While Microsoft is busy announcing and revealing new games at E3, Xbox Live’s Major Nelson twittered a very exciting piece of news of Perfect Dark fans — the original N64 is officially coming to Xbox Live Arcade, and is scheduled for release this winter.

During these busy E3 times, let’s not forget what happened 25 years ago, when Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris, which instantly took the world by storm. The game has sold hundreds of millions of copes in various forms, and even the Guinness Book of Records lists Tetris as the record holder of the “Most Ported Video Game” and “Game With the Most Official and Unofficial Variants”, among a dozen other records.

At E3, Nintendo revealed that the company has shipped over 15 million Wii Fit units worldwide for the Nintendo Wii console, making Wii Fit sell more units than Sony and Microsoft sold of their respective game consoles.

Nintendo has also announced Wii Fit Plus, an extra series of workout games for Wii Fit. Wii Fit Plus will ship with all new Wii Fit boards and will be sold as a separate game for current Wii Fit owners.

With every video game company releasing gobs and gobs of information at E3 there’s dozens of games to look at, but one title that has hardcore gamers excited is Dead Rising 2. The original had a compelling storyline that offered a lot of challenge balanced by a lot of fun using anything and everything on hand to dispatch hordes of slavering undead. We already knew that despite Frank West’s heroic attempts to stop the impending zombie apocalypse the outbreak wasn’t contained to the Midwestern town, with continued outbreaks of zombies across the USA.

One of the outbreaks strikes in Fortune City, essentially a fictionalized version of Las Vegas. The protagonist is Chuck Greene, former Motocross champion and single father who dotes on his daughter Katey. Since her mother is dead, this is likely to be the main plot hook of the game, with Greene working his way through the city in an attempt to rescue his daughter and then help her escape.

As before you’ll be utilizing anything and everything to slaughter your way through hordes of zombies, hordes that promise to be even greater than the original due to upgrades in the engine that’ll allow huge numbers of undead to be on the screen with very little frame drop.

At E3 Iron Will Technologies is unveiling an innovation of theirs that’ll bring many gamers back down memory lane to a time of bad haircuts, ripped-up jeans and Fred Savage. In his classic film The Wizard where he attempts to get a young video game prodigy to a gaming competition. One of the most tense scenes involved one of the antagonists unleashing one of the most bizarre yet desirable peripherals of the early gaming world: the Power Glove.

It was intended to translate a gamers hand movements into control inputs, but due to its imprecision and lack of dedicated games it didn’t really catch on, and was regarded as a gimmick, but the concept has remained popular. Films like Minority Report, Johnny Mnemonic and others have showed extreme fascination with the concept of controlling a computer via hand inputs.

The Peregrine is an attempt by Iron Will to bring this generally science-fiction concept into real life. MMOs and RTS games are notorious for complex control schemes that require endless numbers of key shortcuts for success and to fumble one in the midst of a raid or skirmish can destroy your slim chance of victory. The Peregrine promises to offer over thirty key shortcuts by tapping your thumb to various points on your fingers. Of course the control options are customizable and luckily for those prone to long, long gaming sessions the sensor disconnects and the glove itself is washable.

I was starting to think that the Wii was nothing but a dumping ground for massive party game packs of mini games, and then something happened to change my entire perspective.  It’s called The House of the Dead: Overkill, and it’s a whole lot more fun than I ever expected.

See, The House of the Dead: Overkill plays like a massive collection of seventies drive-in movies unified by one basic script.  You play as Agent G, aided and abetted by Detective Washington and a stripper with the unlikely name of Varla Guns, all after a madman with chemically driven plans for global conquest via an army of mutant humans and animals.  Most of the mutated humans in question look almost EXACTLY like zombies.  You’ll be chasing said madman, Papa Caesar by name, through a series of nightmarish challenges, including clearing out a plantation house of zombies, blasting your way through a prison, hospital, and carnival of the dead, and taking on horrific bloated monstrosities in a swamp.

