Soon that empty space will be filled with people playing Tatsunoko VS. Capcom, Marvel VS. Capcom 2 and Super Street Fighter IV, and while you won’t be able to join them, you’ll at least be able to watch them via Capcom’s Ustream channel, which will be broadcasting until the end of the event. Witness the joy on fans’ faces as they revel in competition! Envy the amazingly good time they are having. Or, you know, enjoy this relatively empty room. Your choice!

You can watch the stream via the little doohickey below, or hit up the channel page to break the first rule of Fight Club.

Video streaming by Ustreamhttp://www.ustream.tv/channel/pac

Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom, with its colourful cast of Capcom characters and throwbacks from Japanese animation company Tatsunoko productions, is almost more about over-the-top and fun fights than it is about skill and tactics. Almost.

While the game limits moves to three buttons, weak, medium and strong attacks, a skilled fighting player can still squeeze quite a bit out of the title.

Earlier this week I sat down with Capcom’s Seth “S-Kill” Killian to chat about Super Street Fighter IV and play a bit of Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars.

The event, held on the 48th floor of a downtown New York hotel, gave me a chance to check out a handful of new characters for the upcoming fighter including Joe the Condor, Tekkaman Blade and Zero. But I spent my time with the game playing an almost emaciated looking Frank West from Dead Rising.

West’s main attacks include swinging a baseball attack into the mid-section of an opponent and slapping enemies with a golf club in a giant, low-to-high swing. When not engaged as the main character in the tag-team battles, he can also be called on to hop into quickly and stun an opponent with the flash on his camera.

But as we all know, Frank West’s real skills involve zombies.

West can call out a zombie from either side of the screen or drop one from the sky into the middle of the battle. The twist is that once the zombie starts making its way across the screen, it will attack anything in its path, including you.

Fortunately, West has his bat and golf club, which he can use to smack the zombies across the screen at enemies. He can also call on a zombie to shoot from one side of the screen to the other in a shopping cart.

West is a fun character to play in the game and his unusual abilities add a nice change of pace to the title. The best part of playing Frank West, though, are some of his super attacks.

One involves him dressing up as Mega Man and blasting away at an opponent, but my favourite arms West with a Servbot helmet. It’s hard to pull off, but if you land the attack, West slaps it on his opponents head and then pushes him through a massive crowd of zombies.

So fun.

Condor and Swan Gameplay [Gametrailers]

From the Mega Man continuity, it’s Zero – from Mega Man X, or Rockman X since we’re deferring to the Japanese titling here. Zero’s official announcement for the North American localisation of Tatsunoko vs. Capcom confirms a rumour about a month old. IGN got the exclusive reveal earlier today, and has video of both characters in action.

Character Unveil: Tatsunoko vs. Capcom [IGN]

Watch Seth Show You How Frank West Works [Capcom-Unity via Joystiq]

Winner gets “precisely 12% of the swag in Seth’s “random Capcom swag” box. You can supply yours at Capcom-Unity. But it’s kind of pointless because I’ve already thought of the winner: Stephen J. Cannell vs. Capcom. You need a franchise with a huge stable of classic action heroes, right? With this you get all four members of the A-Team; The Greatest American Hero; Ken Wahl in Wiseguy; Jim Rockford from The Rockford Files; Fred Dryer in Hunter; Johnny Depp in his 21 Jump Street Days, plus Hardcastle … and McCormick.

Bam, it’s like printing money. I can’t believe I’m still here pitching this to you and you’re not already working on it, Capcom. Get moving, we can talk about my residuals later.

Capcom vs. (Insert Idea Here) [Capcom-Unity; image from Capcom-Unity]

Shoryuken forum poster Mumu was poking about the source code for the Tatsunoko VS. Capcom character site when he noticed something strange in the HTML. While only a few characters had been revealed on the page itself, whoever had built the site pre-loaded all of the images for said characters in a Javascript function, revealing four characters we’ve not yet seen.

‘images/oncharactor_btn_zero.jpg’
‘images/oncharactor_btn_frank.jpg’
‘images/oncharactor_btn_yatter02.jpg’
‘images/oncharactor_btn_joe.jpg’
‘images/oncharactor_btn_tekkabla.jpg’

These characters would appear to be Mega Man Zero, Dead Rising’s Frank West, Yatterman #2 and Joe Asakura, aka Jason from Battle of the Planets.

Along with Tekkaman Blade, who was recently revealed, those characters would seem to round out the North American Tatsunoko VS. Capcom roster quite nicely.

Of course sloppy website coding is by no means official confirmation. We’ve contacted Capcom about this rumour, and quickly received a “No comment!” Make of that what you will.

TvC Full Roster Leaked for the US [Shoryuken]

The first of those characters has been revealed, and it’s Tekkaman Blade, from…Tekkaman Blade, which you may know better as Teknoman.

With four new characters promised, that’s one down, three to go.

Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars Update- New character reveal [GameSpot]

Like what? Like, maybe, online multiplayer. Along with four new characters. Yup. Four. Two from Capcom, two from Tatsunoko.

There’s no word on who they’ll be, but you’re free to start wishing like crazy. Baby Head and some Samurai Pizza Cats would be my pick.

Tatsunoko vs Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars Hands-On [GameSpot]