Konami, home to the wonderful Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania, and Dance Dance Revolution franchises has revealed its lineup for the Tokyo Game Show. Obviously, we have those franchises represented, but there are a ton of other games that will be well worth checking out!

Wii
Elebits

Nintendo DS
Mahjong Kakutou Club DS
Lunar Knights
Winning Eleven DS
Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin
Otogi Juushi Akazukin
Lost in Blue 2

PlayStation 3
Coded Arms Assault
Mahjong Kakutou Club
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

PSP
Mahjong Fight Club Zenkoku Taisen Version
Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops
Metal Gear Solid: Digital Graphic Novel
Winning Eleven 10: Ubiquitous Edition
Silent Hill Origins

Xbox 360
Winning Eleven 10

Konami is really getting into gear with big franchises on every single next-generation platform. Hopefully we also hear more on Hideo Kojima's rumoured secret project for the Wii though. TGS is really becoming more and more interesting as we trudge nearer to the event, make sure you're checking us out every now and then cause we're putting up updates, 24/7.

Kojima Productions is shaking things up for all fans of Snake and Metal Gear Solid, with some significant release date changes. Previously announced as having a TBA 2007 release date, game sites such as EBgames and IGN, have changed the information found in their sites for this game's release date.

IGN has it listed as December 5, 2006, while EBgames has it four days earlier at December 1, 2006. Because of this little discrepancy, we advise you to take it with a grain of salt for now. But it doesn't hurt to hope and wish that the wait to try the "White Flag" mode is just around the corner. Anything that comes up, you'll be the first to know.

Raptor 3D is a homebrew 3D engine for the PSP. It's a 3D graphics tool for people who want to develop their own homebrew games.

Remember this is at the alpha stage, and there might be bugs, but Kojima's been pretty quick with updating previous versions.

About Version 4, Kojima had this to say: "Here is alpha 4, dedicated to QJ net for mirroring all my releases :)" Aw. Shucks. Yes, Version 4 is now at our download site (click on the link below).

Here's Kojima's description of this latest alpha version:

• An Infinitely Faster Animation System
  Optimized to the absolute brink; the previous demo which ran at 21fps now runs at over 60fps (how much over is hard to tell, with the PSP's 60fps HW limit). So now you can realistically use animated meshes within your app game.
• A Single Surface Particle System
  This is easy to use: it's a particle system where each particle is part of a single surface generated in each frame (optimized so it's fast). This means that even if you have a thousand particles, they are all rendered in one call to glDrawElements. All particles are automatically pointed towards the active camera, and can be textured.
• 3D Text Capability
  The font renderer can now produce 3D text and return them as an entity usable just like any other mesh. You can rotate, scale, and position them anywhere in your 3D world. Like the font renderer, it uses the active font as the texture for the text.
• Material Blend Modes
  Now each material has a blend mode that specifies how it is blended in with the screen. Currently supported is Mask which treats transparent pixels as see-through even on 3D meshes (perfect for fences, windows, etc.). This allows you to use simple geo with complex shapes. Also supported is Solid and Add.
• A 3D Credit System
  Using the 3D text engine, this allows you to create rolling credits (like the credits at the end of a movie or game).
  

The demo included with the code has a rolling intro similar to "Star Wars" movies (it calls for a music file called "theme1" so Kojima explained: "I use the actual 'Star Wars' theme personally but for legal reason I can't include it").

Of course, this latest alpha release also includes more bug fixes and other improvements.

Thanks to Kojima's constant updates, it's becoming a more exciting time for PSP homebrew game makers looking for 3D tools. In fact, there's also another 3D engine from LTE Studios.

Download: [Raptor 3D Alpha 4]

Homebrew development is getting easier for newbies to get in; and I really mean it. At first, there wasn't even a toolchain to integrate everything. Then came the toolchain and it pretty much revolutionised homebrew development. This was the case with homebrew games.

Until about a month ago, there wasn't any easy way to make really good games. All the people could do is use Lua and animate a few sprites. Don't get me wrong, some of the games were really nice, but overall, the quality was lacking. Enter two new homebrew 3D engines! The Raptor and LTE engines have made game development a lot easier for people. And since they're coded and used in C++, there will always be a significant speed difference between these games and Lua games, since the fact that Lua is an interpreted language, and C++ is native.

