Space World
Space World was a theme park in Yahatahigashi-ku, Kitakyūshū, Japan. In December 2016, the park announced it would permanently close at the end of December 2017; the park permanently closed at 2 o'clock, January 1, 2018. Space World was the home of a 100-metre tall Ferris wheel affording panoramic views. In October 2016, the park opened its new Ice Aquarium ice rink. Embedded in the ice were 5000 dead fish, which caused public outrage; the park closed the attraction on 27 November. Official website
Famitsu
Famitsu Famicom Tsūshin, is a line of Japanese video game magazines published by Enterbrain, Inc. and Tokuma. Famitsu is published in both weekly and monthly formats as well as in the form of special topical issues devoted to only one console, video game company, or other theme. Shūkan Famitsū, the original Famitsū publication, is considered the most read and respected video game news magazine in Japan. From October 28, 2011 Enterbrain began releasing the digital version of the magazine on BookWalker weekly; the first issue of Famitsū was published on June 1986 as Famicom Tsūshin. It was published semiregularly thereafter, going through periods of monthly and quarterly publication. On July 19, 1991 the magazine was renamed to Shūkan Famicom Tsūshin and issues were published weekly thereafter. Alongside the weekly magazine, a monthly version called Gekkan Famicom Tsūshin was published. At the start of 1996 the magazines underwent another name change, truncating their titles to Shūkan Famitsū and Gekkan Famitsū.
The magazine was published by ASCII from its founding through March 2000 when it was sold to Enterbrain, Inc. The name Famitsū is a portmanteau abbreviation of Famicom Tsūshin; the first issue was published on June 6, 1986. Today, Shūkan Famitsū features multi-platform coverage. Shūkan Famitsū is a weekly publication concentrating on video game news and reviews, is published every Thursday with a circulation of 500,000 per issue. Gekkan Famitsū is published monthly. Famitsū magazine covers alternately feature pop idols or actresses on even-numbered issues and the Famitsū mascot, Necky the Fox in odd-numbered issues. Year-end and special editions all feature Necky dressed as popular contemporary video game characters. Necky is the cartoon creation of artist Susumu Matsushita, he takes the form of a costumed fox; the costumes worn by Necky reflect current popular video games. Necky's name was chosen according to a reader poll, it derives from a complex Japanese pun: "Necky" is the reverse of the Japanese word for fox, キツネ, his original connection to Famicom Tsūshin is intended to evoke the bark of the fox, the Japanese onomatopoeia of, コンコン.
Necky makes a cameo appearance in Super Mario Maker. Famitsū publishes other magazines dedicated to particular consoles. In circulation are: Entamikusu is written for an older audience and covers retrogaming, it has been published monthly since November 2010. Famitsū Connect! On reports on online gaming. Famitsū DS+Wii reports on Nintendo platforms; the magazine was known as Famitsū 64 and Famitsū Cube based on whatever platforms Nintendo was producing games for at the time. Famitsū GREE reports on mobile gaming via GREE. Famitsū Mobage reports on mobile gaming via Mobage. Famitsū spin-offs that are no longer in circulation include: Famitsū Bros. was written for younger audiences and concentrated on video game hints and strategy. It was published monthly and went defunct in September 2002. Famicomi was a comic and manga magazine published irregularly between 1992 and 1995. Famitsū DC covered the Dreamcast. Previous incarnations of this magazine included Sega Saturn Tsūshin which covered the Sega Saturn, with earlier issues covering earlier Sega platforms.
Famitsū Sister covered bishōjo games. Satellaview Tsūshin covered the Satellaview, it was published monthly and ran for only 12 issues from May 1995 to May 1996. Its inaugural issue was the May 1995 issue of Gekkan Famicom Tsūshin. Virtual Boy Tsūshin covered the Virtual Boy. Only one issue was published in 1995. Famitsū PS began publication in May 1996, reported on Sony platforms news, it was known as Famitsū PS2 and Famitsū PSP+PS3 before being discontinued in March 2010. Famitsū Wave DVD covered events and previews; each magazine included a DVD disc with video game footage. It was published monthly and went defunct in May 2011. Famitsū Xbox 360 reported on Xbox 360 news, it went defunct in 2013. Video games are graded in Famitsū via a "Cross Review" in which a panel of four video game reviewers each give a score from 0 to 10; the scores of the four reviewers are added up for a maximum possible score of 40. From the twenty-four games awarded with a perfect score as of 2017, three are for the Nintendo DS and five are for the Wii.
