Battle Armor Division, a mecha action sidescroller, has been released by developer Crian Soft. As we’ve noted before, Battle Armor Division’s gameplay runs in a similar vein to the classic Assault Suits series, which inspired other recent efforts at recreating the Assaults Suit magic such as Gunhound and Gigantic Army. It’s always a pleasure to see a Western-developed mecha game (European, no less) that’s not afraid to combine elements of both Japanese mecha anime and Western military science fiction, especially when it leads to gritty Real Robot conflicts filling the screen with explosions.

On the official site you can find a demo, and the full game is available via digital distribution for 8.90 Euros (around $12.50). Along with the game, a new trailer has been released, asking: “can you survive at the war in 26° century?” Ah, it just wouldn’t feel like a mecha game without a slightly awkward localization.

Good news: it seems that English speakers are getting an actual Gundam game localized overseas, even if it’s decidedly the least ‘mecha’ of the Gundam games, Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3. The US site gives the release date as June 28th 2011, and Europe gets it a few days later, on July 1st 2011.

Needless to say, fans of pressing the X and Y buttons for hours on end will be chomping at the bit to play this, but despite the repetitive gameplay of the first two games I also have to admit that I have 200 hours of play time split between them. The third installment doesn’t seem to change the formula so it’s hard to recommend it, but the Dynasty Warriors series is as long-lived as it is for a reason; sometimes you don’t need the depth of Armored Core, but just want to hammer away at 1,000 Zakus for fifteen minutes, or play something split-screen with a friend without them needing a half-hour tutorial. And, unfortunately, mecha fans don’t exactly have much to pick from in terms of Gundam games in English, and being able to take part in the epic finale to Zeta Gundam is often worth suffering through occasionally mindless gameplay.

The English trailer shows off the new cel-shaded graphics, and seeing the Turn A Gundam again–now accompanied by the absolutely godlike Kapools–does my metallic robot heart some good.

Say it ain’t so, Irem. First it was a rumor, and then that rumor was confirmed. Irem, the game’s developer, was perhaps the hardest hit of any game company by Japan’s earthquake and tsunami, for they cancelled their big game release for this year, Disaster Report 4, because of the obvious similarity of the game’s hypothetical scenario and the very real nightmare that Japan was currently living. Having their big budget game pulled out from under them at the last second likely caused Irem to reassess their financial situation, and continuing work on Bumpy Trot 2, or as it is known in the West, Steambot Chronicles 2, probably seemed impossible – especially given its vaporware nature, being first shown at Tokyo Game Show 2006 and only sporadically talked about since.

Stardock’s Impulse game download service is currently having a sale on a game named Metal Brigade Tactics, a turn-based mecha strategy game. To be completely honest, it’s not all that impressive, but with the current sale price at $3.00, it’s probably worth looking at for curiosity’s sake. There’s also not much else available on the PC in terms of turn-based mecha strategy games, and with its low system requirements this might just be the sort of game to play on a low-spec netbook.

The mecha designs are fairly original, and while the game system was obviously inspired by both Western turn-based games as well as Super Robot Wars, there are a few unique tweaks added to the mix, such as artillery being fired off at the beginning of a turn and landing at the end of it, making them very effective area denial weapons, as foes need to decide between taking damage or wasting a turn taking the long way around. There is a demo available from the official website.

While the past week has been filled with tragedy, there is thankfully some good news to report. During the last flight of the Space Shuttle Discovery before its retirement, the first humanoid robot in space, Robonaut 2, was delivered to the International Space Station. The Robonaut will mostly be running through tests to determine how well its design works in freefall, but it is hoped that with enough data and fine-tuning Robonaut and other robots like him could be used to perform menial or dangerous tasks, freeing the human astronauts for more involved research duties.

We don’t usually report on real life robotics news but the irony here is perhaps too good to ignore. The progenitor of Real Robot anime series, Mobile Suit Gundam, explained their giant “mobile suits” as being upsized versions of the worker pods used in the construction of space colonies. While the concept of these worker machines was mostly an excuse to explain away giant robots as realistic weapons, NASA’s Robonaut 2 will hopefully be fulfilling exactly that role on the ISS: helping construct humanity’s space outpost.

The helmet also reminds us of some of Gundam’s mobile suits in its design, with the stylin’ gold-blinged head being reminiscent of Zeta Gundam’s Hyaku Shiki or the more recent Alvaaron from Gundam 00. And the shape of the helmet visor makes Robonaut look like the smaller brother to the venerable GM (which has inspired other designs, such as none other than Halo’s Master Chief). Most amusingly, Robonaut was developed by a partnership between NASA and General Motors, meaning that there’s a big ol’ “GM” sticker on the bot itself! The classic Gundam fan debate as to what, exactly, “GM” means might finally be over…

Lately we’ve seen a bumper crop of games inspired by classic mecha action platformer Assault Suits Valken (aka Cybernator), in the forms of Gunhound, Gigantic Army, and Explosionade, and now it looks like we can soon add one more to the list: B.A.D. : Battle Armor Division.

Battle Armor Division’s mechanical designs follow closely to those of the original Assault Suits Leynos, and this could very well be a case of where ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ The gameplay in the video that the developer, Crian Soft, has released seems a bit slower than we’d probably like but there’s no use in making judgements until it’s yourself at the controls; hopefully the promised demo is released soon. As it is, the “mecha invasion of Normandy” scene at the beginning of the trailer gives Battle Armor Division quite a bit of hype to capitalize on.

Interestingly, the studio creating this game appears to be Italian, giving yet more support to the idea of mecha games development becoming more of a worldwide effort. Italy also has had their own mecha fans and culture for a while now, and it’s great to see them hitting a critical mass where that pool of talent can be tapped towards further creation.

