As of today,Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars is available on the PAL Wii Virtual Console for a limited time, as a part of its Hanabi Festival promotion. There is currently no plans to release it in the US or have a similar promotion. Oh well, at least we have the Neo Geo Golf hit Neo Turf Masters! That’s even better, right? Right?

The PAL Wii Shop Channel occasionally holds a promotion known as Hanabi Festival, where rare NES, SNES, and N64 games, usually ones that did not have a previous release in Europe, are available for purchase for a limited time.

[Kotaku]

Thats right! Comon sense out of a game company, I guess we’ve covered it all now, haven’t we? We could die peacefully now after this. Yoichi Wada, president of Square Enix, pronounced this pledge in Japan earlier this week by saying they will start “making simultaneous releases the norm.”

Oh my! I feel like I may faint just typing it. Now you may wonder if this applies to FFXIII or Dragon Quest IX, frankly I couldn’t care less. This is a pledge for the future, a trend for the industry. Perhaps one day gamers in Europe and Australia wont have to wait almost a year just for some mystic reasoning that’s never justified. They should be the happiest of us all. Here’s to the future of gaming, may it come to us all at the same time!

[IGN]

1up conducted an interview with one of the most famous video game composers of our generation: Nobuo Uematsu. This dude needs no introduction. He is kick arse. I can’t even diss his socks and Crocs combo in the image above, because he’s just that kick arse. The interview is probably one of the most in depth I’ve read. Nobuo seems at complete ease, enjoys answering the questions and recalling his life at Square. He also doesn’t seem to hold anything back and is incredibly candid. Highlights for me are Nobuo speaking on:

• How he feels Square are taking advantage of him by milking his compositions even though he no longer works for the company.
• Square Enix releasing too many Final Fantasy games.
• The reason he left Square.
• That Square shouldn’t have continued to make Final Fantasy games after Sakaguchi left the company.

He is never bitter though and seems fully contented and happy with his earlier days at Square.

The interview is incredibly long, but very insightful and worth checking out from start to finish. If you’re into video game music, an aspiring composer or just a fan of Uematsu’s in general – you’ll thoroughly enjoy this. I have to confess to having caught onto Uemtasu and the Final Fantasy bandwagon late with game VII, but I immediately latched onto the music, loved it to pieces and quickly became a fan of Uematsu’s work from there on out.

Check it out: James Mielke’s interview with Nobuo Uemtasu

Because of gamevideo.com’s terrible movie players, none of the videos can play for more than 10 seconds without freezing and re-buffering. The whole interview has been transcribed so you can read it all if the the videos mess up on you. But if your not a big fan of reading through 8 pages of text and would prefer to see Uematsu-san kicking it in all his awesomeness, the videos are after the jump.

Read more!

Yesterday a fake piece of news circulated around bunch of gaming sites claiming that Square Enix had formally announced a change in their business plan in which Square Enix committed to only produce new versions of their old games. Many websites took it seriously for a while, including us; I was just about ready to post it when the news got debunked. Its still worth mentioning this though, the original satire piece is indeed a result of Square’s recent releases.

Even though rehashing franchises isn’t anything new to the industry, the gaming gods know Nintendo and EA to be guilty of this quite often, re-releasing the very same game with updated graphics is something that we had not seen much of until this past generation. Now Square Enix has been raking in the cash by releasing many of the first Final Fantasy games for mobile platforms while their new IP’s and even the new entries in their old franchises have been lackluster to say the least.

Read more!

Holy ridiculous swords Batman! We see replica Buster Swords, Gunblades and even Master swords every now and then, but this? This is a first. The folks at True Swords sell a replica of Sora’s Keyblade from Kingdom Hearts.

Its a ‘full size’ replica measuring 39 inches in length, comes with a high quality clasp and true to concept paint job. A true replica of one of Square’s most ridiculous innovative swords! For $39.99 this seems like the perfect item for the Kingdom Hearts fan or cosplayer.

[True Swords]

The gaming industry continues to go gaga over Epic’s Unreal Engine 3, so much that even Japanese developers are licensing it. And not just any developer, SquareEnix is getting it. In a move that would make SquareEnix much more capable of developing multi-platform titles, the RPG ivory tower might also be looking to create some games outside of their usual genres. Our guess? Gunblade Tournament, awesome.

[Team Xbox]

A new game that got a bit shown on this year’s TGS and made by the same guys that did Kingdom Hearts will be hitting Japan Next 2007. It’s called “It’s a Wonderful World” [or Subarashiki kono Sekai in Japanese] and its story revolves around a kid [Neku] that gets strange E-mails with objectives, and a dancer [Shiki]. The cool thing is the battle system, it seems that shiki fights on the top screen and you control her with the D-pad, and Neku fights on the bottom screen with the stylus.

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I hope they bring the crazy games to America, only Japan gets the cool stuff. . .

[Kotaku]