Classic edutainment franchise Math Blaster is making it's way to the DS this spring thanks to a publishing deal with Majesco Entertainment.

Math Blaster in the Prime Adventure combines adventure gaming with mathematical puzzles that has you fighting off an army of robots... robots with math skillz. The game will put your addition, subtraction and multiplication skills to the test and includes four player battle mode and challenge and adventure modes.

I applaud this, seriously. Just the other day, while attending a dinner with Ken Levine and some other folks during PAX, I got into a discussion with a group of them about educational games for next gen consoles.

I think that the three platform owners should get behind bringing a few educational games to their various downloadable game systems.

They should do this for two reasons.

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Things are really looking up for parents who want to buy their children video games for Christmas but don't necessarily want to buy them games they'll enjoy, as venerable PC edutainment software creator Knowledge Adventure partners with Majesco in order to bring their properties to the console and handheld market. "This partnership is part of our strategic vision to transition the company from educational software to a multi-faceted kid's entertainment company," said Knowledge Adventure president & CEO David Lord. "Expanding our product footprint into this new category will enable us to create a market for future products--including our leading JumpStart® brand--on console and handheld platforms and capitalise on the increasing popularity of these platforms." The first product of this union will be Math Blaster in the Prime Adventure for the DS, introducing the 21-year-old franchise to a whole new audience. Do you smell that? That's the smell of children's tears on Christmas morning. It's intoxicating!

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Majesco's getting on board the Facebook game craze with Bananagrams, an anagram game hitting the social networking site for free on August 18th.

The game starts you off with a batch of selected tiles, and then players have to make up as many words as possible, as quickly as they can, from the available letters. Friends can compete against one another live, and the person to use up all his or her tiles first is the winner.

Facebook users can play alone or with up to eight friends at a time. The single-player mode provides a timed race for users to try and beat their own best time.

Full announcement after the jump:

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On its surface Major Minor's Majestic March is very simplistic, but then again so was Parappa the Rapper. And that's an apt comparison. Both games were created by Masaya Matsuura and both feature bright cartoon characters drawn with bold, clean lines.

Instead of tapping out a rhythm on a controller, as players did with Parappa, Major Minor's Majestic March has players setting their own tempo as the Drum Major of a marching band. That may not sound like a big difference but what it means is that it takes the control away from the game and allows gamers to dictate how they want to play. The key to the game isn't rhythm as much as it is consistency.

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You'll probably need a refresher on this one. Major Minor's Majestic March is a Wii game currently in development at Majesco. It's being designed by Masaya Matsuura, with art duties being handled by his old Parappa buddy, artist Rodney Alan Greenblat. It plays a little like Space Channel, except you're conducting an animal marching band. Read those last two sentences over again, let them sink in for a second, and you'll see why this might be one of the quietest, yet most pleasant unveilings of the show.

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Majesco is bringing it's 'A' game to E3 this year, with a strong line up of titles for the Nintendo Wii and DS ranging from the quirky and curious to the deep and involving. By far the most intriguing game in my opinion is Major Minor's Majestic March for the Wii, which reunites the Parappa the Rapper team of Masaya Matsuura and Rodney Greenblat. Along with Major Minor, Majesco's Wii line up includes Cooking Mama World Kitchen, the house remodeling title Our House, and Zoo Hospital, which is a bit like Trauma Centre for the arguably less-evolved set.

On the DS they'll be showcasing the recently announced Mistwalker RPG AWAY Shuffle Dungeon, featuring the combined talents of famed RPG creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, character designer Naoto Oshima and composer Nobuo Uematsu. Trying desperately to outshine that title on the DS will be Wonder World Amusement Park, Babysitting Mania, and physics-based puzzler Marker Man Adventures.

Between Major Minor and AWAY, this is shaping up to be the most exciting Majesco line up in years. Hit the jump for more info.

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So, summertime kind of makes me want to go to amusement parks, but since all I really do is sit inside my un-airconditioned apartment and play video games, I feel glad that Majesco is looking after my interests with the announcement of Wonder World Amusement Park for Wii, shipping to retail today with 30 carnival-style minigames and five "interactive rides".

The park's got five themed zones: Spookyville, Fairytale, Space, Pirate and, quite logically, Carnival. There's a single-player Story Mode and multiplayer for up to three that I assume is local-only. Spookyville sounds rad, and while I'm no coulrophobic, this clown definitely spooks me a little.

Coyote Console's the developer; full details after the jump.

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Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey developer Mistwalker, Hironobu Sakaguchi's current outfit, is teaming with Majesco and AQ Interactive for Away Shuffle Dungeon, an RPG for the DS slated for a fall release. It casts players as the creatively-named young hero "Sword", who must rescue townsfolk from a "mysterious unknown". Sounds traditional!

Majesco knows its stuff, commenting that working with Sakaguchi, Sonic character designer Naoto Oshima and Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu will make the game "well-positioned for success when it hits retail this fall".

Full announcement follows the jump.

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What does it mean when you win the Independent Games Festival? Our own Brian Ashcraft looked at the issue earlier this year, checking out a list of IGF 2008 finalists topped by Petri Purho's Crayon Physics Deluxe, a game in which you crayon-sketch objects and use their physics to solve puzzles.

Apparently, one of the things that happens is that your ideas seem to influence future commercial titles, as Majesco today announced Marker Man Adventures, developed by Glyphic Entertainment and slated for Nintendo DS come the holidays. It's based, said Majesco, on drawing and physics challenges to help stick figure Marker Man find his lost pal, Doodle Dog.

In Marker Man Adventures, players use the stylus and touch screen to "draw geometric shapes-including lines, circles, boxes, triangles and pivot points-to create simple machines that help Marker Man advance through levels from point A to point B". Though Purho's game had no pivot points, and Majesco's version is adding power-ups, hidden areas and "unique surprises" (surprises, yes!), the basic concept sounds enough like Crayon Physics to make me a bit optimistic at the degree to which indie invention often appears to infuse the commercial market.

Gamasutra's Brandon Boyer has a less-obvious but more likely suggestion regarding Marker Man Adventures' inspiration - PC downloadable Marker World, maybe? Full announcement follows the jump.

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A mantra that should cause the clucking of tongues and the rolling of eyes! But no. This isn't some skateboarding series. It's no annually-updated football franchise. It's Cooking Mama! So it's with delight that we learn Majesco will be releasing a new Cooking Mama title this year, and an all-new one to boot. Called Cooking Mama World Kitchen, it's for the Wii, and aside from an entirely appropriate (and welcome) graphical upgrade, we're promised new minigame opportunities ("if you flip a burger too high, you can control Mama as she rushes in to save the day by catching it in her apron") and better motion control implementation. It should be out this holidays. Presser and NSFW screen after the jump.

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