Famitsu has announced its data for estimated physical software sales from September 9th, 2024 to September 15th, 2024 for Japan, revealing that G-Mode's Hokkaido Serial Murder Case: The Okhotsk Disappearance ~Memories in Ice, Tearful Figurine~ for Nintendo Switch has managed to nab the top spot for the week.

The remake of Yuji Horii's 1984 Famicom ADV classic was released worldwide earlier this month across Nintendo Switch & Steam and has since gone on to sell 20,919 retail copies, according to Famitsu's estimations. This puts it ahead of popular titles like Astro Bot (in second place), Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (in third), and Nintendo Switch Sports (in fourth).

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Update : The whole of Professor Layton and the Mansion of the Deathly Mirror has been preserved, after all six chapters of the game were found on an F906i phone which has survived a house fire.

"In an amazing turn of events, @YuviApp has preserved the ENTIRETY of Professor Layton and the Mansion of the Deathly Mirror," says @rockmancosmo. "All six chapters were found on a junk F906i. Previously, we only had the first three chapters. An English translation will happen in due time!"

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Street Fighter II is a fantastic video game, but even the most ardent fan would be hard-pressed to argue that it offers a balanced view on cultural stereotypes – but hey! – it was made in the '90s, and having an Indian yogi with shrunken skulls around his neck was almost acceptable back then.

Joking aside, Rachael Hutchinson – author of Japanese Culture Through Video Games – feels that it perhaps goes a little deeper than that, especially in regards to the iconic rivalry / friendship of Ryu and Ken, arguably the two 'main' characters in the game.

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Formed in 2022 as a joint venture between North American publisher Limited Run Games and Japanese localisation company 8-4, Ltd, Superdeluxe Games is a name that will likely be more familiar with gamers in the Land of the Rising Sun than in the West.

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Update #3 : Edia's 'Tenshi No Uta Collection' was released yesterday on the Nintendo Switch eShop in Japan, as planned.

As stated below, this new compilation release is the latest in the company's ongoing Telenet Revive series and contains the first two Tenshi no Uta games — Tenshi no Uta and Tenshi no Uta II: Choice of the Fallen Angel. It was crowdfunded earlier this year on the Japanese website Makuake, where it raised 11,979,600 yen, and is now available to purchase for 5,280 yen from the Japanese eShop.

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Cosmo Machia has announced via a new trailer that the expanded version of the arcade shoot 'em up TriggerHeart Exelica, Triggerheart Exelica Enhanced, will be coming to Switch in Japan in early 2025 (thanks Gematsu for the spot!).

Cosmo Machia previously reissued the original 2006 arcade game on Nintendo Switch in Japan back in December 2023, before releasing it on PC and in other parts of the world earlier this year.

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The National Museum of Nature and Science in Japan has announced that the PS2 will be among the 18 new additions selected to be part of its 'Future Technology Registry' (thanks VGC for the spot!).

This makes it the first console to appear on the list of devices that have been chosen since the initiative first began back in 2008.

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Tozai Games has announced that Irem Collection Volume 2 will be released in Japan for PS4, PS5, and Nintendo Switch on November 28th (as reported by 4Gamer).

The collection, which includes GunForce, GunForce II, and Air Dual, will be available to purchase digitally for 3,520, with standard and deluxe physical versions available for PS5 and Nintendo Switch for ¥4,400 and ¥9350. As of writing, ININ Games and Strictly Limited Games — the title's western distributors — have yet to release their own updates on the status of their releases. We've reached out to them both for comment and will amend the article if we hear back.

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To celebrate Bub and Bob's 38th birthday yesterday, Taito released Final Bubble Bobble on the Nintendo Switch eShop in Japan — an expanded Master System port of the original arcade game (thanks Gosokkyu for the spot!).

Final Bubble Bobble was originally released back in 1988 in Japan for the Sega Mark III — two years after the original — and arrived in Europe three years later in 1991 for the Sega Master System. It saw the introduction of various improvements to the original game, such as the addition of more secret rooms, items, endings, and bosses.

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Update : Following the earlier news that a new trademark had been registered for the series, Japanese studio Genki has revealed that a fresh instalment in the Tokyo Xtreme Racer series is now in development for PC.

There's not much to go on so far, outside of some attractive renders of cityscape roads and a short YouTube teaser.

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Update #2 : The Cho Aniki Collection will launch this December, in Japan, according to the official Twitter account for the game.

As we've mentioned before, the game was subject to a crowdfunding campaign on the Japanese website Makuake to help bring the project to life. This campaign included a bunch of tiers offering digital codes for the Nintendo Switch, as well as the option to pick up various other pieces of Cho Aniki merchandise like acrylic stands, bath towels, t-shirts, and CDs.

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Alfa System's 2005 arcade bullet hell Castle of Shikigami III could be coming to Steam later this year, thanks to a new crowdfunding campaign that launched at the end of last month in Japan on the website Camp-fire.jp.

Castle of Shikigami III originally debuted in the arcades back in the mid-2000s and was later ported to PC, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii, with the Wii release coming to North America via Aksys Games in 2008.

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Update : Dempa Micomsoft has announced more details on the upcoming miniaturized reproduction of the PC-8801 mkII SR, which was revealed earlier this year in May at the ALL ABOUT Microcomputer BASIC Magazine III event.

The information comes courtesy of the Japanese publication Game Watch and includes some basic specs, a price, and a rough release window.

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Nintendo hasn't had to deal with all that many bruising setbacks during its time in the world of video games, but the Virtual Boy has to rank as one of the most dramatic.

