Yakuza Kenzan
Ryū ga Gotoku Kenzan!, unofficially known as Yakuza Kenzan, is a jidaigeki-themed spin-off game in the Yakuza series. The game was developed and published by Sega for PlayStation 3, it was unveiled at the Tokyo Game Show 2007 and released in 2008. A second Yakuza series spin-off set in samurai era, Ryū ga Gotoku Ishin!, was released in 2014 on both the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation 4 systems. Ishin! is set two centuries than Kenzan!, hence the plots are not related to each other since both games focus on different characters, the historical figures of Sakamoto Ryōma and Miyamoto Musashi respectively. The gameplay shows minimal evolution from the first two episodes except for the new item storage system which allows access to an unlimited number of items from savepoints; however the graphical engine's improvement is obvious during the numerous real-time 3D cutscenes. There are four fighting styles in the game. There are QTE-based special moves that the player can execute, known as'heat action'.
This spin-off is set in Kyoto during the Edo period, in 1605. It is an account of the life of Miyamoto Musashi; the main adventure is completed with sidestories including minigames and a hundred "sub-stories". After being defeated by the Tokugawa clan at the historical Battle of Sekigahara which took place on October 20, 1600, Miyamoto Musashi retired from his great swordsman life to become a modest yojimbo in Gion, Kyoto. Five years after the battle, a little girl named Haruka comes to Gion seeking a local hitman known as Kazumanosuke Kiryu, Miyamoto's new identity. After finding Kiryū, Haruka asks for him to assassinate an impostor pretending to be Miyamoto Musashi. At first, Kiryu refuses when the girl goes as far as becoming an indentured servant in an opulent oiran brothel in order to pay the assassination mission he accepts the one-ryō request; this is the first game in the series where the games's main characters have their face modeled in 3D after their voice actors who are Japanese celebrities.
Cyberware's color 3D scanner was used to analyze each actor's head & face in order to collect data on its shape and appearance this file was worked with the Softimage XSI 3D graphics application. Takaya Kuroda as Kazumanosuke Kiryu / Miyamoto Musashi Shota Matsuda as Sasaki Kojirō Susumu Terajima as Itō Ittōsai Masaya Kato as Seijuro Yoshioka Takashi Tsukamoto as Gion Tōji Hiroki Matsukata as Mysterious Monk Naoto Takenaka as Marume Nagayoshi Aya Hisakawa as Yoshino Tayū Rie Kugimiya as Haruka Yinling of Joytoy as Libido Waterfall Two playable demos were released on January 7, 2008 via the Japanese PlayStation Store; the first demo included sandbox play, the second had a collection of various combat and romantic gameplay segments. As part of the pre-ordering campaign, the Japanese first print was bundled with a limited item, a monography called Kamutai Magazine. Sony celebrated the Japanese release of the game with a 10,000 pieces limited edition Satin Silver 40GB model "PlayStation 3 Like a Dragon Kenzan!
Pack" SKU including a "Rising Dragon" stickers set to customize the console case. The Japanese version was released on March 6, 2008 in both Japan and South East Asia, while Sony published it in South Korea on March 25, 2008 with a subtitled script book. In late December 2009, commenting the opportunity of a western release, Sega Australia managing director Darren Macbeth said "there is nothing in the plan at this stage for Yakuza Kenzan. Right now we are focusing on the release of Yakuza 3; the feedback we get from this release will help us in making future decisions". In March 2010, Yakuza 3 had a western release as did in 2011 Yakuza 4. Again, in 2012, a second spinoff was released abroad and localized as Yakuza: Dead Souls; the Ryu Ga Gotoku Kenzan! Original Sound Track album was published by Wave Master in Japan on March 6, 2008. Music was composed by Hideki Sakamoto, Hiroyoshi Kato, Keisuke Ito and Yuri Fukuda; this OST is noticeable for an exotic track, a flamenco piece titled Baile con la mariposa, the theme for the duel between Musashi Miyamoto and Itto Ittosai.
