While the release of Street Fighter 4 slowly approaches, media molecule found a way to tease us with new sackboys inspired to the popular beat’em up. Chun Li, Ryu, Guile and Zangief will be available from this week PSN update at the price of 2$ each or 6$ for the whole crew. I already hear the tapping on the pads to create new levels just for them.

Now, a poll update! I really appreciate the feedback you gave me about the site style through the poll but I see someone don’t like it completely or don’t like it at all so please comment. I’d like to know what you find ugly or hard to read, navigate and so on.

The new poll I added comes from a question I saw many times in forums and chats and nobody took the time to count the hands of those who are favourable or contrary. C’mon, cast your vote. I know the majority of the people passing by here are males.

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!

Actually, mine is an elephant bank but it serves its purpose well.

After the E3 i browsed www.VGreleases.com and took notes about the release dates of some games. I’m going to spend 400€ or more within December 2009.

If you expected me to list all that I’ve seen at E3 (e.g. on other websites) You’ve come to the wrong place. That would be just a copy paste. Now, here are my impression:

Left 4 Dead 2: I hope the promised updates for L4D aren’t going into this one. I’d be greatly disappointed. The look is ok. I just can’t stand the daylight for a zombie game and the new characters. I love the L4D foursome because everyone has character but seeing the new survivors didn’t excite me at all, except for the white-dressed Nick the gambler.

Project Natal: Incredible! A device that can’t work if you change your pants while you play. Jokes aside, it’s a very interesting project. I’m just a little disappointed about the lack of buttons and physical feedback. This way it looks just like the power glove for 4 limbs.

Halo ODST and Halo Reach: Cool, more info and another chapter in the Halo saga. Too bad Bungie is stuck to dual stick controls in his FPSs.

Milo: Enough tamagotchi, thanks.

XBOX communities: Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm are coming to X360. Good, but often who spends time on these communities likes keyboards to write.

Assassin’s creed 2: Awesome job on the visuals. Though I don’t like the game and I’m never going to play it from what I’ve seen Ubisoft is doing an amazing job on the dubbing (side note: I’m Italian and Venice is in north-eastern Italy).

New Super Mario Bros Wii: a 4-player, 10-years old, dream that comes to life for me. I’ll play it alone from start to finish. Maybe it’s just me, but Instead of the yellow toad I’d like to see princess Peach as in Super Mario Bros 2.

WiiFit+: no comment. Why don’t you release WiiWeightLifting? I’d need that.

Super Mario Galaxy 2: The best title in videogame history is getting a sequel? I’ll need to borrow some drool from my friends.

Wii Vitality Sensor: Don’t ever think about WiiRelax. Release something like… WiiZombie that detects your heart beat and places the zombie horde accordingly. Oh, and with rumble support it could be great for WiiMasturbate too.

Metroid: Other M: I’d have to spend several rows on this. Let’s just say that I’m very afraid of the development team and the possible outcome. But since Itagaki isn’t around any more maybe Team Ninja will use their breast jiggle engine to animate some monster’s gelatinous tentacles (I’m not thinking about hentai).

PSP Go: Smooth move! Really worth the price in my opinion but they’re still missing a point: protect that damn screen!

The Last Guardian: Expect some more poetic puzzles from this one.

Sony’s motion controller: Good thing they used already-on-market hardware like the PS3 Camera. Bad thing they copied. Again. Apparently people likes to throw away dignity in the effort of making money.

Final Fantasy XIV: I haven’t been into MMORPGs for 4 years now and this won’t change my mind but I hope that it’ll be far more playable than FFXI.

Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil for PSP: Sometimes more of the same is good. Oh, and the 4-player co-op in MGS will have some granted hilarious implications.

New Castlevania and MGS arcade: Sometimes more of the same is good. Oh, and the 4-player co-op in MGS will have some granted hilarious implications. Yes, it’s a copy-paste of the above comment.

New Legend of Zelda in  the works: We’ve got only a pic of that but it’s enough to make us wonder why Link doesn’t have a sword and he’s accompanied by a queen-of-the-fairies-like blue creature.

Little Big Planet PSP: I don’t know how they’re going to coordinate graphic and physics processing but this is another interesting title for sure.

