The kit, as far as I can discern, will come on a CD available from high street stores – rather than it being a digital download. The price will be ¥3800 (£29) for the data CD on its own, or ¥14,490 (£109.530) for the data CD PLUS a copy of A9 which, because of the current strength of Japanese Yen feels a bit pricey at the moment.

So what can we expect from the Building kit? Around 60 new buildings are being offered which will, as with the standard in-game constructions, add their own benefits to the game – whether it be increasing cultural or commercial value, attracting new people and so on. Presumably they also allow you to guide the AI construction: So, if you place, say, thatched houses, the AI is discouraged from building high-rise or overly expensive buildings in the surrounding area.

This is what we can expect:

Hotel
Camp
Oberujuhoteru
Motel
Hut
Designer Hotels
Minshuku (small hotel)

Store
Downtown shopping district 1-5
Luncher
Drugstore
Greasy spoon (I can’t wait to see this one!)
Bookstore
Outfitter
Home center

Public Facility
Recycling Center
Credit union
Hospital (Odd that there has been no A9 hospital until now…)

Fitness Facility
Skating rink
Baseball Ground
Equestrian club

A number of other buildings are also included.

As a special bonus, if you happen to purchase the kit in either one of the two big electronics chain stores – either Bic Camera or Yodobashi Camera – the data disc comes with a limited edition version of those particular stores. So, purchasing in Bic Camera gets you the Bic Camera store:

Likewise, purchasing from Yodobashi gets you the Yodobashi model:

All in all, then, it’s looking like a worthy addition to the game – if a bit expensive for overseas A9 fans. No doubt someone will Blog about it when the time comes and we’ll get a decent YouTube movie to assess them further.

Vania600 works under the Sakuradima circle of artists, the home page of which is HERE. Background detail on him is rather sketchy – if you will excuse the pun – but I guess with a little digging Google might deliver up the odd nugget of enlightenment.

I love this.

The new fast train between Narita airport and Tokyo, which debuted on the 17th of this month, is called, somewhat prosaically, the Skyliner. However, the track it runs upon, between Narita and Keisei-Takasago Station, has the far more inspirational moniker Narita Sky Access.

Here’s a few words on the line and train it self – which is, typically, fast and quite lovely to behold.

This new route and train will cut travel time between Tokyo and Narita down from 50 to 36 minutes. The line is operated by Keisei Electric Railway with smaller sections operated by an number of other companies. The route takes advantage of disused track originally planned for the now abandoned Narita Shinkansen project. Cost of travelling will be ¥2,400 or about £17.50.

As for the Skyliner, and more interestingly, it was designed by Yamamoto Kansai, a Japanese fashion designer – apparently famous over there. His overall concept and inspiration for the exterior design was ‘wind’ and ‘poise’ for the interior. He also designed the uniform for the station and cabin attendants.

The Skyliner (officially named Keisei AE series) doesn’t appear in A9, just in case you were wondering. It has a top speed of 160 km/h making it the fastest conventional J-Train.

The community for DDG was friendly and more established than it seems to be for our beloved A-Train (perhaps due, in part, to the pick-up-and-play-ability of the game – quite literally you can get the hang of it in minutes).

So I got hold of a copy, really, really enjoyed it, and lurked around the Densha de Go! forum occasionally. Then (I think this is what happened) some chancer bought the domain name that Butch had been using and made his own – completely crap – DDG site. Butch was rather irritated by this and disappeared in a cloud of red mist. The forum slowly died.

Fastforward two years and it’s back again. There’s some tale involving lost cookies, passwords and a backlog of user accounts, but whatever the reasons were it’s great to see the old place alive again. It might not see the kind of activity it once did, but a few of the die-hard gamers are still there and as an English-language source of information for  DDG it’s the first place you should visit. I was relatively impressed by the size of DDG’s fanbase considering that it is, after all,  an obscure foreign transport game. More impressive still when compared to the far smaller numbers of interested gamers who visited my own A-Train forum. Perhaps A-Train will always be too niche for most tastes….

Like I said, DDG can be compulsive: Rather than laying track and organising schedules you actually operate the train from inside the cab. At the station your vehicle needs to be on time (as you’d expect for a Japanese train) and brought gently to a stop to within inches of a set marker – as is the case for the real J-Train drivers. Along the way you accumulate a points chain that is broken if you screw up by speeding, sounding the horn too much and so on.

There’s a Japanese site for the latest version (on NDS) HERE. I’ve got the Nintendo DS version and so far i’d say it was inferior to the PSP incarnation in terms of control and graphics – so if you have the choice go for PSP. THIS is the DDG FINAL! game page with a video of in-game footage.

You might also want to view this game footage from a recent version which includes the Shinkansen.

In Japan you can play DDG in the game centers….

