Another Century’s Episode R has finally been released in Japan today. There have been multiple game videos shown already (with one linked below), as it seems that some shops broke the street date. From the rather cool custom soundtracks option, that allows you to use music at specific points in gameplay, to the more worrying use of motion controls it seems that the game has managed to keep a few surprises in store. The most unfortunate of these though has to be the complete removal/changing of the boost system that was used in the last three games. Naturally, we’ll be reviewing the game soon but in the meantime you can import it here.

Up at the PlatinumGames official blog, there’s a post from the lead background designer of Vanquish, talking about the influence of Gundam’s space colonies on their game’s visual design. We’ve talked about this obvious influence before but in particular his comment about the team being mainly of “Gundam age” is very interesting. Most of them grew up with this shared cultural experience of Mobile Suit Gundam and other mecha series spawned from the Real Robot explosion that followed in its wake, and this affects Japanese video game development to this day, just as Western video game developers share their own cultural experiences, such as Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons.

Japanese video games can do very well in the West, but much of the time the peculiar differences that Japanese games can have from Western ones is ignored in the press or simply passed off as “Japan is weird”, without exploring the particular background these differences came from, rather treating game development as if it exists in a vacuum. It’s good to see these differences explained, and this in particular is a good example of the scale of influence the mecha animation genre has had in Japanese video game development.

Over at Gundam.info they’ve released a flash based full 3D photo viewer of the full scale Gundam in Shizuoka. As you can see, we’ve linked it above as well. The four buttons along the bottom, from left to right, allow you to choose the various views of the Gundam (either full body day, fully body night or torso day) as well as move around it from left to right. The final button opens the viewer in full screen mode, which we’ve deactivated here (as it didn’t agree with our blog setup for some reason). In any case, it’s nice to see the Gundam from all angles finally.

Just in case you forgot the game still existed over the course of a week, the well-oiled Solatorobo PR machine continues to chug on, with more screenshots and concept art over at 4Gamer. It seems our canine hero can transform into a shirtless bishonen that is sure to drive the fangirls wild, but more importantly it seems the mecha itself responds to the change, becoming a bit more upright, but strangely also developing glowing green claws. So when he’s a dog, the mecha is a bird, and when he’s a human, it has claws. An unusual approach to mecha henkei, anyway.

4Gamer have again got a nice new selection of screenshots for the upcoming Front Mission Evolved. It’s clear that the PR campaign is in its last desperate throes, as the game is released in September. From more angry characters, minus gratuitous bewbs, and surprisingly large mecha (though somewhat meagre when compared to Armored Core For Answer’s Arms Forts) there’s definitely lots of interesting and shiny content to peruse though.

In the latter half of September, Yahoo will be releasing an augmented reality app for iPhone 3GS and 4 users that will allow visitors to the full sized Gundam in Shizuoka to see a companion MS-06S Zaku II in Char’s colours alongside it. Whether this will also make their phones run three times faster remains to be seen.

Andriasang put up a gallery of new pictures for the Game Formerly Known as Solarobo, but Now Known as Solatorobo, including a few pieces of absolutely beautiful mechanical art. It has that “alternate history/steampunk” look to it that was very common in anime as I was growing up, but eventually seemed to get replaced with cleaner and more modern designs, and I’m glad to see this sort of imaginative work back.

Game Watch Impress has an article with much of the same screenshots and mechanical works featured, plus a few extra details if you can read Japanese or are willing to wade through a machine translated version of it. Most of the details in the article are about gameplay elements we’ve seen in action before, but it’s good to know that “dog-man in a bird-robot fishing for battleships” is still a planned feature.

Speaking of things we’ve already seen, the small gameplay videos that were released were edited into a much prettier single movie, complete with gorgeous backgrounds and music. The wide variety of game modes, and the sheer charm of the graphics they’ve been able to squeeze out of the lowly Nintendo DS, have gradually changed my outlook on this game from being a mere curiosity to being a “must have!” title, simply because there isn’t and won’t be anything quite like it. The industry as a whole seems afraid to innovate in 3D action games and platformers, preferring to use proven-successful genre formulas or licensed characters to carry these games, but these fellows are doing something amazing with Solatorobo. Here’s to hoping that the game does indeed get released outside of Japan.

A preview video has also been released, mostly showing off the game’s cast of characters, who are still animal people and not robots like we would prefer:

4Gamer has a nice new batch of HD screenshots for the upcoming Front Mission Evolved. Overall, the game is still looking nice and the September 28th release date seems to be still on track. The update also covers the game system setup a bit as well, though with nothing really new to report since we last talked about it. As the awful acronym for the game’s bullet time (as in “E.D.G.E.” or the more idiotic “Emergency Defense Galvanosynaptic Enhancer”) is still receiving large amounts of PR spooge. Though it seems that Square Enix will be doing something right in terms of releasing toys for the game, for that we happily tip our cyborg top hats in their direction.

What with the release of the Xbox 360 port for Virtual On Force getting ever closer, it seems that there are concerns that this series of games may not entice newcomers. With this is mind, 4Gamer has covered the announcement of a new EX Option. This effectively allows the player to grade the difficulty of the offline singleplayer campaign as per their burgeoning skill level (such as increased health, as pictured above). To be honest these kind of difficulty nullifying features tend to rub me the wrong way, especially considering the previous 360 release of Oratan 5.66 succeeded off the back of its untainted learning curve. Admittedly, this EX Option is entirely at the player’s discretion but this addition to Force reeks of management not development, as any gamer with half a cognitively active brain wouldn’t bother with this.

4gamer has a selection of HD screenshots for the upcoming BluRay hybrid Macross Frontier movie, including the game portion for Macross Trial Frontier. It’s clear that there’s Artdink functional lineage at work here, especially in the HUD but whether they’re involved in the development of this remains unclear and somewhat unlikely. As they have Carnage Heart EXA to be getting on with, not to mention that porting a PSP game to the PS3 is a pretty big ask on the part of Bandai Namco. In any case the hybrid BluRay disc is out on October 7th for 7,140 yen.