Let me get this right out of the way:

Click the thumbnail on the left to find a desktop friendly promotional image for the Virtual Console. Luigi is driving the Sega Outrun car, Raccoon PacMan, ROB, and Kirby dressed as Simon Belmont all show up in this mish-mash classic characters.
If you love Emo as much as you love Nintendo, check out Nintendo Fusion Tour. No word on anything playable, but they’ll at least be showing off new games along with the music.
Kotaku heard rumblings about a Cross-Country Tour for the Wii, but now it looks more like it will be more of a secret invite-only tour. I hope Nintendo realizes the trendsetters at Powet would love to attend.

Finally, a keynote at the Leipzig Germany games conference has been booked called “Wii Prove Our Promise” for Aug. 23.

It looks like Fox will announce on Friday that X-Men: The Last Stand will be coming to DVD on October 3rd in two different forms. One will be a standard release special edition with 10 deleted scenes. The special special edition will feature 3 alternate endings to the movie. A box set of all 3 X-Men movies will also be made available.

In other X3 news, FX has picked up the rights for the movie to air on television along with a whole mess of other recent and current high profile movies. You can expect to be seeing X3 10 times a day on FX soon enough. At least it won’t be as compelling to sit down every time its on and watch like X2 was.

At the not so recent Licensing Show, Art Asylum had on display some of the original Madballs alongside their new reincarnations.

• Bash Brain
• Horn Head
• Skull Face
• Screamin’ Meemie
• Slobulous
• Repvile

One can only hope we get another animated series.

Art Asylum forums were down for an extended period so I was never able to get more info, but since SDCC more info has appeared. You can find a gallery of the new Madballs here.

The biggest event in gaming may be gone for good.

Cost, over crowding, and undue stress on developers to get games ready for the show are all a factor in an announcement expected to be made monday morning, July 31st.

Next-Gen says the convention is to be done with altogether, and replaced with multiple yearly events for publishers. Gamespot says it will simply be shrunk to a press only event.

Until we get an official press statement from ESA’s Doug Lowenstein, enjoy the baseless rumor mongering and over excited reactionaries of the blogosphere:
4CR: E3 Gone Kaput?
Joystiq: E3 cancelled for next year and beyond
Kotaku: E3 Cancelled?!
NeoGAF: E3 Cancelled for Next Year and “Forseeable Future”?
Powet: e 3 Cancelled?

1UP’s Jenn Frank reports on the launch party for the new PSP exclusive Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection. Held at Sony’s Metreon center in San Fransisco, PSP toting fans weren’t as prevalent as hardcore arcade competition players. She’s rather amazed that arcade fighters have such a devoted following, and talks about the community as if it were some kind of fringe thing.

I’m not exactly new to this scene(see: Chicago), but I’m weirded out that a games journalist could be barely aware of the fighter community. Fighters like Tekken would fall off the face of the earth without the annual, monthly and even weekly events fans organize. I mean, you can’t play against the computer for very long before getting bored, and your non fighting game friends stop playing if you beat them enough times. Thats why these competitive events exist.

You get to like a game and you’ve gotta find people who will play with you, even if they’re not always friends. And the more specific your taste, the harder it is to get a game going. Running with Soul Calibur and Tekken players doesn’t mean they’ll play Virtua Fighter or Street Fighter III. And while DOA, Mortal Kombat, and Street Fighter have all migrated online in the past few years, the split second timing required for fighters has kept a lot of them off Xbox Live or other services. Who can blame them? Maybe as broadband speeds increase over the years this will change, but for right now, the only way to fight real fighting game fans is at events.

Car bloggers Jalopnik have snapped several shots of Transformers in LA this week.
To the left you’ll see the big honkin’ pickup purported to be Ironhide. Its a GMC Sierra, which is a big truck to start, but its been tricked out with a lift kit and some heavy duty after market tires. The photographer also mentions the front end has some cool changes too and points out the added smoke stacks. Oh yeah, and the metal embossed Autobot logo on the back bay door. Perfect.

They also saw a Crane, but who knows what that has to do with anything.

MTV News sat down with former Ultra Game Players and Xbox Magazine writer and current Bungie content manager Frank O’Conner about his ability to bait and tease fanboys.
Frank also turns in a great photo-filled journal of ComiCon. I should really call this column “This Week In Frankie”
Rumor time!!! SPoNG says a New Bungie Title that isn’t Halo will be revealed at X06, certifying that Halo 3 will in fact be the last in the series. It is said the game will still take place in the Halo universe, not unlike their Mac classic, Marathon.
Joystiq stupidly spit out A Bungie with business sense would make Halo 4 and 5 and… and made me literally sneer. Who are you kidding man? They’re going to finish the fight with Halo 3 and then move on. This is the same kind of mindset that makes terrible sequels commonplace. A Halo 4 would be horribly tacked on. Bungie has clearly mapped out this universe and history to include many, many events that may never make it into games. Not unlike Star Wars or Star Trek, they’ll find new places to set new stories with new characters without leaving the world we know. Theres a vast history of the Spartan program the Covenant and the Forerunners that we haven’t… hey… wait a minute… Forerunners… Yeah, that could easily be where the rumour came from. We’ll have to wait and see.