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Rumor pegs Nintendo 3DS for November 11th in Japan
Remember when Nintendo said it'd release its release date for the 3DS autostereoscopic portable game system on the 29th of this month? We may already have the magic number -- depending on how you interpret a few Japanese words. You see, a supposed video game accessory designer by the handle "nocchisan" recently tweeted that eleven Nintendo 3DS accessories will be released on November 11th, and asked his or her followers to kindly buy them up... while purportedly remarking that the 3DS itself will arrive at the same time. While the tweets in question can certainly be read that way, and it makes a certain amount of sense for accessories to appear at launch, our admittedly limited grasp of Japanese suggests an alternative translation: that it's the accessories themselves (and not the 3DS) that will all arrive at the same time. There's also the little matter of nocchisan himself, whose Twitter account has already disappeared -- we have nothing actually connecting him to the accessory company except a link in his tweet.
Puchi Puchi Virus has surprisingly excellent art
Puchi Puchi Virus is a puzzle game from Keys Factory, a company that generally sticks to game accessories. It's published in Japan by JALECO, who published things like the NES port of Maniac Mansion and Irritating Stick for the Playstation-- we didn't even know they still existed. The gameplay looks like a slightly novel puzzle game based around capturing same-colored items inside a wide beam. But the art is stunning. The DS can do some excellent 2D in the right hands, and Puchi Puchi Virus has some of the best we've seen recently. The characters are vibrant and presented in an anime style, while the backgrounds are more in the whimsical, highly-stylized form of modern Western animation like Dexter's Laboratory.
