Your Early Morning Germany Wrap-Up

While sane people like you and me were asleep in our beds, Germany was busy putting it down big time with the Leipzig Games Convention. And I guess by big time I mean "there's some stuff there, but 90 percent of it was at E3." Rather than go and wander around looking for that 10 percent of newness, we decided to hang back and save ourselves for the Penny Arcade Expo.

Here's what's happened so far:

- EA announced the cast for C&C Red Alert 3, and it includes Gemma Atkinson, Tim Curry, Andrew Divoff, Kelly Hu, Jenny McCarthy, Ivana Milicevic, Jonathan Pryce, J.K. Simmons, Autumn Reeser, Peter Stormare, George Takei, Randy Couture, and Gina Carano.

You may recognize Gina Carano as "the hot one" from the new American Gladiators series. Also, apparently George Takei, who will play one of the guys telling you what to do when you play as the Japanese forces, will speak out of synch with his lips.

- Sony had a press conference and made some hardware moves. There will be a new 160GB model of the PlayStation 3. Sony's US branch went on to confirm that the same model will be hitting the US in November. It'll come packed in with Uncharted, a voucher to download Pain, and a DualShock 3. It'll hit the US for $499.99.

There's a new PSP hardware configuration coming, confirming those FCC docs that popped up last week. The PSP-3000 has a built-in microphone and a higher-contrast screen with some anti-glare stuff on it, for kicks. The PSP will continue to be $199.99 in bundles and $169.99 as a Core Pack.

Sony also showed a crazy-looking snap-on keyboard for PlayStation 3 controllers. It's a Bluetooth device, so you could conceivably use it with your cell phone or anything else that can handle a BT KB. But it's decidedly shaped to fit on a DualShock, so that would just be silly. This will be hitting in late November.

IGN live-blogged Sony's conference. Aside from the aforementioned hardware stuff, LittleBigPlanet was there. Heavy Rain was shown, too, but it sounds like it was mostly bits of previously-released footage. It's a PS3 exclusive.

- Midway announced additional characters for Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. Raiden and Kano will be joining the MK side. Wonder Woman and Deathstroke will be hitting for DC. Now Kano and Superman can have a battle of crazy laser eyes. Oh, and Raiden and Superman can have a battle of crazy... uh... flying like Superman... thing.

- EA put out a press release for Need for Speed Undercover, the new driving game that EA Black Box will ship this November. We got some hands-on time with this last week, stay tuned for Ryan's impressions of the game. The game will have "real-world damage and realistic driving physics." It'll be interesting to see how far the real-world damage goes, considering it'll have licensed cars like the Audi R8, the BMW M6, and the Lexus IS-F. Speaking of which, I still need to go test drive an IS-F and see if I like them. Might get one.

- Microsoft is apparently showing off a redesigned Xbox 360 controller on the show floor that has a redesigned D-pad. Microsoft is claiming that the pad, which sits on a limited edition green controller, is primarily coming out alongside Pro Evolution Soccer and supposedly will only be available in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Don't expect that to last, if there's a controller with a new D-pad coming, it'll probably eventually make its way out as the new default pad. Eurogamer has a bit more on this.

- Also, totally separate from all this, the president of Tecmo resigned.