Square Enix: 'Of Course' Dragon Quest X MMO Will Be Released Outside Japan

The MMORPG Dragon Quest X will “of course” be released outside Japan, according to a Square Enix producer speaking to Famitsu magazine, as translated by Polygon.

But there’s a catch. Of course!

“However, as for whether it’ll be run in the Dragon Quest style in the overseas market, every nation has its own play style and sensibilities, so I don’t think it’ll be a single game worldwide like with Final Fantasy 11,” said executive producer Yuu Miyake.

Interesting. So Square Enix’s belief is that since the Dragon Quest role-playing game formula is more popular in Japan than in the U.S., it may have to make fundamental changes to the “play style” of the game for overseas versions?

This should not be read as confirmation that the Wii U version of the game will make it outside of Japan. Square Enix recently announced that the game will appear on the PC platform on Sept. 26. This makes a lot of sense, since the extremely low sales of Wii U hardware mean that Square Enix likely can’t get enough subscribers to the MMO based on Nintendo platforms alone. It’s also a loss of one of the Wii U’s bigger exclusives — good for Square Enix, bad for Nintendo.

Dragon Quest X still might happen on Wii U in the Western markets, but it’s much more likely at this point that we see a PC version.

DC Takes 'Before Watchmen' to Times Square with Jumbotron Ad

In Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons; groundbreaking graphic novel, the story climaxes with the appearance of something unexpected in New York's Times Square. Here in the real world, something almost as surprising is showing up in the same location: A jumbotron ad for Before Watchmen, DC Entertainment's series of prequels to the 1985 classic.

The 30-second advertisement is the first time any comic book or graphic novel has been promoted on the Jumbotron, and after its broadcast to hundreds of unsuspecting New Yorkers starting July 16, it's going to go national; airing during commercial breaks on cable channels including IFC, TNT and TruTV according to a report in the New York Post.

RELATED: 'Watchmen,' 'Walking Dead' and '30 Days of Night' Creators Help Launch Black Mask Comics (Exclusive)

Showcasing art from Jae Lee, Adam Hughes, JG Jones, Amanda Conner, Andy Kubert, Darwyn Cooke and Lee Bemejo, the ad links the various Before Watchmen collections not only to the original comic, but also to Zack Snyder's 2009 movie adaptation, perhaps in light of his current Man of Steel success.

This isn't the first television commercial that DC Entertainment has created for its comic output; when the company relaunched its core superhero line in September 2011 as "The New 52," that launch was also promoted with television ads, along with radio spots and widespread mainstream media coverage.

Clinkle raises $25 million to kill Square

FORTUNE -- Lucas Duplan demurs when I ask if his mobile payment startup, Clinkle, is intended to be a Square-killer.

"I don't view this as a zero-sum game, and am appreciative of all the people trying to innovate here, including Square," he says. "We're just looking to build the best possible product to delight our users... but obviously there will be impact felt throughout the industry if we succeed."

Apparently Stanford University's computer science program has a few electives in political science. So I'll say it for him: Duplan wants to destroy companies like Square  by leap-frogging their reliance on proprietary merchant-side hardware -- transforming the entire payment space into one that requires nothing more than phones or tablets. No more credit card machines or mobile device plug-ins. Just the same free app downloaded by both the buyer and seller.

It's a big vision, which is why Clinkle today is announcing $25 million in seed funding from some very big names.

Accel Partners led the round, with Accel partner Jim Breyer also making a personal investment. Other participants include Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Intuit (INTU), VMWare co-founders Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum, Marc Benioff, Regis McKenna, Andrew Viterbi, Owen Van Natta and a whole bunch of Duplan's former Stanford professors.

Accel is a particularly interesting lead, given that it was the first institutional money into Facebook Inc. (FB) -- the company whose early rollout strategy Clinkle hopes to mimic. Duplan's plan is to make the app ubiquitous in college communities -- among both students and merchants -- and then expand from there.

"If your mission is to convince hundreds of thousands of different merchants to take this, it will take too long," he explains. "You have to short-circuit the adoption. When you study how networks get formed, it almost always comes down to closed tight-knit communities, replicating the process and eventually connecting them."

