There’s a nice preview of the upcoming RVR-14 Fei-Yen The Knight kit over at GA Graphic. Much like Kotobukiya’s other Virtual On releases, the detailing is suitably superb. The release date is still sometime in December and the kit will cost around 4,000 yen, which is pretty cheap considering the sculpt. Separately, on the Virtual On kit blog there are hints that the next design to get the kit treatment could be the mass produced Temjin, MBV-04-10 10/80SP.

The Tokyo Game Show brings us another set of hands-on impressions, from Kotaku this time.

There’s not too much in the way of new information, and Kotaku’s impressions take a turn for the negative near the end, but I’d guess some of their complaints could stem from either the playable demo being made easy so as to be more ‘accessible’, or them simply not having enough time to get acquainted with the movement and attack options.

It’s nice to see the wanzers’ rollers making an appearance to speed up the combat and give the player more tactical options. That, along with the previously mentioned on-foot combat will definitely invite comparisons to certain other games, and it looks like the Front Mission Evolved team has their work cut out for them.

Over at Game Watch there’s an interesting piece about the upcoming anime series Halo Legends, apart from having a nice trailer there’s also a breakdown on each of the episodes and their directors. A few people have already noticed the presence of Shinji Aramaki (seen above) but few probably appreciate the fact that Aramaki is more renowned for his mecha design prowess, as he made a name for himself during the 80’s creating things like the Garland from Megazone 23 and the Madox-01. His work is very much on the real end of the mecha design spectrum.

In any case, Aramaki is a big bike nut (he also designed the transforming ride armors in Mospeada in case you’re wondering and supervised the designs in the recent Viper’s Creed) and in his Halo Legends episode “The Package” it looks like the Master Chief is effectively sitting on a “space bike” (seen here). That said, the design for this does look awfully reminiscent of the shoulder section of White Glint from Armored Core For Answer. Anyway, considering the powered armor focus of the Spartans it’s nice to see that someone who effectively helmed that part of Japanese mecha design is now finally making his mark on something originally birthed in the West (though if you ask me the the Master Chief does look an awful lot like Yutaka Izubuchi’s work, namely the ARL-99 Helldiver as well as the GM Sniper II and GM Command).

Famitsu recently posted an interesting piece of coverage for Front Mission Evolved, most probably to tie-in with its presence at the Tokyo Game Show. Despite the fact that the in-game screenshots look better than expected, the refreshing thing to see is that you can also get out of your wanzer and take on enemies as a mere human. This is something that was recently utilised in the fantastic Yuke’s developed VOTOMS game (which we’ve reviewed in case you’re curious) and naturally there are a large number of thematic links between the narratives, especially as to the scale and technical depiction of the mecha themselves.

That said, the video below doesn’t exactly bode well on how it might actually play…

In the latest column over at the Oratan 5.66 blog, it’s been announced that the Hori TwinStick EX peripheral will be playable at the SEGA booth at this year’s Tokyo Game Show. This alone makes the hardware sound pretty sturdy as letting it loose on the floor of a public event would normally be a bad idea (I dread to think what would have happened to the poor Dreamcast twinsticks back in the day).

IGN has an enlightening interview up with some of the people behind the upcoming new entry in the MechWarrior series. After the announcement trailer was released, after a bit of “ooh” and “ahh”ing at the pretty robot graphics, I was left with a lot of questions about what direction they were attempting to take the new MechWarrior, and the interview is uncharacteristically insightful. Not only do these guys really seem to care about what they’re doing, but they sound like they’re capable of doing it, too.

What with this years’ Tokyo Game Show around the corner, the Japanese games industry marketing machine is going into overdrive. The upcoming Front Mission Evolved, being developed by Double Helix, has been given another trailer. Unlike the first, this teaser is predominantly CG footage and not in-game (which is a bit of a shame really). That said, the wanzers have been recreated faithfully enough it seems so there’s at least that aspect to be thankful for.

The hugely expensive HORI TwinStick EX for Oratan 5.66 has been prototyped for the team at SEGA (in Japan). The cheerful column over at the official game blog has a few up close action shots of the peripheral. The release is still slated for around November/December for those that were brave enough to pre-order it.

Normally, in the history of Armored Core, the subsequent releases within the numerical classification are broader in scope and obviously more polished. Master of Arena had a customisable AI setup called Ranker Mk, Silent Line had an organic learning AI and an enormous amount of parts. Yet all these improvements were off the base release that preceded it. Admittedly, I am selling the earlier games a tad short but compared to For Answer, the improvements were linearly obvious.

This cycle has been broken with the latest version as it’s evolved past its roots to a terrifying degree.

Back in the 80’s when the early iterations of Battledroids (then later Battletech) surfaced, many of the designs had been not very surreptitiously lifted from various anime shows. Notably that of Dougram and Macross. FASA were suitably sued for their troubles. That said, over the years FASA did their best to throw several olive branches in the direction of the anime industry. Especially when they hired Shoji Kawamori to pen the designs for the Japanese edition of Battletech.

Fast forward to the recent trailer for the MechWarrior reboot featuring a Warhammer (or a destroid Tomahawk from Macross in case you’re wondering) and it seems that this has opened up the legal can of worms all over again. Considering the original case was with FASA it is interesting that the same designs can come under dispute when the rights are owned by another institution.

Personally, I don’t understand why they just didn’t get Hajime Katoki, Yutaka Izubuchi or Junji Okubo to pen new designs for the reboot and be done with it. At the very least they’d have had mecha that at least looked awesome.