We say goodbye to one of the greats, Akira Toriyama, passing at the age of 68... Also, Cowboy Bebop collaborates with Overwatch, Team Angel, the American live-action Sailor Moon documents found in The Library of Congress, and One Piece's Sanji gets an official FOOD WARS spinoff! Plus, an overseas anime piracy site is prosecuted for the first time, and Toho Godzilla's wins an Oscar! Meanwhile in Japan, a Prefecture Governor wants foreigners to pay special fees, and enjoy Sakura season without allergies, and a toll is officially added to Mt Fuji?! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/animejamsession/support

This week's show was recorded on March 10th, or MAR10 day. A day to celebrate Mario because... it's not his birthday... nor an anniversary... just another silly nerd holiday like some others out there. Nintendo does embrace MAR10 day though with some announcements of their own, including the obvious (a new movie, of course), and the "well that makes sense" (a new lego set). We celebrate Mario and ALL things great in the gaming industry... and drag those things bringing the gaming industry down (certain CEOs). It all makes up another week of the longest running podcast about video games, Orange Lounge Radio!

I finished Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth and moved on to Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and no, you don't actually know the story, so be wary of spoilers. (Not from me, though!) Octopath Traveler has been delisted temporarily from the Nintendo eShop, most likely due to the change in publisher. Toys For Bob, the studio that brought us Skylanders, is leaving Microsoft after the Activision merger. Sony Interactive performed a Reduction in Workforce this week, closing several studios and canceling other projects in flight. EA has also performed layoffs this week, cancelling several licensed games that were in development. The interesting part of their announcement is how much it actually costs to lay off employees and cancel license deals. This leads to a discussion about if games are really more expensive to the consumer or not, and if the rising game budgets are sustainable given inflation. Then we talk to Rob about how he hasn't started Final Fantasy VII Rebirth yet.

On tonight's show... We discuss WcDonalds becoming a reality, two of the largest manga piracy websites are offline, and a co-founder of the first North American anime club and one of the founders of Furry fandom passes... Also, ⁠Crunchyroll⁠ offers compensation for digital copy owners, confirms AI subtitling testing, and no price changes except for ⁠Funimation⁠ legacy subscribers. Lastly, a voice actress deletes Twitter over hate messages caused by false accusations, and ⁠Gundam⁠ creator, Yoshiyuki Tomino returns to anime! Meanwhile in Japan, a cursed festival to be filmed for the first time, in-flight ⁠KitKat⁠s discontinued by an airline, and an ATM will automatically play anti-fraud videos for people on their cellphones?! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/animejamsession/support

Sadly a horrible trend in the gaming industry continues this week, as Sony has announced layoffs impacting many of their studios in different countries. We try to discuss on this show answers as to why this keeps happening this year in particular, and if there could possibly be an end in sight. On top of this news from multiple studios as well as studio separations, there's a whole lot of shakeup going on in the gaming industry. We try to wrap our heads around this and much more in this weeks gaming news. All on another episode of the longest running podcast about video games, Orange Lounge Radio!

I tried the Apple Vision Pro at an XR meetup for three minutes, which means I'm an expert on it now - and I also met an Apple fanboy who actually believed that everything the AVP did was revolutionary and was never part of any VR device before it. (It was wild!) Sony announced that they are investigating making the PlayStation VR2 headset work on PC - which would be fantastic for the hardware. EA Sports will be paying college football players $600 plus a copy of the game if they opt in to EA Sports College Football 2025, but how will they stop people from creating players who opted out without running afoul of the law? Since there was no OLR, we chatted about JRPG lovers eating good between Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Persona 3 Reload, and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. We also talked about Multimorphic's new title for their modular pinball machine, this one based on The Princess Bride.

Noggin the Nog was a Smallfilms series that ran from 1959 to 1965 and briefly returned in 1982. Noggin becomes King of the Nogs and befriends a talking bird and an ice dragon! Can he stop his evil uncle Nogbad the Bad from stealing his throne? Please send us your comments, questions, requests and complaints. […]

We start off talking about the return of EA Sports College Football 2025, because it was teased this week to be returning this Summer, and how it relates to one of the quotes in the show intro. Xbox is bringing four games to other consoles - Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, Sea of Thieves, and Grounded, to expand the reach of Xbox Games Studios franchises - but don't expect Halo to be on PS5 any time soon. Of course Phil Spencer says he'd love to see Sony exclusives on Xbox, but he's not holding his breath. He thinks it's in their best interest, though. This goes into an explanation as to WHY the console wars are "a thing" for consumers, even if it's not for the industry. It's because of the economic status of the loudest gamers - they can't afford multiple consoles so they want THEIR choice to be the correct one. Then we talk to Rob about the Xbox games going multiplatform.

Texas A-Kon postponed, MediaOCD acquires AnimEigo, and Pokémon gets a Time Magazine cover set as well as lighting up the night sky in NYC! Also, an animator survey reveals yearly salary and average hours worked, and the numbers are exactly how you'd think, TOYOTA releases an Initial D-inspired series trailer, and Tokyo gets new Sailor Moon manhole covers! Meanwhile in Japan... Osaka school to switch to fall start and potential English language classes, a vending machine begins selling old bread, and doctors recommend acting like a dying cockroach to help with hay fever?! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/animejamsession/support

The rumors about Xbox last week were really going into overdrive, and this week we finally got some clarity from some of the big leaders at Team Xbox about the future direction of the gaming platform. The information we received seemed... not as hyped as everyone seemed to think it would be. On the Internet? Surely you jest. Still, we talk about the news that did come out including four Xbox titles soon to be multiplatform. In the news later on, we talk about a similar story from Sony regarding PC multi-platform releases. We talk about all this news and much more on another episode of the longest running video game podcast, Orange Lounge Radio!