A shakycam vid of some German dudes playing Samba Di Amigo on the Wii has turned up. And...hrm. Look, maybe it's on easy. Maybe the guy's never played it before in his life. Maybe the light from the windows was interfering with the Wii Remote, maybe the lovely Sega handler hadn't explained things properly to him or maybe it just looks so cold and lifeless because they're, well, German. Those are all things to consider. Because if you watch this without considering them, you may be a little underwhelmed.
SEGA Gamersday: Wii Insider Coverage [Wii Insider, via Go Nintendo]

So sad about Samurai Spirits. It has literally turned into a mixture of Tekken-ish gameplay with no real jumping, and a rather bland gameplay. D: The 3D characters dont even look that good. I mean there's a friggin viking now. A big, fur wearing, horned helmet, axe weilding viking. It's gone World Heroes on us! The game felt sluggish and unresponsive. So sad since I used to love the Samurai Spirits series. I hope they polish it up after the feedback that will be given after the show by the fans.

You're in a pickle. I can sense it. You love Halo. But you don't love reading. Or, you love Halo, and love reading, but find the very notion of reading a book based on a videogame abhorrent. Either of those. What you need, then, is a preview of a Halo book (in this instance, Contact Harvest), let you test it out, try it on, see if it's really you. Like this one, being hosted over at Spawn.com (ie McFarlane, who are churning out a new Spartan action figure every other week). After reading through the 20-page preview, I must say...if you're a fan of overly-descriptive novels, full to the brim with nigh-impenetrable military jargon and acronyms, this one's just calling out for you.
Halo: Contact Harvest Preview [Spawn]

If you like pictures of people standing around, staring at arcade cabinets, this this post is for you! In this case, it's Street Fighter IV and the people, they're excited.

Ever hear of Gamma Attack? Was put out by Gammation for the Atari 2600 back in the day. It's bright, it's colourful, and it's also very, very rare. Someone who's claiming to own a copy of the game has just put it up for auction. Starting bid? Oh, $US 499,999. And ninety-nine cents. Is the game even worth that much? It's definitely rare, but...who knows. Probably not. That's an awful lot of money. At least you'll save on shipping, though: the seller will only part with the game if you arrange a face-to-face meeting with him. Which all sounds a bit fishy, but then, would you write a cheque for half a mil? No. Because when a chance pops up that you can fill a briefcase full of cash, meet a stranger in a deserted car park and exchange the goods under the watchful eyes of hired goons, you take it. Especially when it involves an Atari game, and not something more serious, like biological weapons, high-grade narcotics or, I don't know, your daughter.
Atari 2600 Gamma Attack [GameSniped]

Street Fighter IV is playable. Today, the wait at the AOU arcade show hit 90 minutes to play the game hit 90 minutes. Keep in mind: This is on the business day. So, what's it like? Kotaku buddy Jean Snow was at AOU today and checked it out — even winning a perfect battle. Briefly, Jean tells us:

Controls were what you would expect from the game, nice and tight. But the graphics, oh man, they look soooooo nice! The backgrounds are incredibly detailed. If you look at them, you noticed all sorts of nice things. Like some letters were falling off a sign after a big attack. The entire game is an absolutely stunning package. You play on a widescreen high-res screen, and all the characters were beautifully rendered. Even the chest hair on the wrestler guy Zangief looked nice! It's one of the most beautiful, complete fighters I've seen. Ever.

[Thanks, Jean!]

This is bad news. Not the kind of bad news that'd compel you to clamber up on a rooftop, mind, but it's pretty damn close. The upcoming Highlander game won't feature Kurgan. Not at all. VG247 spoke with the game's executive producer, Luke Timms, who broke the news:

Kurgan, no, but there is one familiar character Highlander fans will be happy to see. Working closely with the original writer - David Abramowitz - ensures that we are in tune with what Highlander fans want and expect.

PlayTV in Action [Three Speech via Gay Gamer]

We've got Okami on PS2, Okami on Wii...which should just about do us, I think. But hey, if you want to close your eyes and imagine an Okami DS (or even GBA), I'm not going to stop you. This might help! It's the work of 7even, one of the artists over at Pixeljoint, who for one of the site's weekly challenges took that awesome boss battle with the lightning sword and reimagined it as a 2D side-scroller. A 2D side-scroller that will now haunt me in my sleep.
Okami 2D mockup [Pixeljoint, via insert credit]

Here we go! This appears to be the first pictures from the Japanese arcade AOU 2008 show floor. A lot of the pre-opening pics seem taken by Blurry McBlur. There are snaps of exhibits for Arcana Heart 2, DoDonPachi Daifukkatsu and Square Enix's Lord of Vermilion. More to come.

