It looks like a giant robot arms race is brewing. Last week, sensational images of a giant Gundam replica in Tokyo’s Odaiba Shiokaze park were sighted. The towering 59-foot tall mech was built by Bandai to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Gudam franchise.

Recently, images of an equally imposing Optimus Prime statue from Beijing arrived.  The Prime statue pictured above is 40 feet tall, falling just short of Japan’s gigantic Gundam – and was crafted from six tons of recycled car parts and junk metal. The fact that this impressive Prime was built from scrap seems fitting for the leader of the Autobots… …

A friend of mine reminded me of Red Steel 2 today, and it got me thinking about my glowing review of Ubisoft’s MotionPlus first-person brawler. I spoke quite hyperbolically, and even when I wrote the review, I wrestled with giving the game a 9.0 with that kind of exalted text behind it. Case in point, look at the balls on me as I close the review with this line: “Plain and simple, this is one of the finest games to grace the Wii console.”

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Fans of Policenauts and Snatcher might want to take notice, because Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima is reportedly working on another adventure game.

In a new interview with 4gamer (as translated by Adriasang), 5pb CEO Chiyomaru Shikura confirmed that he is working on a project with Kojima, saying that he wants to put his “full effort” behind the game.

Asked whether Kojima is making an adventure game, Shikura responded, “Yes, Kojima said that he wanted to make an adventure game. We’re still at the level of ‘let’s lock ourselves away in the mountains somewhere and work on the plot,’ so the specifics haven’t been finalized.”

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Live video by Ustream

Time: Tuesday, July 20th, 2010, 5 p.m. PST

Location: Watch the embedded video player above.

This stark, XBLA puzzle game was a staff favorite at GDC, and now the indie project has gotten wide distribution. Watch as Justin and Tina play through the opening of this beautiful, minimalist adventure. But don’t worry, we’ll try to keep puzzle spoilers to a minimum.

Nintendo and Tecmo Koei put out an awesome 16-minute-long documentary on the making of Metroid: Other M in Japan last week, and obsessed fans have gone to the trouble of translating the whole thing for our western brains.

The two videos below feature Tecmo’s Yosuke Hayashi and Metroid creator Yoshio Sakamoto, who speak over a ton of gameplay footage from the brilliant-looking collaboration project, which’ll be out in the UK on Wii on September 3, and August 31 in the US… …

Dive: The Medes Island Secret, from Cosmonaut Games, might be launching on WiiWare on July 26, according to Nintendo’s website. When contacted, the game’s representatives said that there will be an official announcement about the game’s release date and pricing tomorrow.

The game, which runs on the NyxQuest engine, was reviewed in the latest issue of Nintendo Power, giving credence to the potential release date.

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THQ has big gaming tie-in plans for the future, and appropriately enough, it is starting with the 22nd-century sci-fi shooter series Red Faction. The publisher has teamed with the NBC Universal-owned cable channel SyFy to produce a two-hour movie pilot called Red Faction: Origins, which will air around the time Red Faction: Armageddon launches in March.

Red Faction Origins will debut as a two-hour TV movie next March but could become much more.

Danny Bilson, executive vice president of THQ’s core gaming business, first revealed the publisher’s latest trans-media plans in an investor’s conference call during the Electronic Entertainment Expo, but recently discussed them in greater detail with GameSpot.

Bilson outlined several key aspects of its various gaming tie-ins, including Red Faction Origins, the upcoming Saints Row movie, and a De Blob kids’ project with SyFy. Both the De Blob and Red Faction efforts will debut in March, with the Saints Row film expected around the time of the next game in the series next year. That will be the publisher’s biggest trans-media effort to date, Bilson said, with the movie and game accompanied by Xbox Live and PlayStation Network content, collectible card games with digital code unlocks for the game, novelizations, apparel, and other tie-in merchandise.

While Saints Row worked best as a film (it’s a little too R-rated for most TV networks, Bilson said), Red Faction Origins made perfect sense as a TV movie for SyFy.

“The thing with SyFy is they wanted to get in business with us on multiple things. We thought about what would be good for SyFy, and Red Faction felt like a no-brainer for a couple reasons,” Bilson said. “One is that it’s producible on a television budget. It takes place on a terraformed Mars where people can breathe and a lot of it is natural terrain with vehicles and spaceships and different factions.”

Depending on how well Red Faction Origins turns out and performs, it could be expanded into a full TV season of episodes a la Battlestar Galactica. Bilson said the movie will tell a self-contained story, but one that is designed to push the fiction into a regular episodic format.

“All of these pieces are really to support the games,” Bilson said. “They’re not big revenue drivers or anything like that. It’s really about how we can make the universe cool, give fans more access points to a game they enjoy, and how we can make a game more important when it comes out.”

One thing that Bilson said separates THQ’s efforts from those of its competitors is that announced projects will come to fruition much more consistently. Instead of licensing out its intellectual property or letting other people take it through the film development process, the publisher makes partnership deals with “guarantees to picture.” As a result, THQ films should avoid the development purgatory that has claimed game-to-film adaptations like the Halo movie.

Despite that insistence on releasing finished products, Bilson said the company is mindful about the damage done by substandard tie-ins.

“One thing about trans-media is you can’t have a bad piece because it ruins the whole thing,” Bilson said, adding, “With these partnerships, if it’s not good, we can stop it.”

While THQ will continue pushing its existing intellectual properties into new media where it makes sense, Bilson said the publisher is also taking another approach to the idea. He said the company is working on a partnership with a “major filmmaker” that will see a game and film project for a new intellectual property developed jointly from the ground up, though specific details aren’t yet ready to be announced.

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U.K indie developer Cliff Harris created a stir last week when he called out Epic VP Mark Rein on his block, calling Rein a “jerk” for his comments during a Develop Conference panel about indie games.

Rein apologized for his comments in a lengthy letter Harris, which he also passed to Develop. In it, he offered his apologies for interupting Harris’s panel, writing that he’s “supremely passionate about the plight of indie developers, and game developers in general.”

Referring to a conversation during the panel about having a one-on-one relationship with customers, Rein wrote, “Epic was a tiny indie studio back in 1992 when I became a partner in the business and this sort of thing (sales, marketing, PR) was my specific responsibility. Just like you do now we sold our games directly to our customers by giving our free ‘shareware’ episodes (or demos) they could download with no fuss.”

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The death of Michael Jackson in 2009 brought with it a major resurgence in his music and other media. However, Ubisoft confirmed in a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz that they had been working with Jackson and his family on a game “long before his death.”

According to Ubisoft’s UK marketing director Murray Pannel, Jackson had been “very pro-actively” seeking a partner that he felt “could bring value.”

“So this isn’t something that’s been jumped on since his death – we’ve been working on this, despite the fact that we announced it quite recently, for a long time,” Pannel said.