In our rundown of Japan’s blossoming love affair with Medieval and Revolutionary France, Metafuture regrets being remiss in not including what may be the seed: Arm Joe, the 2D fighter inspired by one Japanese man’s love of Les Misérables.

This man, known only as Takase, has been working on this PC game all by himself since the late 90s. We saw this get mentioned as recently as last month on GameSetWatch, but it completely slipped our minds.

To make up for it, here’s a link to download the game, if you haven’t yet seen Robo-Valjean avenge the mistreatment of his human peasant buddies. (The download will start automatically)

Metafuture infobit: It’s called Arm Joe because in Japan, Les Misérables is called Ah, Mujou (”Ah, Cruelty”).

Developers ArenaNet announced today that Guild Wars is soon to have its third iteration. As is to be expected in a third effort from a franchise with “Wars” in the title, there will be ewoks. Well, that’s how I interpret the “Guild Wars game unlike any players have seen before” full-of-nothing line from the press release.

Details are light, except for the promise of two new classes, the Paragon (a “paladin” “guardian angel of the Elonian people”) and the Dervish (a “dual-wielding paladin” “scythe-wielding holy warrior”— whirling skill cooldown time still under press embargo).

Thanks to reader JP for not ignoring articles about Mark Rein like the rest of us.

Mark Rein is the vice president of Epic Games. His job is to get people to license the Unreal Engine. He goes about this by visiting conferences and sounding so out of touch that people will think the Unreal Engine must be really good to keep Epic in business with Mark on the team.

His latest trip was to England, where he kicked things off by announcing that “very little of [the episodic business model] makes any actual sense.”

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Don’t even think about trying to patch from the game’s updater. 5.2MB! Way to go, THQ! To put things in perspective, that’s an accomplishment akin to what one might expect to see from Brian Crecente if he snuck into a 10th grade grammar bee.

Another Metafuture Hooray goes to GameSpot for still not having the file. I guess the weekend came a little early for El Juegopunto.

If you want the patch, you’re going to have to stand in line at Fileplanet or look for it on your favorite “click here then here then here then here oops server queue is full, thanks for the CPM-rate-depressing ad views” site.

Metafuture, in cooperation with the Prey demo, is pleased to present this handy, concise guide to the history and customs of the Native American tribe known as the Cherokee.

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Now 1UP is in on the action.

Though 3D Realms has now got to take some of the blame for this continuing, because George “The Decider” Broussard himself can’t even be bothered to know for sure what the deal is. Or maybe he really does, and the plan is to let this story ride until even Take-Two starts thinking that they owe 3D Realms $4.25 million when Duke ships. Naw, that’s too clever, or at least too not-cribbed-from-a-Bruce-Campbell-or-other-iconic-gamer-movie.

F13 received word from a source with the trust-inspiring codename “Shiznitz” that Vivendi, owners of Blizzard, gave a presentation to Wall Street. In this presentation, it was supposedly said that thanks to World of Warcraft, Vivendi has a cunning plan that will allow them to produce MMOGs of similar quality for $50 million and a three-year dev cycle.

And they’re going to do it with all Blizzard franchises. Which really means Starcraft and Diablo.

Blizzard, on the other hand, denies vehemently that they are working on any such project.

Analysis: If you want to work on World of Starcraft, send your application to Vivendi.

I’m all for better physics, because the sooner it gets here, the sooner developers will have smoke and running water, which will create a small chance that they’ll give up on the ridiculous floating rubber rag doll corpse physics.

Maybe not.

But regardless, what ATI and Havok are working on— doing physics simulation acceleration through an extra graphics card in SLI with the main card— is a way better idea than doing it through a physics-only card, because then games that aren’t based on wiggly cadavers and exploding crate mountains can use the second video card as, well, a second video card.

The most interesting part of the interview says that this SLI solution is more capable than even unloading physics onto a dual-CPU machine, even when the CPUs are in turn dual-core. We’ll see if that’s marketing fast-talk or not.

Read – Havok FX/ATI Interview [Firing Squad]