cityville out around the world using a drop-down bar of different languages options (English, French, Spanish, Japanese), so users can all play the same base game. The potential for this is that people of different countries, cultures, and native languages can play together through Zynga games.

The game is launching just as Facebook Japan breaks the 4 milion user mark, fueled by months of steady growth (roughly 7% per month). While Facebook Japan is hestitant to flaunt their gaming catalogue as a selling point to Japanese users, it is important for them to have a vibrant entertainment ecosystem especially in a country that values mobile/social gaming so much. Their fear is experiencing "dummy growth" - that is, growth fueled by fanaticism over games that users end up creating empty or multiple accounts for the sole purpose of accessing games, which happened in other Asian countries like Taiwan a couple years back. Facebook Japan is on a delicate path trying to convince users to use Facebook for its social function , asking users to move away from anonymous pseudonyms and move towards publishing their real, juicy personal data. It is very interesting to note that the CPC & CPM for advertising has doubled within the past month for Facebook in Japan.

Tags: Japan by Dominic K. Gallello
2 Comments »

Gakufu Camera [J] (gakufu = music score) is an iPhone app released by music instrument vendor Kawai. The camera application lets you scan music score by camera, recognize musical notes in real-time, play the recognized notes.

("the world's first real-time music score recognition", as they claim. probably on smartphone I guess.)

The app can recognize not only printed score but handwritten ones.

Playing demo starts around 0:25 on the movie above. Personally, it is not what I imagined first when I saw the news. It seems almost impossible "to play" as you need to take correct timings, it gives you tones of the symbols but no length info. However, it may still good tool for people studying how to read scores.

The app costs 350 yen (US$5) at iTunes App Store, seems only in Japan at now.

via IT Media

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
No Comments »