While the PSP may sit atop this week's list of bestselling hardware in Japan, it's still the Nintendo DS that Japanese gamers love more than anything else.

Cheaper versions of the Nintendo DSi LL, DSi and DS Lite walk away with the biggest share of the pie this week, sales likely spurred by the latest Inazuma Eleven game and that new/old Fire Emblem release. The battle between the Wii and PlayStation 3 sees a wider gap this week, with Nintendo pulling ahead, likely from still strong Wii Party sales.

While the PSPgo dips back into triple digit sales, the Xbox 360 seems to be selling better and more consistently than it had before the release of Monster Hunter Online. Wonder why...

• PSP - 28,747
• Nintendo DSi LL - 24,189
• Wii - 21,092
• PlayStation 3 - 19,420
• Nintendo DSi - 18,202
• Xbox 360 - 6,056
• Nintendo DS Lite - 5,059
• PlayStation 2 - 1,475
• PSP go - 831

EA sweetens the deal for players picking up the limited edition of the modern-day Medal of Honor reboot on October 12, with a beta invite for DICE's highly anticipated Battlefield 3 in every package.

We've heard nary a peep regarding Battlefield 3 since EA COO John Pleasants mentioned it back in June of 2009. All we've known since then is that the game is in development.

Now we know a sure-fire way to get into the beta.

Along with some extra weapons and a remastered version of Medal of Honor: Frontline (exclusive to the PlayStation 3 version), picking up the $59.99 limited edition of Medal of Honor ensures players a spot in the Battlefield 3 beta test, which should happen within twelve months of Medal of Honor's release, according to the EA beta website.

Medal of Honor goes on sale on October 12 for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC. I get the feeling sales numbers will be much higher now that this news has hit.

In late May, ModNations Racers producer Dan Sochan told Kotaku a patch was in the works that would shorten the game's lengthy load times. Today, IGN reports that such a patch will be out next week.

First on the list of tweaks coming via the patch, the outlet reports, is:

Slashed Load Times
Yes, there are still going to be load times, but Sony is reporting that in some cases those loads will be 50 percent faster.

A new casual difficulty will be added and it seems that players won't have to go to the game's hub — a journey with load times of its own — to access online play.

ModNation Racers is a great-looking game with excellent track/kart/character editing tools. Being able to play it without sitting through frequent commercial-break-length pauses would be a delight. Let's hope next week's patch accomplishes that.

ModNation Racers Patch Date and Details [IGN]

While much of this weekend will be occupied playing StarCraft II multiplayer—and likely spent very sad at the beatings I'll be receiving—I'll also spend some time slaying monsters cooperatively in Castlevania: Harmony of Despair.

I've already logged an hour or two with the Xbox Live Arcade version of Castlevania HD, but not enough to learn its intricacies, nor enough to defeat that sonofabitch Puppet Master. Hate that guy. Watch out for a Kotaku review of Iga's latest Castlevania game—one totally not pieced together from reviews of previous Castlevania releases—next week.

And while I plan to invest heavily in StarCraft II multi this weekend, I suspect I'll revisit some of the missions, explore the challenges and check out branching story opportunities I missed on my first play through.

How about you? Did you finish StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty's campaign yet? If you're not a StarCraft player, what will you be spending your time with this weekend?

Don't worry, I highly doubt the murderous psychopath Lynch was directing the question towards you in the latest ultra-violent trailer for the upcoming Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days.

At least I hope he isn't, because that would mean he then refers to you as a "little shit," and no one calls Kotaku readers little shits.

Unless of course they're psychotic killers.

Oh, I see. Awkward.

Well his opinion doesn't count anyway.

Short notice, but Lil Poison, a documentary about a kid who became the world's youngest pro gamer plays at 6pm ET today in New York City at the New York International Latino Film Festival.

Details on the movie and the screening, which is in the Chelsea neighborhood, are on the festival's official site.

I haven't seen the film, but it seems to be more than just a rah-rah piece about pro gaming. Lil Poison was a successful pro gamer when he was in the third grade, and there's plenty of family triumph and heartache around a situation like that.

