Ouendan 2 came out today. I had pre-ordered a copy at Pink Godzilla so I was checking their site every hour or so today. Once they posted that their shipment had come in, I promptly went and picked up my copy (as well as Rodney’s). I just spent the last hour and half playing through the first several songs on the “Lighthearted cheering” / easy setting.
So far the game hasn’t let me down one bit. It has everything cool from the original Ouendan and Elite Beat Agents.
As expected, the ability to skip song intros is there. But they went a little bit further and made it to where you can now skip the song ending as well. After you’ve gone through all the game play aspects of a song, the last several seconds are spent wrapping up the story and the ending of the song. I never really had the desire to skip this part before but once you’re doing the same song over and over to try and get a better score, skipping the nonessential parts is very nice.

The stats and records part has been improved too. It has all the stats features from EBA plus a few little extras. Not only is there a record of the top score you got on each song, but it also keeps track of the two next highest scores. It keeps track of whether or not you got a perfect too.

The overview map where you navigate around and choose people to help has changed too. It’s not quite the 3D globe that you had in EBA and it’s not the 2D map you had from the original Ouendan. It’s more a mixture of the two, a flat (non-globe) 3D map… with little trains and cars driving through the city!

There is also of course the addition of the blue team. But their introduction is part of the story so I won’t talk about it.

I am looking forward to wasting hours of my life playing this.

There have been a lot of screenshots posted lately for Ouendan 2. This one below made me especially happy.

As you can see, in the bottom right hand corner is the Japanese text スキップ. In Roman characters, that’s written sukippu, which is the Japanese phonetic spelling for the English word skip.
Woohoo!
I wasn’t all that worried that they wouldn’t add this in sequel since it was added to EBA, but the inability to skip the intros was really my only complaint with the original Ouendan.

So it’s been confirmed that there will definitely be an Ouendan 2. Sweet!
I don’t know if that means there will be an Elite Beat Agents 2 or not, but Ouendan 2 is a perfect start. I simply cannot wait until this comes out.
The company behind Ouendan and EBA, iNiS, had a panel at Game Developer’s Conference that’s going on this week. In addition to talking about Ouendan and EBA, there was the hint of a Wii game in the works. I have no idea what that would be like or how the controls would work but if its anywhere near as fun as their DS games then I can’t wait to see what it will be.

Source

Lately I have been playing the game Elite Beat Agents for the DS. I’ve never really played a rhythm game before and I honestly didn’t think I’d like it but I tried it at a friend’s house over xmas and I have been hooked ever since. I also went and picked up Ouendan at a local import store but I have been too glued to EBA to start it.
Anyway… buy it, play it.
One downside to EBA is that I have found myself humming and singing some of the songs in the game. For example, I just now caught myself singing:

♪ Living in a material world, And I am a material girl. ♪

I got my copy of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Justice for All in the mail today. I’m glad it was more on the side of 5 days rather than 10. I haven’t played it yet but it does have the language switcher at the beginning. In the package with the game, there was a coupon for 5 dollars off my next order at Play-Asia, a Play-Asia sticker, and for no apparent reason, a small pack of Magic Pop Crackling Candy. Yay!

So I finally finished Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. I had only played the first two cases up until recently, when I got sucked in and just played through the rest of the game. It’s pretty text heavy but still a lot of fun. There were several times I actually laughed out loud.

Unfortunately, this game is hard to come by in the US (in stores at least). If you can’t find a reasonably priced domestic copy online, then there is the option of importing it for cheap. Supposedly the Japanese version of the game has the English localization built in and you can switch the language at the beginning. The sequel to this game is supposed to have this option too. With that in mind I decided to go ahead and just import the sequel, which was released today. It’s being shipped via 5-10 day air mail but for a grand total of just $32.50 (game + shipping), waiting 5-10 days is a lot better than waiting until Q1 2007 for the domestic release in my opinion.