During a recent interview, Ichiro Hazama, producer and main mind behind Theatrhythm Final Fantasy, was asked by Nintendo president Satoru Iwata to sum up his game in a few words.

"Hmm, that's a difficult one," Hazama said. "I suppose I'd say it's basically a Final Fantasy music game."

Can't put it much better than that.

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy, which Square Enix releases today for 3DS, is indeed a Final Fantasy music game. To play, you tap along to the beat on the system's bottom touchscreen, doing your best to keep up with the frenetic pulse of horizontally-scrolling buttons. Some you hold; some you swipe; some you just tap. It's not unlike Guitar Hero, Dance Dance Revolution, or, for the more hardened gamers out there, Elite Beat Agents.

The big difference here is that the songs are all from Final Fantasy games, which means Theatrhythm will reach into the back of your mind and tickle the part that fondly dreams about traveling to the moon to kill Golbez or scouring the Planet for clues in a futile attempt to bring Aeris back to life. Theatrhythm's tagline is "Play Your Memories," and indeed, it makes no bones about wanting only to appeal to your old-school sensibilities. The intro screen tells you to "see the nostalgic worlds of Final Fantasy revived." This is a game that assumes you've played at least two or three installments in Square's seminal role-playing game series. If you haven't, Theatrhythm doesn't care about you.

And hey, if you've never so much as touched a Final Fantasy, you probably shouldn't care about this one either.

Theatrhythm is divided into three main sections. There's the Series mode, which lets you pick one of the first 13 (!) main Final Fantasy titles and play through a few of its tracks. There's the Challenge mode, which gives you access to tougher versions of each of these tracks, including a hair-raising Ultimate difficulty that came very close to giving me carpal tunnel. And there's the Chaos Shrine, the closest Theatrhythm comes to a dungeon, which hands you 99 levels of rhythmic battling and exploring through random series of tracks.

There are also three types of musical gameplay: Battle mode, which pits you against cartoony enemies as your four party members stand in a line, Final Fantasy-style, each waiting for his or her turn to attack. Field mode, in which you walk across the gurgling volcanos and disaster-ravaged plains from various Final Fantasy games, sliding your stylus up and down to the infectious beat.

And then there's Event mode, an attempt to make you feel even more wistful by setting Theatrhythm's tracks to background montages from old Final Fantasy games. And while some hardcore fans might appreciate the fact that these scenes are presented in Japanese, I did not. I'm not going to feel wistful for times past by reminiscing about those times in a different language.

Sadly, there's no real single-player campaign or storyline in the game, something that feels very apparent once you've played through the same song twenty or thirty times.

Note that not all of your favorite Final Fantasy tracks are in this game. Each title's selection is rather limited, and they range from the intensely memorable (Final Fantasy VII's "Aerith's Theme") to the thoroughly dull (Final Fantasy XII's "Giza Plains"). Some of my favorite songs are actually reserved for the menus, like a banging remix of Final Fantasy VII's "Highwind Takes to the Skies." Others will be available later as downloadable content.

What's really special about Theatrhythm, and what makes playing it really worthwhile, is that it challenges you to beat yourself rather than some arbitrary set of designer-instituted difficulties. When you fail, you know you failed because you couldn't master the timing. And to get better, you won't have to grind for levels or get better pixels: you'll have to practice over and over again until your timing is right. It's this type of challenge that kept me saying things like "just one more try" until suddenly it was 2am and my 3DS was out of batteries and I'd just played Theatrhythm for half of the night.

In many ways Theatrhythm feels like a mini-game collection, the type of accessory that might have been fully included as a sidequest one of Square's old Final Fantasy games. It's best played in short sessions, due to the lack of unifying campaign or story mode. But it's frenetic and addictive, designed as the perfect diversion for a certain type of person: the nostalgia-embracing, rhythm-loving Final Fantasy superfan.

P.S. If you're trying to ask for this game at a store, you should know that it's pronounced "THEATER-RHYTHM." I think.

Artist Drew Northcott brings us "Vincent Van Gordon", a Van Gogh inspired portrait of everyone's favorite headcrab killing physicist.

