Sega is celebrating the grand reopening of their Tokyo Joyopolis amusement park on July 14th with the debut of a new partnership with Sanrio, the company behind Hello Kitty. The result is a Hello Kitty plush wearing a Sonic costume. Yep, Hello Kitty is cosplaying as Sonic. The plush will be available at the park in late July. The collaboration will go worldwide during the summer of 2013. Expect more of these crossovers.

For more Hello Kitty cosplay, check out the Capcom/Toynami exclusive at SDCC 2012, Hello Kitty cosplaying as Chun Li!

The Wii U Pro Controller presents two problems: 1) It’s just like the Wii Classic or Wii Classic Pro Controllers: the adoption rate is poor, nothing that works on it NEEDS to work on it, and we totally forget about it. 2) It actually takes off, and threatens one of the core value propositions of the Wii U. Only Nintendo makes games for it, and 3rd parties just ignore it after a while. Vinnk and Sean discuss the problem of hardware fragmentation in video game systems, and trot out some well-worn examples as well as more recent ones: the Sega Genesis 32x, Android’s newest Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, and more!

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Heavy Metal is a comics anthology magazine that began life in France under the name Metal Hurlant. It gained notoriety due to its heavy emphasis on sex and violence. It was bought over to the U.S and renamed Heavy Metal in 1977, and was purchased and published by Kevin Eastman. Yes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Kevin Eastman. The U.S version of the magazine featured several news articles that tied it into the Heavy Metal culture. The series spawned two feature films: 1981’s Heavy Metal, a set of story sequences done in different art styles (similar to The Animatrix) and 2000’s Heavy Metal 2000, a feature film featuring a character played by B-movie actress Julie Strain. The game also spawned 2 video games, F.A.K.K.2, a PC game sequel to Heavy metal 2000, and Heavy Metal:Geomatrix, a 2001 Dreamcast/Arcade game from Capcom. Although it uses a gameplay style similar to Spawn: In the Demon’s Hand, various gameplay issues and a lack of content cause the game to fall flat on its face. It doesn’t help matters that the game has very little to tie it in with the comics.
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Hype is great… until your game comes out. Quite different from development hell, these are games that come out, but when they do they don’t quite live up to the promises made by the marketing department — and sometimes the developers themselves. Sean and Vinnk discuss the raft of hate against the Mass Effect 3 ending, the lack of ending for the Shenmue series, Peter Molyneux’s retirement from Lionhead Studios, and more. Suffice to say, it’s been an interesting year for the hype machine and its consequences.

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Gamasutra reports that Hirokazu Yasuhara has joined Nintendo, working at the Nintendo Of America headquarters in Redmond, WA. He joins as a designer with NST, who are credited with creating the Mario VS Donkey Kong series.

Why is this news? Yasuhara is credited as a co-creator of Sonic The Hedgehog, working with Yuji Naka at Sonic Team and at Sega through 1997. During that time, Sega produced games that challenged and overtook Nintendo in many regards. He also worked with Namco-Bandai on Pac-Man Party on Wii and 3DS. With his new position at NST he will inevitably work with Mario. Hirokazu Yasuhara will become the first game designer to be credited on games featuring the three biggest names in video games: Sonic, Pac-Man, and Mario.

If this is not an impressive enough feat, he also has level design credits with Naughty Dog working on the Jak & Daxter series on PS2 and all three Uncharted games on PS3.

Game Developer magazine published a great interview with Yasuhara in 2008 you can read here.

Your eyes do not deceive you. This is an actual Sonic game on the Super Nintendo. “But Sonic is a Sega game!” Yes I know. So how is this possible? Did Tengen get another Sega license? Did Sega know that they were going to fail as a console manufacturer and decided to test the waters as a third party developer years early? Is this the second coming of Color Dreams? Nope. This Super Nintendo game is a product of the wonderful world of foreign bootlegging! A Peruvian-based organization known as Twin Eagles Group hacked a Super Nintendo game called Speedy Gonzales: Los Gatos Bandidos, stripped out all the good stuff, and replaced the main character with Sonic. Basically, you run through each stage repeatedly freeing Mario from cages. While it’s fun for all of 3 minutes, the charm of having a Sonic game on the SNES wore off and players would realize how shitty this game was compared to the Sega titles. It wouldn’t be until Sonic Adventure 2 hit GameCube that gamers would get an actual Sonic game on a Nintendo system. As bad as this game was however, it was nowhere near as bad as the NES Sonic the Hedgehog.

When Nintendo reported two straight quarterly losses in early 2011, followed by a less-than-stellar initial release of its new 3DS handheld console, it didn’t take long for the naysayers to begin spelling the company’s doom.

This is a familiar dance. It started in the ’90s, when Nintendo’s veneer of dominance started cracking in the face of competition with the Sega Genesis. Or maybe it was the decision to abandon the CD format for the Nintendo 64 when Sega and Sony made the leap. Or perhaps it was because, even with the GameCube, no Nintendo console had sold better than its predecessor — that is, until the release of the Wii.

However, despite calls that Nintendo abandon its hardware ambitions — even with the new wrinkle of the ever-rising iOS platform — there are plenty of reasons why Nintendo would never, could never, and should never stop making TV or handheld consoles.

Here are the top five:

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Sean is looking for some retro game goodies at the Mad Gear booth in the MAGFest 2012 Marketplace, but Earl Gray III walks off with the best haul! What’s a retro video game reviewer to do?

Follow Earl on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/EarlGrayThird

Check out Mad Gear for your retro game wares:
http://mad-gear.com
http://twitter.com/MadGearStore
http://facebook.com/MadGearStore