Funny how things happen, isn’t it? I’ve been looking forward to getting my PSP in Japan – I have a US copy of Wipeout Pure sitting on my desk and next week I’ll have Virtua Tennis and Transformers The Movie on UMD – and my DS has been collecting dust pretty much since I got Wario Ware for Christmas last year.

I felt an urge out of the blue to play it a couple of days ago and have been playing around with the minigames in Super Mario 64 on and off since. When I somehow managed to spend almost an hour playing Luigi’s card memory game and another hour on that weird shell bowling game I knew that I really needed a new DS game, and the VGC was selling Yoshi Touch & Go new for £20 which is less than any of the major online retailers.

It’s one of them that I’d been meaning to pick up for a while (along with Kirby Canvas Curse and Meteos, which I’ll probably pick up in Japan) and although it’s pretty basic, almost to the point of being a tech demo, I’ve been enjoying it. I’m always up for a high score attack and although this one could do with a bit more variety it’s good fun and I might review it when I get some time.

I’ve also got my name down for a US copy of Nintendogs when the VGC gets it in late this week and should be buying Dachshund & Friends. I’m intrigued to try it after all the hype so I’ll write some impressions when I get my hands on it, hopefully on Friday.

Four months and one day since my last review, I’ve posted a review of Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s PSP puzzle title Lumines which can be accessed directly here or, as always, through my review index. I don’t own it yet (difficult when I don’t even have a PSP) but I spent the best part of six hours across two days playing it and absolutely loved it. I’m definitely picking it up in Japan since the import is in English anyway.

I know it’s another five star review and I find the review section slightly dull because of that, but it’s actually kind of difficult to play bad games to the extent where you can give them a fair crack in a review when I’m an incredibly picky buyer anyway. I’ll try to play something utterly shit so that I can tear into it and show you the other end of my spectrum.

Perhaps unsurprisingly to anyone who knows me I found the news that EA would publish Minna Daisuki Katamari Damacy in Europe potentially worrying. Good that it would have some exposure (although it could easily be left unpushed and fall by the wayside like the excellent Oddword: Stranger’s Wrath, which EA also picked up but then left to die), but bad that it was the Evil Empire that was giving that exposure and getting their foot in the door of a sleeper hit that had no licence, no licenced music, and not even a particularly marketable concept…yet.

What I did find funny was that it was necessary for them to point out today that they won’t be altering the concept – notably the music – for their European version. It seems that even EA themselves were only too aware that their reputation goes before them and that much of the hardcore experienced a collective vision of EA Trax popping up in the game with the latest Maroon 5 track. Of course that’s only because their marketing department has been reading our thoughts from their lair inside a volcano.

Also on the subject of EA, I heard a very funny statistic about them over on the Dreamstation.cc Video Game Show – apparently out of EA’s next 26 titles, 25 of them are sequels. The one that isn’t? The Godfather…

So it looks like the Xbox 360 will be coming in two flavours: a bare bones version for $299/£209 and a deluxe one with all the trimmings (including a wireless controller and 20GB hard drive) for $399/£279. I’d said all along that it would be more than $300…so there.

Since I heard the initial rumblings that it was going to have a dual price point in the US earlier today I was convinced that we’d get completely raped with that old “swap the dollar sign for a pound sign” thing with a £299/£399 price (they did that with the Xbox, after all), but MS have actually brought the 360 out here for less than the Xbox was at launch. We still end up paying about £50 more than the Americans but if you were to import one and pay shipping and import duty you’d probably be paying £50 more, and you’ve got to expect it anyway. Bear in mind that the US price doesn’t include tax either whereas ours does, so in some states the yanks will be adding around $30 to the price.

Kudos to Microsoft for actually giving us something close to a good deal. At least they’re not charging £70 for hardware that’s pushing five years old.

I just saw this linked on Joystiq. Apparently either some joker’s having a laugh at the expense of the new Zelda and the IMDB, or Eiji Aonuma is taking the franchise in an even more radical direction than anyone could have expected. Not only is every fanboy’s fantasy, Reggie Fils-Aime, making a cameo appearance as “The Man” (actual character or fanboy declaration of love?), but excreable rapper 50 Cent will appear as Link’s horse Epona and fitness guru Richard Simmons will turn up as the wannabe fairy, Tingle. Not that “wannabe fairy” can really be used to differentiate the two of them.

I give it hours at the most before it’s removed even if it is funny as hell, so here’s a screenshot for posterity:

The anxiety over TGS has passed, since I’m assured that I’m not going to be conducting interviews or anything like that. I’m just going to be attending conferences where some of the new booty will be shown off – I’ve heard that there are conferences from Square, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony at least, so there should be some good stuff on show that I’d miss out on if I was only hitting the show floor. For some reason even though I was slightly underwhelmed by MGS3 (keep meaning to give it another try), all I’m really intent on seeing is Metal Gear Solid 4. That and anything new on Resident Evil 5, of course.

In other news, I somehow spent a few hours today in the VGC playing nothing but Lumines. I don’t know how I managed it (on most games it’s a chore for me to play that long in one sitting) but before I knew it almost three hours had passed and I still wanted to try for the next skin. I’m definitely picking that one up in Japan. It’s like crack, but crack that can play really good music.