Yes, I need to recharge my DS Lite. Ryan Payton at Kojima Productions was kind enough to pass along Lunar Knights for me to take a look at. I'm a few hours in, and I'm really digging the title. It's slick and polished, just like what you'd expect from Hideo Kojima and co. Music's great as are the anime cut scenes. Lunar Knights is a dungeon crawler (which I dig) with vampire slayers. The game takes place in the Boktai universe and is the forth installment in the series — A non-sequential one at that, apparently. Out is the solar sensor of previous installments. And in its place, touch screening and whistling into the mic. All in all, solid title that shapes up to be more than a diversion for Kojima while he plucks away at MGS 4 (and for everyone else waiting for it!). People in Kotaku-land pick Lunar Knights up? If so, whaddaya think? Brian Ashcraft

A ton of new releases coming out this week with a little bit of everything from RPG's and strategy games to racing and sports titles. The PS2 gets quite a bit of love this week with five games on it's dance card. The rest of the titles are pretty evenly distributed amongst all the portables and consoles, with the exception of the PS3 which is strangely absent from this list.

• Diddy Kong Racing DS DS Diddy Kong makes a bid for the Mario Kart throne.
• Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia PS2
  Pure, unabashed Japanese RPG goodness.
• Final Fantasy VI Advance GBA
  The classic RPG is given a facelift for it's re-emergence on the GBA
• UFO: Afterlight PC
  Be an intergalactic space strategist!
• The Sims Life Stories PC
  Enjoy controlling the lives of your tiny minions with a new story mode.
• Capcom Puzzle World PSP
  Five classic Capcom puzzle games including: Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo , Buster Bros., Super Buster Bros., Buster Buddies and Block Block
• Fuel PC
  An around the world race on ATV's.
• Lunar Knights DS
  Battle space vampires from beyond the grave.

• Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI PS2
  Eleventh game in the long running strategy sim series.

• Winning Eleven: Pro Evolution Soccer 2007 X360, PS2, Wii, PSP
  Pro soccer debuts on the next gen consoles.
• MVP 07 NCAA Baseball PS2
  More baseball on the PS2, now with a new pitching style!
• SnoCross 2: Featuring Blair Morgan XBOX, PS2
  Blair Morgan is kicking it olde school on the PS2 and Xbox.

Flynn De Marco

I sat down with Kensuke Yoshitomi yesterday to talk a bit about Lunar Knights, Kojima Productions upcoming sequel of sorts to the GBA franchise Boktai. After showing up embarrassingly late, we got down to rapping about how glorious the Nintendo DS is.

The DS version is drop kicking the solar sensor for a very specific reason—kids in Scandinavia complained that they couldn't play the game due to lack of sunlight.

Kojima himself told Yoshitomi that he was concerned about towheaded boys and girls to the ultra-north getting their vampire slay on and that they should make a new game. Fortunately for them, the solar powered gimmickry has been dropped, in favor of blowing into the microphone, stylus shmupping, and 2D role playing.

I hadn't really given the game much consideration until we started talking, but it's starting to sound like a must have. Interviewing developers is easy, but when genuinely nice guys show the coolest aspects of their games it's often hard on the wallet. Michael McWhertor

E3 seemed a little light on the swag front this year, with the only covetable things on my list being Sony's Ape Escape dolls and Square-Enix's Dragon Quest slime keychains. The one thing that did fire up the fanboy inside me was Konami's Kojima Productions pamphlet. Normally, corporate pamphlets are a staid affair, seemingly created specifically to line the garbage cans of the L.A. County Convention Center.

Last year's Kojima Productions kit was a lovingly crafted work of marketing art, an oversized, Hideo-heavy focus on the newly formed production offshoot. This year the team went all out, creating a 58-page magazine dedicated to Kojima Productions that apes the style of the E3 show floor daily. Unfortunately for the staff at the Konami spin-off E3's daily magazine changed publishers this year, resulting in a different appearance for 2006, but longtime E3 attendees recognized the similarities immediately.

Awkwardly titled "Show Maybe?" (after Show Daily) The mag has a series of interviews with staffers including Kojima himself and Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops producer Noriaki Okamura, plus articles on the titles Metal Gear Digital Graphic Novel, Lunar Knights and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.

Tons more Metal Gear minutiae include detailed descriptions of every Hidechan radio program, as well as partial transcriptions, and info on the english language counterpart Kojima Productions Report. Metal Gear character artist Yoji Skinkawa also gets a little back-slapping from his co-workers, who's artwork was featured at this year's Into the Pixel gallery show.

I snagged an extra "Show Maybe?" for the Kotaku swag bag, which one lucky reader will have an opportunity to win when our contest goes live. Keep your eyes open for an announcement.