Following on from Bandai’s toy, Kotobukiya have announced a Hanged Man kit from Armored Core V. Like the previous kits in the range, this is similarly gimmick ridden. There’s also an additional campaign where you can get the Moonlight and Another Moon laserblades. The kit is release this July for around 9,000 yen, though you can pre-order it here for less.

So in less than two years, the freemium Gundam Battle Operation has now reached 1 million downloads. Most of these gamers being middle aged guys apparently, which is actually different for other games and aspects of the Gundam franchise (as in Japan it’s about a 50/50 split between men and women). That aside, we’ve played this again since we got back to Japan and it does play better, as the crazy amazing net connections here mean you don’t suffer from lag or the horrible framerate issues I saw when I played it in the UK. It’s still pretty awful though. Anyway, a million downloads. Wooo!

If you remember those nice people at Dracue, of Gunhound fame, well they are taking the next step by releasing a port of the classic Assault Suit Leynos on PS4. Announced at this year’s BitSummit, this new port will pool on the talents of Toru Yoshida (of VOTOMS fame) and Hyakutaro Tsukumo, who also co-composed the score for Gunhound. This doesn’t look like a simple update to Leynos either, but a full blown functional reboot in the style of Gunhound. Whilst we’re not too happy about that, Gunhound was good and Dracue gets the material they’re riffing off. We can only hope they’ll move onto Valken at some point too. The trailer for the new port is shown below.

For those that have been a reader on this site for a while, you’ll remember we talked about Gigantic Army a good while back. Well, due to Nyu Media we now have the game on Steam. Thankfully the developer Astro Port are still involved and it seems to be more of a new means of distributing the game rather than anything else untoward. In any case the game only costs $5.99, so what the hell are you waiting for? Buy this now it’s just fucking great!

Over at 4Gamer we have a new update on the forthcoming Gundam Side Stories collection of games. First though, let’s talk about the above screenshot. As it basically shows the Blue Destiny GM kicking the Efreet Kai, now this is not something that really happened in the original games and is another instance where it seems the “remake” is deviating from the host material. We only hope that the other games in the collection are more faithful functionally speaking. That aside, in addition to the main games there will also be a VR mission mode that allows you to build a custom team of mobile suits. This gives credence to our theory that the games would crossover in terms of units somehow. It also harks back to the Tactics Battle mode we saw in Journey to Jaburo (which was pretty much the best part of the game and in turn created the setup seen in Lost War Chronicles, which is also getting remade in this collection). Bar that we also now have some nice shots of the RX-80 Pale Rider, the unique mobile suit that has been introduced for the game. The game is still on course for its May 29th release and you can pre-order the standard edition here.

We now have the second extended promo for Super Robot Wars Z 3, this being the one that will be shown in shops across Japan to curious punters. It shows pretty much all the new aspects of the game, from the team system as well as Maximum Break. There’s also a lot of battle animation eye candy, with the the RX-93 Nu Gundam looking especially lovely. We’re still bummed by the lack of Final Dancouga but there’s a lot of other cool series afoot here, so that should be good at least. The game is still on track for its April 10th release and you can pre-order it accordingly here (PS3) and here (Vita).

So we now have the first promo for the Gundam Side Stories collection and it’s featuring Blue Destiny. There’s quite a lot of gameplay footage in this trailer and it’s clear now that these “HD remakes” are basically classic missions from the older games in the new Missing Link engine. This is a pretty big deal, as what made games like Blue Destiny so special was their claustrophobic first person view (something that seems to be entirely absent now). We’re actually pretty disappointed now about this new collection, as it seems very clear that Bandai are just going down the cheap and nasty route for this. Oh well, we’ll be picking this up in May but our reaction has now dropped to below “meh”. The other weird thing is that this version of Blue Destiny looks like it’s referencing the manga narrative rather than the original games (as the trailer talks about about letting down Marion after the Blue Destiny GM’s head is blown off by a Dom). This is because the manga ends on Earth between the Blue Destiny GM and Efreet Kai, whereas the games finish in space between two EXAM system Gundams. Anyway, this collection seems to be comprised of a whole ball of weird. The trailer is shown below.

In the latest issue of Famitsu, Bandai Namco have announced something wondrous. Specifically that of HD remakes for 5 classic Gundam gaiden games. These games being Blue Destiny, Rise from the Ashes, Space To the End of a Flash, Zeonic Front and the first Senki. All of these will be bundled with Missing Link and use the new engine. What’s not clear is whether the first person view that was key to the Saturn and Dreamcast games has been preserved (as from the screenshots it looks that the updated versions have gone third person in terms of the camera). Still, the fact this is happening at all is pretty damn great. In addition, there will be a limited edition of the game that will come with a kit of the new RX-80 “Pale Rider” as well as a soundtrack and artbook. Though at 14,893 yen it’s a tad pricey. We also have a release date for the games of May 29th. Considering how good many of these older games were, we really hope they don’t mess them up in terms of the new HD remakes.

Not long after the first game was released on console, Bandai Namco announced a new arcade game would follow. That was nearly three years ago and in that time Full Boost has been a huge success in the Japanese arcades. Since coming back to Japan we’ve availed ourselves of the omnipresent arcades and naturally played a large amount of Full Boost too.

As we come from a game development background, primarily that of design, it’s interesting to see how much work went into Full Boost. To look at, the game doesn’t appear to be doing all that much new and could even be regarded as just a shallow cash-in. In reality though, that is a painfully inaccurate appraisal. There’s an enormous amount of improvement across how the game operates, consequently this is one of the most engrossing and rewarding versus games we’ve played in a long time.

Over the past few years, Border Break has had somewhat of tumultuous time. It started out very well, but with each successive iteration more and more players dropped away. From Airburst to Union and now Scramble, SEGA are obviously hoping that the fourth update will be one to bring the punters back. The biggest problem the series has had is through its aggressive monetisation. It started out fairly invasive but has become more encompassing to the point that it’s financially crippling to play at the higher levels (as in the cost to “get good” has just gone through the roof). Whether this monetisation will have been fixed for Scramble is unclear, as you’d expect SEGA are pretty cagey about this, but it’s clear they haven’t given up on the series yet. The smart thing about Border Break though is that each of the updates haven’t required new hardware as technically it’s just a software update. So from an arcade management point of view, it’s a lot less hassle to host the game. No word on a release date, bar sometime this year, but it will be interesting to see how this does in the wild and whether gamers will come back to it.