The kids at 4CR do some good, good work! Unlike us, who are paid in gold, jewels and exotic spices, they bust a gut for the Nintendo fanboys of the world for nothing. So we're a little sad to hear that 4CR's Mitch, who put together the awesome Nintendo Valentines Day cards we posted a few days ago, has had one of his earlier cards ripped off. All Saints, a "trendy" British fashion chain (and a big one at that), have nicked Mitch's "You Complete Me" Tetris design, put it on a shirt and are selling said shirts for a whopping £40. Or, you know. EIGHTY BUCKS. Why eighty? It's not like they had designers to pay.
Zounds! We've Been Plagiarised! [4CR]

Nokia's revamped N-Gage, now a multi-handset platform rather than standalone hardware, is trying to learn from its predecessor's mistakes. Ditching the rubbish hardware was a good first step. Harking back to Nokia's one shining triumph in the gaming world - Snake - might be another. This is Snake for the N-Gage, which is nothing like your granddaddy's Snake. It's got online leaderboards, a snazzy new colour scheme and reacts to the background music (though, criminally, not your own mp3s). Definitely looks like an improvement, but then...what was wrong with the old Snake?
[via Pocket Gamer]

Hit the jump for a higher quality clip. Do it!

Valentine's Day isn't over! There's still time to make out with each other! Here's what appears to be one of the first Western-made dating sims for the PC. Dubbed Don Juan, the retro game ran on early 80s British PC Oric 1. Tiny screenshot after the jump.

Capcom are keeping a fairly tight leash on people snapping pics and vids on the AOU 2008 showroom floor, but that's never stopped the internets before. The first shaky-phone-cam footage of the game's made its way out of the show, and is now ready for your slack-jawed approval/hair-pulling disappointment. Ryu v Viper above, with loads more after the jump.

Think Apple are about to bet the farm on entering the console race? Maybe not. A "senior development source" has told British trade mag Develop that they're doing nothing of the sort. Rather, the recent game-related trademarks that popped up are more likely to mean a bigger push on Apple's part to bolster the iPod games market, which for all the device's popularity can't be performing as well as they'd have hoped. He also mentions the rather more obvious fact that Apple have spent a lot of time and money building their reputation on the consumer electronics side of things, and are not about to go blowing all that by entering a console market that's already tough enough as it is.
'iPod is Apple's game gateway' says insider [Develop]

A while back, we posted what looked like the official Mario Kart Wii box. We weren't sure, though. Now we are! Hooray!! Nintendo updated its press site with official images of Mario Kart Wii box art art and logo. So, if you're really into official box art, get your jollies after the jump. Hint: YOU'VE SEEN IT BEFORE.

Competitions are fantastic. Except, of course, when they end. That's exactly what happened to our Lost Odyssey comp, which finished on February 13.

It took a while to go through all the comments we received during the week, and I apologise for not posting the results sooner. Honestly, my job would be so much easier if the calibre of entries wasn't so high. So in the future, can you guys please just post poorly punctuated fanboy rants*?

(*This is a joke. Please keep the wit, humour and intelligence coming.)

Thanks once again to Microsoft for supplying us with the prizes. One copy would have been great, but MS came to us with five. Which, as you can imagine, was awesome.

So, which five readers had the best comments? Hit the jump to find out!

Oh dear. In a listing for the upcoming Wii port of Okami on their company store, Capcom have posted a bunch of screenshots (the button prompts show it is indeed the Wii version). Tiny, tiny screenshots. Which are very, very concerning. With extra content out of the question, there were only two things that would set the Wii version apart from the PS2 one: Wii Remote brush control and 16:9. These screens look 4:3. A 4:3 game in 2008? Disappointing. So let's keep things optimistic and hope they're a cropping error, or are from an early build, shall we?
Okami Wii [Capcom Store, via Go Nintendo]

Yeah, the filthy rich and super-important make donations to Presidential candidates, but everyday folk do as well. And games developers are everyday folk. 1UP have, using the Fundrace 2008 online search tool, found which people from which studios have donated to the various candidates. Those hoping/expecting for some love for Hillary Clinton will be sorely disappointed.

