Siliconera has confirmed that a sequel to Dissidia: Final Fantasy will be coming to the PSP. The new is titled Dissidia Duodecim: Final Fantasy and is scheduled for a 2011 release in Japan. Joining the ranks of playable characters will be Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII and Kain from Final Fantasy IV. Kain is the more interesting addition to the crew, as it indicates the the sequel will be branching out and adding characters other than the main characters. More details are expected at Tokyo Game Show. I sincerely hope this means Zack is in the game. Who do you want in the sequel?

Since BioShock hit the scene, the game's instantly recognizable underwater city of Rapture became a major part of any conception about video game settings. While Bioshock 2 stayed in Rapture, Bioshock Infinite will take place in a completely new location. Speaking to NowGamer, director of development for Irrational (formerly 2K Boston) Tim Gerritsen explained the approach for Rapture's successor, the skybound city of Columbia. The most interesting point he made was about the city's floating, unstable towers.

"Everything we’ve built within the levels is about creating new opportunities for the players from the floating buildings," Gerritsen said. "You saw the buildings within the world – and these buildings move. Suddenly, and fundamentally, it creates a brand new gaming experience because if I see a building off in the distance, will it always be there or will it move? That creates all-new opportunities for us as makers and you as players."

One of Rapture's signature features was the creepy dimness of rooms and corridors illuminated only by flickering neon signs. This environmental tone fit the location - there's not much light on the sea floor. Columbia, on the other hand, floats among the clouds and is awash in sunshine. The rest of NowGamer's short interview with Gerritsen offered other interesting glimpses into the world of Columbia, and how even a brightly-lit, open-sky can find opportunities for suspense and fear.

If this seems like a tease, well...it is. BioShock Infinite isn't expected to arrive until 2012.

Super Mario Bros., the game that launched a million side-scrollers, is coming up on its 25th birthday. The game first came out in Japan September 13, 1985, and hit the United States in March of 1986. Nintendo is preparing for the celebration with a trademark representing the game's 25th anniversary. It's only been registered in Japan, and Nintendo of America hasn't made any announcements yet, but it looks like the company is getting ready for some sort of 25th birthday celebration.

One thing's for certain: a little over a month after the game's birthday, Super Mario All-Stars will finally hit the Wii. Unfortunately, it looks like it's going to be a Japan-only release in the form of a retail game. According to Siliconera, the "Super Mario Collection Special Pack" will hit stores in Japan on October 21 with a retail price of 2500 yen (about $30). Besides the game collection (which includes Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2 USA (the reskinned version of Doki Doki Panic we all grew up with), Super Mario Bros. 2 JP (better known in America as "Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels"), and Super Mario Bros. 3), the pack will come with a soundtrack CD including music ranging from Super Mario Bros. to Super Mario Galaxy 2, and a booklet going over Mario's history from 1985 to now.

Mario's side-scrolling debut in America has its 25th anniversary next March, so while nothing has been confirmed by Nintendo of America, there's still a chance we might see a similar release in the Spring.

[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

Boss fights don't have to make sense. Sure, sometimes you'll fight a crime lord, an alien overlord, or an evil wizard that fits in with the narrative of the game you're playing, but just as often you're probably going to run across a mutant cake, a robot dinosaur, or a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere.

What is the Giant Space Flea from Nowhere? It's supposed to be the embodiment of all evil in the world. Some say its father was the main character's long-lost friend. Nobody believed it was real. Nobody ever saw it or knew anybody that ever worked directly for it, but to hear the cutscene tell it, anybody could have worked for it. You never knew. That was its power. The greatest trick the GSFN ever pulled was convincing the world it didn't exist. And like that, poof. It's gone.

The GSFN is any boss that just doesn't make sense. It appears out of nowhere, forces you to fight it, and then vanishes without a word. In some games, it turns out to be the final boss, just because the guy you were chasing the entire game didn't seem big or interesting enough. It just shows up, looking for a fight.