…not only that but there’s a game over there inwhich you get to operate a bus – come to think of it there’s a few PC versions of this type of game, too. If I’m not mistaken they used to talk about them on the DDG forum. Brilliant.

I awoke one morning determined to play a proper scenario – get a better feel for the flow of a game in A9. I chose the first scenario (the designated starter map of the game), consisting of a well-developed office district surrounded by three satellite towns – all eventually, I guess, to be swallowed up as the city expands. Anyway, my point here is that it isn’t until you begin to play for real that attention is drawn to the differences in game play, some subtle – others obvious, and how they’re combining to enhance the game overall.

So, starting today, and for the next few updates, I’ll be looking more closely at the gameplay features new to A9 that are making all the difference.

And (if I may begin with a conjunction), in response to THIS question from dimas, knowledge of the Japanese language is a distinct advantage upon first approaching the game. However, knowledge of A8 or AHX from XBox360 is a pretty solid back-up if your Nihongo is lacking. Inspite of the apparent complexity with new variables like power and pollution to consider, menus are essentially set-up as they were in A8. It just takes a little time and patience as you familiarise yourself with the layout. Rather than irritate my old lady with requests to translate everything, I’ve been relying more upon my limited knowledge of Kana and by comparing images of the menu screens in versions of A8/A9. On the whole it’s worked well enough. Take a look at these screens:

Comparing the Japanese and Euro A8 data from the Balance Sheet screen is straightforward enough. But even with the new menu in A9 (the image to the far right) we can see that the essential layout is similar to that of A8. Therefore we have Total Returns, Total Costs columns highlighted and positioned to the left as they were before. Total Debt, Total Capital and Total Funds are stacked to right. All I did, then, was compare the Kanji from the two Japanese versions for sililarities and check them against the Euro version. The Kana (the more simplistic-looking characters) I can manage anyway. The A9 menu just has more buildings and subsidiaries and therefore a few more lines of information than before.

For example, in the A9 menu, looking at the highlighted Total Returns column on the top left and counting down 3 lines we see the Truck Returns data (currently at 0). Clearly this doesn’t appear in A8 at all. From there count down a further 4 lines and we see the Subsidiary Returns data (¥105, 430, 000). I didn’t have a clue what this was until I compared it to the J-A8 screen which has the same characters, then matched this with the Euro A8 menu to identify it as Subsidiary Returns.

In this manner I have been working my way through the various menus – and improving my Japanese slightly at the same time!!   I do intend to post comparison screens at some point to help others who are struggling.

Anyway, I digress….

For the moment I want to talk about a feature in A9 which is so brilliantly practical and useful it makes you wonder why it took Artdink several generations of the game to realise it’s worth. This feature is nothing more than a simple green ring which appears around stations and truck stops to show their scope of effectiveness. It indicates the perimeter within which materials can be used and designates the area inside of which you may pick-up or drop off those little grey boxes.

Above we have a truck stop situated next to a materials yard in the center of the image. Clicking the truck stop produces the green circle you see. Now, to deliver or pick-up materials from this truck stop I must place a materials yard within the circle.

Here’s the same truck stop close-up (a yellow area of the road with four distinctive signs) sitting right next to the materials yard. You’ll see the trucks pause within this area of road, deposit/pick-up, and move along. In reality it didn’t need to be this close to the materials yard – as I mentioned, the green circle indicates an area within which loading/unloading operations are effective – the yard could just as easily have been positioned close to the beach to the upper right. You know, the inclusion, or rather, the return of buses and trucks is another game-changing design feature which deserves a post all of it’s own.

Okay, so what if we have two or more stations or truck stops within close proximity to one another?

In this image there are now two green circles – a bright green circle around the truck stop and a larger, dimmer circle around a train station (stations generally have a wider active area). Going to the construction menu and selecting, in this case, a new materials yard, I bring the selection (seen as a red box) into the area of the truck stop. Because the circles of station and factory overlap somewhat both have become visible. However, since I’m only within range of the factory this circle highlights brighter than the station’s. Also notice that the active building (in this instance it’s the truck stop) shades blue.

Moving the materials yard within the perimeter of both station and truck stop highlights both buildings and green circles to indicate that loading/unloading from this either location is possible for this yard.

As you can see above, this feature is also available (it can be switched off in options menu) for the truck depot which here is acting as a loading base from a factory just south and to the left – but still within the active green circle.

Here there are multiple converging areas around the main city station. My original truck stop is just visible at the very top of the image.

Simple. Practical. Time-saving. Love it.

The other day I purchased a new graphics card for my gaming PC. It’s an ATI Radeon HD 5570 – a ‘low profile’ card to fit the small design of my Aspire X3810. It’s about the best LP card I’ll be able to fit into the casing and has pushed the frame rate whilst playing A9 up to a very steady 50 fps on 1600×1200, full AA. The only thing I find that’s killing the frame rate is shadowing which drops it by around 30 fps.

More soon…