leander

Konami

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Okay. I think I’m starting to figure Konami out.

  • KCET (Tokyo) seems to be the division where Nagoshi is; the “true” Castlevania games are developed here. This is also where Silent Hill apparently calls home. Contra, Suikoden, Gradius, Tokemeki Memorial, Dance Dance Revolution, to boot. KCET is host to Konami’s special soccer-devoted team, “Major A“.
  • KCEK (Kobe) developed the N64 Castlevania games and Circle of the Moon (aha! I was wondering why the character art looked so similar to the N64 games! And why the character once again wasn’t a Belmont, and nothing fit into the storyline properly — just as in the N64 games).
  • KCEO/Konami OSA (Osaka)… This is the original Konami office, founded in 1969. It seems mostly soccer games come out of here now, but I’m assuming this is where most Konami games were developed until the mid-90s sometime. This appears to be the group currently responsible for the Track & Field and Blades of Steel series.
  • KCKJ/Konami JPN (Tokyo again) is split into two teams, across two separate offices in Toyko: KCEJ East and KCEJ West. East is behind Reiselied and 7 Blades, plus a lot of dating sims. West is where Hideo Kojima is holed up, and thereby the home of Metal Gear and ZOE.
  • KCEN (Nagoya) — A few licensed games for the Gameboy Color and golf games for the GBA, plus a version of Vandal Hearts for the Saturn. KCEN are also behind Castlevania Legends for the original Gameboy, and they apparently did the Saturn port of Nocturne in the Moonlight. That seems like about it, though. Fishing and horse racing games seem to be their real specialties.
  • KCES (Shinjuku) — They seem to do even less than the Nagoya branch. Can’t find much information on them.
  • Konami STUDIO was formed in August of 2000, out of two former divisions: KCE Sapporo and KCE Yokohama. I don’t know what either originally did.
  • KCEH/Konami Hawaii (Honolulu) appear to behind all of the ESPN-licensed sports games that Konami used to put out before Sega snatched up the license. Also, they seem to be behind all of Konami’s domestic PC releases — such as the Castlevania/Contra pack from a couple of weeks ago — and a couple games for the GBA such as the new version of Motorcross Maniacs and a pretty highly-rated “classic Konami” pack containing Yie Ar Kung Fu, Rush ‘N Attack, Gyruss, and so on.

Konami also has a Shanghai-based division, who seems not to do much.

KCEK, KCET, and KCEJ seem to be the three most important divisions. KCET and KCEJ officially like to be called Konami TYO and Konami JPN now, for whatever reason — but I think their original names are less confusing.

There’s a long investigation of the Castlevania series which I dumped onto Lan and Shepard around a month ago. I might dig for that in a bit.

ODCM, RIP

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Okay. When ODCM folded, the subscription was supposed to switch to NextGen. Instead, Lan got PSM. And it seems I get… Gamepro.

Nice. Gamepro says that GunValkyrie is “based on the popular anime of the same name”.

Oh, neat. and they print salient, up-to-the-minute secret “codes” here, too. For instance, if you stick your Sonic Adventure (1) disc in a CD-Rom, you get hidden artwork. Cool, huh?

Of course they don’t actually give the developers for Sega’s games — just “Sega Corporation”. Hum.

And I don’t think I’ve seen a review in this issue so far which has understood the point of the game in question.

Shadow of a Dream

  • Reading time:1 mins read

SA2 is getting much better now. A bunch of sources had reported that the game seemed sort of disappointing at the outset but that it improved dramatically somewhere in the middle or toward the end. This is more or less accurate.

When I first put in the game, I was basically turned off by its progression, structure, difficulty, and by the evil camera. Now that Lan and I have hacked our way pretty deeply into the story mode, it’s become very fascinating; the plot is now interesting, and somewhat more coherent, the level design is impressive, the bosses are neat, and things in general seem to at last be coming together.

I think I can confidently say that I like this game now — though it’s still got a terrible camera in places, and some of the early level design especially is discouraging. One has to make an effort to figure out how good the game is, and I can see how a lot of people would not do this.

I still have to do research on that magazine thing…