This makes me think of old times when we played the same levels of Super Mario Bros for days without any add-on. Today, looks like we can’t even buy a game if it’s not going to be online or have some sort of “collectors edition” with figurine or game-related bonus item. Anyway, these are the latest announcements: Pikmin hat for Animal Crossing, Sackboy figurines, new Mass Effect DLC under development and printable Killzone 2 stuff.

You’ll find the Pikmin hat for your character in Animal Crossing city folk in your mailbox until February 12 and it’s completely free. The Sackboy figurines are currently being manufactured and they’ll range from 5cm to 45cm (huge!) but I don’t have any info about pricing yet. I don’t know anything about Mass effect either, because the developers are very reserved but I hope that it comes out soon, so I can play it along with Bring Down the Sky (I don’t have the free space to install mass effect any more after Dead Space, Mirror’s Edge and the Source SDK. As for Killzone 2, I’ll make it short: find hidden stuff in the game and you’ll get hidden stuff in real life. That’s it. If you find a token or something like that during the single player you’ll be awarded with a code that allows you to download high-resolution prints for paper-crafts or just posters! Sure it’s a great idea but the file sharing community won’t need too much time to create a “Killzone2 paper-craft compilation”.

Nostalgic side of the day: Super Mario theme played with bottles!

They fit like the devil and holy water but apparently, Square-Enix offered big bucks to buy Eidos. Eidos’ shareholders will have a meeting next moth to ponder this buyout but there’s no doubt they’ll accept, because Square Enix is paying Eidos 130% its cost! Looks like a weird move from Square whose financial forecast for 2009’s first quarter are frightening. Anyway, I’m really curious to see what they’re going to do with the new studios and intellectual properties. In my opinion, they’re going to hand over european localisations of their games to Eidos London, Wimbledon and Montreal. Probably they’ll keep on producing games for the existing franchises under new management. If they’ll give Lightning’s face to Lara or just her breast size, I’m going to cry. I wonder what would happen if Square bought Bungie. This sucks on ice!

I couldn’t get more excited for a Dead Space trailer thinking of the new control possibilities and immersion.

Also, while the Scout update for Team Fortress 2 is slowly revealed, Valve takes his time to announce us that we suck. Well, you suck. I call myself out. Despite their efforts to fix any bug and exploit they still noticed lots of cheaters and bug abusers and decided to remove their special weapons for a month. I hope nobody of you is among these unlucky people that will have their back burned online.

Edit: You know what my thoughts are about casual gaming, brain training and so on, being a hardcore-retro gamer, but this really makes my arms fall: Dream Club. (no tag in the post for this announcement. I refuse to add one)