To: Crecente
From: Bashcraft
RE: They're Not Kidding When They Say XL

Fatty tuna? It's expensive! The other day when we were at a family friend's house, this recipe for phony fatty tuna was discussed:

You take chilled avocado and slice it into bite-sized pieces. Then, put soy sauce in a separate dish. (Be sure to add wasabi!) Then, dip a piece of avocado in the soy sauce, and then close your eyes and devour away. And there you go, fake phony tuna!

The important thing is to close your eyes while eating it.

Oh, and just as you get a sandwich from Nintendo for the Nintendo DS XL, Nintendo announces...a totally new Nintendo DS. That's odd timing, no?

What you missed last night
Nintendo Announces New Hardware, The Nintendo 3DS
Would You Pay Women To Play Xbox Games With You?
Is This How 3D Will Work On The Nintendo 3DS?
Nintendo 3DS Is A New Hardware Series
What We Know (And Think We Know) About The Nintendo 3DS

[Pic]

Do you know? Do you?

According to Famitsu publisher Enterbrain, there have been over 30 million Nintendo DS consoles sold in Japan between December 2, 2004 and March 21, 2010. The top three selling Nintendo DS titles are New Super Mario Bros. (5,767,262 copies), Pokémon Diamond Pearl (5,766,571 copies) and Animal Crossing: Wild World (5,133,862 copies). Those are all Nintendo games!

ニンテンドーDSの国内累計販売台数が3000万台を突破 [Famitsu] [Pic]

BioShock and Batman. Apart from the "B" thing, you wouldn't think the two had a thing in common. But then, you'd only say that if you hadn't seen a 1994 episode of the Batman animated series, called "Deep Freeze".

In this episode, an intelligent, if slightly deranged man builds a city in the middle of the ocean. He does so to carve himself, and his followers, an oasis, a fortress against an outside world he believes is in sharp decline. Sounds familiar.

This city, called Oceana, has - like the rest of the Batman series - a distinct "art deco" appearance. Which BioShock also boasts. There are also helicopter security robots. Just like BioShock.

Of course, there are also marked differences. Deep Freeze focuses more on the story of Batman villain Dr. Freeze, and Oceana's creator, Grant Walker, is more Bond villain than Andrew Ryan, as he seeks to destroy the outside world by freezing it.

So it's not a "copy". Nobody is alleging that. All we're saying is, if you're a fan of BioShock and Batman, and would like to indulge your fantasy of seeing the two come together (in a way that's not Batman vs Big Daddy), you should try and track down a copy of the episode.

How BioShock's Plot Was Predicted by Batman: The Animated Series in 1994 [Geekosystem]

Sega's Yakuza gangster game series is not in 8-bit. But if it was, what would it look like?

Site 8Bit Maniacs is offering cellphone wallpaper as well as other Yakuza cell phone content.

8-bit yakuza crooks are kinda cute!

More often than not, when politicians utter "video game" in a sentence, it is usually in a pejorative fashion. Here is one occasion when it wasn't.

The United States does not have high speed rail like, say, Japan does. So when U.S. law makers were discussing how advanced Japanese rail is, they did not hesitate to mention how impressed they were.

At a congressional hearing, the Associated Press reports that Illinois Republican Dan Manzullo said he took the bullet train two years ago from Nagoya, where he visited Toyota Motor Corp., to Tokyo. I got to sit right up in front," the congressman said. "It was almost like a video game," he added. "You have to try that sometime."

President Barack Obama revealed an economic stimulus package with eight billion dollars for building a high-speed rail network in the U.S.

"Japan's population, its density, its geography, make it entirely different when discussing public transportation than with respect to the United States," California Republican Representative Ed Royce said. "We look at economic merit when addressing infrastructure."

Perhaps we've reached a point in which video games can be used by politicians to describe good things!

US lawmakers wowed by Japan bullet train [Yahoo!] [Pic]

Overnight, Nintendo made the surprising decision to reveal a new piece of hardware months outside of E3. Well, "reveal" might be too strong a word. "Barely mention" might be more appropriate, leaving us to fill in the gaps ourselves.

With curiosity being a driving human instinct, and Nintendo doing little to satisfy our need for answers with the briefest of press releases, we have to read between the lines to try and find out more about Nintendo's latest piece of portable hardware. So...let the line-reading commence!

What We Definitely Know

Here's the stuff that's explicitly stated in the press release.

- That a new handheld, called the Nintendo 3DS, will be released sometime during Nintendo's next financial year (Apr 2010 - March 2011).

- It will be capable of producing 3D graphics, without the need for 3D glasses.

- The 3DS will be backwards compatible with the entire line of Nintendo DS products.

- It will be properly revealed during the E3 trade show in Los Angeles, which will take place in June.

What We Think We Know

There are a few more details we can glean from the information above. This isn't confirmed, just stuff we suspect based on supporting evidence.

- The 3DS will feature 2 cameras (If it includes support for DSi software, it'll have to)

- It's an all-new line of hardware, not simply a new model of the DS. Despite having the letters "DS" in the name, it's a working title, and the use of terms like "backwards compatible" and the fact it's succeeding the "Nintendo DS series" sounds a lot like this is the first of Nintendo's next generation of handheld gaming devices.

- It'll use those cameras to track the movement of the handheld and/or the player. That movement will then be used to display the 3D effects, similar to the way recent DSi title 3D Hidden Picture handles things. In support of this, in an interview with a Japanese newspaper earlier this year, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said in relation to the company's next handheld "it will be necessary to have a sensor with the ability to read the movements of people playing".

And that's it! No further info, no pictures. We'll probably have to wait until E3 to learn more, but we'll update this post if we hear anything else.

Prepare for an eery sense of deja vu, Heavy Rain fans, as you watch actor Sam Douglas - the face and voice of Heavy Rain's Scott Shelby - play exactly the same role in a real movie. Trenchcoat and all.

The scene is from Derailed, a 2005 film starring Clive Owen (Children of Men) and Jennifer Aniston (daughter of Days of our Lives' Victor Kiriakis). Oh, and the RZA!

Douglas is barely in the film, but a scene showing him in a long coat, as in investigator, questioning someone, is a treat. Especially that last line, about shipping people off to the morgue each week....

Beverage Mountain Dew has been doing the game collaboration for years — like Halo 3 or World of Warcraft. Who's next?

Upcoming PSP game Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker appears to be the latest game doin' the dew tie-up thing. Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima posted the following images on his Twitter account.

Peace Walker sneaks onto the PSP this April in Japan and this June in the West.

なんじゃこれ？ and デューです〜 [Twitpic]

Halo's Master Chief and Gundam's Zaku II get mashed up in this customized figure. Custom mech toy designer Angelo Guibone is responsible for this delight.

As website GameSetWatch points out, the figure has been given Master Chief accents as well as a Halo paint job.

MG - HALO Master Chief Zaku [Figure.fm via Mecha Damashii via GameSetWatch]

Last year, a patent was uncovered for a Wii football. It had been designed by Nintendo, and yet, it was stupid. Well, looks like somebody else has beat the Big N to the market.

CTA Digital, manufacturers of cheap gaming peripherals and accessories, has released the "Soft-football for Wii", a product so stupid it couldn't even get the rights to the name "Soft Football".

The ball itself is made of soft foam. The harness for the Wii Remote is made of plastic. And it's not even a full football; because it's more of a hand-grip than a complete ball, half the thing is missing so there's room to slide your hand in.

What's worst is that this is an improvement for CTA, who already have a Wii football on the market. It's called the Wii Football. It fell down by being even stupider than the Soft-football, in that it was hard, and tried to use the football as the controller itself.