Examples of Giant Space Fleas from Nowhere include:

• Dark Force, the final boss of Phantasy Star, was initially one of these, but was retconned into having an expanded role in the Phantasy Star mythos in later games. You can say that he "graduated" from Space Flea status.
• Dragon Quest in general is terrible about doing this to the final boss of the game. Even the very first one, the original text had the Dragonlord's pet superdragon come out of nowhere after you beat him (although the first translation changed this to his "true form" to help make the fight climactic and continuous.)
• Skies Of Arcadia has quite a few of these. An overweight, acid-spewing rabbit, a giant robotic penguin with a death-ray, a floating tortoise that could make itself invincible, and a cockatrice-esque giant bird all appeared suddenly, were dispatched by the heroes, and died without comment from anyone.
• Chernabog from Kingdom Hearts. He literally appears out of nowhere, after you've jumped through the hole in "The End of the World". You don't know who he is, Sora makes no comment about him whatsoever, it's never explained if he's a Heartless, what connection he's got to Xehanort or why he's even there, he's the only boss who doesn't get an entry in Jiminy Cricket's journal and he's never mentioned again. It's as though the developers just thought it would be a disservice not to include one of the most impressive Disney creations, even if they had to just drop it in without so much as a single word of context. It's just plain Rule Of Cool (and copious Rule Of Scary).
• Chrono Cross and the Time Devourer. Sure, Lavos is mentioned a couple times in passing if you go out of your way to read side documents near the end. Schala isn't. But the game already gave two 'final' bosses before this, one at the end of a long dungeon and the prior requiring a long attunement and the entire game having built up to it. But then you fight this giant space eating glowing thing that merged with Schala somehow and defeat it with The Power Of Rock? What the hell? Dropping Magus in would have made about as much sense. Hell, Chrono, Marle and a zombie Lucca would have made about as much sense. And what was with Miguel? Why was he a superpowered philosophical fisherman?
• The ending of No More Heroes has got to be a parody of this, with a long stream of nonsensical boss fights and totally non-foreshadowed plot twists which push Travis to break the Fourth Wall and complain that the developers are just making this up as they go along.
• After defeating the Big Bad Plutonium Boss of Blaster Master, a strange cyborg knight with a plasma whip appears out of nowhere to challenge you.
• The video game The Matrix: Path of Neo more or less proceeded with the plot of the three Matrix movies. Until the very end, when instead all of the Smiths morphed into one giant "Mega-Smith" to fight Neo. Atari-esque avatars of the Wachowski Brothers stopped the plot at that point to explain how the metaphorical ending of the movies didn't translate well into a video game. This may be true, but it did feel like they were making fun of the player. ("Have fun... and enjoy enlightenment!" [Both laugh])
• Metal Slug 3's first four and a half levels are a fight against a human army (and the odd Giant Enemy Crab)... until you defeat the commander. At that point, an alien springs from his body, and the last half of the last level is a war against the invading aliens known as the Mars People. The series takes Refuge In Audacity, though, so most players's reactions are "Oh, cool!"
• Castle Crashers also does this in the final level. Even though the Cyclops and Black Knight are both encountered in earlier levels, on the final level you fight a guy with a toolbox for a head that draws bad flash animation.
• The final boss from Mega Man 2 would certainly count as this. Right as you reach the end of the caves underneath Wily Fortress, you meet up with Dr. Wily, expecting a battle against one of his mechas... But, for some reason, he literally levitates out of the Wily Saucer and transforms into what looks like some sort of space alien... Not only that, but the room becomes filled with stars and darkness, again without any prior lead-up. After you destroy this "true form" of Wily, it turns out to just be his Holograph Projector, and, as the room returns to normal, you see that Wily was just behind a console, operating the green-shooty-alien-holograph-thingie.

