#it was on the sega and i’m not fluent in japanese so Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[o1ivegr1]

a little over 3 yrs now and i just played this game yesterday lol

EXCUSE ME WHO IS SHE WHY AM I JUST NOW FINDING OUT ABOUT HER??

[lostsummerdayz]

Will Jet Set Radio Ever Come To The PS4? It Already Has

The Better Question Would Be... When Will We Experience It?

by Nay Holland

If anyone knows me, they know that I am a Jet Set Radio fan to the core. It was one of the few games I wore to the ground on my Sega Dreamcast. It was the source of my first ever cosplay. My earlier fightstick art was based off of Gum from the original game. There hasn’t been a game that impacted my childhood much like this game had.

All one need to do is check Twitter to see the Rudies (fans of the series) tweet about wanting their games on modern consoles including their love for the games themselves. Especially on the PlayStation 4. (Check out the #JetSetSona tag if you hadn’t already!)

So it came as a surprise when I wound up reading a tweet from the official Japanese PlayStation account, with a link to a blog post and Jet Set Radio front and center.

Now, I’m not going to pretend my Japanese is fluent. It really isn’t. I had to use the help of Google Translate to take the wheel for me.

From what I could gather, the post showcased several Sega classics that are currently on PlayStation streaming service, PS Now. These titles include Crazy Taxi, Virtua Fighter 2, and of course, Jet Set Radio.

You can read the blog post here.

What I found most interesting is that Jet Set Radio is actually on PS Now. The caveat is that it’s only on the Japanese PS Now at the time of this writing.

So what gives? Why is a timeless classic, that is arguably more popular among the Western audience than the Japanese, currently Japan-exclusive on the Sony console?

This is especially puzzling as the game has been made backwards compatible on the Xbox One since 2016. Being that you can still purchase the game for PlayStation 3, I don’t believe it’s much in the way of a licensing issue as well. Perhaps there’s a slated release for the Western PS Now users in the future? Only time will tell.

How did such a niche series attain a devoted fanbase? How did it ever get to this point? In order to answer these questions, we have to look back a bit.

In the turn of the millennium in the year 2000, Sega blessed the world with a culture bomb. Combining the beats and aesthetic of Hip Hop culture with a modern rebellious “stick-it-to-the-man” attitude, Jet Set Radio was a game that was light years ahead of its time.

Praised for the music and art direction, the game never had a chance to kick off as it was a victim of its own success. For those who had played it, it was herald as a masterpiece. However, majority wouldn’t have the chance to experience this moving work of art for themselves as the discontinuation of the Sega Dreamcast loomed. Smilebit, the developers of Jet Set Radio, found their new home on the Xbox.

In 2003, they released a reboot of the original game titled Jet Set Radio Future, which was an entirely new game from the ground up. It still had the blend of Hip Hop culture and art, yet it was set in a dystopian, totalitarian-esque future instead of the modern era of the previous game.

This shift of attitude and gameplay won a set of fans that would stick around to this day. The original fans of Jet Set Radio wouldn’t see their beloved game return until 2012, twelve years after its original release.

This HD remaster version of the original game, released on Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, and Steam, featured updated graphics to fit the expected HD quality of games at the time. The rest of the gameplay at its core was kept the same, welcoming old fans of an oft long forgotten game and ushering in new curious ones. With the release of the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4, however, this version was rendered obsolete.

At least, until it became backwards compatible on the Xbox One in 2016 as mentioned earlier.

While there are many options for the original Jet Set Radio, the Jet Set Radio Future release continues to be lost in the wind. As of this time of writing, the game is yet to be backwards compatible with Xbox One.

The Xbox 360 compatibility is notoriously bad in some sections of the game, specifically on 99th Street. This means that the best way to experience Future remains on the original Xbox.

There are, of course, other ways to experience the game, with Xbox emulation on the come-up in the past several years. But the fans want to support the series. Again, just take an afternoon to look through Twitter. Fan support is quite massive even in this current year.

Sega themselves haven’t been ignorant. They have included several characters of the series in various Sega titles as well as include cameos in the style of costumes for games like Sonic Forces. Occasionally you’ll see a tweet or two from the official Sega page referencing the series.

With this recent tweet and post from Sony themselves, however, they understand the concept of love game’s resounding popularity. When you have official companies stoking the flames of the community by acknowledging that they exist, it’s difficult not to have hope for the future.

Maybe one day we will see Jet Set Radio on the American PS Now. Perhaps we will somehow see Future on any modern console. Again, only time will tell.

[attract-mode-collective]

In The Garden Of Candy Cabs

toco toco, a series highlighting Japanese creatives that I’ve been extolling the virtues of since close to its debut has just hit a fairly momentous milestone: episode 50! Which also happens to showcase one of Attract Mode’s inspirations, that being Edit Mode. So of course I think everyone should see the video above (tho be sure to have closed captions on, btw, unless you’re fluent with Japanese).

