News: Kaitou Rousseau & other handheld tidbits

January 05, 2006, 06:07 PM

by chazumaru, via Namco & various -
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I think the goal here is to pretend you are a girl as you come out of the ladies' room. Namco has announced a new and intriguing DS title in this week's Famitsu. Kaitou Rousseau ("Rousseau the mysterious thief") will be a comical adventure game that presents itself as a classic digital comic, only you are required to interact with the scenes by drawing the hero's face accordingly to the situation. For instance, when chased by some museum guards, you will need to change the hero's face into a window frame so he fits into the background. Puzzling!

Nintendo's handheld is officially sold out in Japan after the craze of last december. Gpara has conducted an amusing investigation in Tokyo, looking for the last DS consoles avaiable in town. According to the always reliable Shinobi blog, the second Otona no DS Training game broke the system's record of sales on first week (edit: by selling almost ten times as much as the first game on its first week). The first DS Training and three other DS games totaled more than 100,000 sales for a record week total of about 1,400,000 DS titles sold. "Let's play money making game" indeed (remember Zelda?).

In other handheld news, Recap noted Nintendo's new Value Selection for Gameboy Advance. For once, the box design of a budget re-edition is not a complete train wreck of bad taste. Considering how cautious Nintendo has been not to kill the juicy GBA market in 2005 in spite of the success of the DS, the first choice of fifteen games for this selection is interesting. Besides Namco's classics, all the other games belong to the adventure/RPG/SRPG genre. With the recent release of Final Fantasy IV Advance and the upcoming re-editions of FFV and FFVI, as well as Shigesato Itoi's much awaited Mother 3, the GBA is apparently trying to appeal to the oldschool RPG fanbase. A great excuse to get yourself Magical Vacation and Mother 1+2 for cheap anyway.

The PSP is also in the headlines as the promotion of Gensousuikoden I&II will feature an iPod Nano & Gensousuikoden Eraberu Nanatsu no Monshou Set campaign. For about 35,000 yen, Suikoden fans can come home with a "Gensousuikoden" limited edition 4GB iPod Nano, complete with a specific case and headphones. Seven different versions will be produced. Each version uses the design of one of the seven runes identifying the successive main protagonists in the series. One might think the PSP users buying Gensou Suikoden I&II would already use the PSP to listen to their music, instead of buying a new MP3 player. Oh well... Finally Johnnyram on GA-F discovered that the PSP versions of XI, Lemmings, IQ and Bomberman will all come out on march 9 for 3,990 yen each.