In 2000, Capcom and it’s biggest rival SNK combined thier forces together to make one of the biggest fighting game crossovers since, well, Marvel vs Capcom.  The result had lots of potential, but the point system made the gameplay painfully unbalanced.  Thankfully, it was followed up upon a year later with what to this day remains the biggest 2-d fighting game ever.  Lots of cast members joined from both companies’ various catalogs, from Fatal Fury and Street Fighter to Samurai Showdown and Darkstalkers, and even lesser known games like Rival Schools and Last Blade.  Capcom adopted SNK’s playing system well and managed to integrate it’s own.  With the 6 grooves, players could play thier favorite characters how they wanted.  In short it was fighting game bliss.

A side note, the Xbox version is the only version with online play, and it was one of the first games on Xbox Live.

Let me get this right out of the way:

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.

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.

Wave 1 is right around the corner (and you can see the bios here!), and as excited as everyone I’ve talked to has been for the first batch, our eyes are quickly darted toward wave 2!
TFW2005‘s Kickback and his awesome inside sources have come through with some pictures of Voyager Jetfire, and deluxe Grimlock and Mirage. Since their site has been slammed with traffic lately, I’ve taken the liberty of posting mirrors of the images.

At the behest of Warner Bros., original Superman II director Richard Donner has been putting together a Director’s Cut of the movie, expected to be out later this year. Here are a few of the restored clips.

For those not familiar with the story of the film’s creation: Donner, along with story writer Mario Puzo, was responsible for creating the 1978 Superman movie with Christopher Reeve. He envisioned the story as a two-parter, and did most of the principal shooting for Superman II at the same time.

Before he could wrap up the project, he was ousted thanks to the producers, Ilya and Alexander Salkind. The new director, Richard Lester, had the job of piecing together a movie from existing footage and filming (or, in some cases, re-filming) the rest of the scenes.

Gene Hackman refused to come back after Donner was unceremoniously canned, so for every scene that Lester shot which required Luthor, they had to use a stand-in who you would only see from the back. Any unrecorded dialogue required a soundalike looped into the film.

We’ll finally get to see Superman II (mostly) as Donner intended it — he still has to use some of Lester’s scenes with Bizarro-Luthor (et al) because no other footage exists, but he’ll certainly be able to get the film most of the way there. I look forward to it.

~Sean