Two of videogaming’s most iconic characters are entering the ring and going toe to toe. Exclusive to the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita versions of Street Fighter X Tekken, Capcom’s very own Mega Man will be joined by Namco’s mascot, Pac-Man.

For the first time, the version of Mega Man featured on the original Mega Man 1 box art will make the jump from the cover to be a playable character, with Pac-Man taking on all challengers as he rides atop Mokujin.

To see how these two characters inject their own unique and light-hearted fighting styles check out the brand new trailer.

Mega Man and Pac-Man join the previously announced PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita exclusive characters, Cole from Infamous plus Toro and Kuro.

Street Fighter X Tekken will release for PlayStation 3 on March 6 in North America and March 9 across Europe with PlayStation Vita and PC versions to follow.

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The next generation portable device that we have been calling NGP for the last few months has a new name. Yesterday, Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Kazuo Hirai took to the stage at the E3 press conference in Los Angeles to confirm that the final name is PlayStation Vita and that it will retail at €249 and €299 for the Wi-fi and 3G & Wi-fi models respectively.

That wasn’t the only highlight of a press conference packed with new games, crowd-pleasing live demos and surprise announcements.

This time last year, Naughty Dog wowed us with that Uncharted 2: Among Thieves set-piece with Drake fighting an armed helicopter, and this year they brought a new level from Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception that pits our untucked hero against a squad of enemies on a sinking ship. They also brought this stunning trailer that the audience was lucky enough to see in 3D and on a screen bigger than any bus I’ve seen.

Marcus Smith of Insomniac Games was also on-stage to play through a never before seen section of Resistance 3 taking place in St. Louis that sees Capelli join forces with the Remnant, a group of rebels, to take out a dropship.

We love to see new games announced at E3 and there was an especially excited whoop when Sly Raccoon slinked onto the screen in the teaser trailer for Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time on PS3.

Dust 514 is another brand new title; a PS3 exclusive from CCP that syncs up with the hit MMO EVE online. Dust 514 is compatible with PlayStation Move, will have its own dedicated PlayStation Home space and will also have some kind of link-up with PS Vita.

PlayStation Move fans can also look forward to Medieval Moves, an action adventure from the creators of Sports Champions that features intuitive motion control in a fantasy world filled with enemies and contextual puzzles. Sticking with fantasy settings, Ruin was debuted, an action MMO on PS Vita and PS3 that allows the player to save their game on one system and pick up exactly where they left off on the other – a brilliant example of how your PS3 and PS Vita will work together.

Of course, PlayStation Vita was what many came to see and they were spoilt with an extensive line-up of games – it was revealed that more than 80 games are currently in development for the handheld.

One of the biggest surprises was the arrival of Yoshinori Ono to present a playable version of Street Fighter X Tekken on PS Vita, which includes an unexpected guest character: Cole McGrath from the inFamous series.

The press conference is just one part of E3 and we are going to be spending the rest of the week on the show floor filming a live video broadcast featuring interviews, banter and game demos; check it out here on the PlayStation.Blog over the next three days.

Hope you enjoyed this year’s announcements – there were many more than I’ve listed here. We always enjoy reading your feedback so tell us what you think in the comments and I’ll jump in tomorrow morning.

Time to watch Jane’s Addiction…

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At Captivate last week, CAPCOM unveiled the first batch of playable characters in Street Fighter X Tekken: Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Guile and Abel from Street Fighter and Kazuya, Nina Williams, King, Marduk and Bob from Tekken. Afterwords, Producer Yoshinori Ono spoke how Street Fighter X Tekken came to be. In his words…

“When we [CAPCOM] took that 10 year break between releasing Street Fighter games, I feel that Tekken diligently stoked the fighting game campfire and kept people interested,” explains Yoshinori Ono, producer on Street Fighter X Tekken and one of the most animated game developers I’ve ever met. “With Street Fighter IV we tossed kerosene on that fire and got fans really excited about fighting games again.”

“I was having dinner with the Tekken director [Katsuhiro] Harada-san shortly after Street Fighter IV came out and we got talking about how we could keep that campfire burning,” he continues. “We were half-joking when we first conceived this collaboration, but it did seem like a great idea to both of us and pretty soon we were both saying, ‘you go back to your office and I’ll go back to mine… let’s synchronise watches and convince everyone that we should do this’. Long story short, we’ve got our game coming; they have a similar thing going on over there, and we’ll see what happens.”

Ono-san was speaking at CAPCOM’s Captivate event in Miami, where he unveiled the first batch of playable characters in Street Fighter X Tekken: Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Guile and Abel; and Kazuya, Nina Williams, King, Marduk and Bob from the Street Fighter and Tekken worlds respectively. I have played quite a bit of the game using all characters over the past week. If you’re interested in hearing about that then ask away in the comments, but for now I’ll leave Ono-san to continue the story of how Street Fighter met Tekken…

“Harada-san has zero input on this game and we don’t do an awful lot of communicating. In fact, he has less knowledge of the game than you do right now and he might learn something when he reads this interview.”

“Street Fighter and Tekken have always been different games. Street Fighter is slower paced and a little more deliberate, it’s all about judging the distance between yourself and an opponent and anticipating what they are going to do. It’s not as aggressive as Tekken, which is played at a faster pace, right from the very first punch.”

“What we’ve tried to do here is merge the two so that you retain some of the more thoughtful approach that you associate with Street Fighter, while also getting a taste of that more ‘in your face’ Tekken style. We think we’ve found a way to get the best of both and we’ll just continue fine-tuning so that the final result is a perfect marriage and a unique game in its own right.”

“There was some communication early on and, usually with a collaborative project like this, we would be obliged to buy some Tekken reference materials, but I certainly don’t want to give money to a competitor, so I’ll most likely work out some private deal with Harada-san where we borrow that stuff. I’m not going to tell him exactly why we need it though, that would be showing too much of my hand.”

“But back to the original point, they have no input into our game and we have none into theirs.”

“There are a lot of Tekken characters that are really difficult to get right in this game, but our selection criteria is to pick the most challenging to bring over because it’s more fun for us and I think it will make the game more compelling in the end. One example is Marduk, who is a pretty surprising inclusion. We have some other powerful grapplers in Street Fighter but nobody that moves the way he does. From E3 onwards we’re going to be revealing many more characters and some of them are going to be truly out of left-field.”

“You might be thinking there’s no way we can include certain characters but you could be second-guessing yourself further down the line. The Tekken universe has some supremely weird characters, including animals and even inanimate objects, and that might strike you as contrary to the Street Fighter aesthetic, but then we’ve had a character whose limbs can stretch and people shooting fireballs from their hands, so the addition of an animal wouldn’t be so out of place and it could make the game really interesting.”

“We’re not just throwing a bunch of Tekken characters into Street Fighter and I hope that fans from both sides are going to be attracted to Street Fighter X Tekken.”

“The ideal ending to this story is to have built a common ground, where the best Street Fighter players and the best Tekken players in the world can duke it out. I’d be really happy with that.”

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