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.

The official site for the Animal Crossing movie is online. It’s got wallpapers, character information and all kinds of info that’s confusingly not in English.

Check out the trailer to get a look at what the movie will be like.

The movie centers around a girl named Ai who moves to a town populated by animals. Similar to the story of the popular Nintendo Gamecube and Nintendo DS games of the same name she will befriend the townspeople and get a part time job helping out to make ends meet. Game favourites Tom Nook, Kap’n and Tortimer will be featured along side a sample of the animals from the game. We’ll see Sally, an elephant, Bouquet, a cat, Alberto, an aligator and Saruo, a Monkey.

Set to be released on December 16th 2006 in Japan it’s far too early to tell if this will get a North American release.

The biggest gaming event of the year is apparently so big, news from it is still being reported on.
First, look how fast the Wii ejects!
The big hit of the show was not the Wii, but the GameCube! The devkit for the new Nintendo system is based so closely on the prior generation that demo units for the Nintendo Booth were made up of just a stock black gamecube with a couple modifications to utilize the controller!
Kotaku also sat down with Miyamoto for a good 25 minute interview and he address all the next-gen hot topics.
IGN and GameTrailers have also compiled best-of-E3 lists that kinda surprise. I mean obviously Halo 3, Smash Brothers, etc took a lot of the glory, but those games weren’t playable and had only a small actual showing. IGN hands the award to Bioshock, a game I totally missed last week. GameTrailers says Assassin’s Creed, which was announced for PS3, but anyone who got to play will be quick to tell you that they were holding an Xbox 360 controller to do so (Ubisoft says they haven’t announced a 360 port yet, but considering its already running on a 360, I’d say its a safe bet!)
Last, and least surprisingly, Karima Adebibe (the rookie model currently cast as Lara Croft) tells CNN how she handles the smell and numbers of fanboys at E3.

It’s amazing how a game getting close to 5 years old can still yield surprises. I won’t tell you what happens, but about a minute in something really crazy starts to happen, it makes a pretty spectacular looking mess in the middle of the stage. It’s a shame it takes so much set up, it would be a heck of a trap to set during casual games against friends…
Thanks to Neil on NBC for the link.