Now might be another good time to shameless flaunt this Edit Mode tee I own; I’m probably maybe one of two or three (at most) to own one outside of Japan. Some might recall seeing this in a rundown of Game Culture Snapshots many moons ago…

On that note, and I know I keep saying this, but… am gonna pass along a new batch, hopefully soon. Until then, may I suggest Minus World’s take on game focused photography? Here we have some choice selections (some of which I was going to spotlight myself, but have been beaten to the punch, I must admit), like this Pac-Man rickshaw. It’s actually something that was originally posted by miki800.com, which I guess goes to prove that there’s quite a few of us that love both video games and Instagram…

Via the aforementioned survey is how I came to discover the bootleg! store, which deals in all kinds of rare or just plain odd video game or music related items (often a combination of both). Here we have an individual prepping for the release party for (what I believe to be is) the inaugural release by Heavy Metal Raiden, which is a band that does rock infused covers of tracks from the shmup Raiden…

Here’s what Heavy Metal Raiden sounds like, btw.

Moving on, bootleg! store’s Twitter reveals even more curios, like old game soundtracks on audio cassettes, which I’ve never actually seen believe it or not, despite by heavy interest in that world (I just always thought they came out on records and CD)…

And via Oliver’s most recent survey, I came to learn about the work of Emil Ohlund, which is on display at excube…

The custom Super Famicom cart that Oliver digs is nice and all, tho I prefer the image that’s used to promotion the exhibit…

Though here’s another look at that cart…

If you look around excube’s Twitter, you’ll find all sorts of neat things, including some killer threads…

So, which music video do you prefer; this one featuring a pixelated girl (via prostheticknowledge)…

Or this one featuring the polygonal boys of Persona 3-5 (via @xpatriciah)…

Speaking of, am really enjoying the current craze of adding the sexy af battle interface onto anything and everything (via maxalaatikko)…

On a semi-related note, thanks to @supcat for alerting me of the existence of this most wonderful of nonexistent video games…

And a huge thanks to @focra for the getting me the one birthday present (I’m 40 as of tomorrow, holy sh*t indeed; there’s also a bunch of things I could use, but for the purposes of this gag, please play along), which is this memory card that the Tiny Cart Twitter dug up…

On another kind of related note, here we have cf-12’s Virtua Stick, which has been personalized is a similar fashion…

Some additional pics of his set-up…

I’m always interested in seeing how folks play games at home, especially when you have stuff intended for outside the home (as previously noted). A few other examples, courtesy of decideweapons…

Here’s the story behind that previous pic…

“That one time I had an Aero table for a couple months. This photo was taken after i dropped it off at my buddy Andrew’s house before moving to California. These things are a bit overrated imo and actually quiet unplayable compared to traditional candy cabinets. But they are the rare so collectors go nuts for them!”

I came across decideweapons courtesy of sixteen-bit, which is where I also encountered the following as well….

I have no idea that the story is behind the candy cabs in the rose garden. Sorry.

Remember my mention of pixel8or last week? Well, here’s something that’s even more Rez-like than before…

Get a load of this; there were once plans for a Time Gal sequel, but instead of being FMV, it resembled Street Fighter?

Sticking with Video Game Densetsu for just a bit; an old PSone game that’s gotten renewed interest, mostly due to a live action adaption of the source material that bombed spectacularly, is Ghost In The Shell. And here’s a bunch of illustrations for the game (many of which I hadn’t seen before, and a few are slightly NSFW, FYI/BTW), not from GitS creator Masamune Shirow, but Toshihiro Kawamoto, who was one of the chief architects behind Cowboy Bebop…

And here’s an illustration from one of Shirow’s contemporaries, for the autumn of 1997 edition of the Tokyo Game Show, by Katsuhiro Otomo…

Something else that’s kinda/sorta related is Akira X Dragon Quest (via spaceleech)…

beautyofabandonedplaces recently posted the following image, which is the remains of an abandoned television game show set Canada…

… It prompted the following observation from lunaticobscurity…

“a fighting game stage waiting to happen”

… And that led vice-s-assistant to post a gif that demonstrates how IT ALREADY HAPPENED!!!

Yet another example of real life, or in this case an app, resembling a game, or vice versa (via beat-ignition)…

Now more than ever, I do my best to avoid politics around these parts, yet I can’t help but share this awesome clip by of Alex Jones on the Sega CD, which I originally saw via @HappyHarryToons, though the following is VMU Dream’s copy

Another clip from Twitter that I had to upload onto YouTube myself (in case anyone was wondering, I did ask the creator if a link was handy, but I’m also the impatient type; if there are any objections, I will not hesitate to take my copy down) is of the Konami logo in its entirety, which is actually quite rare, by @goodvideozone…

Which souped up Game Boy do you prefer? huzzahdave’s…

Or bootersbordello’s…

May as well re-post another oldie but goodie, though unlike last week, am going to keep my mouth shut (not that there’s much to say to start with)…

And finally, one last video, this one starring fellow Attract Mode Collective member Derek Yu plus company, in a documentary that’s for all the Spelunky diehards out there!

Don’t forget: Attract Mode is now on Medium! There you can subscribe to keep up to date, as well as enjoy some “best of” content you might have missed the first time around, plus be spared of the technical issues that’s starting to overtake Tumblr.