Accel's Breyer was originally a bit skeptical when introduced to the company by Diane Greene -- particularly about what happens when students go home for break or graduate -- but got more comfortable after meeting with student groups at both Stanford and Harvard (where he sits the Harvard Corp. board). What he learned was that the general idea of a seamless payment system was appealing to the students, and that many of their hometowns either were, or were close to, other college communities. It also helped that Clinkle plans to offer incentives that are more relevant to their target audience, than traditional credit card perks like frequent flier miles. Also worth noting that Breyer was not only a longtime Facebook board member, but also was a director with Wal-Mart Stores (WMT).

The $25 million is expected to take Clinkle past initial roll-out this fall, and help it build out all of the relevant security and compliance features. Duplan is not yet providing too many specifics of how the app actually works, but the high-profile investors clearly saw something unique.

"Our goal is to provide an experience that can let people replace their physical cash and physical credit cards, not to just to enable merchants to take cards," Duplan says. "Right now if I challenged you to download every payment app and leave your wallet at home, you'd be hard-pressed to compete with cash and credit cards," Duplan says. "We want to help people do that, not just make it easier for merchants to take cards."

Follow me on Twitter @sajilpl

Book News: Turkish Protesters Form 'Taksim Square Book Club'

People stand and read books during a silent protest last week at Istanbul's Taksim Square.

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.
Erdem Gunduz, the protester known as "The Standing Man" who held a six-hour silent vigil in Instanbul's Taksim Square in response to clashes between Turkish police and demonstrators, has inspired protesters to form "The Taksim Square Book Club" — a group of demonstrators, some masked, standing silently and reading books. An Al Jazeera slideshow shows a many protesters holding pointedly political books such as George Orwell's 1984 (which has recently enjoyed a massive surge in popularity in the U.S., following revelations about NSA surveillance.)Jane Austen might be the new face on the £10 note, says the outgoing governor of the Bank of England. According to The Guardian, Sir Mervyn King told the Treasury select committee that the author of Pride and Prejudice is "quietly waiting in the wings." This comes after an outcry last month over the planned replacement of Elizabeth Fry, one of only two women (!) other than the queen ever to appear on a British banknote.John Quincy Adams, sixth U.S. president, champion of the Treaty of Ghent and possessor of stern sideburns, was also a rather undistinguished poet. He once said, "Could I have chosen my own genius and condition, I would have made myself a great poet." His ode to a Eurasian bullfinch is up for auction in July: "Not Solomon the wise, in all his glory / Bright bird of beauty, was array'd like thee / And thou like him shalt be renown'd in story - / Bird of the wise, the valiant and the free."For The New Yorker, Ian Buruma writes about the Chinese poet Liao Yiwu, who is living in exile: "And so it is that this immensely gifted Chinese writer performs his poetic acts of mourning for the entertainment of audiences in Berlin and New York—an exotic "dissident" abroad, his voice to be heard everywhere except where it is most needed."Barnes & Noble will stop manufacturing its own Nook tablets, the bookstore chain announced in a press release Tuesday. The tablets will soon be, ahem, "co-branded with yet to be announced third party manufacturers of consumer electronics products." Earlier this week, the company reported a fourth-quarter net loss of $118.6 million, up from a loss of $56.9 million at the same time last year.The spy novelist Alex Berenson gives his take on the Edward Snowden saga in an essay for The New York Times (his use of the phrase "huggle-muggle" alone makes it worth reading): "For a spy novelist like me, the Edward J. Snowden story has everything. A man driven by ego and idealism — can anyone ever distinguish the two? — leaves his job and his beautiful girlfriend behind. He must tell the world the Panopticon has arrived. His masters vow to punish him, and he heads for Moscow in a desperate search for refuge. In reality he's found the world's most dangerous place to be a dissident, where power is a knife blade and a sprinkle of polonium. ... I wish I'd written it."
 

Times Square takes yoga time-out

21 June 2013 Last updated at 16:41 GMT The event is into its 11th year New York's Times Square, one of the world's busiest crossroads, has come to a standstill to allow yoga enthusiasts to mark the summer solstice.

The Manhattan square became a sea of yogis exercising in time on their mats, beneath the billboards.

Tim Tompkins, co-founder of event, said part of its appeal was finding stillness and calm amid the city rush on the longest day of the year.

Into its 11th year, the event has grown from three people to more than 15,000.

Free yoga classes began at 07:30 local time (11:30 GMT) and were due to continue until sunset.

The oldest of the teachers in the square was 94, the AFP news agency reported.

"Yogis on the screens in Times Square!" one woman wrote on Twitter.

"Amazing way to start the summer!"