I recently moved to Japan and am studying Japanese pretty hard. I have a DS, but have said goodbye to my consoles and computer so am greatly missing gaming. I would buy Japanese games, but I know few Kanji and it is a real pain to look them up as I am playing a game.

However, I recently found out that Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass on the DS shows the hiragana (furigana) for Kanji if you tap the Kanji with the pen. This has been awesome. I have been playing and really enjoying the game and getting really good Japanese practice. If I don't know a word it takes moments to plug it into my electronic dictionary and get the translation. It's great, because the game keeps using the same words that are relevant to the story so its easy to learn many new words.

In fact it has been so great, that I'm looking for new games that offer this feature. Ideally on the DS, but I am open to buying a PS2 or a Wii. I assume there are a number of others, since the Japanese themselves forget kanji since they are so difficult. I suspect most of these games will be kids games, as kids books for example only have hiragana as they are still learning the Kanji.

So, anyone know any others? Has anyone used games to study Japanese?

a lot of games do that, although i'm no familiar with playing japanese DS games. My friend had the japanese version of that mario RPG game, i can't remember what it is called on DS. That game does that. I bought mario superstar baseball and warioware on GC in Japan and those had hiragana on them, most games that are kid friendly will. I also have fire emblem on GC, and that didn't, so that should give you some idea.

playing games is ok for japanese practice, but i would recommend watching dramas instead. Anime is no good because it's just too unrealistic, it's not useful japanese.

I agree, most anime is not very useful.  I do watch a bunch of dramas for the practice.

Games are really good for me because I don't get much of a chance to read Japanese, since my Kanji is poor.  Unlike listening reading gives you the chance to go at your own pace and understand the Japanese much better. Very useful I think.

what worked best for me was just writing messages on my cell phone to friends. Another thing to do is to use something like MSN messenger with people, that has helped me so much. Also, I write a diary in Japanese on www.mixi.jp. If you get any friends 90% of them will probably have a diary on there, and this can be helpful as writing and reading practice plus you can learn more things about your friends.

As far as video games go you're gonna want to stick to kid friendly games (not kiddy, but kid friendly) and most of them will offer hiragana and will just be easier to understand.

Is that furigana (kana on top of the kanji) or kana switched for kanjis?

if you haven't found this, this is the best japanese dictionary on the internet that i know of and i've been using it for years. It has all the words you need to know even all the slang, and for almost every word there is loads of example sentences that will show you how to use the words in a sentence.

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1C

 Furigana.  Sorry I didn't realize there was a specific word for it.

 Yeah I've used that one.  I tend to just use my electronic dictionary though.  Another great tool is rikaichan for Firefox.

 http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan

 If you mouse over the Japanese is gives you reading and the various possible translations.

 Thanks for the diary site, I'll check it out.  I have been keeping my own diary on my computer, but having it online could be good.