The upcoming Gundam Extreme Versus is not only getting an opening song from Linkin Park but it’s also getting Gackt to take the role of the game’s main villain called “ex” (piloting the new Extreme Gundam, obviously). Gackt has a pretty long history of being a publicly vocal Gundam fan. From the somewhat surreal music videos of him piloting an RX-178 Gundam Mark.II for the Zeta Gundam films, to the opening song of the last Gundam Versus game (which was a cover of the classic Ai Senshi no less). Gackt also does some pretty cool impersonations of Tōru Furuya (Amuro Rey) and Shūichi Ikeda (Char Aznable) amongst many others. One nice comment he’s made a few times was that when he went out drinking with the two actors he’d close his eyes and imagine that Amuro and Char were haggling over what beer to get. In any case, it’s kinda nice that such a nerdy fan of the original show has finally been given his own character.

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It turns out, that after this year’s TGS, that HORI put their limited run of TwinStick EX peripherals back on sale for a few days last week. As we said in our impressions, we weren’t keen on HORI’s sticks and so if you missed the chance to nab these, you really shouldn’t feel hard done by.

Separately, Juro Watari has been posting on the official blog about a new 144 page artbook that chronicles the 15 years of Virtual On’s mechanical lineage (as penned by Hajime Katoki). This seems to be part of the Memorial Box setup too.

After much anticipation, we finally got to visit the 1/1 scale Real Grade Gundam now in Shizuoka. It is an epically wonderful thing and utterly massive. Naturally to commemorate the event we took pictures, these are available after the jump.

On the final public day of TGS, the SEGA booth was graced with a rare showing of one of the most important figures in mecha gaming; Juro Watari. Effectively the father of Virtual On, Watari has never been one for the limelight and as such hasn’t really been one to conduct many interviews, so seeing him on stage like that was really rather wonderful. He was also joined by Takanobu Terada, of Super Robot Wars fame, and many had thought that it was going to amount to a massive announcement regarding a new Virtual On themed Super Robot Wars game. Alas, nothing of the sort happened and they instead spent the time talking about how much they like robots and breasts. 4Gamer has some nice coverage of this too.

One of the most popular games at this year’s TGS, apart from Monster Hunter Portable 3rd, was that of Platinum Games’ upcoming third person shooter Vanquish. Unlike the already released demo, the TGS version had different bosses amongst other things. We also played the game on both the PS3 and 360, with the PS3 version seeming to run a bit smoother (which isn’t surprising considering that was the game’s lead platform during development).

In short, the game really was stupendously good and it did honestly feel like Casshern the game, with guns and set inside O’Neill cylinder. Our impressions after the jump.

One of the first games we played at this year’s TGS was Front Mission Evolved. Despite being readily available in the shops in Japan, the game graced at least three separate booths across both formats (that in itself was pretty damn crazy to be honest). As such saying that the game we played was a “demo” and that there’s room for improvement doesn’t really hold true here, the code shown at TGS was utterly final in the released sense of the word. So what follows is pretty much an overture for our review most probably, in short we weren’t that impressed.

Again, apologies for the somewhat blurry photo but the game in the picture is Level 5′s new PSP game Danball Senki. In many ways it’s a spiritual successor to Custom Robo Battle Revolution on the GC, as Danball Senki has an RPG type hub with a simple mecha action game core. Unlike Custom Robo though, Level 5 clearly have oodles of money as the game has pretty amazing production standards (even the anime cut-ins are very nicely done). The game will also be kicking off an anime, manga and even a model kit line, so Level 5 have clearly invested a lot in this one. The impressions are after the jump.

Tucked around the side of D3′s booth was one machine playing Bangai-O HD Missile Fury, due to its unfortunate placing it didn’t receive much attention but that at least meant we got to have a go. It’s worth saying up front that this was just plain raucous fun throughout and considering the series’ lineage there’s no doubt that this new game will be absolutely bloody amazing.

There were only four DS’s at the show that graced the upcoming Super Robot Wars L and the demo only had the first level in the game, as far as we can make out. The booth also had the latest OG anime trailer blaring away above it, which also added to the atmosphere a fair bit. Hit the jump for our impressions.

We managed to not only have several playthroughs on the upcoming port of Virtual On Force but also try out the HORI TwinStick EX peripheral that will be compatible with the game on its release in December. From what we saw, pretty much all the VR and their variants were playable and the following impressions were undertaken using Temjin 747. We’ve also linked a video at the end of the post to show the sticks in action with the game (we aren’t the ones playing though, in case you’re wondering).