In a world driven mad by a hunger for browser games, only one can claim to be based on Sakura Wars, and that game is Sakura Taisen Taishou Roman Gakuentan.

Sakura Wars is a popular series of strategy RPGs mixed with elements of dating sims and visual novels, and the jump to Web 2.0 is all the more inexplicable considering how story- and character-driven the original games were. Sakura Wars was defined by its pioneering use of character relationships affected by the player’s choices, as the main character attempted to woo one (or more) of the female actors/mecha pilots he was leading into battle against demons, and any attempt to scale what was a personal experience into a multiplayer one is going to be an uphill battle, if it wants to stay true to the series.

Luckily for us mecha nerds then that we care far more about making robots slice bloody swathes through the Enemy than we do about making cute girls blush, because the mecha for the browser game are looking just fine. The mecha of Sakura Wars have an interesting aesthetic, combining the extremely realistic elements of the VOTOMS series with the characteristic boilerplate feel of steampunk, and as what little we know of the game suggests it will be battle focused, this could turn out to be an utterly superb multiplayer mecha strategy RPG, albeit one that is likely to cause purists to tear their hair out.

Of course, with the reportedly poor sales of Sakura Wars in the West, the chance of this being localized for English speakers is astronomically small. However, the language barrier hasn’t always stopped us foreigners from trying to play Asian multiplayer games before, and really: those mecha have different production versions, with all sorts of different tubes and doohickeys going every which way: how can you not be excited for that?

The official site for the game has a very short but also very Super Robot Wars-looking video on it, teasing us yet more with a fruit us Westerners might never taste (those of you having trouble with that link, try this one).

4Gamer once again delivers the goods, this time with an announcement of some interesting DLC for Gundam Musou 3, including a mission consisting solely of Acguys. The lowly mass-produced aquatic unit from the original Mobile Suit Gundam has developed a cult following of sorts over the years, mostly due to its bizarrely incongruous cuteness. Most people – the lucky ones -gloss over the unit on first impression, but eventually you start to see the big ol’ teddy bear underneath that gigantic undersea Zeonic death machine, and nothing ever looks the same again. Welcome to the cult of Acguy.

Bandai, never one to ignore their fanbase, have a very special version of the Acguy in the new Gunpla Builders line, although I dare say that they are playing with fire. You can’t try to modify a cosmic horror/cuteness like the Acguy without putting your very soul into peril. Whatever vein of madness Kunio Okawara struck upon should remain forever undisturbed.

And on the opposite side of the cute/awesome spectrum: there’s also a stage featuring the Einerad support unit from Victory Gundam, because nothing says ‘manly’ like taking your giant bug-eyed robot and putting it inside a giant racing tire, complete with giant guns on the top. It’s a damn shame that Victory Gundam was produced as a cartoon series and not as a heavy metal concept album, because a picture of this as the cover art would have made it go triple platinum. People say that Victory Gundam can be the most depressing Gundam series, but if you think about it, it’s really just the most metal.

A post on the Mommy’s Best Games devblog almost-but-not-quite announces a PC version of Explosionade, along with a map editor, to be in development. The original Xbox Live Indie Game version was spectacular and we are excited at the prospect of a wider audience being able to play this fantastic game. At 80 Microsoft Points, or one US dollar in real world currency, it was exactly the sort of game we hoped for when the Xbox Live Indie Games section was first announced: insane, amazing, and cheap.

Being able to pop open the hood and design your own maps for Explosionade is definitely an appealing prospect, especially given that the difficulty of the original was perhaps too low in order to accommodate the non-hardcore crowd, but there are some concerns that it might be difficult to do much with the game’s assets that the original game didn’t already do–the game’s design was pared down with a laser to only the bare essentials, and Explosionade made smart use of what it had. When you need to pay employees and are (reportedly) eating wild scorpions to cut personal expenses, selling your product for only a dollar is risky business and you have to make everything you do count.

The trailer for the ExplosionadEditor is enough to convince anyone of the absolute necessity for its release, though, and I’m reminded of just how much fun Bangai-O DS’s level editor was. It really is unfair of them to release this trailer, and lord their ability to make their own levels over us, while we wait patiently for mecha goodness to rain down like manna from heaven.

The magnificent bastards at the Romhacking Aerie told me to drum up support for a possible Christmas release of their Super Robot Wars J translation, and when the 25th of December came and went with nary a sighting of Santa carrying a sack full of binary patch code, the caterwauling of fans crying out in unison caused such a disturbance in The Force that Jedi in a galaxy far, far away could feel it, to say nothing of the psychic pressure our more local Newtypes had to put up with.

However, it was all a ploy to teach us the true meaning of Christmas: being surrounded by friends and family and not by Game Boys. Now that Christmas is over, we can finally get back to ignoring our family again because, yes, the fan translation is now out. Carefully follow the directions included in the readme, which detail the patching procedure and suggest utilities to use if command-line interfaces give you the heebie-jeebies.

The release of Super Robot Wars games into English through fan translations are always marked as grand occasions, because although most fan translations deal with games which are unreleased in English, most of them still have the theoretical possibilities of release through either an updated version or a classic game download service such as the Wii’s Virtual Console. The Super Robot Wars games, however, have no such chance at release because of the legal issues surrounding them. They’re much beloved for their combination of multitudes of fans’ favorite mecha anime series into the same game, but this combination produces a legal snarl of epic proportions as different companies all claim ownership of the rights to these properties in the West, making negotiations prohibitively expensive at best and utterly impossible at worst. As such, make sure to enjoy the fruits of their translation labors.