A while back, Parappa The Rapper creator Masaya Matsuura got a little heat for saying the DS bubble had burst. Now, he's back to clarify!

It is not a simple bubble. The DS successfully launched in many territories simultaneously, but maybe at the end of 2006 to 2007 many titles — sequels — lost [money]. Very few titles are getting much better.

This means, especially for the Brain Training titles or non-gaming content, it is getting difficult right now.

As in the United States, Wii rules the hardware sales roost in Japan. Super Smash Bros. Brawl may be killing it in the software charts, but those figures don't necessarily translate to big hardware boosts which could be due to supply constraints. Numbers were down for every platform but the PSP, which continues to threaten the Wii for the number one spot on Media Create's list. For the week ending February 10, the Japanese console war racked up the following casualties.

• Wii - 81,737


• PSP - 75,912


• Nintendo DS - 60,464


• PlayStation 3 - 23,985


• PlayStation 2 - 11,038


• Xbox 360 - 3,615

AOU kicks off in Tokyo tomorrow. Being the world's biggest arcade show, there'll be plenty of good stuff on show. Including some new Street Fighter game people seem to be all excited about. Capcom have passed out a few photos of their booth now, so you can see it without filthy, greedy patrons swarming all over it and dirtying the place up, so here, check em out. Oh, and "I'm Here To Smash You Up"? Best tagline ever.

To: Ash
From: Crecente

Valentine's Day is always rough for my brother. The day after Valentine's Day, two years ago, his daughter was shot in the head by an abusive ex-boyfriend who, apparently, wanted to spare himself the embarrassment of revealing to her that his promises of sobriety and life on the straight and narrow was nothing more than a thin tapestry of lies.

My brother has, increasingly, been dealing with this death. But today he discovered that the man who allegedly supplied the gun to his daughter's killer will likely be set free. Released, it turns out, because Jennifer's spineless murderer can't be bothered to stick to the agreement of his plea bargain and testify against his weapon supplier in open court.

It shocks me that the Travis County District Attorney's Office can be so heartless as to break this news to my brother a day shy of the two-year anniversary of his only child's death.

This trailer for Uwe Boll's film adaptation of Far Cry is sure to put asses in movie theater seats. Snappy catchphrases in the making like "I haven't said anything about being simple" and the gleaming star power of Til Schweiger are going to go a long way to ensuring that Crytek's game becomes a massive blockbuster. Is it me or is there an out of place punch-in-the-face sound effect near the end?

Yesterday Luke posted about a slide from an Electronic Arts analyst presentation which seemed to indicated that BioWare was working on a new Knights of the Old Republic title. Electronic Arts contacted us today to request a correction on the rumor we posted.

The slide from the EA presentation was titled "Best Creative Talent", EA said, and it "addresses future and past titles."

KOTOR, Black, Boogie, Skate and some other titles on the slide speak to past portfolio releases and the pedigree of the studio but do not specifically address future sequels. The MMO in development at Bioware Austin is listed a "New MMO". We apologise for any confusion this may have caused.

Great so now we know that the slide may or may not mean that a new KOTOR is being developed by Bioware. The public relations folks haven't responded to our email asking specifically if Bioware is working on a new Knights of the Old Republic game.

Bioware at Work on a New KOTOR [Kotaku AU]

The official Capcom blog pointed out earlier today that those earlier posted Famitsu pics of Street Fighter IV, well, they don't quite do the game justice. Nor does a Babelfish translation on details relevant to new fighter Abel. If you want a proper look at the new mixed martial arts star, check out the gallery below. The better news from the Capcom USA folks is that they'll be translating entries from the official Street Fighter IV development blog, currently only in Japanese. Check 'em out.

The program, called "Feedback", is a chart editor for Activision's Guitar Hero series. With it, you can add your own songs to the finger-flexing music title, like Master of Puppets demonstrated here.

Now, you may have heard of Feedback before. But what you probably didn't know is that it's made by two Aussie developers - one from Pandemic and the other Krome Studios. The pair has just released to the tool for free, and you can download it from the official website.

The site also has comprehensive instructions on how to use the utility, which requires a PC running Windows 2000, XP or Vista. The latest version of DirectX 9 is a must as well.

There's a press release and a screenshot after the jump, if you feel like taking a squiz.