"Simlish" is the official language of The Sims. It's what Sims speak instead of English, and it's going to be the language of choice for over two dozen pop, hip-hop, and alternative artists in The Sims 3 Late Night expansion and The Sims 3 Xbox 360/PS3/Wii ports. The Sims 3 Late Night will be getting 18 popular music tracks in Simlish, while the console ports will get a whopping 21 songs, from artists like 3oh!3, Flo Rida featuring Jovi, Mickey Fatz, and My Chemical Romance. The songs will be rerecorded in Simlish, so Sean Foreman and Gerard Way will be crooning their bands' songs in vaguely French-sounding mumbling.

I'd honestly take offense at this, if anyone of the music was good. Fortunately, the tracks are all from autotuned pop bands with z's in their names, or guys like Souja Boy or My Chemical Romance. Incidentally, My Chemical Romance uses lyrics that are far too interesting and violent for the quality of music. They sound like a bunch of wussy douchebags, so why do they keep talking about things like murder and poison? Bah, kids these days. Let me know if George Fisher or Glen Benton re-record any of their bands' songs in Simlish.

There's just a day and a half left to enter the first Aggrogate giveaway! We're giving away a Castle Crashers King figurine (an exclusive you can't buy from The Behemoth!), along with various other Castle Crashers swag. Just send us an email with your favorite Castle Crashers character/weapon/animal orb combination and explain why! The giveaway ends at 12:00 a.m. on September 8, and we'll announce a winner soon after that.

Ubisoft looks to be following Microsoft's own Kinect launch example with Motion Sports, a sports minigame compilation title set to hit shelves alongside Kinect this November. The six minigames include dodging tacklers as a football player, horseback riding, downhill skiing, hang gliding, boxing, and soccer penalty kicks. At least some of these games include head-to-head multiplayer, but the trailer doesn't indicate whether or not they all do.

Wii Sports was probably the best proof-of-concept for the Wiimote technology, so it's fitting that approachable sports-themed minigame titles would be a major part of Kinect's holiday season honeymoon. Including Microsoft's in-house Kinect Sports game, which also offers six sports minigames, Kinect now has at least two launch titles of that flavor. It will be interesting to see how Kinect is received - especially if minigame compilation titles are the meat and potatoes of its offerings. Will there even be room in the market for two sport minigame titles at launch? Interestingly, Kinect Sports won't even be pack-in with the Kinect; that honor goes to Kinect Adventures, another minigame compilation.

Youtube user GrafWutzenstein has spliced together the gameplay trailers that were sent to IGN, 1UP, and GameSpot. The trailer showcases four of the multiple characters playable in game including MegaMan, RockMan (based on the Japanese boxart), a MegaMan based on the bad box art of the American version of the first game, and Ryu from Street Fighter. The game also includes Arthur from Ghosts and Goblins, though he is not in the trailer. Incidentally, the game looks very much like the stop motion trailer that was released previously. MegaMan Universe is coming out on Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Store.

GamePolitics reports that Iran has released at least two games focusing on the "crimes" of the "Zionist" Israeli government. The games were made by the student arm of Basij, Iran's paramilitary volunteer militia. The first game is titled Assault on Freedom Convoy, and it details the May 31st Israeli commando raid on activists trying to slip through a Gaza naval blockade that left nine Turkish activists dead. A website run by student Basijis said the game exposes the "crimes of the Zionist regime during the attack on the flotilla," according to the Times of India. The second game is called Devil's Den 2, though no more details are currently available (there's a 25-year-old board game called Devil's Den about the battle of Gettysberg, but there probably isn't any relation).