Seriously, there’s probably enough basic fodder here to make a dozen or more direct to video splatter flicks, and they probably wouldn’t be half bad, either.  Carny alone would give me the galloping creepsies, and there have already been some pretty solid zombie prison movies.  Even The Asylum could do one right back in the day when they weren’t churning out sad retreads of blockbusters one right after the next.

The graphics are appropriately splattery, and the voice acting just screams seventies drive-in, in fact, the level of profanity in this game was probably approaching unnecessarily high levels but that’s nothing adults can’t handle.  But where this game really got me was in terms of sheer gameplay.  The Wiimote is surprisingly well placed to handle shooter games—all I could think while playing was that the Wii desperately needed a Star Trek-themed shooter. I believe that the Wiimote would make an excellent hand phaser.

Of course, there’s a down side to all this, too—if you’re not into splatter flicks and blasting zombies then you’re not going to get anything out of this game.  I happen to fall into both those categories, both loving watching other people blast zombies and doing the blasting of said zombies myself.  This game is tailor-made for people like me, but if you don’t happen to fall into the category of a horror enthusiast then it’s not going to be the game for you.  All you’ll do in this game is shoot zombies with a variety of weapons.

Speaking of which, I loved the variety of weapons in this game.  I further loved that they were upgradeable based on level performance, which provided the infusion of cash necessary to have my hardware tricked out and to get my shotgun and assault rifle and whatnot up to their highest levels.  I do somewhat resent that combo scoring seemed to be affected by my use of an automatic weapon, but this was a minor irritant at best and certainly didn’t get in the way of the game’s sheer blistering fun factor.

The House of the Dead: Overkill should provide plenty of fun and plenty of action.  Better, it’ll do that in a shooter package that doesn’t depend on you hovering above a gun barrel for once.  Excellent, smooth gameplay and fun dialogue make this one one to pick up if you’ve got even the slightest horror buff tendency.

The Nintendo DS seems posed to take the crown as the most successful gaming device ever sold. Since its original design the handheld has leaped to the top of the sales charts and sat there like a cash-spewing frog. The DSi, the newest iteration of the system doesn’t have much of significance to offer when compared to its predecessor the DS Lite, at least where gamers are concerned. It offers a relatively poor quality camera, takes away the GBA cartridge slot and lets owners listen to certain kinds of music files.

It seems that the system is even more popular than its predecessor; it has already sold over a million units across Europe since its launch in April of this year. It took a mere eight weeks to reach this milestone, a significant accomplishment when you consider that the DS Lite took thirteen weeks to sell over a million units. The previous models are still popular too, with half a million units of prior iterations being sold since the launch of the DSi.

In addition to unveiling the sequel to Super Mario Galaxy, Nintendo has unveiled a new Metroid game for the Wii as well. Called Metroid: Other M, it will be developed by Team Ninja and is both a first person and third person action game. It will be released in 2010. As usual, expect a lot more info, and hopefully a vide or two, during E3.

Nintendo just wrapped up its E3 press conference, and one of the new games unveiled was a sequel to Super Mario Galaxy, titled Super Mario Galaxy 2 (what else?). The game will feature new worlds, and this time, Mario will get hep from Yoshi as well. Expect more info in the upcoming days.

Red Steel was one of the earliest hardcore games for the Wii and though it emphasized the sword-fighting that part of the gameplay was disappointing due to its gesture-based controls while the gun controls were much more realistic. With the sequel the developers are hoping to deliver on the original promise by utilizing Wii MotionPlus controls.

It’s been demoed at E3 and sounds like it’s a far superior version to the original, with creative director Jason Vandenberge squaring off against a hammer-wielding opponent. Ubisoft has confirmed that the game will be bundled with the controller peripheral since it’s now mandatory for the game. Chance are many will already have the Wii MotionPlus before then since it’ll be bundled along with several sports games and