The folks behind many fine gaming mice, keyboards and other products are cooking up a treat for MechWarrior Online. Razer’s still in development controller, named Artemis, was shown off at this past E3. You can see some pictures here.

As it is still in development, what you see here is likely to change somewhat from now to release. Though what we have now is quite lovely, if I don’t say so myself. From left to right we see a 12 key console with sliding throttle, a centre section featuring an 8 inch monitor to be used in conjunction with the game’s main screen, and finally an adjustable flight stick featuring force-feedback. The unit will also feature fully programmable button combinations (macros). For example; you would be able to bind one key of the 12 to fire a volley a missiles, followed by a barrage of laser fire, topped off with a peppering of autocannons.

We might also point out that this is the first time since the original Steel Battalion, that a mecha game has had a similarly complex controller of its very own (the recent HORI TwinSticks are pretty simple by comparison). We’re quite excited indeed and cannot wait to get our hands on this beauty.

The rather luscious looking Hawken has apparently already been receiving criticism from its prospective fanbase; due to the mecha coming across as merely mecha skinned people rather than pilotable machines in their own functional right. In some ways, we can see where people are coming from (as a recent game will attest to) but we think the rationale put forward does somewhat miss the point. Specifically that why would mecha be made unnecessarily awkward to pilot, despite being a rather obvious straw man on their part no decent mecha game goes out of its way to do what they claim. In fact the opposite is true; that in order to give as much control to the player the controls and movement need to be managed more carefully. Gamers want to feel that they’re controlling a complex and potent machine, as there are already plenty of pedestrian shooters out there to choose from. All this aside we’re still sitting on the fence until Hawken is finally out later this year.

The full Mamoru Oshii directed live action trailer for Steel Battalion Heavy Armor is now available for all to see. Despite the obvious facts that it makes no sense and is utterly terrible, we do at least get to see an angry blonde Polish lady fire a large machine gun. Clearly Oshii just wanted to go to Poland again and play around with live ammunition. If this is what constitutes as premium PR material then it’s clear that Oshii is laughing his arse off at Capcom, all the way to the bloody bank no less. With the game’s release barely a week away now, we’re not sure this will entirely help promote it.

We now finally have details on Gundam Battle Operation’s freemium setup. It seems that the main form of game currency are units of energy. Each unit amounts to one play and you earn one unit every two hours (amounting to a total of 12 a day). The monetisation part starts when you run out of units, as this is where you can buy more (rather than having to wait for them to recharge). The current pricing will be is 100 yen per one piece of energy, followed by bulk purchases at 6 units for 480 yen, 13 units for 950 yen and 27 units for 1,850 yen. There will also be a campaign where units will be doubled from the game’s releases on June 28th to July 11th. Whilst the mobile suits are pretty much free, sadly you can power up your suit and weapons for a small fee. The latter sounds pretty dumb and falls into the tragically common freemium approach. That aside, the game has also received over 100,000 registrations already. So at least when the game’s released it should have a good head start in terms of the online community.

In a pretty interesting move, Bandai have decided to ratchet up their already prestigious Soul of Chogokin toyline with a newer and even more exclusive brand. Put simply, we now have a DX (or “deluxe”) variant to the Soul of Chogokin range. The first of these epic toys will be the classic Mazinger Z (pictured above). The toy itself will feature a large amount of diecast and clock in at a very decent 30cm. The price tag is also suitably DX, as it’s an eye watering 36,750 yen. Apart from the awesome cut away armor, the toy will also have a variety of light and sound gimmicks (shown nicely here). Released in December this year, we now have yet another epic toy to add to our stocking requests.

The recently announced E.X. Troopers has finally had some more of its story details released. Featuring the plight of Bren Turner as he joins NEVEC’s “Academy”, his main desire is to be the best vital suit pilot. During his transport to EDN-3rd their ship is attacked by unknown vital suits, forcing Bren to enter the new Gingira VT (shown above) to defend the ship. Despite the new VT basically being called “glittering”, we like its design quite a bit. Anyway, the new high resolution screenshots look awesome and we’re really looking forward to finally playing this come its release later this year.

