Since I did not have time to post very much this week (lots of deadlines), I will instead post a summary of all that was interesting.

Japanese Second Life Competitor

ANN and others have been reporting on the announcement of a new Japanese virtual world, ‘meet-me’, which is now under development.

Included in the companies helping out with character design are anime studios Production I.G. and Studio Pierrot.

The setting for the game will be a virtual version of Tokyo. Expect to hear about an alpha version of the game late this year.

In releated news, Studio 4°C has announced it will be working on the design aspects of another virtual world called ‘Cyber Megacity: Tokyo’s 0th Ward’.

X-Japan Reunite

After being disbanded for 10 years, the surviving members of Japanese rock group X-Japan have said they will be reuniting to perform a new single and carry out a concert tour. The song will be a new vocal version of ‘Without You’, a tribute to Hide (the bands late guitarist). The first location for the tour will be Los Angeles.

Bleach Movie 2

It has been announced on the official Japanese Bleach movie website that a second Bleach movie will be released in Japanese cinemas this December.

Anime accounts for 26% of searches on Wikipedia

A testament to the popularity of anime outside of Japan, market research group Compete, Inc have released details on their blog which suggest that 26% of all searches on Wikipedia during the month of April were anime related!

There is some good news for all J-Rock fans (if this hasn’t already hit your radar): X-Japan’s founder Yoshiki, together with Van’s Warped Tour, has announced a massive J-Rock festival taking place next month (May 26th/27th)… in LA!

The venue will be the Wiltern Theatre, and the lineup includes: Alice nine, Vidoll, DuelJewel, Kagrra, Miyavi, DéspairsRay, Merry, girugamesh, and MUCC.

The official site for the concert festival is http://www.jrockrevolution.com/ , and you can also find lots of info on the festivals MySpace page.

Since I am living pretty close to LA atm, I might actually go along ^^.

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Shiken ga owarimashita! (exams are over)

I didn’t get much of a chance to post last week, due to the fact that it was filled with final exams, and so instead will post a big summary of all news deserving note.

Dragonball MMORPG

An official announcement has been made by Bandai Visual regarding a new MMORPG which will be themed around Akira Toriyama’s amazingly popular Dragonball series. The game, known as “Dragonball Online“, will be set several hundred years after the events of the original Dragonball arc and will feature both old and new characters. Expect to see the game sometime in 2008, and check out 4Gamer for more screenshots and information (if you speak Nihongo).

New Studio Ghibli Movies Announced

Studio Ghibili, the Japanese anime film studio who are responsible for films such as Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle, have just released details of two new projects:

The first, “Gake no ue no Ponyo“, is about a 5 year old boy known as Sousuke, and a goldfish princess called Ponyo who wishes to become a human. Suitably eccentric. A 2008 release for this movie is planned.

Ghibli also announced a joint venture with artist Naohisa Inoue; the film is titled “Iblard Time“, and is about an imaginary world, Iblard, conjured up by Inoue. The movie will be released straight to DVD/Blu Ray on July 4th.

Ghost Hound - A new Shirow Masamune/Production I.G. project

Production I.G. have announced a new anime series, “Ghost Hound“. The series will be written by Shirow Masamune, creator of Ghost in the Shell, and aired on Japanese TV channel Wowow this autumn. Ghost Hound’s official Japanese website can be found here.

L’arc~en~ciel Single: “Seventh Heven”

After almost two years since releasing their last single (Link), Japanese Rock group L’arc~en~ciel have announced a new single “Seventh Heaven“. The song should be hitting Japanese stores on May 30th. More details on the band’s official website.

Since its release, there have been an abundance of fan videos relating to the series ‘The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya’. In this article I am going to post about some of my favourites.

1) Murder Mystery Computer Game

The creator of this video has done a fantastic job at re-creating the feel of a visual novel style video game using bits of video from the ‘Remote Island Syndrome’ episodes. Throughout the video there are a series of text/selection dialog boxes and some very fitting music.

2) Suzumiya Haruhi no ASCII

Whoever created this video either had way too much free time or simply used a plug-in to their favourite video editor.. either way, it is still pretty cool. The content of this video is the entire ending video of the series with each frame converted to ASCII.

3) Suzumiya Haruhi - God knows

Not so much a fan video, rather a clip of one of the best bits of the series. In this video you can watch Haruhi and Yuki playing Hirano Aya’s song ‘God Knows’.

Which are your favourite videos?

Welcome, Welcome. If you are wondering what this site is all about, fear not, I shall reveal.

The Otaku Times is a new blog which aims to render for you the finest that geek culture has to offer. The word ‘Otaku’ is Japanese slang (Why Japanese slang? Because Japan pwnz0rz of course) which is used to refer to geeks, usually of the variety obsessed with Anime and/or Computers, our niches. ‘Times’ is used to demonstrate the fact that the site will be generating news related to important world issues (haha), as seen in for example ‘The New York Times’, ‘The Sunday Times‘, etc.

What you can expect to see:

Anime/Manga:

Everyone loves space bounty hunters, high school girls who are actually aliens, and big mechas (if you don’t you should be ashamed of yourself). Here at The Otaku Times we will do our utmost to bring you up-to-date news regarding the latest goings-on in the anime/manga world, and from time-to-time we will post reviews of series we have recently finished watching.

Computers/Tech:

Computers and technology are becoming a greater part of our lives at a rapid rate, with this growth there are naturally lots of new and exciting developments going on all the time. The Otaku Times will attempt to chronicle the developments which we believe are particularly interesting, there should also appear at some point a number of tutorials related to programming in languages such as ‘Ruby’, ‘PHP’, ‘Java’, etc.

Misc Fun:

As mentioned previously, here at The Otaku Times we love everything Japanese (well, pretty much) so expect to see some of the following:

Battle Angels (Japanese Idol battles) - ‘Who is hotter, Mihiro, or Miyabi?’
JRock/JPop related postings
Japanese Lessons

Blog posts will also often include links to external media files, these might be accessible via a .torrent file or as direct downloads on sites such as RapidShare or MegaUpload.

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If you have any interesting ideas regarding the content/direction of the site please feel free to post a comment. Also, if you share our interests, have an excellent mastery of the English (Japanese?) language (with some examples at hand), and would like to help out with posts, then please email us at applications [at] otakutimes.com .