This year marks the fortieth anniversary of masked, motorbike-riding super hero "Kamen Rider" ("Masked Rider"). How will this milestone be marked? Why, with hotpants.

A Japanese record label is teaming up with the franchise's production company to create "Kamen Rider Girls", a Japanese pop unit with five girls ranging in ages 18-20 and representing different incarnations of Kamen Rider.

Kamen Rider is a tokusatsu TV series that debuted in the early 1970s.

The show spawned movies, manga, video games and even international adaptations like Masked Rider in America.

During the previous decade, tokusatsu shows began increasingly popular with the advent of Ultraman. But Kamen Rider owed more to a late 1950s program called "Gekkou Kamen" or "Moonlight Mask".

The program debuted in 1958. Moonlight Mask, with his bike and pistol, was a hit with the kids. While American kids in the 1950s were dressing up as Davy Crockett, Japanese kids were wearing capes and turbans. Even though the show was later canceled, movies followed as did an anime.

Gekkou Kamen was clearly an influence, but Kamen Rider wasn't a straight up copy. Gekkou Kamen is more like the Lone Ranger, and Kamen Rider is more like, say, Spider-Man with the protagonist transforming into Kamen Rider.

Kamen Rider's grasshopper design was no accident, and would help influence generations of bug-based heroes in video games and differed from forerunners like Super Giant, a steel tights wearing superhero.

Forty years of Kamen Rider history, several generations of the Japanese males all reduced to five ladies singing pop tunes. Well, five for now, because there are plans to add more members in the future.

The Kamen Rider series is unabashedly commercial. The goal is to entertain, sure, but also sell toys to little boys. Even under that veneer of rampant commercialism, there is brilliant character design and all around cool. No idol group, male or female, no matter how good can do that justice. Then again, that's probably not the point.

The group's first single, "Love Rider Kick", goes on sale on December 15.

Culture Smash is a daily dose of things topical, interesting and sometimes even awesome - game related and beyond.

仮面ライダーGIRLS初お披露目! 「スーパーヒーローミュージックスタジオ」 [マイコミジャーナル]

Morons yammering away in your headset can be off-putting to the average gamer toiling through a round of Call of Duty online, but how does it affect the combat capacity of an actual, trained soldier in the field?

Machinima specialist Rooster Teeth's new series Immersion seeks to find out, having US Special Forces veteran "Shane" fire twenty rounds down a firing range with an M4 carbine. His first ten shots are in sweet, blissful silence.

His second ten shots are with the comedy crew from Mega 64 giving him shit through his headpiece. Will he buckle under questionable statements about his junk? Under offensively homophobic slurs? What about racial shit inside his brain right now?

Though the country earlier this year published a sci-fi MMO, Garshasp - a monster hunter of folklore - is billed is Iran's first AAA-quality video game. It's being made for the PC because trade sanctions prohibit selling dev kits there.

Thus, Garshasp has been in development since 2006, and its makers are waiting on a publishing deal before taking it international. As for the game itself, it appears to be a straightforward third-person action-adventure game, focusing on combo-heavy melee combat with jumping puzzles and other platforming aspects. You can read up on more about the game at its Wikipedia entry.

Iran's First AAA Video Game Looks Impressive [megamers, thanks mathare92]

Of all the things she's done in her life - like starring in sitcoms, animated series and big Hollywood movies - there's nothing actor Mila Kunis would love more than to play a "kick-ass mage".

Kunis, who has scored gamer brownie points for her addiction to WoW then lost them with a starring role in the awful Max Payne movie, was speaking to MTV about Blizzard's massively-multiplayer hit when the topic of the franchise's movie came up.

"Hell yeah! I would do it, of all things," she squeals, when asked if she'd want to take part in the forever-in-development-hell project. "I don't know if I would want to be a big character in it, but I would totally want to run around as a little mage. Like a kick-ass mage. With pigtails? Mmmmm... Awesome!"

While on the subject, the Family Guy and Book of Eli star says she's managed to kick her well-publicised WoW addiction by taking a fairly drastic step.

"I'm off," she tells MTV. "I took it off the computer. I did. I didn't cancel my account, so I still have my little twinks running around, but I had to take it off."

"I feel like a drug addict talking about a drug!"

That's because you are a drug addict talking about a drug. Just because it's got Orcs and shit in it doesn't make it any less dangerous.

Mila Kunis Goes Cold Turkey On 'WoW,' Dreams Of Pigtailed Mage Role In Movie [MTV] [image: Getty]

Why should anyone in their right mind pay good money for a console port of a game you can play on a PC, right now, for free?

Auditorium HD is a console port of Auditorium, a PC game put out in 2009 that was itself a bulked-up version of a Flash-based puzzle and music title first released in 2008. There wasn't much to it then - you guide a "flow" of music through a series of bars that need to be filled up - and now, two years later, there's still not much to it, the extra levels added for the game's first commercial release now added to again with a second "campaign" extending the game's lifespan.