According to Northcott, there might be character similarity between Freeman and Van Gogh. He adds, "There's certainly a physical resemblance anyhow." That's certainly better than Freeman mailing his ear to a prostitute.

Vincent Van Gordon - half life [Deviant Art via GameFreaks]

D'wah. Now this is adowable. Baby Cloud Strife—hair, sword, and all. This photo was snapped by Jeriska at the recent Anime Expo 2012.

Check out more of Jeriaska's pics here as well as in the link below.

Cloud Strife - Anime Expo 2012 [Flickr]

Back in 2005 to combat the success of Koei's Dynasty Warriors series, Capcom released Sengoku BASARA on the PlayStation 2. Where Dynasty Warriors had always been focused on Chinese history, BASARA set out to do the same thing but with Japanese history. However, Koei had already done the same thing by releasing Samurai Warriors the year before. So Capcom made the story and characters as over the top as possible in hope of differentiating its game from Samurai Warriors. It worked. And now six games and a wildly popular anime later, Capcom has decided to go back and slap a coat of HD paint on the first three PS2 titles—Sengoku BASARA, Sengoku BASARA 2, and Sengoku BASARA 2 Heroes—for the Sengoku BASARA HD Collection.

This last weekend at the Capcom Summer Jam 2012, Kotaku East was able to get fifteen minutes with this samurai-filled collection—and the unfortunate news is, while it isn't terrible, it is a bit lackluster. Like most PS2 remaster titles seen this generation, nothing has changed gameplay-wise between the HD remaster and its original version; the changes are all visual.

At first glance, the HD looks very pretty: The frame rate is constant and the models are detailed and sharp. However, then you start to notice the problems that come from BASARA being a last-generation Dynasty Warriors clone. The draw distance is still terrible, with the scenery looking plain, dull, and muddy. The low amount of entities allowed on screen makes for a constant pop-in, pop-out of enemies mid-battle. Moreover, in the numerous in-game cutscenes, the characters' faces are completely static and have no lip movement nor change of expression. In the days of muddy PS2 SD, that might have been somewhat hidden; but in glorious HD, it stands out like a sore thumb.

So as far as HD remasters go, the Sengoku BASARA HD Collection is a competent one. The gameplay remains the same as always and the first three BASARA games have never looked better. Sadly though, as much as the HD coat of paint makes these games look their best, it serves to highlight the most dated aspects of the games as well.

The Sengoku BASARA HD Collection will be released in Japan on August 30, 2012 for the PlayStation 3. There is currently no word on an international release.

Next year, a new tokusatsu movie called Space Hero Fly is hitting theaters in Taiwan. You might remember this movie the first time, when it was called Kamen Rider. Which Kamen Rider? Take your pick.

Super Hero Fly is a cobbled together creation that rips off the designs of various Kamen Rider heroes, such as Kamen Rider OOO.

The similarities did not go unnoticed in Taiwan and Mainland China, where people were quick to point out, hey, this is a brazen Kamen Rider clone. In Taiwan, this even made TVBS news, which broke down the character design bit-by-bit, pointing out what had been swiped.

There are some differences, however, For example, in the upcoming Super Hero Fly flick, the hero not only battles monsters, but also lawsuits. Okay, I made that last part up.

台湾特撮『宇宙超人FLY』が、そのまんま仮面ライダーで完全にアウト [Hero Material]

China is getting its own COD—and not merely as the new foreign bad guys. Meet Call of Duty Online.

Other than the single player campaign, isn't all Call of Duty online? Well, yes. But in China, it's Call of Duty Online. Announced today, the game is published by Chinese gaming giant Tencent. Activision first mentioned the free-to-play, microtransaction-based game back in February 2011.

While consoles are banned in China, the microtransaction-based model on PC is widespread throughout Mainland China. The country's gray market also makes consoles and console games readily available.

Late last month, Activision snatched up a slew of Call of Duty related web addresses—17 in total. The websites are probably protecting the Call of Duty online presence in China from internet bad guys.