The track list has 31 titles. Additional soundtrack includes two songs by Japanese hip hop artists Ketsumeishi. Opening theme: Bushido by Zeebra. Released in Japan by Pony Canyon as a dual-disc single on March 5, 2008. First disc is a CD including the title track and an instrumental version plus a B-side Lyrical Gunman featuring Rudebwoy Face and Chappa Ranks. Second disc is a bonus DVD with the music video for Bushido which includes cutscene footages from the game. Closing theme: Life is Beautiful by Ketsumeishi from their 2007 album Ketsupolis 5 published in Japan by Toy's Factory. Clothes manufacturer Cropped Heads collaborated with Sega to produce licensed Ryu Ga Gotoku Kenzan! tee-shirts, Ace Cook produced Ryu Ga Gotoku Kenzan! Cup noodles; as of July 9, 2008, the game has sold 270,438 copies according to Famitsu. As a best seller in Japan, the game received a budget re-release under the PlayStation 3 the Best bargain collection on December 11, 2008, it earned the Award for Excellence at the Japan Game Awards 2008, the Japanese video game magazine Famitsu reviewed it 37/40.
Official website
Shigeru Miyamoto
Shigeru Miyamoto is a Japanese video game designer and producer for the video game company Nintendo serving as one of its representative directors. He is best known as the creator of some of the most critically acclaimed and best-selling video games and franchises of all time, such as Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, F-Zero, Donkey Kong and Pikmin. Miyamoto joined Nintendo in 1977, when the company was beginning its foray into video games and starting to abandon the playing cards it had made since 1889, his games have been prominently showcased and anticipated as flagship titles of every Nintendo video game console, with his earliest work appearing on arcade machines in the late 1970s. He managed Nintendo's Entertainment Analysis & Development software division, which developed many of the company's first-party titles; as a result of Nintendo president Satoru Iwata's death in July 2015, Miyamoto fulfilled the role of acting president alongside Genyo Takeda until being formally appointed as the company's "Creative Fellow" a few months later.
Miyamoto was born in the Japanese town of Sonobe, a rural town northwest of Kyoto, on November 16, 1952. His parents were of "modest means", his father taught the English language. From an early age, Miyamoto began to explore the natural areas around his home. On one of these expeditions, Miyamoto came upon a cave, after days of hesitation, went inside. Miyamoto's expeditions into the Kyoto countryside inspired his work The Legend of Zelda, a seminal video game. Miyamoto graduated from Kanazawa Municipal College of Industrial Arts with a degree in industrial design but no job lined up, he had a love for manga and hoped to become a professional manga artist before considering a career in video games. He was influenced by manga's classical kishōtenketsu narrative structure, as well as Western genre television shows; the title that inspired him to enter the video game industry was the 1978 arcade hit Space Invaders. Nintendo, a small Japanese company, had traditionally sold playing cards and other novelties, although it had started to branch out into toys and games in the mid-1960s.
Through a mutual friend, Miyamoto's father arranged an interview with Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi. After showing some of his toy creations, Miyamoto was hired in 1977 as an apprentice in the planning department. Miyamoto went on to become the company's first artist, he helped create the art for Sheriff. He first helped the company develop a game with the 1980 release Radar Scope; the game achieved moderate success in Japan, but by 1981, Nintendo's efforts to break it into the North American video game market had failed, leaving the company with a large number of unsold units and on the verge of financial collapse. In an effort to keep the company afloat, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi decided to convert unsold Radar Scope units into a new arcade game, he tasked Miyamoto with the conversion, about which Miyamoto has said self-deprecatingly that "no one else was available" to do the work. Nintendo's head engineer, Gunpei Yokoi, supervised the project. Miyamoto imagined many characters and plot concepts, but settled on a love triangle between a gorilla, a carpenter, a girl.
He meant to mirror the rivalry between comic characters Bluto and Popeye for the woman Olive Oyl, although Nintendo's original intentions to gain rights to Popeye failed. Bluto evolved into an ape, a form Miyamoto claimed was "nothing too evil or repulsive"; this ape would be the pet of the main character, "a funny, hang-loose kind of guy." Miyamoto named "Beauty and the Beast" and the 1933 film King Kong as influences. Donkey Kong marked the first time that the formulation of a video game's storyline preceded the actual programming, rather than being appended as an afterthought. Miyamoto lacked the technical skills to program it himself, he wanted to make the characters different sizes, move in different manners, react in various ways. However, Yokoi viewed Miyamoto's original design as too complex. Yokoi suggested using see-saws to catapult the hero across the screen. Miyamoto next thought with barrels for obstacles; when he asked that the game have multiple stages, the four-man programming team complained that he was asking them to make the game repeat, but the team successfully programmed the game.
