One of the things that had me excited about the Nintendo 3DS was the announcement that, after over a decade of waiting, Megaman Legends 3 might finally see the light of day. I was a little perturbed about the choice of platform, but considering the series’ historically poor sales, the cheaper development costs of the 3DS may well have been the only way it would ever be released.

While I’m a fan of portable RPG’s (the games that live on my DSi XL are almost all RPG’s), I’m not sure how well the third-person action-RPG style would translate over to a handheld device — I’ve heard the complaints about the “crab-claw grip” employed to play Monster Hunter on the PSP, and I’m worried that some horribly unergonomic fate will befall the players of Legends 3.

And then, even as I was griping about all of this, news came about Keiji Inafune’s departure from Capcom. Since he was pretty much the guiding animus behind the Legends series (and a lot of the better Megaman games in general), that cast a pall over the future of Megaman Legends 3. As much as I would love to see this game still come out, without Infafune, would it still be mined from the same vein as the games that had come before it, chock-full of the humour, wonder, and whimsy which so heavily characterized the first two releases?

Obviously, I’m hoping that this is the case; ten years is a long time to wait for the end of a story, and Legends 2 pretty much left us on a massive cliffhanger, and the fanboy in me really wants to know — what happens next? That’s why I was really glad to hear that, though many things remain uncertain, development on this game was continuing onwards. This is horribly weeaboo, but — tanoshimi ni shiteimasu!

The Not So Lost Woods, a photo by zero-lives on Flickr.

It’s probably a bad idea to read too deeply into the strange synchronicitys of media releases, but given the unsettled nature of the times we’re living in (what with the Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear difficulties; and all the continued political instability in the Middle East), it does seem kind of strange that we’re seeing (or have recently seen) not one, but FOUR major media releases about alien invasion.

The first would have been Skyline, which was utterly forgettable. Even the CG aliens and mecha were… kinda bland. It didn’t help that it had a ridiculously disjointed plot and relatively unlikeable main characters. The best thing that could be said about it is that portrays something seldom seen in alien invasion movies — the utter demoralization of Earth’s defenders, without the usual cinematic pablum of a heroic rallying to destroy and push out the aggressors.

Battle: LA is then the logical follow-up for Skyline (not surprising, considering that the same visual FX went into both movies, an issue that could have led to Sony suing the directors of Skyline for basically being hired to work in Battle: LA’s FX, only to use those same effects in a movie released four months earlier). This one is a more traditional alien-invasion scenario (in the vein of ID4) coupled with a thinly-veiled US Marines recruitment advertisment. As expected, the good guys win, the bad guys retreat, things go boom.

If it had been left at this, I’d chalk it up to the Deep Impact / Armageddon effect, except for the presence of Falling Skies.

It’ll be interesting to see a longer-format alien-invasion series, as that should allow for a larger exploration of many of the issues that arise from the ongoing occupation of the planet and the depredation of the human species by a vastly technologically superior foe. Plus, Noah Wylie does make for a charismatically earnest leading man, and my love for disaster porn means that I’ll make some effort to follow the show as it goes on.

What really made me question this overall invasion zeitgeist was wandering into the Inversion website, which seems to be a video game whose core mechanic is basically the Half-Life 2 Gravity Gun, writ large and first used by aliens on an unsuspecting Earth.

So, is there something going on? And I’m not talking conspiracy-theory-crazy here; just that the overall mood of the entertainment-seeking audience seems to be be keyed to watching humanity get decimated by unfathomable forces from beyond this world. That’s kind of disheartening, on the whole. Hopefully we’ll see a reversal of this trend when someone announces a My Little Ponies – Friendship is Magic movie or something.

Although I keep hearing J. Jonah yelling “I want Portals! Pictures of Portals!”

So, the World of Warcraft community is abuzz with the picture Blizzard released on their Facebook wall about their new, purchasable Winged Lion Mount….

Considering how much their first store mount earned for them, this would likely be yet another financial windfall for the company. Gamers, with their bizarre sense of surreptitious elitism, were quick to decry the first mount as a blatant money grab, considering that it was a re-skinned version of a much more difficult to obtain mount. I say “surreptitious elitism” because I’d imagine a lot of these same gamers quietly went and bought the mount for themselves anyway. It’s interesting to see the same arguments of “non-exclusivity”, “conformity”, and “unearned privilege” that were leveled against the Celestial Steed (or “Sparkle Pony”) are already being recycled for this new mount, which seems to have already acquired the nickname TRL (“That Retarded Lion”).

While I didn’t pay for my sparkle ponies (they were gifts), I was very appreciative of them, and in turn, the new winged lion would be a zero-day purchase for me if at least half the proceeds went to helping out the victims of the recent Japanese catastrophe. It does seem unlikely that Blizzard (well, Blizzard-Activision) would do so, considering the dearth of upcoming income streams for Activision. One can hope, though.

Note: I actually only want one of these two things.

Okay, I’m getting chills just hearing the Mass Effect theme playing at the end there…