COD [Tencent Games]

This last weekend in Tokyo, Capcom put on a little event called Capcom Summer Jam. In it they showed off a large portion of their upcoming and recently released titles. Foremost among these was the first playable demo of Okami HD—which Kotaku East was on hand to play.

Originally released back in 2006, Okami was one of the PlayStation 2's swansongs which became famous for its combination of quality Zelda-like gameplay and astoundingly beautiful sumi-e art style. It even garnered a sequel in 2010 on the DS as well as an appearance by the main character, Amaterasu, in Marvel vs. Capcom 3. But ever since the announcement of the first HD collection re-release back in 2009, fans have been clamoring to see the PS2's most beautiful game redone in HD splendor. And after my time with Okami HD last weekend, I can assure you this HD treatment is really doing the game justice.

Unlike the PS2's other HD re-mastered games, the changes in Okami are not just visual. While the game plays exactly the same as it always did back on the PS2, PlayStation Move support is being added to this version—mirroring Okami's 2008 Wii port.

On the visual side, everything is markedly clearer. In most of the HD remasters, the old PS2 models seem a little blocky despite the HD textures covering them. But in Okami HD, this blockiness actually meshes with the ink brush art style, making the game look even more like something that was hand painted.

In my fifteen minutes with Okami HD, the visuals were smooth and clear, and the frame rate was constant. I did notice a bit of a blur/afterimage occasionally following fast movements. But that might have been the TV and not the game—or maybe it was just a camera filter programmed into the game. Regardless, the occasional blur, while present, didn't make the game even a little less beautiful.

In the end, the only thing to really say about Okami HD is that it's Okami... in HD. And from what I was able to see, Capcom is hard at work making this HD conversion look the absolute best it possibly can. Who could ask for more?

Okami HD will be released on November 1, 2012, in Japan on the PS3 with an international release scheduled for this winter.

Japanese police arrested a 19 year-old college student from Kyoto Prefecture for allegedly violating the country's Unfair Competition Prevention Law. In short, the student was nabbed for posting Wii homebrew software online. This is apparently the first arrest of its kind in Japan.

According to Japanese news reports, the "illegal program" allowed players to boot up pirated software on the Nintendo Wii. This past February, the college student supposedly put the software up on his website, where it was downloaded nearly 6,500 over the course of three months.

Since last year, the college student earned roughly ¥200,000 (US$2,500) from his site in advertising revenue. That should come in handy with his legal fees.

Ｗｉｉの不正プログラム提供　容疑の大学生逮捕 [産経]

Capcom Summer Jam, Capcom's own mini-Tokyo Game Show, happened this last weekend in Japan. Inside the show, Capcom showed off its biggest new and recently released titles in playable form.

Among the upcoming titles were Resident Evil 6, the Sengoku BASARA HD Collection, and the first playable demo of Okami HD. The recently released titles on the show floor included Dragon's Dogma, Steel Battalion, and Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City.

Other than that, there were stage shows, a mini-concert by Japanese popstar May'n, and even an airsoft gun range inspired by Resident Evil. Capcom also showed off a large amount of Monster Hunter paraphernalia and artwork.

To see what the show was like, check out the image gallery above.

Just as Apple forked over US$60 million to use the iPad moniker in China, a household chemical company called Jiangsu Xuebao filed a lawsuit over the use of "Snow Leopard". Or rather, the use of "xuebao" (雪豹), which is Chinese of "snow leopard".

Back in 2000, Jiangsu Xuebao filed a trademark for the use of "xuebao", or "snow leopard", in electrical equipment. The company is contesting that Mac OS X Snow Leopard infringes on the use of "xuebao".

According to a Chinese legal expert, Jiangsu Xuebao is unlikely to win the case, because Apple does not use the Chinese "xuebao" in marketing Snow Leopard. However, Jiangsu Xuebao stated that Apple tried to register "xuebao" back in 2008, but couldn't because of the pre-existing trademark.

A Shanghai court is slated to hear Jiangsu Xuebao's suit later this month. The company is seeking around US$80,000 in damages and an apology from Apple. The irony? Check out Jiangsu Xuebao's products. Many look familiar.

苹果咬了雪豹一口？ [DSQQ via MIC]