This is not a game. I repeat, this is not a game. Based on the Korg MS-10, Korg DS-10 is a music tool packed in DS software. It allows up to eight DSes to connect by ad-hoc wireless. The soundboard interface looks like an actual Korg synthesiser soundboard with knobs that can be rotated and turned and jacks that can be plugged into and switch by simply drawing lines. And since it is a straight up synthesiser on DS software, the chart of full scale musical notes might seem intimidating. It's possible to create full, rich layered tunes that range from a minute and a half to five minutes. Developer Cavia included a "Chaos Pad" that simply lets users "draw" on the touch screen and it maps out corresponding notes. Perfect for noodlers.

The latest issue of Nintendo Power reveals, via cover story, that Sonic the Hedgehog is back! After a painfully long absence, the "Blue Blur" is returning to the Wii with Sonic & The Black Knight which the mag pitches as a "big new Wii-exclusive adventure" in which Sonic "swings cool steel". Yep, the Sonic drought is over.

We have little info beyond the cover details for Sonic's third Wii outing, but can imagine a Sonic themed adventure with the compelling gameplay of Red Steel or Dragon Quest Swords will fit the series like a glove. Hey, we'll take it (begrudgingly) over gunplay any day.

To sum up... :\

Sonic and the Black Knight (Wii) revealed in new Nintendo Power [NeoGAF - thanks, Carlos!]

OK, and after this, I promise no more bashing on Nintendo's press conference. But I used to work in internal PR for a very large software company (that may or may not have produced products that rhyme with Shmorton Shminternet Shmecurity) and we'd go to RSA, host our own user conference, all that stuff. What I mean to say is that I've seen some eye-rolling moments in keynotes, when top executives try to get hip. But I've never seen anything close to this.

The -Minus World sums it all up with the five most embarrassing moments. Yes, No. 1 is DJ Ravi flailing away like a toddler batting at a mobile. But the other four are alternately hilarious/pathetic too, and I think any one of them, by themselves, would have made it a trainwreck.

Anyway, enjoy. See you back here tomorrow.

The 5 Most Embarrassing Moments of Nintendo's E3 Conference [The -Minus World, and pic]

Message boards and forums are livid at EA and NCAA Football 09, whose problems apparently go well beyond EA Locker corrupting the roster files. AOL Fanhouse went through the boards and made a full accounting, and it's grim.

• Sliders are borked. The CPU sliders do nothing. Human sliders affect both CPU and human. Level playing field!
• Online dynasty mode is borked. It sometimes simulates games that have been played by humans.
• Super-sim is borked: Using it to fast-forward through a blowout can add many more plays than would actually happen in the football game, and produce extremely lopsided final scores.
• Kick returns are borked.
• The new player speed model is causing huge problems with pursuit angles by CPU-controlled players.

Damn, does this count as simulating a "war economy" too? Gamepolitics picked up an item out of Tacoma, Wash. that a former technical advisor on the original Metal Gear Solid faces a federal charge of attempted parts smuggling. The parts in question are "sophisticated holographic night vision gunsights", bound for Japan.

Capt. Tomoaki Iishiba, a Japanese national who joined the U.S. Military in 1993, faces one count. He basically acquired the sights and then mailed them to others without an export licence. The sights cost more than $US 600 each.

He's scheduled to enter a guilty plea at the end of the month.

Metal Gear Solid Tech Advisor Busted By Feds for Shipping Weapons Parts [GamePolitics]

Penny Arcade nails it in three panels. Then F@NBOY$ goes and re-nails it in seven. Well, they re-nail Nintendo's cringe-inducing presser, anyway.

Both full size strips are on the jump. Sorry to do that, but at front-page width you can't make out the words.