Ideal Player

The late-night adult gamer who after an evening spent elsewhere, doing other things, wants nothing more than to retire to their room and play a gentle game about gentle music.

Why You Should Care

The PlayStation 3 may be home to several "chilled" games of this nature, but while other games like Pixeljunk Eden and flOw are mostly about relaxing, Auditorium HD lulls you into a trance with one hand while covertly taxing your higher brain functions with the other.

Why should I buy this if I can play the Flash version for free? Good question. While there's little in terms of design or mechanics you'll get outside of the free version available on the game's site, its a question of scale. The free game is small. The PC version you can pay $10 for, at 15 songs (each with numerous states inside) is bigger. This one is bigger still, adding a whole new set of songs and levels that relegates the original retail release to the status of a campaign. If you play the Flash version and love it, look at the commercial releases as the main meal to the free version's entrée.

How tough is the game? Oh man. It's tough. On the one hand, Auditorium can be very forgiving in some levels, as there's no single, definite "answer" to solving a puzzle. You just need to be close enough to the general idea and you'll pass. On more difficult stages, however, this can be a problem, as you can be very close to solving a puzzle and not know it, since you're left endlessly tinkering with things until it all comes together. It can be incredibly frustrating to clear one stage in five minutes then be stuck on the next for over an hour.

It will move you. While Auditorium HD will also be released on PSP, it's the PlayStation 3 version that is most interesting, because of its support for PlayStation Move. Played with a control pad, Auditorium is a great puzzle game. Arranging the screen so that the music is able to "flow" could have been a maddening task for a regular game in this genre, but Auditorium makes it a delight. Played with a Move controller, though, which is held like a conductor's wand, it becomes something more, its elegant controls complementing the simple flow of the game perfectly. (Note: the game also supports stereoscopic 3D, but since I don't have the tech for that, I couldn't test it.)

So what's the music like? For a game based around the flow of music, whether you dig the tunes or not is obviously important. I liked it - it's a non-stop collection of sweeping yet simple orchestral stuff - but if you were hoping for boppy dance beats or other more up-tempo fare, sorry, this isn't the game for you. One thing that saddened me was that, having grown to really dig the game's music, there was no way to listen to it outside of a stage; the game could really have done with at least an in-menu jukebox for all its songs.

Auditorium In Action

The Bottom Line

There are times when Auditorium HD's roots as a free Flash game show; when you quickly see most of what the game's going to show you, when you realise you'll be doing the same single thing over and over for hours and when you realise the game's intro sequence has been ported over unimproved, looking decidedly "un-HD" in the process. But then, Auditorium prospered as a Flash game for a reason: its mechanics and premise may have been simple, but they were beautiful, and they were fun. Auditorium HD simply takes those positives and gives you a lot more of them, making it not just the definitive version of the game, but one of the better titles of this ilk on the PlayStation 3.

Auditorium was developed by Cipher Prime and published by indiePub for the PlayStation 3 (version played) and PSP, released on November 23. Retails for $10. A copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played Auditorium Classic to completion.

Three weeks post-Black Ops we've seen more lucky kills and wacky vids than you can shake an RC-XD at. This helicopter takedown reminds that Grand Theft Auto IV, even two years later, pulls its weight in WTF multiplayer kills, too.

[seen via Hot Blooded Gaming]

Kind Kotaku readers, won't you come into this post and talk about the off-topic things we like to discuss when darkness falls over the video game news of the day? This is your opportunity.

I'll leave this open thread in your possession. I must prepare for a few days off and a trip to New York City, where at least three Kotaku editors will convene for things you probably aren't that interested in. Secret meeting stuff, you wouldn't want to be bothered. Until then, please, talk amongst yourselves.

Team Meat's pithy riposte to PETA's meat-is-murder complaint earlier today. Via Super Meat Boy's Twitter [thanks Nerf Herder]

The release of Gran Turismo 5 in Japan and the build up to Monster Hunter Portable 3rd give the PlayStation family a week to completely dominate overseas. Just how helpful were GT5 and the latest Monster Hunter?

Well, the PSP was actually down from its spectacular sales from the week prior, with the PlayStation 3 more than doubling its popularity week to week. The new Gran Turismo 5 PS3 bundle was certainly a boon to sales of Sony's now-gen console.

Wii sales were up too, presumably helped by the recently launched Mario Sports Mix. Here's how Media Create sees the console war shaking out for the week of November 22 to 28.

• PSP - 75,689
• PlayStation 3 - 68,840
• Wii - 41,267
• Nintendo DSi LL - 28,370
• Nintendo DSi - 26,548
• Xbox 360 - 4,329
• PSP go - 1,675
• Nintendo DS Lite - 1,539
• PlayStation 2 - 1,332

Fight Night Champion will offer players the story of fictitious boxer Andre Bishop, whose career arc will involve - as the HBO guide used to say - adult situations, adult language, profanity (maybe nudity?) in EA Sports' first M-rated game.

Here's the game's second video, released Tuesday. To see more of Bishop's story, go to Fight Night's Facebook page and hit "like."