This seems to be the final promo video before the release of Gundam Battle Operation this Thursday. As you’d expect, at over 5 minutes long, it doesn’t hold much back and shows a lot of the game in action. Despite the somewhat unfortunate monteisation structure, the sheer scope of this game is pretty ambitious. We’ll be posting our impressions not long after the game’s release.

Finally, the unit we’ve most wanted to see in Gundam Extreme Versus Full Boost has been revealed. The mighty MS-08TX (EXAM) Efreet Kai from the pretty damn fantastic Blue Destiny games on the Saturn will be added to the game on June 26th. To be fair, this mobile suit was telegraphed a while back in a “blink and you’ll miss it” segment of the game’s first promo. Much like the RX-79BD-1 GM Blue Destiny Unit 1 in Full Boost, the Efreet Kai is very much based around melee combat and it also only costs 1000 points to use (half that of the Blue Destiny GM). Anyway, we’re just glad the Efreet Kai has finally made it into the game.

Despite our double-take on the whole weird marketing for Hawken, the playthrough of the game now has us a bit more excited. Especially as the customisation options look to be pretty cogent. If that didn’t pretty squarely make Hawken a mecha game, then behold its own controller (shown above). Dubbed the slightly tragic “Mek-Fu”, the controller is actually a fully customisable USB device. So even after Hawken has been and gone you’ll still be able to use it quite happily on other games. Considering MechWarrior Online’s Artemis controller, this looks a lot more like the classic Steel Battalion setup we loved and adored. However, the price tag may end up being considerably more than the Steel Battalion one and that even included the game. Though at least you’ll be able to use it on other games, something the Steel Battalion controller wasn’t really able to do. If you want to see the playthrough we’ve linked it below.

Famitsu has the scoop on Assault Gunners, a new PSN download mecha game for the Vita out at the end of June. Like the other download only games for the Vita, the price tag is a similarly reasonable 1,480 yen. For that you get a 30 mission story mode, a Horde mode clone called “Inferno” and 4 player ad-hoc multiplayer. There’s also a load of customisation available too. All that aside, the game looks to be pretty damn solid indeed. We’ve been craving for some good mecha games on the Vita for a while and now a whole bunch arrive at once. Developed by Marvellous AQL, it’s directed by Kazuyuki Ogawa (of Clock Tower fame) and produced by Shinji Motoki (who recently worked on the pretty awesome Muramasa game on the Wii). Anyway, a demo is out for the game today and we’ll be buying as well as giving the game a good once over on its release on June 28th.

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 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.

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.

What with Chousoku Henkei Gyrozetter’s arcade release imminent, on June 21st in fact, a new promo has been released to help get the word out that this game is positively bonkers (yes that’s a transformed Prius above firing electricity, obviously). The driving setup looks pretty cool though, something we weren’t expecting at all. The mecha combat does still appear to be turnbased though. In any case, the full promo is shown below.

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.