We’ve been out of the country for the past few days, so updates to this glorious site have been delayed somewhat. Please accept our apologies on that front. Anyway, the recent Revision live stream for Armored Core V was archived pretty recently. The event was a pretty interesting one as it acted as a sort of post-mortem and general update on how the game has done (in Japan obviously). Unsurprisingly, From Software have been pretty on it in regards to listening to players and subsequently balancing the game further. Something that’s been pretty integral to the game, as the Official Partnership forum is actually linked into player’s profiles in game too. Sadly, Namco Bandai have been handling the Western release and they really haven’t been anywhere near as diligent. In any case, they covered a lot of ground in this session and even showed off a new toy prototype (shown above), that of Chief’s AC (with Giga Cannon no less).

Somewhat related, Namco Bandai did finally decided to do a soft patch to the game in the US and Europe a few days ago. This brings the stats up to the 1.02 patch in Japan, which hit in February. This patch also contains the slightly overpowered pulse machineguns, something the Revision live stream referenced when they went through all the patch changes. Unlike the Japanese version though, this seems to be a server side hack of sorts (rather than a proper patch). This means that if the dedicated servers are shutdown in the future (like with Chrome Hounds) we’d regress to the original 1.01 stats, with all the hellish nonsense surrounding gats, shotguns and heavy reverse joint legs. Hopefully, now that Namco Bandai have decided to get involved more, we’ll actually have some decent patch updates in the future. Especially as the Japanese version is on version 1.04 by now.

Anyway, we’ve embedded the full live stream archive below and it has some pretty nice shots of how they built the CG movies too.

Now with a confirmed release date on the horizon for 2nd Super Robot Wars OG, we’re now getting some more details on the game. Such as new mecha and characters that will be present, with the somewhat weirdly named Code “Evil” above (as designed by Hajime Katoki no less). The other new mecha are also penned by Kazutaka Miyatake, so it’s clear at least that they’re spending at least some money on the game.

Moving on from that, there’s mention of a Twin System now. Similar to the formation setup seen in the first Super Robot Wars Z, this distills the units down to simply two per group (rather than three). Like the formations though you can use the Twin System to attack enemy units individually or together. Personally, we liked the scope offered by the three unit formations but this is definitely better than nothing in that regard. Apart from all that, the new level maps look suitably lush and have actual shadows now.

Overall then, this is shaping up to be not only a very pretty looking game but also strategically interesting too. The release of this game really can’t come soon enough for us.

What with this year’s E3 gladly behind us, we now have a few reports to read and taken in. One of these is for Lost Planet 3. Covering the game pretty broadly, it does confirm that the previous mecha nomenclature of “vital suits” has been dropped in favour of “rigs”. Considering the utter lack of imagination shown in the mecha designs (seen above) it’s good to know that same lack of inspiration has also spread to the narrative. Weirdly NEVEC is still present though, which is interesting as this game looks more of a reboot than a sequel. The report talks about the Unreal engine a fair bit too, justifiably espousing its graphical prowess. The sad thing is that the toolset is very comprehensive (from personal experience), yet Spark have chosen to make another generic corridor based shooter. Oh well.

Now with the release date widely known, we’ve now also been treated to a new trailer for Gundam Battle Operation. Specifically focusing on the mobile suits this time, the trailer shows a lot more of the grapple based melee attacks and whilst they look cool we feel that moving the camera out like that tends to fuck things up. Especially as to get that nice camera angle you often have to lock player control out elsewhere (so they can’t move out of shot) and this normally results in a long and very fixed animation sequence. The latter is the death of any decent melee combat, which is a shame as the rest of the trailer looks pretty fluid. Anyway, see what you think of it below.