Patently Ridiculous

It’s friday night and I should be having fun. Instead, I’m being the most boring person on the Internet and randomly searching for Japanese patents. Why, because sometime you find clues to a new and exciting game.

No such luck today but I did find this patent from our good friend Kenichi Nishi. It’s very confusingly written (as are all legal documents) but it seems to be a patent for the gameplay structure in skip’s 2003 GameCube RPG Giftpia. What’s strange is that the patent was filed in the US in 2004, a year after the game was released in Japan. Further proof that the game was definitely supposed to be released in the States? I think so. Funnily enough, some of the less specific gameplay descriptions also sound like they could apply to Chibi-Robo. I guess that just shows that Nishi’s RPGs all have a certain something in common.

Interestingly, the patent also claims that the proposed RPG could be made for a console with ‘intergrated monitor’. I’d like to think that this means that a DS version is on the way… but I suspect this kind of comment is standard practice and doesn’t really amount to anything.

Still, it’s intersting to see how these things are handled behind the scenes and it goes to show why developers sometimes appear to be inactive for so long. It’s because they have to spend all their time writing ridiuclously long documents like this one.

By the way: If anyone can get the images on this page to load then please send them to me. I’m quite keen to see what they look like.