If you can't make it or want to know more about the film, check out IFC's interview with Lil Poison director Beth Earl. A sampling:

IFC: Little Victor is a kid who was able to turn his passions into something that became profitable for his family. Do you think that he was more or less able to cope than an average kid whose parents are going through a divorce? Did you see a personality change as his parents were breaking up?

Earl: Yes. I think he withdrew a lot more during that time and has now kind of come back and is more himself. It's important for any kid going through that to have an outlet but for him, because it was video games, he became more socially withdrawn, I think. But you wonder if he had people to talk to? On the surface, it took his mind off of things but perhaps there would've been other ways.

IFC: And there's still pressure and obligations associated with games...

Earl: There's one scene in the film you'll see, but there's a moment after a fight where he's in the basement alone playing the Wii. When you see him playing games that he doesn't compete in, that's a world that's all his own. And so when he plays the Wii, or if he's playing...he had like a virtual pet for a year and I think all he did was press space bar and he would do it for like an hour. It reminded you he was a kid.

How About a Lil Poison? [IFC.com]

When you play with thermoelectrics, you're bound to get burned, or possibly chilled.

Researchers from the at the Tokyo Metropolitan University have discovered that certain something that's been missing from every video game that's ever featured lava and ice levels: ThermoGame, a video game interaction system that delivers sensations of hot and cold to the player.

How does it work? Small solid-state devices use electricity to generate and remove heat. It's all based off of the Peltier effect, named after the French physicist Jean-Charles Peltier, who discovered the temperature-changing effects of electrical currents in 1834.

A pair of these devices is housed in the upper and lower halves of a video game controller's casing. At appropriate times during gameplay, the devices activate, rapidly cooling or heating the controller surface, bringing the sensation to temperature change to the player's hands.

While the change in temperature is small, with only a ten degree difference in the controller's temperature in five seconds, researchers found that this small change provides enough of a sensory nudge to draw players deeper into the virtual environment.

The technology, presented at SIGGRAPH 2010 this week, was developed in cooperation with the National Institute of Special Needs Education, with potential uses including temperature-based control mechanisms for use by the blind.

It might not be smell-o-vision, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Adding Temperature to Human-Computer Interaction [MIT Technology Review]

Once you finish playing next month's Metroid: Other M on the Wii, you can watch it. A "theater mode" will stitch the game's cut-scenes and some pre-recorded gameplay into a Samus epic.

This news comes from an interview with Other M creators in Famitsu, as translated by 1Up.com:

The storytelling aspect of Other M continues to play a major role even after you beat the game, the way [Nintendo designer Yoshio] Sakamoto puts it. "There's a 'theater mode' that lets you view all of the cutscenes linked together seamlessly as a single movie," he explained. "We placed just as much weight on enjoying the story as we did on the action aspects of this game, but it's hard to fully communicate a storyline in a video game with just one playthrough. At the same time, though, it's asking a lot of players to beat the game twice to get it all, so that's where the idea for that mode came from. It lets you make a lot of discoveries, things you missed or dialogue that makes more sense in retrospect. I hope it helps people understand the story better."

This theater-mode movie is about two hours in length and divided into chapters like a DVD film. It's not just the movie cutscenes straight from the game, though — there's some pre-recorded gameplay bits to it as well, although those sections aren't recorded off your own moves as you beat the game. "I wanted to do that," Sakamoto said, "but we're using our own sample play data instead because that's also a way of giving the player hints — like, you can beat this particular boss this way too, and so forth."

Another notable tidbit: the game's creators believe players will only find 30% of the game's items on the first play through. I think Metroid players who pride themselves on discovering each entry's secrets will consider that a challenge.

All About Metroid: Other M's Gameplay [1up.com]

After teasing the first statue in their Left 4 Dead 2 line on Wednesday, Gaming Heads sends us detailed pictures of their grotesque Tank statue, along with a $300 price tag, and that's the cheap version.

