The president of NTT DoCoMo Ryuji Yamada revealed in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that his company is in talks with console manufacturers regarding the addition of 3G capabilities in their upcoming handhelds.

Most new phones on the market today connect to 3G networks for voice and data transmissions. Amazon’s Kindle actually provides free 3G to its users through a exclusive deal with Sprint, who gets a small portion of content sold through the e-book reader.

Yamada didn’t name any names when referring to the manufacturers he was in talks with, but let’s face it, when you mention “videogame-device makers” and “next generation of hand-held consoles,” Nintendo and Sony are the only names in the market right now. Both companies haven’t commented on Yamada’s claim, so, for now, this’ll have to stay a rumor.

Source [via Nintendo Life, Cubed3]

Web comic Dueling Analogs put together a little “what if” video for some of the characters that didn’t quite make the cut to be in the excellent Flash game Super Mario Crossover.

It’s pretty safe to say that these people weren’t exactly great fits for the game to begin with.

I wouldn’t mind playing with the L block from Tetris, though.

Source

The Guitar Hero franchise has definitely seen better days. After the string of GH games that have come out in the part year, Brian Bright, project director at series developer Neversoft, has admitted that their sales have been very underwhelming.

“Sales across the board were lower last year,” said Bright. “Our rival might sugercoat it but I won’t. Sales are down for software and for peripherals. We put out a load of games last year, and even when you add them all together they didn’t do better than World Tour.”

Bright believes that the problem lies with the choice and appeal in the song selection.

“I think it did lose its identity,” Bright said. “The first three Guitar Hero games had very strong ties to rock ‘n’ roll, but I think with World Tour and 5 we just tried to please everybody. And in the end I think we ended up not pleasing anybody. We put more into this game to give Guitar Hero its life back.”

I think the solution is actually really simple: Stop milking the franchise into the ground by putting out a new game every three or four months. But, Activision will be Activision. We’ve seen what they did with the Tony Hawk series.

Source