When the game was sent to Nintendo of America for testing, the sales manager disapproved of its vast differentiation from the maze and shooter games common at the time. When American staffers began naming the characters, they settled on "Pauline" for the woman, after Polly James, wife of Nintendo's Redmond, warehouse manager, Don James; the playable character "Jumpman", was named for Mario Segale, the warehouse landlord. These character names were used in promotional materials; the staff pushed for an English name, thus it received the title Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong was a success, leading Miyamoto to work on sequels Donkey Kong Jr. in 1982 and Donkey Kong 3 in 1983. In his next game, he reworked the Donkey Kong character Jumpman into Mario, gave him a brother: Luigi, he named the new game Mario Bros. Yokoi convinced Miyamoto to give Mario some superhuman abilities, namely the ability to fall from any height unharmed. Mario's appearance in Donkey Kong—overalls, a hat, a thick mus
Panzer Dragoon Orta
Panzer Dragoon Orta is a 2002 rail shooter game for the Xbox, published by Sega and developed by Sega's Smilebit studio. It is the fourth game in the main Panzer Dragoon series. Many of the developers had been part of the defunct Sega studio Team Andromeda, which disbanded after the release of the previous Panzer Dragoon game, Panzer Dragoon Saga, on the Saturn; the story follows a teenage girl, rescued from her lifelong prison by a mysterious dragon and must defend herself from the forces of an oppressive empire. Panzer Dragoon Orta is a rail shooter: players can control the dragon's position onscreen, may slow down or speed up, but are in no control to fly about the level. Attacking is performed by holding down a mappable attack button, maneuvering an onscreen cursor over enemies, releasing the button to fire a volley of arching lasers at each target. Orta is equipped with a rapid-fire pistol, which can be used by tapping the attack button instead of holding it down. Enemies must thus be defeated before they vanish offscreen as the levels "scroll" by, with the exception of boss battles, which take place in environments that "loop" until the boss is defeated).
An onscreen radar marks enemies in the dragon's immediate surroundings as red dots. Using the Right and Left Triggers, the player can rotate the view 90 degrees to the right; this way the player can look in front, to the sides or behind the dragon and take down incoming enemies. A Life Gauge displays the dragon's current health; when the dragon's health reaches zero, the game ends and the player will have to redo the entire Episode. If the dragon dies during the final boss fight of the Episode, the player gets the option to restart the Episode at the boss fight. Orta's dragon can morph itself instantaneously between three different forms: the Base Wing, Heavy Wing, or Glide Wing; each of these forms can level up by collecting "gene bases" from certain enemies. Unique to the Glide Wing is the ability to have the dragon perform a barrel roll by moving the thumbstick sideways in quick succession; each dragon type has a different Glide Gauge. The dragon's ability to slow down or speed up can only be done a limited number of times as it decreases the Glide Gauge.
When the Glide Gauge is empty, the dragon can no longer slown down or speed up and must wait for the gauge to refill. The Glide Wing can speed up or slow down up to three times using a full Glide Gauge, while the Base Wing can only do so two times; the Heavy Wing can't speed up at all, trading its mobility for a greater damage output. As with the Glide Gauge, each dragon type has a different Berserk Gauge. Using the dragon's Berserk Attack depletes the Berserk Gauge. Besides inflicting a lot of damage on the onscreen enemies, the attack grants the dragon invincibility for a short amount of time. In the case of the Glide Wing, the attack steals life from the onscreen enemies and uses it to refill the dragon's own Life Gauge. During the boss battles, the player can position the dragon to the front, the sides or behind the boss using the dragon's ability to speed up or slow down. During a boss fight the onscreen radar shows the areas around the boss where the dragon is vulnerable to attacks and the ones where the dragon is safe, these areas change as the battle goes on.
The player must use this information to move around the boss and avoid being hit, while finding and attacking the boss's weak points. At the conclusion of each Episode, the player is ranked based on the number of enemies defeated, hits taken, the time it took to defeat the boss; each of these is assigned a letter grade from S, A, B, C, D. The four grades are averaged together to give the player an overall assessment of how well they performed; this grading occurs at the conclusion of the game's numerous side-missions. The Empire has returned to power, using ancient technology to genetically engineer dragons called dragonmares. A young girl, has lived all her life in a tower in a valley, imprisoned by the nomadic Seekers, who fear she is a harbinger of doom. One night, the Empire attacks the valley with its dragonmares. Before the dragonmares can harm Orta, a mysterious dragon eliminates them. Orta flees the valley on the dragon. Evren, a general in the Imperial Army and leader of the dragonmare squadron, pursues her.