The PlayStation 3 has five games with a perfect score and the Xbox 360 has four, with both consoles having four titles in common. The others are for different platforms with only one title each. Franchises with multiple perfect score winners include The Legend of Zelda with four titles, Metal Gear with three titles, Final Fantasy with two titles; the most recent game to receive a perfect score is Dragon Quest XI. As of 2016, all but two games with perfect scores are from Japanese companies, nine being published/developed by Nintendo, four by Square Enix, three by Sega, three by Konami and one by Capcom; as of 2016, the only two foreign games to achieve a perfect score are The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim by Bethesda Softworks and Grand Theft Auto V, from Rockstar Games. Other foreign games that have achieved near-perfect scores are L. A. Noire, Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto IV – all three of which came from Rockstar Games.
Business Jump
Business Jump, was a Japanese seinen manga anthology published by Shueisha under the Jump line of magazines. The manga of Business Jump were published under the "Young Jump Comics" line; this magazine's mascot was an Western-style mouse illustrated by Susumu Matsushita. The magazine debuted in July, 1985 as the first "salaryman" magazine to be published by Shueisha, Inc. Business Jump completing with Ultra Jump, Super Jump, etc. was one of its kind in the Jump family of manga magazines. Business Jump readers were young, twentysomething business men. BJ was a monthly publication, the date of its release was changed to the first Wednesday of every month. For the second time, it was changed in 2008 to the 15th; the magazine was discontinued in late 2011, with a final double issue, numbered 21/22, released on October 5. Several ongoing series were folded into Grand Jump. Official website
Virtual International Authority File
The Virtual International Authority File is an international authority file. It is a joint project of several national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center. Discussion about having a common international authority started in the late 1990s. After a series of failed attempts to come up with a unique common authority file, the new idea was to link existing national authorities; this would present all the benefits of a common file without requiring a large investment of time and expense in the process. The project was initiated by the US Library of Congress, the German National Library and the OCLC on August 6, 2003; the Bibliothèque nationale de France joined the project on October 5, 2007. The project transitioned to being a service of the OCLC on April 4, 2012; the aim is to link the national authority files to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together. A VIAF record receives a standard data number, contains the primary "see" and "see also" records from the original records, refers to the original authority records.
The data are available for research and data exchange and sharing. Reciprocal updating uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting protocol; the file numbers are being added to Wikipedia biographical articles and are incorporated into Wikidata. VIAF's clustering algorithm is run every month; as more data are added from participating libraries, clusters of authority records may coalesce or split, leading to some fluctuation in the VIAF identifier of certain authority records. Authority control Faceted Application of Subject Terminology Integrated Authority File International Standard Authority Data Number International Standard Name Identifier Wikipedia's authority control template for articles Official website VIAF at OCLC
National Diet Library
The National Diet Library is the national library of Japan and among the largest libraries in the world. It was established in 1948 for the purpose of assisting members of the National Diet of Japan in researching matters of public policy; the library is similar in scope to the United States Library of Congress. The National Diet Library consists of two main facilities in Tōkyō and Kyōtō, several other branch libraries throughout Japan; the National Diet Library is the successor of three separate libraries: the library of the House of Peers, the library of the House of Representatives, both of which were established at the creation of Japan's Imperial Diet in 1890. The Diet's power in prewar Japan was limited, its need for information was "correspondingly small"; the original Diet libraries "never developed either the collections or the services which might have made them vital adjuncts of genuinely responsible legislative activity". Until Japan's defeat, the executive had controlled all political documents, depriving the people and the Diet of access to vital information.
The U. S. occupation forces under General Douglas MacArthur deemed reform of the Diet library system to be an important part of the democratization of Japan after its defeat in World War II. In 1946, each house of the Diet formed its own National Diet Library Standing Committee. Hani Gorō, a Marxist historian, imprisoned during the war for thought crimes and had been elected to the House of Councillors after the war, spearheaded the reform efforts. Hani envisioned the new body as "both a'citadel of popular sovereignty'", the means of realizing a "peaceful revolution"; the Occupation officers responsible for overseeing library reforms reported that, although the Occupation was a catalyst for change, local initiative pre-existed the Occupation, the successful reforms were due to dedicated Japanese like Hani. The National Diet Library opened in June 1948 in the present-day State Guest-House with an initial collection of 100,000 volumes; the first Librarian of the Diet Library was the politician Tokujirō Kanamori.
