In the mad rush towards the end of last year, we neglected to mention that the excellent Carnage Heart EXA had been picked up by Natsume for a digital release in the West via PSN. No details on when this will happen (except “early 2013”) or how much it will cost but this is still resoundingly good news. Especially as EXA was received very well in Japan when it was released back in 2010 and it’s just nice to see Artdink’s classic mecha series still trundling on.

Famitsu has a piece on the forthcoming Gundam Breaker game. Explaining how you can kitbash mobile suits together, as killing enemies drops their model parts which you can then use later. Despite showing all manner of in-game shots, we also get to see some of the arenas now too. The interesting omission in all of this is the fact that the Vita version is no longer mentioned, leaving only the PS3 game. However, the official site still lists both platforms. In any case, we still have no word one when this will be released (bar sometime this year) nor how much it will cost. That aside, the game has an interesting premise and we’re definitely curious about it still.

Over at Famitsu we have a bunch of new things revealed for the upcoming Macross 30. From in-game shots of the YF-30 in all three modes (shown above) that make it look more like a fighter-bomber with a dedicated missile pod array, to all manner of detail on the Sub-Quests. These are the open world missions you can undertake, which range from item collection to killing lots of things dead. If we’re honest, these don’t sound overly interesting. What does sound interesting though are the controls, which will have two modes; the classic PSP setup and a new one that allows for more precise aiming. To the extent it almost sounds like they have a dual analogue control setup for battroid mode. This might explain the slower gameplay, as manual look based combat definitely has an upper threshold of game speed before it just becomes impossible. Games like Armored Core get around this by having a weapon lock-on that helps with doing the finer enemy tracking for you. Following on from that there will also be an option to have your difficulty automatically adjusted to how you play, though you can still pick the fixed difficulties too thankfully. There’s also some stuff about the limited edition variable fighter skins, though these look utterly dire so the less said about them the better.

Whilst it’s been a tad quiet on the Battle Robot Damashii front, we now have a new trailer (shown below). Almost entirely gameplay footage it looks like a cross between From Software’s Another Century’s Episode Portable and a slew of Artdink’s Macross and Gundam games. As we suspected, the mecha haven’t retained their anime scales but have instead been treated in the same way the Robot Damashii toys have. In addition, the footage primarily shows a lot of quite rigid melee combat. To be fair this is more likely down to the editing, as the Gundam Extreme Versus trailers offer suffer the same fate (maybe Bamco should get another trailer guy?). Finally, the trailer hints that a lot more shows will be included along with the ones that have already been announced. Let the guessing games begin!

For those that saw the reveal of the Hatsune Mike Fei-Yen in the upcoming Super Robot Wars UX announcement and thought this was done without the consent of the team behind Virtual On, then you were very wrong. So wrong in fact that Juro Watari, the father of Virtual On, openly welcomed Miku and even wrote her lines to be used in UX (apparently she’ll sing too). Personally, we think this is a resoundingly good thing and half hope that the next proper Virtual On game gets the Miku treatment too. In addition, there’s a new advert for the game (shown below). Don’t forget the game will be released on March 14th and you can pre-order it here, though you’ll need a Japanese 3DS to play the game as all 3DS games are region locked (thanks a fucking bunch Nintendo for that one!).

Albeit brief, we now have a new advert for Macross 30 (shown below). It only shows a few more seconds of gameplay and emphasises how smooth the game appears to be running. Not to mention that we’ll obviously be getting a lot of new animated footage for the game. Hopefully that will mean some kind of high fiving from Basara and the other classic Macross characters. Don’t forget you can pre-order it here

Over the past few years, realising that the current generation has decayed due to excessive functional standardisation, we’ve had a few “classics” resurrected into HD to stem the tide of mediocrity. Whilst many of these games were originally rather noteworthy, their updated HD versions have often been very disappointing. This is mainly down to the fact that these ports are in fact outsourced in their entirety.

The worst offender thus far has been that of Konami, with a variety of HD re-releases suffering from all manner of grievous problems (many of which the original games never suffered from). So what has happened to the Zone of the Enders HD edition then? Well, firstly it was ported by High Voltage Software (not internally by Konami, as we were led to believe) and they’ve done a pretty poor job. Now, we’ve never thought the Zone of the Enders games were bad but they are functionally flawed. Though the issue here is entirely down to the fidelity of the port itself.

We’ve somewhat held off talking about Chikyuu Boueigun 4 (aka EDF4) for a while now but this news seemed worthy. Considering that this game series was birthed from Sandlot’s nerdy love of classic mecha anime and the tech it produced during the PS2 era, the mecha lineage is a notable one. So when they added mecha to the third game we were pretty excited. However, it wasn’t very useful in-game if we’re honest. This new mecha looks more the part though, almost out of VOTOMS with a nice Shinji Aramaki twist from MADOX-01. Anyway, we’ll be buying this when it’s finally released next year and it should be better than the dire Insect Armageddon as Sandlot are working on this again (yay!).

A new patch and DLC for Gundam Extreme Versus has gone live today. As we previously mentioned, this DLC includes the RX-105 Xi Gundam and RX-78GP03S Gundam Dendrobium priced at 500 yen a piece. The patch is also a pretty sizeable one, at 244 MB, and it lacks new Trial Missions too. That aside, the new units are pretty awesome (especially the Xi). In addition, the game itself is now available at a drastically reduced price as part of a Best re-release. You can buy that version here.

We now finally have a decent promo for the upcoming Macross 30 (shown below). It shows a fair bit of gameplay and it’s clear that this game is slower paced than the PSP counterparts, almost languid. That said it does look fine and the framerate is pretty high and consistent throughout. So at least that won’t make controlling your variable fighter too arduous. Bar that we (briefly) also get to see the new YF-30 in fighter mode, so that’s something at least. The game is still set for its February 28th release year and you can pre-order it here.