For my private life, after quitting my job I’m going to do the entrance examination to the academy of fine arts in October. I’ve got plenty of time to study and practice new stiles until then (as you can see it from the new cinematic shots in the latest story).

Also, after years of honoured duty, my SNES is going to have a long vacation. There’s no more space for him under my TVs (damn DTTs!). I’ll have to put him in a box an save it for the future generations. I think games like Super Mario Kart and Yoshi’s Island will be highly enjoyable even for my sons.

Time flies. It’s been almost a month after the last post already. I know I should have written this earlier but I had some exams to pass. I passed every one of them by the way and only three remain in October but I have the whole summer to work on those, between some Mario Galaxy and Metroid.

You may have read the latest news on game announcements at E3 but let’s recap, just to make sure what we’re going to buy and why.

Microsoft

Probably the most embarrassing conference I’ve seen, even worse than that Nintendo conference from 2009. Let’s face it, Kinect (Natal’s new name) is just an improved Eye toy and what they showed was a more multimedia box than a gaming console. Movies, Facebook integration and sport events aren’t that interactive when it comes to actually play. And about Skittles, I’m sure that the little girl enjoyed that part as much as we didn’t. You’ll see my comic on this later. There’s at least a really good news in the release of a new 360 model, with built-in wi-fi and larger HDD.

EA

Nice stuff, really. I’ve got a couple of friends overly excited about Battlefield Vietnam just for the lack of Carl Gustav and seeing Dead Space 2 in action with more quick time events was really a bang. I’ve been re-playing Dead Space lately after EA’s big sale on steam and I perfectly recall the adrenaline i felt the first time a drag tentacle grabbed me.

Crysis 2 is nearing completion and it has been optimized for slower machines while faster machines will star in Need for Speed: Hot pursuit featuring multiplayer police car chase.

Ubisoft

Ubisoft presented a handful of very interesting games, starting with Child of Eden, from Tetsuya Mizuguchi, and ending with Rayman Origins, passing by Assassin’s creed brotherhood. They also showed a new non-video-game with plastic guns and laser sensors that allows you to battle in your living room or set up checkpoint runs. I don’t know if you have ever seen this but in the 90’s there was a game called “Laser combat” sold with 2 guns and 2 chest sensors. It’s pretty much the same, even in the look.

The most interesting product is probably the UBIart Framework: a new in-house development engine. I hope they release it as free someday, like the Unreal Engine or Quake Engine.

Nintendo

Everyone that wasn’t expecting anything big after the leaks in the months before E3 got terribly shocked. Nintendo threw on screen a huge number of games for both DS, Wii and the new 3DS, finally unveiled. Goldeneye, Donkey Kong Country Returns, Kid Icarus Uprising, Zelda Skyward Sword, Kirby Epic Yarn, Golden Sun: Dark Dawn and many more. I really can’t figure out precisely how much I’m going to spend within the next year.

My bad, I couldn’t see the Nintendo 3DS in action as you don’t get the 3d effect from videos but from what I’ve read it works like a window on another world. The black border around the screen helps to isolate the 3d image from the rest and your brain reads it independently. It sounds awkward but it’s possible if your eyes aren’t too close or too far from the screen and not tilted. With the amount of games revealed and awaiting us within the end of Nintendo’s financial year (March 2011) there’s no doubt they owned the show this year.

Sony

Sony’s motion control, named Move, is finally priced at $49.99 and supported by good games and not only tech demos, like Sorcery and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11. Media molecule’s Alex Evans unveiled a little more of Little Big Planet 2 and how it will be a platform for games and not just a platform game. I admire their intents but I feel that the LBP franchise would work way better on PC with external applications and a supportive community. Just look at how far Garry’s Mod made it.

The big bomb came with Gabe Newell, announcing that portal 2 will be released on PS3 too. I wonder what made him change his mind considering that coding forPS3 is actually time-consuming, despite his previous statements were jokes or not. Medal of Honor and Dead Space 2 went on the screens again with Dead Space Extraction as bonus playable with the PlayStation Move. The conference ended with a disturbing clown in an ambulance promoting a new Twisted Metal game.

The worst part was Kevin Butler, charging up the crowd  and mocking the products of other companies like Sony invented everything in gaming since the creation of PlayStation. That’s not something you do in front of people who probably owns every console on the market.