As some of you may have heard, ownership of the rather important Japanese messageboard 2ch has been transferred from independent owner Hiroyuki Nishimura to a holding company called Packet Monster, but no further information was given. According to Zepy’s entry, Packet Monsters Inc Pte Ltd is actually located in Singapore. I decided personally verify if Packet Monster Inc Pte Ltd exists as a company at the location found using whois 2ch.net domain look up. I have posted the results over here.

It seems that the mystery is solved with a combination of the photos I took and sakakucomplex.com entry here (thanks to Narcissist in the Canned Dogs thread). It seems that Nishimura enlisted the help of a Singapore company called Rikvin (A company that specializes in Singapore-based offshore company formations) in setting Packet Monster Inc Pte Ltd which is merely a holding company. The photos simply serve to show that the building address itself does not lead to a physical location representing Packet Monster. Any legal implications are still up in the air for now, but at least it can be confirmed that, for the time being, the company is merely a shell, not an independent office.

Ragnarok Online 2

Emil Chronicle Online is being translated to English by (surprisingly) a singapore company, Infocomm Asia Holdings. The same company that’s bringing out Granado Espada in the region, which by the way has started operating in both singapore and the u.s.

Don’t hold your breath for Emil Chronicle Online in the west though (EConline for short). There are currently no dates for anything. A bit about the game system. The Marionette system is actually a system that allows your character to change form to power up. There is an assorted amount of forms you can change to including stuff like turning your MOE character in a fishman – literally.

You can view the information here about the game in English and the original Japanese version over here.

I spoke with Infocomm Asia regarding the publisher being Gravity, and not Gung Ho, and they said Gravity is liaising with them hence Gravity. I did my own research and found that Gravity is distributing the game for Gung Ho. Both companies are owned by Soft Bank.

While Eric-Jon and Tim wandered around the Tokyo Game Show pointing at D3′s Earth Defense Force 3 (also using spyglasses to induce exclamation marks over Hideo Kojima’s head at the Microsoft press conference!), myself and Brandon were also there on behalf of Gamasutra and Game Developer magazine (and GameSetWatch, even!), and we posted a wrap-up of our total TGS coverage on Gamasutra.

We’re a bit more developer-centric, but interesting things to IC-ers might include Inis’ Keiichi Yano talking about the state of the game biz in Japan from his perspective (“Nintendo made a really good comeback… you can’t buy their hardware, that hasn’t happened since the Famicom”), and the first interview in a while with Dylan Cuthbert of Q Games (Star Fox DS, Digidrive GBA), in which he talks about the ‘salaryman’ ethic from Japanese game developers.

Mr. Sheffield’s full interviews will be posted gradually over the next few weeks, but include chats “…with LocoRoco director Tsutomu Kuono, Q Entertainment game director Reo Yonaga, Sega veteran Toshihiro Nagoshi (Yakuza, Super Monkey Ball), Capcom and Clover Studio’s Atsushi Inaba (Okami, Viewtiful Joe), Bandai Namco development director Makoto Iwai and representatives for Ridge Racer 7 and Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire, and Sega’s Yojiro Ogawa (Sonic and the Secret Rings for Wii).” Plenty to look forward to!

Hello, Insert Credit fans! Brandon has been called away to a new life as the King of Siam, and in the meantime, I’m here to point out a new feature about Sega GameWorks we posted over at Gamasutra, talking about the company’s attempts to revitalize the U.S. arcades.

This actually includes neat stuff like bringing the card-heavy Sega Japan arcade hits Mushiking and Love & Berry over into GameWorks in due course, and also launching an American version of the All.net arcade network service (first game using it is, ahem, Extreme Hunting 2 – but still!) This all seems very IC-relevant, thus… this post!

[Also, wanted to point out that alt.gameblog GameSetWatch, which is where I spend most of _my_ time posting weirdo ephemera, has added a few columnists not unknown to IC fans, including Persona doing weird Pokemon cartoons, Jiji talking about retro remakes, and Dessgeega looking up 'freely downloadable video games' in their many guises. Now, time to wait for Brandon to send down his first royal decree. Bet it's about Matrimelee!]

While at E3 last week, errant IC co-founder Brandon covered the show for Gamasutra, and its sister weblog GameSetWatch (which I run nowadays) compiled a list of links to some of his best interviews, many of which are eminently interesting to IC readers – Q’s Tetsuya Mizuguchi, Gamevil President Kyu Lee, Hudson Entertainment’s John Lee, among others.

Also, my favorite event of the show (yes, even including Robin Williams’ relentless penis jokes while demonstrating Spore) – Space Ghost interviewing Peter Moore over at the GameTap booth. Any space-based talk show host who can make the Xbox VP dance for a dollar is worth a few minutes of my time, I’d wager.

In addition, over at GSW, there’s assorted other E3-related madness – I picked my favorite alt.games of the show, ‘Cinematech: Nocturnal Emissions’ producer Ryans weighed in with some other ‘key E3 titles’, and Kevin ‘Video-Fenky’ Gifford decided to check out the E3 1995 floorplans, just to compare and contrast – Sega had the biggest booth back then, oh my, whereas this year, giant Shadow the Hedgehog statues openly mocked us – how the mighty hath fallen. We now return you to your normal IC programming…

Note from brandon: I also interviewed Kazuma Kaneko of Shin Megami Tensei fame. Might want to checcccccck.