If you remember the last time Nintendo revealed a new piece of hardware (the Revolution/Wii) it was ages before people got their hands on the thing. The 3DS, on the other hand, will be playable in less than three months.

Nintendo spokesman Ken Toyoda said yesterday that "We wanted to give the gaming industry a head's up about what to expect from Nintendo at E3", in response to questions why the company made such a surprise announcement.

"We'll invite people to play with the new device then".

E3 2010 will be held in Los Angeles between June 15 and June 17, which is less than three months away. We knew we'd be seeing the thing there, but for it to be in a publicly playable state is a surprise. A pleasant surprise.

Nintendo to Make 3D Version of Its DS Handheld Game [New York Times]

Upcoming Xbox 360 RPG Fable III may be following in the footsteps of its predecessor and going "episodic", according to comments from the game's creator, Peter Molyneux.

"We've always had a feel for Fable as a game that's got a big story, that starts in King Arthurs time and goes through this big arc so in some ways we're [just] playing out that, but I've often thought it would be brilliant to be walking through Charles Dickens' London", Molyneux told attendees at a SXSW panel.

"It was such a dark place and very episodic too – so we're doing that with Fable 3, we'll give you the first big episodes, and you'll be able to download new episodes, which is analogous to the way Dickens wrote."

Now, the episodic he's talking about here isn't the same as that employed by the recent "splitting up" of Fable II. That was a single large game broken up into several smaller pieces.

What Molyneux seems to be talking about here is that you're given a "full" game out of the box, with several major pieces of DLC released afterwards, continuing the story.

Having just finished Mass Effect 2's "Firewalker" pack, which feels disjointed and unfulfilling once you've finished the main storyline, it's an approach that seems to have a lot more merit than the current norm of simply adding new, random missions or quests.

Fable 3 and Emotional Games [Bit-Tech]

Welcome to the nightly off-topic discussion on Kotaku, which we call Kotaku Off Topic. What's on the menu tonight? Everything.

While you're chatting off-topically, I'll be away at a dinner for a friend, a going away party for someone en route to greener pastures. I'll also be doing my best attempt at avoiding Lost spoilers, easy to do when you're miles away from a television, but slightly harder in the age of Twitter and petty manchildren who enjoy spoiling things for others out of spite. Did you know that's a quick way to get your Kotaku account banned? It's true!

Well, carry on with the interesting conversation, but please keep it spoiler free. Here's a few things to start discussing.

• Transformers 3 adds John Malkovich, Frances McDormand & Ferrari - Shit's gettin' classy!
• Weird: The Al Yankovic Story - Very impressed with Funny or Die's ability to cast people.

As seen on Izit.

Generally, the reason you adapt a comic book franchise for a video game is because its most recognizable characters help drive its sales. Bane, while familiar to the Batcore, probably doesn't have much of a Q-score with the general public.

That doesn't stop Sefton Hill, the director of Rocksteady's award-winning Batman: Arkham Asylum from daydreaming about a standalone game starring the temperamental luchador pumped full of super ripped fuel, or really any of the other lesser-known villains in the Batman continuity.

"I think one of the things about working on Batman is that you really get to see how good all the villains are," he told Videogamer.com. "I really think there's scope to take some of those villains, even some of the not-so-famous ones like Bane, who has a phenomenal backstory, and really work on turning that into something original and fresh.

"That's kind of something [that would be] less popular, but something that could be really interesting and exciting. That could be crazy."

Yeah, and it's not gonna happen. If you were to ask, Family Feud style, for the name of a Batman villain, the results would go something like: Joker, Penguin, Catwoman, Riddler, Scarecrow, Two-Face, Mister Freeze, etc., Bane as a character is not even 17 years old. He's a strong supporting character - but the emphasis is on "supporting."

A Standalone Bane game? Yes Please, Says Batman Dev [Videogamer.com via CVG]

The NBA Jam fan page on Facebook rolled out another five screens of the upcoming reboot of the beloved arcade/early console classic. We now know the names of eight more players who'll be appearing in the game. They're identified inside.

Indiana's Danny Granger (shooting) and Mike Dunleavy versus New Orleans' David West and Chris Paul.
Denver's Carmelo Anthony (dunking) and Chauncey Billups versus Miami's Michael Beasley and Dwyane Wade.
Atlanta's Joe Johnson (dunking) and Josh Smith versus Sacramento's Kevin Martin (since traded to Houston) and Andres Nocioni.
Milwaukee's Michael Redd (shooting) and Andrew Bogut versus Utah's Deron Williams and Carlos Boozer. Where's the Bucks' Brandon Jennings?
The Jazz's Williams (dunking) and Boozer versus the Bucks' Bogut (on ass) and Redd.

via NBA Jam's Facebook Fan Page

The third entry in Monolith Productions' F.E.A.R. franchise may be getting its big reveal in the next month, as foretold by a teaser in an unnamed Spanish language gaming magazine. The supposed name of that game? F.3.A.R.

