Toro: the gormless cat that has been delighting Japanese PS3 owners with daily news since launch.

Sony’s mascot in Japan isn’t Sackboy, or Nathan Drake, or Crash sodding Bandicoot, oh no – it’s a cheerily braindead white cat called Toro, star of Dokodemo Issyo and Mainichi Issyo. He’s been around for just over a decade, starting life on the Pocketstation, and he is officially a Big Deal. He’s INSANELY popular. For the tenth Toro anniversary, they ran a nationwide train promotion where kids had to run around between different stations collecting stamps for gifts. They even got two people to dress up as giant cats and welcome people. Anyway, he and his slightly less gormless pal, Kuro (a black cat), have been the stars of the PS3 since launch in Japan with Toro Station. It’s a free download from the Japanese PSN store – every single day, Toro and Kuro present an adorable little news programme about… something. Sometimes it’s new happenings in the world of Playstation, sometimes it’s about a coffee shop in Tokyo that’ll draw cats on your coffee foam, once it was about toilet paper with maps of the galaxy printed on it. It’s awesome. But if you’ve never experienced the wonders of Toro Station, your chance is up. They’ve changed it.

You see, as well as watching the news you can also buy trinkets, minigames and stuff for Toro to play with from the Mainichi Issyo store for absolutely extortionate prices, which is where it makes its money. See, if you download something, it makes the retarded cat happy. Buy him a brick for 100 yen and he will play with it delightedly for hours. If you don’t buy him anything, all he has is a fridge and an empty orange crate, and he’s forced to roll around on the carpet for entertainment. So although Mainichi Issyo is technically free, it’s difficult to hold on to your money for long, because you want to see him do things like this.

Now, though, the golden days are over – a month or two ago, a troubling service message indicated that Mainichi Issyo was going to be changing. Subscriptions to items like the camera and services like the special cat garden that you could invite your friends to would be “terminated”. Now Sony has revealed the evil plan: Mainichi Issyo is now going to operate on a subscription basis. If you want to see Toro Station on the day it comes out, or have access to the cat fashion shows, or keep all the stuff you’ve paid for in your Toro house, you’re going to have to start paying 800 yen a month. Otherwise Toro has to do his news broadcasts from behind an orange crate in a rubbish tip. (Literally – look:)

Basically, something that’s been free for years is now going to cost a fiver a month, and they’ve bulldozed Toro’s house. Essentially they’re guilting you into buying him a new one. It seems like all the stuff you’ve already paid for will be taken away if you don’t pay up for a subscription, too. Check out the Mainichi Issyo site to see what’s still free and what’s now “premium content“. More Torogate news as we get it.

In preparation for reviewing DJ Hero, I bought a pair of pink Calvin Harris-style fly-eye glasses and read a copy of Mixmag cover to cover. Really, though, I ought to have spent a little time with Amplitude. DJ Hero has far more in common with Harmonix’s early rhythm-action games than with Guitar Hero, Rock Band or anything that has come since.

It’s all about the peripheral, of course. The mini-turntable is undeniably cool. The spinning record has vinyl-like grooves in it and sparkly buts on the sides to make it look cooler when it’s spinning. There are three buttons, a crossfader that you move left and right to control the mix, an effects dial that messes with the sound or chooses your freestyle effects. It feels fantastic to play – it’s not much closer to actual DJing as Guitar Hero is to real shredding, but it really gives you the illusion of control over the music.

Caption editor's caveat: I know nothing about the DJ scene.

As notes scroll down a highway on the screen, you play by pressing the buttons, crossfading left and right or holding down a button and scratching back and forth. Arrows indicate when you have to scratch in a particular direction.

On anything below Hard, it’ll accept any movement as scratching, but on Expert you have to scratch back and forth with the same actions and rhythm as the actual mix, making the game a lot more technical. It’s impossible to actually fail a song in DJ Hero, but you can do spectacularly badly. You’re scored out of five stars, and the more stars you get, the more new setlists, decks, characters, outfits and other fun stuff you unlock.

A DJ doing authentically DJ-ish things. There may be music involved.

Playing DJ Hero is a zoned-out experience. It doesn’t lend itself as well to performance Rock Band and its ilk. It’s still a party game, but instead of leaping around in front of people you’re hidden at the back, controlling the music, regarding the screen with the customary rhythm-action gamer’s thousand yard stare. Hook up DJ Hero to a big TV and a good sound system and there isn’t a more quietly thrilling music games out there. It’s a very different experience to something like Rock Band; much more precise, but just as rewarding.

