The third livestream for Armored Core Verdict Day will be happening on the 21st June (you’ll be able to watch it here). The previous livestream is also online here if you want to watch it. From what we’ve been seeing it seems that the game is going to be very good indeed. In addition, there are lots of rumours flying on Japanese boards about merged servers. If true that would make a huge and very positive difference to the game’s online community and potential longterm success.

After Yamato shut its doors, we heard rumours that Arcadia had bought the remnants of the company out. It now seems that those rumours had an element of truth to them, as we’ll be getting a 30th Anniversary 1/60 scale VF-1J toy in August. Whilst it looks pretty hideous and is no more than a re-paint of an already existing toy, this is still good news for Macross fans. Especially as Arcadia are also still planning to release Nekki Basara’s guitar too. In the meantime, if you really want you can pre-order the new VF-1J here

As we mentioned previously, Hasegawa are releasing a kit of Myzr Eta from Virtual On Force in June. This is one of the many Myzr variants from the game and already accompanies another kit, that of the Delta released back in January of 2011. Like the previous kit, the Eta can also transform. This new kit will cost 6,090 yen and is at 1/100 scale. You can pre-order it here.

As part of the current Deal of the Week, the fantastic Bangai-O HD is now half price (at 400 MSP). We have an enduring love for Treasure’s shooter, as archived here in our feature on the series. So if you haven’t bought the latest game already, then there’s no excuse now. Unlike the other Treasure releases on XBLA, this isn’t a remake of a previous game but an all new one. The reviews, especially in the West, were sadly rather lawltastic as it seemed to be somewhat of a shock to the system for many of them (as it’s obviously very skill based). So ignore them entirely and just buy it now. It’s bloody awesome!

4Gamer has a nice big update on Masou Kishin III, showing off the main mecha and characters. The special Valsione from the anime series, that we covered previously, also gets more eye candy too. Still no word on whether winkysoft is handling this but we’re cautiously optimistic that they will be. The latter is a big deal, as they made all the previous Masou Kishin games and some of the best entries into the normal Super Robot Wars canon too. In that, the games they made were far more strategic than the more brute force approach seen in the recent games. Pride of Justice is still set for its August 22nd release and you can pre-order it here.

Over at Hideo Kojima’s Twitter feed, he recently posted some photos of Yoji Shinkawa posing with a large prototype of ThreeA’s new Metal Gear RAY toy. This is a follow up to the equally large Metal Gear REX released by ThreeA last year. Whilst we love Shinkawa’s designs, we were pretty disappointed with ThreeA’s REX toy. It lacked any real diecast and subsequently felt very cheap. In addition, the colour scheme was also completely wrong and all the lightning felt out of place too. No word on price or release date for this new RAY toy though but it will probably be similarly priced to the previous REX toy.

This year’s Shizuoka Hobby Show is under way and as always it has a huge amount of new model kits on display. With Hasegawa’s new Myzr Eta kit (shown above) from Virtual On Force being notable. Bar that, there’s obviously a large amount of new Gundam related kits on the way and it seems the HGUC range seems to be getting a lot of interesting new entries. If you’re curious about the show then both CyberGundam (here, here and here) and AmiAmi (here, here and here) have lots of photos. HLJ also has a nice breakdown too.

The beta for Gundam Breaker has passed half million downloads since its launch. That’s not at all shabby for basically a glorified demo. In addition, save data from the beta will also be carried over to the full game come its release on June 27th. Finally, those that buy the game at launch will get all manner of parts perks with the MSN-00100 Hyaku Shiki (pictured above) being one of them. You can pre-order the PS3 version of the game here.

In the upcoming Masou Kishin III players will be given a special bonus code in the initial run of the game. This will give a different version of Valsione as seen in the Super Robot Wars OG: The Inspector anime series. This is not to be confused with Valsione R, which is a different mecha entirely. However, this redesign from the anime will have different attacks and animations from the standard Valsione (so it’s not just a simple re-skin). As always, these kind of little bonuses appeal to us and we’ll be definitely nabbing the game come its August 22nd release.

Whilst this is not the first toy of Sakura Shinguji’s pink custom koubu from the Sakura Taisen series, this new Variable Action toy from Megahouse looks to be one of the best. Released at the end of September for 7,800 yen, it has a nice sculpt and what appears to be decent articulation too. Sadly, it doesn’t look like it comes with a Sakura pilot figure (though this likely helps to keep the price down). If you are one of those that enjoy pink steampunk mecha then make sure to pre-order yours here.