She is saved by a renegade imperial drone. He flies away and Orta asks the dragon to follow him. In her search, Orta meets a friendly but reckless member of the wormriders. Mobo leads Orta through a sea of ash to the wormrider village; the imperial fleet attacks the village and Evren's squadron engages Orta, but she and the dragon defeat them. Evren's dragonmare self-destructs and Orta and the dragon fall from the sky; the wounded dragon carries Orta on foot across a snowy land. They fend of an attack from a flying predator. Abadd kills the family with a laser volley, he claims to have information about Orta's birth. They descend into the ruins of a access the ancient information network known as Sestren. Orta finds a message recorded by her mother, saying that she formed using DNA she recovered from a human in Sestren. Abadd explains that he has learnt the secret
Board of directors
A board of directors is a group of people who jointly supervise the activities of an organization, which can be either a for-profit business, nonprofit organization, or a government agency. Such a board's powers and responsibilities are determined by government regulations and the organization's own constitution and bylaws; these authorities may specify the number of members of the board, how they are to be chosen, how they are to meet. In an organization with voting members, the board is accountable to, might be subordinate to, the organization's full membership, which vote for the members of the board. In a stock corporation, non-executive directors are voted for by the shareholders, with the board having ultimate responsibility for the management of the corporation; the board of directors appoints the chief executive officer of the corporation and sets out the overall strategic direction. In corporations with dispersed ownership, the identification and nomination of directors are done by the board itself, leading to a high degree of self-perpetuation.
In a non-stock corporation with no general voting membership, the board is the supreme governing body of the institution, its members are sometimes chosen by the board itself. Other names include board of directors and advisors, board of governors, board of managers, board of regents, board of trustees, or board of visitors, it may be called "the executive board" and is simply referred to as "the board". Typical duties of boards of directors include: governing the organization by establishing broad policies and setting out strategic objectives. For companies with publicly trading stock, these responsibilities are much more rigorous and complex than for those of other types; the board chooses one of its members to be the chairman, who holds whatever title is specified in the by-laws or articles of association. However, in membership organizations, the members elect the president of the organization and the president becomes the board chair, unless the by-laws say otherwise; the directors of an organization are the persons.
Several specific terms categorize directors by the presence or absence of their other relationships to the organization. An inside director is a director, an employee, chief executive, major shareholder, or someone connected to the organization. Inside directors represent the interests of the entity's stakeholders, have special knowledge of its inner workings, its financial or market position, so on. Typical inside directors are: A chief executive officer who may be chairman of the board Other executives of the organization, such as its chief financial officer or executive vice president Large shareholders Representatives of other stakeholders such as labor unions, major lenders, or members of the community in which the organization is locatedAn inside director, employed as a manager or executive of the organization is sometimes referred to as an executive director. Executive directors have a specified area of responsibility in the organization, such as finance, human resources, or production.
An outside director is a member of the board, not otherwise employed by or engaged with the organization, does not represent any of its stakeholders. A typical example is a director, president of a firm in a different industry. Outside directors are not affiliated with it in any other way. Outside directors bring outside experience and perspectives to the board. For example, for a company that only serves a domestic market, the presence of CEOs from global multinational corporations as outside directors can help to provide insights on export and import opportunities and international trade options. One of the arguments for having outside directors is that they can keep a watchful eye on the inside directors and on the way the organization is run. Outside directors are unlikely to tolerate "insider dealing" between insider directors, as outside directors do not benefit from the company or organization. Outside directors are useful in handling disputes between inside directors, or between shareholders and the board.
They are thought to be advantageous because they can be objective and present little risk of conflict of interest. On the other hand, they might lack familiarity with the specific issues connected to the organization's governance and they might not know about the industry or sector in which the organization is operating. Director – a person appointed to serve on the board of an organization, such as an institution or business. Inside director – a director who, in addition to serving on the board, has a meaningful connection to the organization Outside director – a director who, other than serving on the board, has no meaningful connections to the organization Executive director – an insi
Yu Suzuki
Yu Suzuki is a Japanese game designer, producer and engineer, who headed Sega's AM2 team for 18 years. He has been responsible for several of Sega's arcade hits, including three-dimensional sprite/texture-scaling games such as Hang-On, Space Harrier, Out Run, After Burner, pioneering polygonal 3D games such as Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter, which are credited with popularizing 3D graphics in video games, as well as the critically acclaimed Shenmue series of open world adventure games; as a hardware engineer, he led the development of various arcade system boards, including the Sega Space Harrier, Model 1, Model 2, Model 3, was involved in the development of the Dreamcast console and its corresponding NAOMI arcade hardware. In 2003, Suzuki became the sixth person to be inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Hall of Fame. IGN listed him at #9 in their Top 100 Game Creators of All Time list. In 2011, he received the Pioneer Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards. Suzuki joined Sega in 1983 as a programmer.