The quality of the presentation strikes you immediately. The opening cutscene is polished and brilliantly surreal, the graffiti-inspired art style in the menus isn’t garish, the effects whilst you’re actually playing the game are noticeably sleek – the vinyl-like sheen of the note highway, the bright, well-animated background visuals, the great animation on each of the selectable DJs. It oozes unselfconscious cool, too, managing to pull a rave-inspired style without appearing over-the-top or gaudy. All of it suits the music perfectly, of course, which is the most important thing.

You see lightgun games galore in game centres, obviously, but when Music GunGun! started appeared on the Coming Soon lists it piqued my interest. I’m unhealthily obsessed with rhythm-action, you see, and fairly interested in any lightgun game that doesn’t just involve shooting an endless parade of men in the face (which is a surprisingly high number in Japan). The name conjured awesome images in my head of a game that combined the two. I was not disappointed.

The cabinet itself is drowning in kawaii – the little guns have stars on the sides of them, and one of them’s pink. The characters are woodland animals, the reticule is in the shape of a heart. It’s ace. Actually they look more like hairdryers than guns. Music GunGun tends to be downstairs in the game centre with Taiko Drum Master, UFO machines and games where you hop up and down on a pogo stick to race rabbits and frogs around – in other words, all the stuff For Girls – but don’t worry, this is Japan. Masculinity has no meaning.

The Aim of the Game is to shoot cute puyo things that come flying towards you in time to the music. In the mode of Ouendan, circles fill up to tell you the optimum time to shoot. Each song has accompanying insane background graphics where you’re chasing a boss enemy – in one you’re chasing a truck whilst shooting puyothings in beat to the theme from Evangelion, and a sort of boss leans out of the window and throws squillions of enemies at you. You can always see your reticule on-screen, so it’s more about rhythm than shooting skill.

My favourite thing, though, is that the game tells you to do a pose at the end of each song, firing your gun into the air off-screen. Too few games demand posing. It’s a Taito game though, sadly, so you can’t use your e-Amusement pass and store your achievements with all the other bemani games.

Cheers for the pictures, Gigazine – check out some awesome videos over there too, featuring folk in costumes giving a great demonstration back at AOU 2009.

From the box art, all I can make out is that it’s a game about a boy going to a rural paradise for his summer holiday. Kids’ game, or heart-rending fake childhood simulator for depressed Japanese people stuck in horrible jobs in an oppressively huge city? We shall see!

The box is the first point of call for Nanikore!

Well, first impressions – the character models are extremely creepy. Their vacant stares recall pod people. It’s like they remembered to model everything except the face, and scrawled blank smiles on with crayon as an afterthought.

It appears we’re in Hokkaido – the last bastion of unspoiled rural countryside in all Japan and eternal romantic childhood motif for unhappy Japanese artists/filmmakers. A scary-faced wee girl is singing a Japanese kids’ song in the back seat of a car whilst we get lovely view of mountains and flowers. And cows! Who doesn’t love ‘em.

I’m deposited in a countryside house straight out of My Neighbour Totoro. There’s a tractor nearby with UNCLE FARM written on it. It would appear there’s nothing much to do except talk to my eerily cheerful family members and run around the beautifully drawn countryside – the backdrops are in sort-of 2D, and they are quite lovely. I can collect bugs and look at things to get fun countryside facts about birds and cows and agriculture. It’s all very idyllic, but in a distressingly uncanny way. I just don’t like their faces.

I can slide down a grassy hill on a piece of cardboard, dive into the lake, ride a conveyor belt (sadly not into a grinder – I don’t think this particular summer holiday can end in horrific tragedy)… and that appears to be it. Maybe I get a bike later on? At the end of every day I eat dinner with my perfect family and write a diary in baby Japanese – even I can read it without reaching for the denshi jisho – illustrated by kids’ drawings of mountains and family. Sweet. But still, sort of eerie.

I still can’t quite figure out who this game’s for. The simplicity might suggest it’s for kids, but there’s also a distinct lack of action that might only be tolerable for laid-back adults. The longer I play it the more depressing I’m actually finding it – like Ghibli films, it seems to yearn for a time long gone in Japan when childhoods were carefree and farming was a reasonable occupation. Come to think, I see a lot of salarymen playing this on the PSP on their commutes. The game’s either a way to relive happy childhood memories or, more likely, invent one that never was.