Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love, the steampunk mecha SRPG from Nippon Ichi America, has a pre-order for the game available at their store, Rosenqueen. Most notable is the fact that Sakura Wars preorders from Rosenqueen include a hardcover art book, which is a different item from the PS2 Premium Package’s artbook, so if you pre-order the PS2′s Premium edition from Rosenqueen you walk away with no less than two different artbooks, as well as a poster and an extra disc containing the Japanese voices (the standard edition is English dub only). Considering that the price point for all this is currently only $50, this feels like one of the old Working Designs packages, just without that old Working Designs premium price. Definitely a good last hurrah for the ageing PS2 platform.

The Wii version is also still a go, but other than the hardcover artbook you get from pre-ordering at their store, you don’t get any of the extras the PS2 version gets. To make up for this, it’s available for $40, pretty nice for a next-gen release and a lot better than the other shovelware that gets released for the system at the same price. There’s also a fan art contest (more info here) for you artistic types.

A new PSP game by the name of “Gundam Assault Survive” has been leaked on Amazon.co.jp. With a release date of March 18th, it seems that Amazon have probably jumped the gun on the impending PR campaign. In any case, the name alone suggests that this could be another entry to the Gundam Battle Assault series. Though Japanese fans have been hearing rumours that Artdink may be developing a new game in the same vein as their successful Gundam Battle series (something the two recent Macross PSP games are based off in terms of technology). We’ll know for sure in the next few weeks most probably, when the marketing push kicks off in earnest.

Update: The above product link is now dead, so someone at Amazon is probably getting scalped as we write this.

Several things happened over the Christmas period that we didn’t cover, so here is a brief update on all lovely things Oratan. First, was a new column on Christmas Day over on the official Oratan site. Bar many platitudes towards the fans there was also a brief glimpse of a signed card by Hajime Katoki, the series’ principal mecha designer, thanking the team for the recent 360 port, which is obviously rather nice of him. The other element that was also quite interesting was that the online questionnaire results have been received by the team and they’re digesting the data as best they can. Apparently the number of entries was a lot more than they were expecting as well, which isn’t surprising considering that Oratan is Japan’s number one selling XBLA game. In any case, the hints of a Force port not that long ago may develop into something else as many fans want an all new game.

Second, the HORI TwinSticks are now out in the wild and many Japanese owners have been blogging about their recent purchase. In short, they’re not great (though this feeling is probably exacerbated by the rather larger price tag). It seems that there is a deadzone on the switches at the base of each stick, something the original Dreamcast and Saturn sticks lacked. Considering that a lot of Oratan relies on very quick and precise movements, this deadzone could understandably rub many fans up the wrong way. Interestingly, those that modded their Dreamcast/Saturn sticks say that the new port works better with them rather than the new HORI sticks. Admittedly, it’s still early days and this could all just be fan based grumbling (as we have yet to verify any of these findings first-hand) but it’s not exactly great for those who forked out a small fortune.

Finally, the Kotobukiya Fei-Yen Knight kit has been released. This kit is also of the DNA side colours and costs around 4000 yen. You can also buy it here.

Over on Square Enix’s Downloadable Games page on Facebook it’s finally been confirmed that a PS3 version of Thexder Neo is in the works. As Akira Kokushoh says “THEXDERNEO for PS3 is coming up in 2010! With PS3 graphic THEXDER NEO becomes more THEXDER. Can’t wait to show you. Checking would be almost done! Happy holidays, and please look forward for Square Enix’s Downloadable Games coming up in 2010!”

For those that may remember, we reviewed the excellent PSP version last year so the confirmation of a PS3 version is good news indeed!

(via Gamerbytes and Game Set Watch)