The philosopher Masakazu Nakai served as the first Vice Librarian. In 1949, the NDL became the only national library in Japan. At this time the collection gained an additional million volumes housed in the former National Library in Ueno. In 1961, the NDL opened at its present location in Nagatachō, adjacent to the National Diet. In 1986, the NDL's Annex was completed to accommodate a combined total of 12 million books and periodicals; the Kansai-kan, which opened in October 2002 in the Kansai Science City, has a collection of 6 million items. In May 2002, the NDL opened a new branch, the International Library of Children's Literature, in the former building of the Imperial Library in Ueno; this branch contains some 400,000 items of children's literature from around the world. Though the NDL's original mandate was to be a research library for the National Diet, the general public is the largest consumer of the library's services. In the fiscal year ending March 2004, for example, the library reported more than 250,000 reference inquiries.
As Japan's national library, the NDL collects copies of all publications published in Japan. Moreover, because the NDL serves as a research library for Diet members, their staffs, the general public, it maintains an extensive collection of materials published in foreign languages on a wide range of topics; the NDL has eight major specialized collections: Modern Political and Constitutional History. The Modern Political and Constitutional History Collection comprises some 300,000 items related to Japan's political and legal modernization in the 19th century, including the original document archives of important Japanese statesmen from the latter half of the 19th century and the early 20th century like Itō Hirobumi, Iwakura Tomomi, Sanjō Sanetomi, Mutsu Munemitsu, Terauchi Masatake, other influential figures from the Meiji and Taishō periods; the NDL has an extensive microform collection of some 30 million pages of documents relating to the Occupation of Japan after World War II. This collection include the documents prepared by General Headquarters and the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, the Far Eastern Commission, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey Team.
The Laws and Preliminary Records Collection consists of some 170,000 Japanese and 200,000 foreign-language documents concerning proceedings of the National Diet and the legislatures of some 70 foreign countries, the official gazettes, judicial opinions, international treaties pertaining to some 150 foreign countries. The NDL maintains a collection of some 530,000 books and booklets and 2 million microform titles relating to the sciences; these materials include, among other things, foreign doctoral dissertations in the sciences, the proceedings and reports of academic societies, catalogues of technical standards, etc. The NDL has a collection of 440,000 maps of Japan and other countries, including the topographica
Adventure Island (video game)
Hudson's Adventure Island is a side-scrolling platform game produced by Hudson Soft, released in Japan for the Famicom and MSX on September 12, 1986. It was released in North America for the Nintendo Entertainment System on September 1988 and in the PAL region in 1992 under the title of Adventure Island Classic. Adventure Island is an adaptation of the arcade game Wonder Boy, developed by Escape for Sega. Adventure Island was followed by a series of sequels with no connection to the Wonder Boy series; the player controls Master Higgins, a young man who ventured to Adventure Island in the South Pacific after hearing that the Evil Witch Doctor kidnapped Princess Tina. To rescue her, Higgins must survive a series of 32 stages. There are eight worlds called "areas", which are divided four stages or "rounds" each, which are further divided into four checkpoints; when the player reaches the fourth round of each area, he must confront a boss at the end to continue to the next area. The game is completed when the player saves the girl after defeating the eighth and final form of the evil lord.
Master Higgins loses a life whenever he touches an enemy, an enemy's attack or a fire roast, or when he falls into a pitfall or a body of water. Moreover, the player has a health gauge that starts out with 11 points, which depletes over time or whenever Higgins trips on a rock in his path; when Higgins' health gauge reaches zero, he will lose a life as well. If Higgins still has extra lives left, he will revive at the last checkpoint; the game ends. To replenish his health, Higgins can pick up numerous fruits on his path; when the player's score reaches 50,000 points, 100,000 points, 200,000 points, Higgins will receive an extra life. Finding a bee-like fairy known as Honey Girl will grant Higgins invincibility for about ten seconds and allow him to kill enemies with a single touch. Hidden somewhere in each stage is a special pot, which doubles the player's end-of-stage bonus if collected. Higgins starts off each life without the ability to attack and can only gain the ability to attack by picking up a stone axe, which can be found in specific spots in each stage.