In his first year, he created a 2D boxing game called Champion Boxing for Sega's first home game console, the SG-1000. According to Suzuki, the executive staff at Sega found the game so impressive that they released it in arcades as-is by installing an SG-1000 into an arcade cabinet, he was promoted to project leader while still in his first year at the company. Suzuki began working on another arcade game which would prove to be the big stepping-off point of his career. "To develop this game," Suzuki told G4TV, "I rode on motorcycles a lot. When we came up with the prototype, I would ride on that prototype bike for hours and hours every day." His efforts culminated into the game Hang-On, released in 1985. Hang-On was a success, it did not feature any traditional controls, as the movement of the on-screen avatar was dictated by the movements the player made with their body on the motorcycle cabinet. This began the "Taikan" trend, the use of motion-controlled hydraulic arcade cabinets in many arcade games of the late 1980s, two decades before motion controls became popular on video game consoles.
Running on the Sega Space Harrier hardware, it was the first of Sega's "Super Scaler" arcade system boards that allowed three-dimensional sprite/texture-scaling at high frame rates. The three-dimensional sprite/tile scaling was handled in a similar manner to textures in texture-mapped polygonal 3D games of the 1990s. Suzuki stated. All the calculations in the system were 3D from Hang-On. I calculated the position and zoom rate in 3D and converted it backwards to 2D. So I was always thinking in 3D."He soon followed with the 3D-esque third-person shooter game Space Harrier that year. Showing his interest in Ferraris, Suzuki created the driving simulator Out Run, released in 1986. Although it didn't feature a Ferrari, the player controlled a car that looked exactly like one. Out Run offered players a wide variety of driving paths and routes to complete the game, adding elements of nonlinear gameplay and increasing replay value, it featured a radio with three songs to choose from as players drove through the wide variety of landscapes.
At the Golden Joystick Awards, Out Run was awarded the Game of the Year award. Suzuki's hits included the jet fighting After Burner series in the late 1980s and the roller coaster kart racer Power Drift in 1988. Improving on the "Super Scaler" technology and road scrolling effects of Hang-On and Out Run, Power Drift created "all of its track layouts with flat bitmaps" to simulate a "wholly 3D space using 2D technology."In 1990, Suzuki brought out a spiritual sequel to After Burner called G-LOC, which featured a gyroscope-like cabinet that rotated 360 degrees to give players the realistic illusion of flying a fighter jet. Suzuki had been interested in 3D technology since his days in college. Although Space Harrier and Out Run had graphics similar to 3D, they did not utilize the capabilities. Yu Suzuki introduced and spearheaded the Model series of arcade hardware which would help lay the foundation for 3D arcade games for AM2 but other arcade departments at Sega as well In 1992, they released the 3D Formula 1 racer Virtua Racing, considered one of, if not the most, realistic-looking arcade games on the market at that time.
GameSpot listed it as one of the 15 most influential video games of all time, commenting that "It wasn't the first polygonal game on the market... but along with Virtua Fighter, Sega's 1993 release on the same hardware, it introduced the concept of polygonal graphics to the masses."In 1993, Suzuki created Virtua Fighter, the first 3D fighting game, which became enormously popular and spawned a series of sequels and spinoffs. It inspired many 3D fighting games such as the Soul Calibur series; some of the Sony Computer Entertainment staff involved in the creation of the original PlayStation console credit Virtua Fighter as inspiration for the PlayStation's 3D graphics hardware. According to SCE's former producer Ryoji Akagawa and chairman Shigeo Maruyama, the PlayStation was being considered as a 2D focused hardware, it wasn't until the success of Virtua Fighter in the arcades that they decided to design the PlayStation as a 3D focused hardware. 1UP listed Virtua Fighter as one of the 50 most important games of all time.
They credited it for creating the 3D fighting game genre, more demonstrating the potential of 3D polygon human characters, showing the potential of realistic gameplay (introducing a character physics system and realistic ch
