Mastiff Sinks Teeth Into Technic Beat, Gungrave OD

Thanks to GamerFeed for its news story noting that publisher Mastiff has picked up the quirky Arika-developed Technic Beat rhythm title for American release. It's explained: "Players listen to music represented in the game by radiating concentric rings of sound. Picking up the beat, they dance into the middle of the rings and try to 'catch' the music", and a hands-on preview at IGN PS2 has screenshots and more info on the "wickedly weird" PlayStation 2 title. Mastiff, the tiny U.S. publisher also responsible for bringing cult PS2 SRPG La Pucelle Tactics to the States, are also publishing PS2 action title Gungrave OD in the U.S., according to IGN, who describe the sequel to the somewhat one-note Sega-published shooter as "an assault on the senses."

Comments

no disrespect to the Orientals but what I call...

[h0mer]

...'Play Jap.'

It's great that someone has finally figured out that bringing quirky and fun Japanese games over here is a wise idea. None of these games are going to sell a million units, hell, they probably won't sell 100,000 units but these games will sell.

I'm hoping that even with the cost of localizing text and other aspects of the game, Mastiff is still turning a profit. I've always been a big fan of importing games and I've been worried that the next generation of consoles will be much harder to hack and get imports up and running.

Wow! Looks Interesting

[blueZhift]

This looks really interesting. If it gets the marketing it deserves, it should have a good chance as the US market is slowly getting into games like this. It's a shame what happened to Rez, but since that time I think things have changed somewhat. At the very least, maybe people are finally getting bored with all of the sequels and movie licensed games.