Majesco Entertainment

Majesco Entertainment Company (formerly Majesco Sales, Inc., commonly referred to as just Majesco) is an American video game publisher and distributor founded in 1986, headquartered in Edison, New Jersey, United States.

History

Majesco was first known as a reissuer of old titles that had been abandoned by their original publisher. By cutting the prices and eventually arranging the rights to self-manufacture games for both Nintendo and Sega systems, the company found a sustainable market niche.

Later, Majesco arranged with Sega to manufacture a version of its Genesis (known as Mega Drive outside North America) 16-bit console, which had been superseded by the 32-bit Saturn. It released this in 1998 as the Genesis 3 and followed up with a version of the handheld Game Gear called the Game Gear Core System.

The company's focus shifted to in-house game development, initially under the brand Pipe-Dream Interactive since few believed they could make the transition successfully. Majesco focused on developing for then-current generation systems, such as Nintendo's GameCube and Game Boy Advance, Microsoft's Xbox, and Sony's PlayStation 2. A few of the titles it released, involving popular characters, included a few Bomberman titles for the Gamecube and Game Boy Advance. Majesco also published PC games with Terminal Reality as the developer, such as BloodRayne and BloodRayne 2.

Technical analysis

In finance, technical analysis is a security analysis methodology for forecasting the direction of prices through the study of past market data, primarily price and volume.Behavioral economics and quantitative analysis use many of the same tools of technical analysis, which, being an aspect of active management, stands in contradiction to much of modern portfolio theory. The efficacy of both technical and fundamental analysis is disputed by the efficient-market hypothesis which states that stock market prices are essentially unpredictable.

History

The principles of technical analysis are derived from hundreds of years of financial market data. Some aspects of technical analysis began to appear in Joseph de la Vega's accounts of the Dutch markets in the 17th century. In Asia, technical analysis is said to be a method developed by Homma Munehisa during early 18th century which evolved into the use of candlestick techniques, and is today a technical analysis charting tool. In the 1920s and 1930s Richard W. Schabacker published several books which continued the work of Charles Dow and William Peter Hamilton in their books Stock Market Theory and Practice and Technical Market Analysis. In 1948 Robert D. Edwards and John Magee published Technical Analysis of Stock Trends which is widely considered to be one of the seminal works of the discipline. It is exclusively concerned with trend analysis and chart patterns and remains in use to the present. Early technical analysis was almost exclusively the analysis of charts, because the processing power of computers was not available for the modern degree of statistical analysis. Charles Dow reportedly originated a form of point and figure chart analysis.

Double Fine Productions

Double Fine Productions, Inc. (commonly referred to as just Double Fine) is an American video game developer founded in July 2000 by Tim Schafer after his departure from LucasArts. He started Double Fine with programmers David Dixon and Jonathan Menzies in what was once a clog shop in San Francisco. After several months of working on the demo for what would become Psychonauts, a mixture of personnel from the Grim Fandango development team and other new employees were slowly added to begin production.

Though the company's first two games Psychonauts and Brütal Legend were critically praised, both underperformed publishers' expectations. The future of the company was assured when Schafer turned to several in-house prototypes built during a two-week period known as "Amnesia Fortnight" to expand as digital, smaller titles, all of which were licensed through publishers and met with commercial success. Schafer has since repeated these Amnesia Fortnights, using fan-voting mechanics, to help select and build smaller titles. Double Fine is also credited with driving interest in crowdfunding in video games, having been able to raise more than $3 million for the development of Broken Age, at the time one of the largest projects funded by Kickstarter. The company has continued to build on their independent developer status and has promoted efforts to help other, smaller independent developers through its clout.

Cooking Mama

Cooking Mama (クッキング ママ, Kukkingu Mama) is a cookery simulation-styled minigame compilation video game for the Nintendo DS and iOS developed by Office Create and published by Taito, Majesco, and 505 Games. It was awarded IGN's "Best Of E3" award for 2006 and was joined by a sequel for the DS, Cooking Mama 2: Dinner with Friends. Two games have since been made for the Wii: Cooking Mama: Cook Off and Cooking Mama: World Kitchen.

Gameplay

In Cooking Mama, the player is tasked with cooking various meals using the device's touch screen. Following the instructions of the titular "Mama", the player uses the stylus or their finger to perform different kitchen tasks, including chopping vegetables, slicing meat, flipping food in pans, and arranging the final items on the plate. The version of the game for iOS also takes advantage of the accelerometer in its devices with some similar gameplay to Cooking Mama: Cook Off. Each of these tasks is performed by completing a mini-game which usually lasts less than 10 seconds. The gameplay structure consists of the player progressing through a series of short minigames. The game features a total of 96 different dishes.