I've read a number of thought-provoking pieces over at Only a Game, and this week Chris Bateman has a meditation up on Nintendo, the 'mass market,' moving away from games, and what this could spell for the industry at large. Is it really all it's cracked up to be? Unlike most of my favourite essays from Bateman, this one is pretty short and digestible — he points out that aggressively pursuing the 'mass market' (casual market) is working out splendidly for Nintendo, but he wonders if aggressively targeting that market inherently means moving away from games. And what about the industry at large? Well, that's not so clear:

Wasn't there to see it, don't know, as this is the E3 Gameplay Trailer for Lego Batman, but it has no sound. Not sure if that's a bug or intentional. But it begins with Lego Riddler sitting on a toilet, and if I see that I have an ethical obligation to report it to you mature people. (Snicker). Then Riddler and Mister Freeze go out, drive a cop car into a lot of smashable minikits, and Freeze goes apeshit with the gun, freezing Riddler in the process.

This video is 15 minutes long. I'm pissed there's no sound, because I love the Lego speak in the cutscenes, and God only knows what they're "saying" in that opening. It looks like a delightful game, with tons of LOL potential.

LEGO Batman: The Videogame E3 2008 Gameplay Trailer (HD) [GamersHell]

Ever wanted to decimate the world's population or see if you could develop a super-bug that would leave the globe in utter pandemonium? If the answer is yes, browser-based Pandemic 2 is your game; even if the answer is 'uh, no,' it's an interesting way to while away some time. Watch as your customised disease of choice is let loose on the world, then use your 'evolution points' to mutate the perfect delivery method for a global pandemic — the goal is to have a trail of devastation (and bodies) left in your wake. There are two different modes, 'realistic' and 'relaxed,' so if you're not sure you're ready for a realistic onslaught, you can try your hand with the easier mode.

Pandemic 2 [CrazyMonkeyGames via IndieGames]

This is absolutely parody. It could be unintentional self-parody. Or it could be someone masquerading as a PS3 fanboy to parody that particular constituency. But it's parody. A guy who gives the announcement of Final Fantasy XIII for the 360 equal weight to Asperger's is, shall we say, having a disproportionate reaction. (Full text on the jump). Still, we had a video earlier of an angry, ticked off PS3 fanboy who claimed to know Japanese culture about as well as Marcus Brody could [teeth clenched] blend in [/teeth clenched] in the Middle East of the late 1930s. That guy turned out to be a Something Awful goon.

The fact the text is available only as a screen capture (full version after the jump) leads me to be skeptical someone actually feels this way. But, if you're a Microsoft partisan and want to gloat, here you go. And if you are four-square for Sony and want to rage, here is a comrade-in-arms. And if you invest your emotions and identity in pro bono advocacy for multinational corporations with billions in market capitalisation and brigades of PR professionals, you need some perspective. Like this guy.

Lest anyone missed this little gem among the E3 hubbub, Blizzard has scored a victory against WoW bot maker Glider. Don't remember that whole kerfluffle? Blizzard sued Glider over EULA infringement for copying code, as well as the ancillary issue of pissing WoW users up and gobbling up resources. Glider shot back with 'But grinding your way to level 70 is boooooring.' Probably unsurprisingly, this argument did not go over very well in court and Blizzard won its summary judgment motion. All's well that end's well ... or is it? Over at PlayNoEvil, there's some interesting analysis on what this judgment could mean and why it may not be all that it's cracked up to be:

Not sure what to make of this. Bullshit radar says "proof of nothing" because there's no reason for tech support to be looped in on a game in development. That said, two guys worked up an extremely patient, social engineering prank that had 2K Games support believing, or at least suspicious of the possibility of a hacked Grand Theft Auto IV demo on pirate sites. And in the back-and-forth, it turned up this reply from tech support:

With an aging gaming population comes more gamers with money, which means ... money to spend on travel. Bonnie Ruberg takes a look at where gamers would go given $US 1,500 for expenses for a 'game-related' vacation. PAX? E For All? Tokyo Game Show? ... Disneyland? I can't remember the last proper vacation I had, but I can say definitively I wouldn't be planning it around a convention or expo. In fact, a weekend off with time to do nothing but hang out would be a treat right now:

Reader Paul from Australia sends in this pic (and two others) of his homebrewed homage to Pyro from Team Fortress 2. Naturally, because this is how my mind works, I thought "well if Pyro is a female character, this dude is running around in girls' clothes". I kid! I keeeed! The mask is right on, but the suit's not the same texture as Pyro's rubberised get-up, which in addition to being expensive would also look like fetish gear. What. What?!

