You're waiting 'til tomorrow anyway. That's why it's a tease, not a game announcement.

I'll dutifully keep my eyes on the Twitter feed and Facebook page, anyway. After Muramasa: The Demon Blade, I'm actually sort of excited for whatever these guys have up their sleeve.

And with any luck, I'll get an official press release with a few extra tidbits come tomorrow to share with all of you.

That's right – that thing I'm always going on about is the main selling point of this game: steampunk. Normally, this would be an automatic plus for me if the Victorian corsets are frilly and the airships are spectacular. However, my steampunk standards are high and as some games have proved, genre alone is not enough to sell a game.

What Is It?
Nostalgia is a turn-based RPG that's been out in Japan for the last year or so. Players follow young Eddie, a budding airship pilot/adventurer who goes on a quest to become more of a badass and find his missing father.

What We Saw
I played the demo level of the game twice on the noisy PAX expo floor.

How Far Along Is It?
The game ships October 20.

What Needs Improvement?
You Can't Fast-Forward Text: None of Nostalgia is voiced and there is a lot of reading to do. Rather than let the game decide how fast I can read, I would really rather just mash the A button to bring up all of the text in a text box at once and then mash it again to get rid of it.

Bland Music and Scenery: With the exception of the air travel and most of the menus, the 3D visuals of the 19th Century steampunk world are little dull. London lacked anything resembling Jack the Ripper's era and Cairo was cramped and yellow. The music in the demo level didn't wow me, either – but do bear in mind the background noise of PAX might've had an impact on my auditory impressions.

What Should Stay The Same?
The Airships: Rather than just serving as a fancy mount, airships like Eddie's Maverick make up about half of the gameplay. While in the air and navigating the globe from London to Cairo, random encounters will occur where Eddie and his crew man battle stations on the airship to fight. Each character brings their specific skills to their station, like the mage character can charge up a canon attack, Eddie the melee character can ram the Maverick into an enemy, etc. Enemies can attack in the air from the front, the back or the sides of the airship and according to an Ignition rep, the difficulty level of the encounters changes depending on which of the three levels of altitude your ship is traveling. Aside from that, the ship is fully customizable when you shell out for parts and stuff at stores.

The Overall Look: London and Cairo might've looked a little dull but the character models were so cute. Eddie almost looks like a baby Cloud from FFVII – and I don't think that's an accident. I'm told the dev team that worked on Nostalgia was responsible for bringing FF III and IV to the DS and I appreciate their sense of visual homage.

Final Thoughts
The word nostalgia seldom goes with the word passion. At best, it inspires lukewarm, fuzzy feelings of half-remembered happy things. And for me, that just about sums this game up: I was never passionate about random encounters, but I get a little misty-eyed at the mention of turn-based combat.

Momohime is the female lead of Muramasa: The Demon Blade, driven by the evil spirit inhabiting her body to seek out the 108 cursed demon swords. She then uses the powers of those swords to inflict massive-damage on anything that stands in her way. From Ignition's character description:

Possessed by the spirit of a foul swordsman, this young kunoichi is forced to carry out its devious plan against her will. Described by her subjects as "beautiful as a flower and pure as the snow," Momohime lived her life as the Princess of Narukami. When a dark spirit comes to visit her castle, Momohime's idyllic life is changed forever. Forced against her will, she leaves behind everything she knows in a quest for the cursed demon swords…

Be sure to watch the trailer all the way through to the end, where we get to see some of the hot spring fun we've heard so much about.

He tells Gamasutra that Muramasa: The Demon Blade's assets are created at double the size of what we'll see in the Wii version, noting that "producing a fully HD title would not be a great deal of extra work for us." He's not promising anything, cautioning that making Muramasa hi-def ready "wouldn't be a simple insert." He's just being honest.

It's something that Muramasa: The Demon Blade's Japanese publisher Marvelous Entertainment probably wouldn't see be sad to see. Marvelous has said it may bring some of its Wii games to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, a move that may help eke out more profit from its lower than expected performance on Nintendo's platform.

Kamitami, of course, touches on a number of topics not related to upscaling its games for more graphically capable platforms, which you should read for yourself at the full interview.

King of 2D: Vanillaware's George Kamitani [Gamasutra]

Mai's absence in The King of Fighters XII is being felt keenly by fans, and while she could be showing up as a downloadable character somewhere down the line, it's still a rather sore subject. So why would a company release a video on the evolution of the series that punctuates the hardest part of that evolution to handle? It's cruel and unusual punishment, I tell you.

Nostalgia basically takes the same sort of airship travel as we've seen in earlier entries in the Final Fantasy series and countless other roleplaying games and pimps it out, letting the player customize weapons and take to the sky for airship battles. The look is similar, as is the music, but the combat is something that hasn't been explored much outside of cut scenes, with the possible exception of Skies of Arcadia.

