Racketboy

For those of you who would like to start (and finish) your Dreamcast collection, check out this eBay auction. This user is auctioning off a complete set of US Dreamcast games — all of them are complete originals — no backups here. There is a link to a nice set of pictures also.

From GamePro.com:

Namco has announced that Toru Iwatani, maker of Pacman, will become a guest professor at Osaka University of Arts in the newly forming “Character Modeling” department.

The formation of the department is still pending for approval, but if accepted, Iwatani would start lectures on video games as early as April 2005. Currently a part of Namco’s Incubation Center (which focuses building on new ventures), Iwatani will join the department at the request of manga author Kazuo Koike, who is a professor in the department of literature at the university.

The Character Modeling department not only focuses on video game characters, but also manga and animation characters, and seeks to nurture and educate potential animators, game designers, CG designers, producers, and art directors. Students will not only learn about character creation, but also of marketing, publishing, and editing. Lab classes giving students a hands-on experience in creating games is also being planned for the start of the academic year in 2006.

This wouldn’t be the first university to have departments focusing on games–other universities in Japan including Tohoku University of Art and Design have game-related curriculums, with developers featured as guest speakers.

It is interesting to see how video games are creeping into more of our culture. It goes to show that video games are becoming a valid form of media, similar to music and movies. I could ramble on that subject for quite a while, but I’ll spare you — for now.

Technorati Tags:
videogames, games, pacman

Magic Box has some new screens of Bandai’s Riviera: Promised Land for GameBoy Advance, a fantasy RPG ported over from WonderSwan Color. The game features an Easy Trigger System, you can simply use the direction button to perform various actions, triggers are displayed on screen. I’m always excited to see some classic Japanese-style RPGs being released, especially to Gameboy Advance. This one seems to have some nice eye-candy as well.