When Higgins is wielding the stone axe, he can trade it for magical fireballs that have longer range and are capable of destroying rocks and rolling stones. To break an egg, the player must hit with a weapon twice. In addition to weapons, there are numerous bonus items stuck inside. There is a negative item, the eggplant, which drains Higgins' life meter; some of the eggs are not visible in plain sight. The locations of these "hidden eggs" are indicated when a weapon thrown by a player disappears before falling to the ground and are uncovered by jumping at the indicated spot; some of these hidden spots don't contain hidden eggs, but instead a cloud that will warp the player to a bonus stage, instead uncovered by standing still for a short period of time. At the bonus stages, the player can collect a series of fruits. However, instead of losing a life, he will return to the regular stage at the next checkpoint. At the fourth round of each area, Higgins will confront a different form of the Evil Witch Doctor, the game's boss character.
He has the ability to change his head by up to eight different types. Higgins must defeat him by striking his head a specific number of times with his weapon; the number of hits required to defeat him increases with each area. When the Evil Witch Doctor is defeated, he will escape to the next area, he uses the same attack in each form, with the only thing that changes besides his durability are his mobility speed and the speed of his fireball attacks. When Higgins defeats his final form, the Evil Witch Doctor will fall into a pit and the girl will be rescued. Adventure Island began development as a direct port of the Sega arcade game Wonder Boy, the rights to which Hudson Soft obtained from developer Escape. During the development of the port, the decision was made to change the character design of the protagonist, modeling him and naming him after Hudson Soft's spokesman Takahashi Meijin. In the western version of Adventure Island, the Takahashi Meijin character was renamed Master Higgins. While the Wonder Boy series adapted an action RPG system for its sequels, most of the Adventure Island sequels stuck to the game system of the original Wonder Boy.
Moreover, Hudson Soft obtained the rights to port all of the Wonder Boy sequels to the TurboGrafx-16, changing the title and character designs of each game. Incidentally, the Japanese version of Dragon's Curse was titled Adventure Island; the rights to the Adventure Island series are owned by Konami, who absorbed Hudson Soft in 2012. The NES version of Adventure Island was re-released in Japan for the Game Boy Advance as a Famicom Mini title on May 21, 2004, it was re-released internationally for the Virtual Console service in 2008 for the Wii and in 2014 for the Wii U. A remake was developed for the PlayStation 2 and GameCube titled Hudson Selection Volume 4: Takahashi Meijin no Bōken Jima, released in Japan on December 18, 2003
Derby Stallion
The Derby Stallion - known in Japan by the portmanteau abbreviation DerbyStal - video games are a series of genre-merging horse-racing and business simulation games created by ASCII Entertainment, released by Nintendo. The series comprises 21 games, spans more than 10 console platforms, is the best-selling horse racing series of all time with total sales topping more than 4 million in Japan; the ultimate goal of the player in the Derby Stallion games is to win the title of GI Racer. To do this, the player must attempt to develop the greatest stock of horses that he can in order to have the greatest chance at each of the weekday and holiday races that compose the 1-year racing schedule of the fictitious "SRA" group. Between races, the player engages in numerous business simulation, farm simulation, role-playing activities. Derby Stallion games have evolved as newer members of the series have been added, allowing players greater and greater control over every aspect of the horse-raising business.
As such, the player must now race horses and place racing bets, manage the working of a stables and/or ranch, select different studs and broodmares for breeding, learn to break and train horses, set up advantageous horse trades or sales, among other duties. Players must make critical decisions about appropriate ages to race horses, breeds to pursue, the timing of events to coincide with race dates; as the player improves the stock of his horses, his racing statistics, his position in the world of the horse business, his Group Ranking increases until he reaches the goal of Group I at which point he has won the game. The games allow the player to continue playing after the top goal has been met. Derby Stallion games all feature a single-player mode, however much effort has been put into making the games as versatile as possible for multiplayer capabilities. Multiplayer functions allow players to trade or complete sales between themselves, to set up breeders' agreements, to race against opponents.
To accomplish this, various methods have been used to exchange data from the earliest password code exchange to online connectivity with PCs, Satellaview exchange, RANDnetDD service. Other methods of data exchange that have been developed include various Game Boy-Link connections and telephone satellite connections. Derby Stallion II is a complex horse farm business simulation game, released in 1994 for the Japanese market, it was created for the Super Famicom. In the game, the player must breed horses that can be trained to become horse racing champion thoroughbreds. However, the player starts out with a limited amount of money and must sell horses at a profit once they are too old to race anymore. Derby Stallion 64 is a horse racing Nintendo 64 game, a business simulation game, it released in 2001 for the Japanese market
