Heading to PSP, DS, and Cell Phones next year.

SquareEnix's biggest announcement at TGS so far is the further expansion of the Kingdom Hearts series in the form of three new portable titles: Birth By Sleep for PSP, 358/2 Days for DS, and Coded for mobile phones. 

Birth By Sleep seems to be the most straightforward of the three, playing much like it's PS2 predecessors, while telling a prequel story.

358/2 Days (is that supposed to be pronounced "179 Days"?) will apparently focus on 4 player simultaneous play involving members of Organization XIII and will be fully 3D, not sprite based like the GBA's Chain of Memories. Word is the title will make sense when you play the game. Hey, any title that doubles as a math problem has piqued my interest.

Coded is the obligatory cell phone game that, like Before Crisis, Parasite Eve 3, and FF Agito XIII, no one outside of Japan will ever get to play. Do you really need to know any more than that?

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You can buy but you can't play.

Halo 3 has been sitting in the back room of many stores for a couple weeks now, but as next week's street date approaches, more and more copies are finding their way into the hands of impatient gamers, largely due to an error on the part of European retailer, Argos.

UK-based game site PRO-G, one of the lucky ones to get their dirty mitts on a copy of the game through Argos, spoke to a Microsoft rep who informed them that anyone playing the game early will find themselves banned from Live. Simply playing offline won't cut it either as the next time you connect to Live they can see that the game has been played and will issue a ban just the same.

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Yes, you read that right.

If you raised an eyebrow at the headline it's because you know that there never was an SNES version of Secret of Mana 2, and furthermore, that no such game by that name was ever released anywhere. Ever.

Tell that to ebay seller kurt.roussel, who decided that such minor philosophical issues as "existence" weren't about to stop him from auctioning one off. What is real anyway? Sure the game isn't "real" in the sense that it is about as unofficial as it gets, but what IS real is the desire to acquire that images of it instill in me. I'd love to have that on my shelf just to blow people's minds.

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Along with some game called Ikaruga.

One of my fondest hopes for this generation was to see a sequel to Rez show up on 360 and/or PS3. Today, that dream seems a little more realistic with the announcement at Microsoft's pre-TGS press briefing that RezHD will be appearing on Xbox Live Arcade in early 2008. It's not a sequel, but no Rez fan can complain about playing the game in HD and 5.1 surround sound. Plus, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect at least one new level or two, Tetsuya Mizuguchi pretty much promised it:

Personally, Rez has been and will always be a lifelong concept. I hope to take what I learned from the experience of creating the original game and look forward to taking it to a whole new level in the future.

See that? "A whole new level"! OK, maybe that's not what he meant, but it does give hope for the possibility of a sequel somewhere down the line.

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Or maybe not. 

Most people have long forgotten that a remake of Final Fantasy VII (as well as VIII and IX) was actually announced almost seven years ago…for PS2. While they were all quietly canceled as a result of the tremendous money pit better known as Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, fans have never stopped begging Square to give them the opportunity to buy the game again.

As recently as June, FFVII character designer and Kingdom Hearts/FF Versus XIII director Tetsuya Nomura insisted that they were "absolutely not" making it while Crisis Core director Hideki Imaizumi has just intimated to Famitsu that they are "aware of consumer interest" but the current obstacle is the fact that the team responsible for the infamous 2005 FFVII tech demo are busy working on FFXIII.

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