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.

Ok fans, get comfortable because there are a LOT of updates in this one. Instead of the usual breaking up the updates by company, this time around I’m going to break it up by properties (ie. Transformers, Marvel Superheroes, Star Trek, etc)

To view all the updates, continue on after the jump. Please note that I will be updating this constantly for a while until I feel I got everything I needed to.

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Day 2!

Once again, keep checking back because I am updating this as I find stuff through tomorrow afternoon, when I start Day 3’s coverage. Details for Day 2 after the jump.

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I will be updating this post throughout the day with news and announcements as I find them. I will include coverage of last night’s previews as well.

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With the convention starting tomorrow, tonight brings us Preview night at the San Diego Comic Con.

The past few days has brought us a wealth of news on what to expect at the convention. I will try to summarize some of the highlights that have been revealed thus far in this post.

Check back for updates. We will have one SDCC post a day, highlighting all the news, revelations and happenings of this pop culture mecca. These posts (including this one) will be updated throughout the day as we have new information to add.
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Botcon.com has posted official images of the next exclusive for this year’s official Transformers convention. We have seen many pictures of this figure on ebay and elsewhere surface for the past couple months, but here it is finally in official paint scheme.

 

You might remember the previously announced figures, but if not here’s whats official so far:

• Optimus Primal
• Dinobot
• Cheetor
• Rhinox

Unofficially we’ve also seen:

• A repainted Cybertron Defense Red Alert with remolded head as Megatron
• A repainted RID Windshear with remolded head as Waspinator
• A repainted energon divebomb that could be Terrorsaur

From this it seems pretty obvious we’re not just getting a maximal set of figures, but we can only speculate on that for the time being until things play themselves out.

Also, I was pretty disappointed that news of Rattrap’s revealing was not trickled through the email list of the Collector’s Club first. If I’m paying an annual US$40-60 membership, I expect news like this to be given to the members first and not have to find out via another news site, especially where the club and convention are so tightly coordinated.