As was announced a good while ago, those pretty nifty people at Sentinel have finally previewed the forthcoming Riobot Jehuty (shown above). The Riobot range are primarily made of plastic but are normally beautifully sculpted with amazing articulation. Compared to the recent Revoltechs, which are nice enough for the price, this toy will be in a whole other league in terms of quality. No words on a specific release date or price, but the figure will be around 15 cm tall. In any case, this is one of our hotly anticipated toys and the pictures above only help to cement our conviction that it will be pretty damn awesome.

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’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.

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.

A new live stream for Armored Core V has been announced. Entitled Revision its main focus is to cover feedback from the Japanese community on the game, especially in regards to the online implementation and how matchmaking has been dealt with. This will also be an interactive event as well, as it seems viewers will be able to ask questions to the panel. Personally, we applaud From Software’s support of the Japanese community. If only Bandai Namco would learn from their example when it came to the Western release of the game, something they are still wholly responsible for. The new live stream will happen on 11th June at 9pm (Japanese time).

Separately, we will be posting a new post-mortem opinion piece on the game as we’ve been playing the Western version since March. Whilst the review we did still holds true, it was very much based on the Japanese releases. The Western version has had some pretty interesting issues by comparison. So keep an eye out for that over the next week or so.

As this year’s bizarre clusterfuck that is E3, there’s now finally some (supposedly) in-game footage of Lost Planet 3 in a pretty slick trailer (plus some nice screenshots). Despite the somewhat desperate attempts to emulate a Hollywood film, the whole setup does show the fact we have another middle of the road Unreal powered game on our hands. This is not to say that Unreal is a bad toolset, far from it, but that publishers tend to force developers to play safe and opt for functionally very standardised design. Though in this instance it feels more like Spark are leading Capcom down the garden path due to their lack of inspiration. Considering this developer’s pretty crappy portfolio up to this point and the fact we’re getting a Red Faction: Armageddon vibe from this, we’re expecting something functionally very safe but also deeply lacklustre. Thank fuckity there’s E.X. Troopers on the way. The full trailer is available for your viewing pleasure below.

At a recent event in a Akiba Sofmap, the upcoming Steel Battalion Heavy Armor was available to play by members of the general (Japanese) public. Bearing in mind that a demo is also available online, it’s now fair to say that our initial concerns about the game have in fact developed into fully fledged and pretty justified facepalms. The video below does help to illustrate some of the problems the game has but when you actually pilot one of these bastards yourself you realise that it genuinely has “issues”. From Software, as far as we’re concerned, have just been helpless pawns in all this. We can also only begin to feel the pain the likes of Hifumi Kouno and the rest of the original development team on the first Xbox game must be feeling right about now. In any case, we’ll be definitely reviewing this puppy come its imminent release in the next few weeks.

What seems to be the entire newly animated opening movie for the Zone of the Enders HD Collection is now available online for everyone to see. Animated by Sunrise, it was specially commissioned for the new HD collection. There’s also a brief interview with Kojima online too, though this more importantly shows the new HD gameplay in action. Both videos are linked below.

Famitsu has a nice new update showing in-game screenshots for the upcoming Zone of the Enders HD Collection. The most impressive of these, we think at least, are for the original game. In many ways playing that will be more interesting than Anubis (which already had many silent revisions and a special editions). Fingers cross crossed that they’ve helped to excise the suck out of the first game.

As previously mentioned, the Mamoru Oshii directed live action trailer for Steel Battalion Heavy Armor received its first preview. Naturally this pretty much shows Oshii’s predilection towards gratuitous gun porn. Following on from this there’s now also a rather blandly narrated “how to” trailer on the game. As always this doesn’t fill us with confidence as the game is increasingly looking like a pile of steaming bobbins. Either way, we’ll know for sure come the end of June when the game is finally released.