Mohammad Reza Jokar, head of the Basij student wing, said about the games, "The young generation must find out about the Zionist regime and since video games enjoy large audiences, they were unveiled ahead of Quds Day," referring to the annual Palestinian solidarity day held in Iran on the last Friday of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

To be perfectly candid, this may be the hardest review I ever write. Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is easily one of my favorite franchises. I've bought all the soundtracks including the original movie score, the movie soundtrack, the game soundtrack, and the music from the trailers. I spent all day driving to various bookstores hoping someone had put out the last volume early. I've seen the film no less than four times. You could say I'm a pretty big fan of Scott Pilgrim. So the real question is: does this game hold up to the franchise from which it was spawned? Short answer: maybe.

Like the movie and the graphic novels, the game is the tale of a strangely lovable slacker forced to fight the seven evil exes of the girl of his dreams in order to be with her. This is serves as an extended metaphor for how every one of us has to fight off their demons and fears when trying to win someone's heart. Unfortunately, the game pretty much skips over all the narrative, instead dropping you in stages and telling you to go left and kill all things in your path. It makes the game feel all the more retro, but I do wish that some more of the storytelling had made it into the game.

As the screenshots show, SPvTW tries extremely hard to to invoke gamers' nostalgic sensibilities. The chiptune soundtrack from Anamanaguchi would easily be the strongest part of the game, were it not for the equally amazing pixel art work done by Paul Robertson. Before you even get to the gameplay, the graphics and sound are excellent reminders of the days of 16-bit gaming.

The face buttons map the two attack buttons, both heavy and light, a block button and a jump button, while the shoulder buttons and bumpers activate your crowd-clearing special attack or call out your striker for special moves like healing you or stunning every character on screen. You shouldn't recklessly user those attacks because they use "guts points," and the first time you are knocked down with no health points your remaining guts points get converted into health to prevent you from losing a life.

Even the cheat codes are retro: X, Circle, X, Square, X, Circle, Circle turns on Blood Mode just like in the Sega Genesis version of Mortal Kombat, while the same-character code (Down R1, Up, L1, Triangle, Circle) is right out of Street Fighter II. You'll find yourself punching yellow boxes with question marks for coins, running down rainbow roads, and hurling turnips at your enemies. To increase your stats, you can buy items like the Bionic Arm, Never-ending Fantasy, and Speedy the Porcupine. This game manages to be more chock full of old-school gaming references that I thought was possible.

All that old school goodness comes with a price. Scott Pilgrim is a hard game, and that difficulty is compounded by its odd leveling system (lifted straight from the beat-em-up classic River City Ransom). Retro callbacks are great, but nostalgia doesn't justify all but forcing players to grind cash in levels, just to be able to buy the upgrades necessary to beat the next stage. That doesn't even take into account the last stage, which has 3 separate boss battles and will punish you if you aren't very well prepared.

Fortunately, autosaving helps a lot. The game will automatically save your progress whenever you complete a stage, lose all you lives, continue, or return to the map. This is a very good thing, because the game is buggy. There are numerous glitches throughout the game, and while some can be exploited to your advantage, others might force you to hard reset your system (the latter type of bug is probably unintentional). The worst part is that the glitches seem to appear wire no rhyme or reason, so I can't even advise on how to avoid them. The only other possible complaint would be the lack of online multiplayer. For myself, I understand they opted to leave it out to make it feel more oldschool. Still, even the upcoming Street Fighter III re-release is getting an online versus mode. Considering how pervasive as online gaming has become, most reviewers will knock points off for the lack of online co-op.

If you are a huge Scott Pilgrim fan or just loved old school arcade beat-em-up's like Battletoads, Double Dragon, and River City Ransom, you'll find a lot to love here. Gamers who aren't such big fans of the franchise or old-school gaming might find the reliance on retro mechanics to be more of hindrance than a boon. As for me, this is currently on my top ten games of the year.

Above is the original pitch video for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World found by Comics Alliance. It's interesting to see just how retro the game was planned to be. This video is pre-Paul Robertson and pre-Anamanaguchi, and is a very different take on the franchise than the final product. The chiptunes rock covers are pretty awesome, though.

Played on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Completed with Scott Pilgrim and Kim Pines.