No really, I think I have a strange form of Tourette's, that causes me to blurt out wildly inappropriate, if not profane, things. Fahey and Leigh can attest to that. So can my girlfriend from my senior year of high school. We saw "Ghost" on a date and, while she was crying during the scene where Patrick Swayze possesses the mystic's body so he can hold his wife one last time, I leaned in close to whisper, "You know, what's really going on here, is Demi Moore is actually dancing with and kissing Whoopi Goldberg". And I wondered why I was a teenage virgin.

Wow, that was a digression. Hit the jump for the images.

Paul also advises that it's available for sale if you want to buy it. You can e-mail him, just be sure to remove the ATs and DOTs.

Danc at Lost Garden has another take on the utility (or lack thereof) of game reviews in today's gaming landscape, this one looking at the 'expertise bias.' He points out the disparity between reviewers and players when it comes to looking at new games — especially ones that have a gentle difficulty curve. His basic operating premise is that because game reviewers have plowed through so many titles and mechanics, they're looking at 'difficulty' in an entirely different light than vast portions of the audience. What will the future look like? He posits observation of other players is going to become increasingly important to developers, and if reviews can't keep up with that, they will really fall by the wayside:

Reader Sourside21 found four Photobucket images of Soulcalibur IV breaking the street date by about 10 days. Well, maybe. It looks like these guys are playing it in the back of a store, so maybe they're employees (or friends) playing with the stock after hours. Naturally, we don't see any gameplay. But we do see the character selection page and Kratos ain't on it. "We'll probably be getting a lot of information on how each of the characters play soon", Sourside21 surmises. Good bet. All the full size photos are on the jump. Officially, Soulcalibur IV drops on July 29 in North America, July 31 in Japan, Australia and Europe, and Aug. 1 in the UK.

Beijing Perfect World is launching Perfect World International, an English version of the MMORPG that's built for English-speaking spots in North America and Europe (you won't have to play the Malaysian version if you don't feel like wading through other languages!). The closed beta will be coming next month with anticipated release in September of this year. It sure looks pretty — I may just have to fire up the game this weekend to see if it's actually that pretty on my computer.

You know, when some of us decide we're starting all over and the place needs a new look, we take some cheap furniture or knicknacks to the dump or have a yard sale. Lara Croft packs her home with explosives and goes for the extreme makeover. Speaking of, she looks completely different, like a Bratz biker, almost. Where are the trademark shorts?

Looooong trailer for the subject matter (and being entirely a pre-render.) But it's out Nov. 8, on PC, the next-gens, PS2 and DS. And I suppose then, or before, we'll get the story of why she went and blew up her own manor.

Tomb Raider: Underworld E3 Exclusive Trailer [Gametrailers]

This being the E3 week, we churned out a huge amount of reporting and you consumed it in record-breaking numbers. Knowing that this post would serve as an E3 recap of sorts, I've categorised some things out in the jump. This covers stories that we tagged original; there might have been some others from the conference that didn't get that tag. Either way, this is our comprehensive E3 coverage list, so if you're not seeing something below, check that.

As a part-timer and the least experienced game writer on this staff, I had my own impressions of E3 which I will write up later, from an outsider's perspective. (I was only there Sunday and Monday). We all work in separate cities, and this event allows us a time to work together, in person. And the Kotaku staff of Fahey, Bash, McWhertor, Leigh, Adam, Maggie and of course, Crecente -- with help from Gawker managing editor Noah Robischon in Los Angeles, and Jim Reilly working offsite on multimedia assets -- came together like a team of superheroes to put out one hell of a report for you this week. They're all recovering this weekend, but show the Supa-Kotakufriends a little love in the comments.

Highlights
Nintendo Introduces Wii Motion Plus
Xbox Division FINALLY Reports Profitable Year
Tretton: Sony Considering PSP with Harddrive
Mario & Zelda Teams Both "Hard At Work" On Wii Games
The New Xbox Experience: Just The Facts (And Maybe Some Conjecture)
Ladies And Gentlemen, We Have Booth Babes

Much more after the jump.