Designed by Gunpei Yokoi, the man behind the legendary Game Boy and Game & Watch, the Virtual Boy seemed like a sure thing on paper. Riding high off the success of its previous hardware, there were lofty hopes for the table-mounted 32-bit system – yet it reportedly only sold 770,000 units worldwide (despite Nintendo of America boldly projecting sales of 1.5 million) and was quickly discontinued.

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The Japanese manufacturer PLUM is releasing a new model of Type01 Soryu mech from the Data East game Wolf Fang Kuuga 2001 in Japan, and pre-orders are available online now (thanks @gosokkyu for the spot!).

Wolf Fang Kuuga 2001 (otherwise known as Rohga: Armor Force) is a game that originally debuted in arcades back in 1991 and forms a loose trilogy with 1989's Kuuga – Operation Code Vapor Trail (also known as Vapor Trail: Hyper Offence Formation) and the 1996 title Skull Fang.

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Game preservation faces a lot of unique challenges, but one of its major obstacles is opposition from organizations who don't believe the public should have access to remote libraries of games.

Earlier this year, for instance, the ESA's lawyer Steve Englund was quizzed on the topic of game preservation in a hearing on the subject and said that there's " combination of limitations would support to provide remote access", before going onto state that physical buildings housing collections of vintage games aren't the answer. And it seems this issue isn't just exclusive to the Western institutions.

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The popular Japanese games store Friends has announced it will be closing down at the end of August, as recently discovered by the Twitter user @Grandmaster2048.

Friends is one of many game stores that can be found in Akihabara and is primarily known for selling video game soundtracks, electronic toys, peripherals, consoles, and an assortment of games for retro platforms like the NES, SNES, PS1, and MSX. In the past, the store was previously spread across two floors in a building located above a local restaurant but had recently downsized to only occupying a single floor.

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Bandai Namco recently held a DJ event called Ridge Racer Night 2024 to celebrate the game's 30th anniversary, and it has confirmed that a multi-disc CD collection will be released.

Held at Shibuya WOMBLIVE on July 7th, Ridge Racer Night 2024 featured the talents of MEGA, AYA, sanodg, J99, Hiroshi Okubo, Mifumei and Sho Okada.

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Not so long ago, we reported on the fact that the Sega Saturn Mobile Suit Gundam Side Story: The Blue Destiny games were getting cool action figures, and now the spiritual sequel to those games is getting its own model kit.

Gundam Side Story 0079: Rise from the Ashes launched in 1999 on the Sega Dreamcast, and, like the Blue Destiny games, is played from a first-person perspective within the Mobile Suit's cockpit.

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On June 7th, Capcom announced via a trailer at Summer Games Fest that M. Bison would be one of the four characters included in the year 2 roster for Street Fighter 6.

But only recently, it has come to people's attention that his legendary Japanese voice actor Norio Wakamoto won't be returning this time around, potentially signalling the end of an era for the iconic character (h/t: EventHubs).

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We've done our best to try to keep you up to date with the latest news on the X68000 Z — ZUIKI's miniaturized version of the Sharp X68000 — but every so often something slips through the cracks.

Case in point, recently the company announced that it was adding a new crowdfunding feature to its website and that its first project would be a standalone reissue of the black monitor. This was an item that was initially only included in its 'complete pack', which retailed for ¥87,780.

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Namco's 1982 arcade hit Xevious is one of the most influential shmups of all time. Not only did it do a lot of new things with the genre – such as boss battles and including an actual storyline – it was also a huge commercial success for the company, spawning sequels, ports and related merchandise.

Such is Xevious' high status within Namco's pantheon of games that it was given the CGI movie treatment in 2002 to celebrate its 20th anniversary. Created by Groove Corporation, the 75-minute film was shown during a summer 2002 roadshow in Japan, and while a home media release was planned, it never happened. The movie hasn't been rebroadcast since then.

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A new offline meeting space called the Hakuba Virtual Off Center (HVOC) has recently opened in Nagano, Japan for fans of the Virtual On series, giving players a special place to meet up and play all of its original arcade entries (h/t: Game Watch/Forbes).

Virtual On — just in case you've never heard of it — is a cult-3D shooting and fighting game series starring giant mechas, which was originally developed by Sega AM3. It initially debuted in the arcades back in 1995 and later went on to spawn two more arcade games, a bunch of ports for home platforms, and a couple of console exclusives for PlayStation machines.

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Whenever I've talked to people about retro game hunting in Japan, the conversation has always turned to how much better everything was in decades gone by (before the scalpers moved in and raided all the best stuff and the retro boom caused everything else to skyrocket in price). So I didn't really know what to expect before visiting the country earlier this year.

I couldn't help but feel like I had missed the boat and was about to encounter rows and rows of empty shelves (and exorbitant price tags with far too many zeros to count). But, like many, I'd always dreamed of coming to Japan and part of that dream was checking out its amazing game stores. So, despite my reservations, I decided to embark on an epic game hunt across 3 cities (Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka) and 17 stores, to see what I could find. Below I've put together a complete list of all of the stores I ended up visiting on my trip, along with some thoughts on each. Hopefully, this will prove useful if you ever decide to go to Japan in the future, or will bring back some happy memories for those of you who have already been:

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Back in 1993, Sega released SegaSonic the Hedgehog in Japanese arcades. Controlled using a trackball, it is notable for featuring Mighty the Armadillo and Ray the Flying Squirrel, and was developed by Sega's AM3 arcade division.

It's also one of the only Sonic titles to not have been re-released in some form or another, which makes it a very rare find on the second-hand market – especially with all of its original paperwork and manuals.

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