That's according to The King of Fighters XII Facebook page and Twitter account, putting an end to the torment that is the 2D fighting game's fluctuating release date, social networking style. We're getting it two days before our brethren in Japan, so try to be that much more excited.

Thanks to Collin for the tip!

Sure, we could have edited the slate ourselves, but then how would we preserve the excitement? Simply telling you about it? That never works. The little date code at the beginning of this "Triumph of Combat" video shall be preserved in its entirety, to show the world just how thrilled Ignition and company are to have been picked as the best among such a crowded field of 3 or four titles, if that.

Oh I kid. Good job guys!

Thirteen classic SS characters and eleven newcomers gather in this latest entry to do battle with the villainous Golba, rendered in high-resolution 3D, which means we also get high-resolution decapitations and dismemberment, and isn't that what video games are all about?

The game was announced last fall as an Xbox LIVE title. Why's it M.I.A.? According to Ignition Entertainment, "It is still happening, but I believe that's scheduled to be a 2010 title." Sit tight!

What Happened To Metal Slug 7 For Xbox Live Arcade? [Siliconera]

Flying airships? Check. Dungeon battles? Check. Plucky young spike-haired anime characters going on a globe-trotting adventure, fighting dragons, wyverns and other unimaginable evils? Check please! Nostalgia's game development pedigree is rock solid and looks to not rock the boat with any of its RPG conventions, perhaps with the exception that's it's set on Earth, spanning real world locations that include New York, London, and Cairo.

The first trailer for Nostalgia is dramatic and cut scene filled. Interested?

RPG Dream Team Delivers Steampunk Nostalgia To The DS [Kotaku]

So says Ignition Entertainment's Shane Bettenhausen, who tells Siliconera that the Vanillaware-developed and Ignition-published Wii game is so "deeply steeped in Japanese tradition, mythology, and culture that trying to dub it, trying to make something more Western is really not a service to the product." And we think that makes a lot of sense.

Plus, we'll just get into the experience faster, saving us precious seconds that would normally be reserved turning off Muramasa's English language dub.

For our hands-on impressions of the Wii game from E3, check out Totilo's preview.

Ignition Discusses Muramasa: The Demon Blade's Localization (Only Japanese Voice Acting!) [Siliconera]

Here at Kotaku we try to expand our horizons. And sometimes our horizons are expanded for us, like when I drew the assignment to meet with Ignition Entertainment at E3 last week. I was ready to play their pretty side-scrolling Muramasa: The Demon Blade and, what do you know, I previewed it.

Then, my former colleague in games reporting, Ignition's director of business development, Shane Bettenhausen, welcomed me to try King of Fighters XII. Me, the guy who lost in Street Fighter II to Soulja Boy.

I let Shane play. I asked questions.

Tell me, I requested, what someone who doesn't know anything about The King of Fighters XII should know.

From my notes: Fighting game (obviously). All hand-drawn. The artwork for each character, rendered in 720p, took 18 "man-months" to complete. Lighting was faked by drawing different sprites for the characters depending on where they stand in the playfield. Three-on-three fights, as is tradition. Not much of a story in this one, and a pared down roster. All dream matches.

Oh, Shane said, something else: did I see this character he was playing as? Ash Crimson? That's the main character. He asked me to guess Ash's gender.

Female?

No. Male. The King of Fighters series, I was told, has been progressive with introducing characters with alternate lifestyles, like cross-dressing. "It seems that most fans are warming up to him," Bettenhausen said of Ash, "Even though he looks like a girl and wears his hair in a bob."

So progressive are the developers of The King of Fighters — and so impossible is it to erase the inquisitiveness from a journalist even after they cease being paid to be a journalist — that Bettenhausen told me that he asked the new game's developers at SNK Playmore to clarify the sexual orientation of those characters for whom such a thing may have been ambiguous.

The evil (naughty?) secretary Mature? Bisexual.

This guy Shane was fighting in the game named Benimaru, who Bettenhausen pointed out wears a halter top, fingerless gloves and flicks at his tall head of hair when he wins he fight? "Apparently he's a hit with the ladies," Bettenhausen told me. "He has tons of girlfriends."

Interesting. I didn't dare play the game. Time was short and I needed to get to more Muramasa. But now I know a little more about The King of Fighters. Enough to make me curious, for reasons I didn't expect.

The King of Fighters XII is out in July for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

The single-player adventure or action game genres are not as popular on the Wii as mini-game compilations. But an increasing number of publishers and developers seem undeterred, making games designed to please the hardcore, like MadWorld, Dead Space Extraction and The Conduit. If that's not bold enough, then this game, Muramasa, does it without the aid of motion control, which the developers thought would not allow for the precision gameplay needed during the most frantic 2D crowd-fighting moments.

Avoiding the shakes, the game's creators are hoping other elements will sell gamers on Muramasa.