The blurry picture released earlier this week did not do Gaming Heads' rendition of Left 4 Dead 2's Tank any justice at all. Now that we see it in its full 15-inch glory, we can easily see how a hardcore fan might lay out the $299.99 asking price for one of these terrible beauties.

Of course a truly dedicated fan would spend an extra $25 on the exclusive version. Limited to 300 pieces worldwide (the standard version is limited to 750), an extra $25 scores you a pump-action shotgun and slightly rarer giant zombie statue.

Wouldn't this look lovely on your mantle, covered by some sort of velvet cloth?

Earlier today I showed you that the first LittleBigPlanet was customized by a gamer to play like Xbox downloadable darling Limbo. Last week, however, I watched its sequel play like Xbox downloadable darling Shadow Complex. LBP2 is wonderfully flexible.

Like its predecessor, LittleBigPlanet 2 is a highly customizable action game that is most impressive in its malleability. It may appear to be a co-op side-scroller, a modern Mario Bros. made of realistic-looking virtual cloth, wood and brick. But the people behind LBP2 want us to think that it can be anything.

The new game need not remain a side-scroller. It can be a top-down shooter, a real-time strategy game. It looked to me, when I played a little bit of LittleBigPlanet 2 last week at a Sony PlayStation showcase event, that it could even be Shadow Complex.

This was Shadow Complex:

See that stuff the guy is standing on? That's foam from his foam gun. The Xbox 360, Metroid-inspired Shadow Complex let your hero create his own slopes and walkways by shooting goo from a gun. The first level I played of LBP2 featured a Sackboy, my character, equipped with a hat that could shoot globs of foam. The hat could be set to shoot any substance in the game, a Sony representative who also had a controller in his hand told me. In this level, though, the hat would shoot goo. The goo would stick and pile. We could make our own platforms with it. Soon, I had Sackboy imitating what the Shadow Complex guy is doing in the screenshot above (sorry I don't have a picture of it). The foam gun may not have been Shadow Complex's only special feature, but it was one of its finest. LBP2 can ape it.

In that level my Sackboy also had a grappling hook that allowed for a lot more clinging and swinging than the first game offered. Though the jumping in the game is still floaty, I felt more in control as I hopped around, more capable of going where I wanted.

The Sony people are proud to say that, in just 24 hours, some of Little Big Planet's top users were able to use an early version of LittleBigPlanet 2's enhanced editing options to create all kinds of creative games.

For example, there was this UFO-flying game:

I tried it. I flew the ship around and shot at some enemies, admired the cows.

I didn't try the LBP2 real-time strategy riff:

Nor did I see the 3D-shooter one:

I did try Oh Dayum, It's Rambo which reminded me of the old Capcom game Commando. It turned LBP2 into a top-down military shooter. That was a neat trick that, though I think they sawed this woman in half by putting sackboy in control of a large cardboard soldier that was too big and awkward to move around the screen. Not bad for a 24-hour experiment, but not designed well enough to feel tightly controlled. It felt more like a lark of an effort than a game I would play twice.

All these variations are made possible with LBP2's improved editing tools. Game owners can still use a PlayStation 3 controller to build or tweak levels. They can now also access an in-game device called the Controlinator to map PS3 controls to any object in the game. You can assign actions to the PS3 controller's sticks and buttons. The Sony rep who showed me the game quickly made a UFO of his own and mapped movement controls to show me how this worked. He was also able to define the effects in-game gravity would have on the UFO, to modulate its buoyancy and its responsiveness to controller input.

For those of us who don't plan to create many things in LittleBigPlanet 2 nor put all our faith in amateur creators whose content we can download, I'm told that we can expect Media Molecule to again offer a full set of professionally-made levels and mini-games. The MM folks will also create a batch of levels that can be controlled with a PlayStation Move, though launch plans do not include giving LBP2 owners the ability to make Move-based content of their own.

LittleBigPlanet 2 looks like a nicely-improved laboratory for professional and amateur game-making. The PS3 title launches in November, though given the additions to its editing suite, I suspect the reasons to keep playing the game will pop up for many months after that.