Carrying on the proud tradition of replacing numbers for letters, as popularized by games like Driv3r, Wip3out and Thi4f, F.3.A.R. has long been rumored to be in the works, further extending the horrific tale of Alma and her offspring, the Point Man. The teaser image posted to NeoGAF doesn't offer much in the way of details on what the third proper F.E.A.R. game would bring with it other than fetuses of mass destruction and grizzled looks, but it does hint at more information hitting next month.

We reached out to Warner Bros. reps who declined to comment about the image or the possibility of one more F.E.A.R., but it certainly looks like we're due for more.

F3AR revealed.Yes, it's named F3AR, so original. [NeoGAF]

If iPhone and iPod Touch gaming is in the same category as the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable, then the Apple device surged in 2009 at the expense of the two dominant mobile platforms, especially the PSP.

That is the finding the analytics site Flurry, which found Apple's control of the DS-PSP-iPhone portable gaming marking, in the U.S., increased to 19 percent in 2009 from 5 percent in 2008, while the market shares of both the DS and the PSP shrank.

This market on the whole did grow, Flurry said, to $2.55 billion from $2.25 billion, so Nintendo's DS software revenues would have gone up by about $100 million (from $1.68 billion to $1.78 billion). But for the PSP, revenues fell sharply, falling from $450 million in 2008 to $280 million in 2009. Flurry says it took the numbers from the NPD Group and its own estimates of iPhone/iPod Touch revenues.

Overall, Apple's mobile devices are figured to account for 5 percent of all U.S. video game software revenue. "Controlling 5 percent revenue of a $10 billion industry in just a year and a half is significant," Flurry wrote. "From a market share perspective, console games lost ground to portable platforms and iPhone. While the downturn in the economy may have dampened sales of the more expensive console games category, there is no denying that iPhone has generated substantial revenue and entered strongly into a mature industry."

Naturally, differences in distribution, development cost, length of game experience and device features invite argument as to whether Apple handhelds should be compared with Nintendo's and Sony's. But yes, if game software on a handheld is the definition of this market, then Apple certainly is a force in it.

Apple iPhone and iPod Touch Capture U.S. Video Game Market Share [Flurry via Games Industry.biz]

If you plan on picking up WarioWare: D.I.Y. next week—with or without a shiny new Nintendo DSi XL to go along with it—get ready to do some heavy reading, thanks to the game's bulky instruction booklet.

A copy of WarioWare: D.I.Y. just showed up here at Kotaku Towers West (sans gigantic sandwich) and it may have a valid claim to the biggest Nintendo DS instruction manual ever. At 65 pages, it's a little beast, doing a most voluminous job of explaining the programming and game design features of WarioWare: D.I.Y. Pretty hefty for a game series famous for its seconds-long twitch-based games.

Keep in mind, this is a single language manual, not one of those English, French and Spanish numbers, the kind that ballooned the New Super Mario Bros. Wii manual to a whopping 66 pages.

While I haven't actually had a spare minute to play my copy of WarioWare: D.I.Y., I have done something just as important—oops, I mean trivial—I've tried to see if any of the other DS games in my collection compare to the latest WarioWare. Here's a small first-party sampling.

• Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon - 37 pages
• Advance Wars: Dual Strike - 39 pages
• Brain Age - 49 pages
• Picross DS - 29 pages
• New Super Mario Bros. - 45 pages
• Mario & Luigi: Partners In Time - 37 pages
• Rhythm Heaven - 16 pages
• Super Mario 64 DS - 35 pages
• Elite Beat Agents - 27 pages
• Animal Crossing: Wild World - 43 pages
• Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis - 33 pages
• Advance Wars: Days of Ruin - 43 pages
• Mario Kart DS - 40 pages

WarioWare D.I.Y. more than doubles the instruction manual page count of WarioWare Smooth Moves for the Wii, a 32 page tri-language manual, and easily bests the 37 page-long LittleBigPlanet manual. That design-your-own-level game for the PlayStation 3 also packs in 12 pages of developer credits.

What can we conclude from this? Nintendo is making sure that no facet of making your own WarioWare games—micro-sized they may be—goes unexplained.

Ever wondered who was responsible for Tony Hawk Ride's skateboard controller? Rock Band: Green Day? Every other headscratching boardroom meeting concept? Meet Indie Man, hero to independent game developers and the enemy to the corporate video game establishment!

(This was one of Mega 64's many contributions to this year's Game Developers Choice Awards and Independent Game Festival Awards, one of the comedy group's best. Enjoy it, as we did at this year's GDC event.)