What Is It?
Muramasa The Demonblade is published by Ignition Entertainment and is one of those rare third-party Wii exclusives made for traditional gamers. It's a side-scrolling scored beat-em-up featuring two playable characters with two occasionally overlapping runs through the game's story. The stronger boy hero, Kisuke, and the speedier female warrior Momohime, are each on quests to find the Demon Blades. Each hero has dozens of swords that the player can choose to wield. The game's hook is that it looks gorgeous, exhibiting the museum-ready painterly style seen in developer Vanillaware's PS2 cult classic, Odin Sphere.

What We Saw
I played through the easy-mode E3 demo level for Momohime. She can jump and swing her swords, three of which she can carry at a time and all of which have unique secondary attacks. As with Odin Sphere, the character's progression is paced across discrete side-scrolling stages barely wider than a screenshot. Clearing the enemies out in one of them will cause a scoreboard to appear, ranking player performance and adding experience points to unlock new swords.

How Far Along Is It?
The game is already out in Japan, so even though it's not going to be sold in the U.S. until September, it doesn't seem like much will change.

What Needs Improvement?
Separate Lives: Even though the game's two protagonists adventure through 20 of the same levels out of a total of 40, there is no overlap between a player's progress playing as one or the other — no shared experience points, no traded items... nothing. In fact, the player can only commit a save file to their play-through of one character. This prevents a player from hopping back and forth between characters without employing multiple save slots. Such a system seems like it divides Muramasa into two games, and we're left wondering if there's any advantage to that design. It's hard to see what it would be.

Really Long Health Bars: This is not a universal bias, but some gamers don't want to fight a boss whose screen-wide health bar represents maybe a sixth of its overall health. Five more screen-wide health bars to deplete after that.

What Should Stay The Same?
Those Beautiful Things: Screenshots of this game look great. Movies do too. Seeing it in person is no less visually stimulating. Characters are colorfully drawn, sunsets and wheat fields are painted to look equally splendid. Enemies are worth a gawk, some of them massive storybook paintings come to virtual life.

Motion-Free: Muramasa is played with a thumbstick for movement and jumping, as well as just a few of the Wii remote and nunchuck buttons activating attacks and special attacks. It's hard to see how motion control would add anything constructive.

Broken Swords: The one limitation in the game's easy mode — as opposed to its other difficulty level, which is said to be ultra-hard — was the decaying of the player's sword. Spam the same sword attack buttons too much and that sword breaks. The fractured swords restore themselves over time, but the minutes during which the sword is broken force the player to change weapons and sometimes change strategies. That's an interesting wrinkle to a combat system that otherwise seems to be about as basic as it gets.

Final Thoughts
Muramasa The Demon Blade doesn't seem to have gameplay deep enough to engage gamers for a long time without some other attraction keeping players engaged. Thankfully, Muramasa has that: a graphical style as imaginative as a storybook and as beautiful as anything rendered in a 2D video game in a long time.

The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions are due to ship stateside in less than two months, but Ignition hasn't firmly decided on which King of Fighters characters will appear on the game's box art. You get to decide. Err... again. The publisher is offering up another round of box art voting, pitting the previously voted upon version against the more coveted by nature of being Japanese designs.

Of course, if you want the exotic CERO rating and lone SNK Playmore logo, you can still import. But that would be kind of silly, don't you think?

I'm putting my vote behind "Whatever has meaty Athena not offering upskirt visibility on the cover."

Rock the Box Round 2: Vote for your favorite King of Fighters XII PS3 box art! [Ignition Forums]

The publisher announced today that it had acquired the North American publishing rights to the title, planning for a September 2009 release, talking us down from the ledge, drying our tears, wiping our noses and telling us that everything will be alright.

Muramasa: The Demon Blade comes from the development team responsible for the gorgeous side-scrolling action game Odin Sphere. According to Ignition, the game will support 16:9 widescreen display, two playable characters—one ninja, one kunoichi—and has been "hailed by Kotaku as 'this year's prettiest, most enticing Wii game.'" And they're right! We totally said that.

New-like screens of the Wii exclusive await you...

That's because the game apparently has a North American release window, which was, frankly, (good) news to this casual King of Fighters observer. The trailer dates The King of Fighters XII for a PlayStation 3 release this Summer.

Ignition Entertainment lists no other platforms on which KOF XII will "kick. some. ass.", but we'll bug them for clarification. While we wait... WOOO! SUMMER!!!

I'll spare you the full plot, but it involves Toki and his Cosmic Cleaners collecting stolen items using their tornado machines.

What this boils down to is some quite Katamari Damacy-like gameplay, with a very DS twist as you use the stylus to whip up a tornado that sucks up whatever you have been asked to recover.

Must play hell on your touchscreen - better invest in a new protective film.

[Tornado]