Anyways, on with the news. Kojima has updated his great homebrew 3D engine to alpha 3. I'll remind you that this is still before beta stages, so it will not be perfect, but Kojima must be given full marks for trying and actually accomplishing this feat alone, unlike the LTE engine guys.

The latest alpha contains a lot of new features. I'll quote Kojima here:

"Most notable new feature is full boned animation support. including finally, 100% support for the b3d file format which has exporters for many apps including 3dsmax/milkshape/ultimate unwrap etc.

Included is a already compiled demo with test b3d. press select to exit cleanly back to the os.

Also includes many bug fixes and cleaned up code. No more memory leaks etc."

Now that we have that out of the way, the download link is below. C'mon guys, start making some games!

Download Link: [Raptor 3D Engine Alpha 3]

Update: Just a day after the first alpha was released, Kojima has updated his homebrew 3D engine to incorporate a few new features.

Here's what he had to say:

"This version adds visualizers. Visualizers are a plugin based(I.e to create one you inherit the base visualizer class) and each surface has one.
A visualizer's job is to take and sync data, bind it's resources, then render.

Currently there is one visualizer, VL_VertexArray which as the name suggests adds vertex arrays to raptor, so you should see a big speed up from the last release.

The source is still engine/demo all in one, not separate yet. (I don't have a great ide so it's easier for me to keep it all in one atm)"

The updated engine can be downloaded below.

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Just the other day, we had the LTE studios people releasing their custom-made 3D engine for homebrew developers. And since I wasn't quite expecting it, I was pleasantly surprised.

And again, I wasn't expecting any other engines. At least not so soon! Well, it's nice to be surprised once in a while. And considering the fact that it's another 3D homebrew engine for the developers, it does sound great. This time, it's Kojima from the PS2DEV forums with the great accomplishment.

Here's what he had to say:

"Here's the first alpha of raptor 3d. It's a hybrid engine that is a port of MiniB3D by simon harris, and my own engine Trinity, both of which are open source PC GL engines. It's written against the latest svn version of PSPGL and as such requires you have it installed before using this. Currently the project is a single file containing a small demo and the engine, by alpha2 maybe 3, it will be organized into separate files for each class."

Like the other engine, this one also offers great features:

• SceneGraph with child/parent relationships.
• Multi-texture material (Only 1 one texture supported atm, need to do multi-pass stuff)
• Full suite of entity maniuplation functions, including position/rotate/lookat/scale etc.
• Matrix class.
• 2D Engine using pens for fast orthogonal 2d rendering of rects/lines 2d textures.
• 2D Gui, with windows, buttons, plugin styles and more, including full mouse cursor emulation via the nub, dpad and action buttons, sliders, canvas etc
• Full support for static b3d files made popular by the blitz3d Application.
• Font renderer.(Uses texture based fonts)
• Logger (Create text logs and log output via Logger->Log())
• And some other stuff.

The next version, alpha2 will most probably also add in boned animation and multi-pass texturing.

We've made a forum thread where all the interested developers can discuss. Kojima has also written a small coding guideline which we've pasted in our forums. Good luck with your homebrew games!

Download Link: [Raptor3D Alpha2 Opensource 3D Engine]
View: [Forum Discussion Thread]

Every year at E3, attendees are given generous helping of freebies - from pamphlets to trinkets to cheap junk that fills giant tote bags. If you're a Metal Gear fan, the only thing you'd want to get your hands on (swag-wise) is Kojima Production's "Show Maybe?", a parody of the daily E3 magazine Show Daily.

Those who weren't lucky enough to attend E3 2006 can still have the chance to see the magazine in its full-gloss glory as Kojima has made the entire magazine available on its website. Free of charge, of course.

As it's a complete version, expect to see full ads which are as interesting as the articles themselves. The mag reveals details about upcoming Metal Gear projects including Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, hints on storylines, confirmation of a Metal Gear Solid movie, and a sneak peek at the Nintendo DS game Lunar Knights. It also features a behind-the-scenes look at the 15-minute trailer of the much anticipated Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.

Click on the Read link to start reading now!