NTT DoCoMo, one of Japan’s largest mobile phone operators, is actively seeking to bring 3G wireless capabilities to handhelds such as Nintendo’s 3DS and Sony’s much-rumoured PSP follow-up.

“Videogame makers know that in order for portable game machines to take the next step forward, they need wireless communication,” NTT DoCoMo President Ryuji Yamada told The Wall Street Journal, “We are discussing this with various players.”

Early tech specs reveal that Nintendo’s 3DS wireless connectivity comes through 802.11 Wi-Fi with LAN and 2.4 GHz band support, though the company chief Satoru Iwata has said that the device would “push” content to players rather than the “pull” model employed by the current DS, something that could be enabled by a 3G connection.

“The distinction between gaming devices and mobile communication devices, like smartphones, are blurring,” said Yamada, “And it may eventually disappear.”

As the PlayStation 3′s Move and Xbox 360′s Kinect come closer to market there’s been a widespread belief that motion controllers – as well as other emerging technologies such as 3D – would prolong the life cycle of the current generation.

In an interview with Gamesindustry.biz, Reeves said that he believed that the next generation may come as soon as 2012, and that the current motion controllers were simply the first step towards a new way to play games.

“I honestly think in two or three years’ time we’re going to see much more of a breakthrough in terms of the way we control games,” he said, “Much more than Kinect or Move are offering. A lot of people are working on that type of thing in Scandinavia, Japan and the US. How to control games in a much more accurate way. I know from working on Move, which started four or five years ago, when we had a big box in a room to get the whole thing working. It’s come down to something much smaller now.”

There’ve been rumors swirling around about a sequel to Capcom’s superhero-flavored fighter Marvel vs Capcom 2 pretty much since the game arrived 10 years ago. And given Capcom’s recent success with a Street Fighter revival — not to mention the sales rampage of MvC2 on XBLA and PSN — the sequel rumormill has once again begun turning furiously. This week’s press-only Captivate event in Hawaii, held yearly by the Japanese publisher, is said to have showcased just such a sequel in Marvel vs Capcom 3 for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, claims PlanetXbox360. At the same event, a sequel to Bionic Commando: Rearmed is alleged to have been announced, though no details are given.

According to the report, MvC3 will receive a retail release and will run in “full 1080p.” Allegedly, while the full character list is unknown, some have been confirmed. “Wolverine, Spider-Man, The Hulk, Magneto, Storm, and a few others will be back; but the team behind MvC3 have said they will be blowing fans out of the water with the sheer number of characters this game includes,” the piece claims. Rather than sticking with 2D graphics of MvC2, the rumored sequel is said to mix Street Fighter IV‘s graphical style with the last Marvel vs Capcom game’s 2D style. The piece finally claims we’ll hear more about the title next week and it’ll even be playable at E3 in June. When we reached out to Capcom for comment, we were told, “We don’t comment on speculation and rumors.”

But first, a word about Elites. These warriors are going to be unlike anything you’ve experienced before, according to Bungie. Bigger, faster, and with better shields, these are not the same guys you remember from the first Halo game. Normally, they’re roughly the same speed as a Spartan, but with the new Evade roll maneuver, they are described as “easily the most agile combatants on the battlefield in multiplayer.” Add in health that recharges fully without the need for health packs and at a faster clip and you might start to think that these guys are a bit unbalanced. Bungie apparently thinks so, too. In some modes, the games will only be Spartans vs. Spartans or Elites vs. Elites. No mixing of species here. However, there are some modes that Bungie is not detailing just yet in which the classic foes will face off.

Plenty more new images are waiting in the gallery.

Now, back to the equipment. Armor abilities are not something that you’ll find and pick up on the map, as you did in the past with the overshield or active camo. They come packed in Load Outs, which is essentially Halo’s new class system. Each gametype or matchmaking list will have a set of Load Outs defined by Bungie for you to choose from. These will include which armor ability you get, as well as your starting weapons. Some options shown included the Air Assault Load Out (pistol, rifle, 2 frag grenades and the jet pack) and the Operator (shotgun, pistol, 3 frag grenades and the armor lock ability). If you kill someone, their weapons will fall and be up for grabs as usual but the armor ability will not. That can only be had by choosing it in your Load Out, which can be changed mid-fight before spawning back in. Other weapons, as always, can be found in select places around each map.

For the beta, Bungie has revealed five armor abilities. Active Camo is available to both Elites and Spartans. It becomes less effective the faster you move and also jams radars, including your own. Armor Lock is a “burst of invulnerability.” Hit it once for a quick bit of protection or hold it down for a longer temporary shield. When you use it, you can’t move. Nothing can move you in fact, not even a vehicle which will find nothing but an impassable wall. Projectiles will even get deflected. Evade is a speed burst in the form of a rolling dodge, and it is used only by Elites. The last two have already been talked about a lot and are fairly self-explanatory — the jet pack and the spring move.

Each of the returning weapons (SMGs and battle rifles are out) have been reworked and tweaked a bit, so you can expect to relearn how they handle when the beta launches. This was a necessity for several reasons, though it stands to reason that the biggest reason for some changes is the removal of dual wielding. It’s out in Reach. One weapon at a time for you.

I want it.

Some of the new weapons introduced so far include the Plasma Repeater, which is a bit different than the Plasma Rifle in that it slows down as it heats up and it requires a reload instead of a recharge. It’s a bit more effective than the traditional Rifle, which will still probably be the go-to weapon for Elites in the campaign. Another new Covenant weapon is the Plasma Launcher. This puppy can send a stream of four plasma explosives which then will track any opposing player or vehicle, similar to the Needler. The last new Covenant weapon introduced so far is the Focus Rifle. This is described as a combination of the Sentinel Beam and the Beam Rifle. You can zoom in with it and the launch a beam of death.

For the human tech, there’s a new grenade launcher. The neat part about this is that if you hold down the trigger after firing, the grenade won’t explode. This allows you to decide when that grenade will go off and I can already see pros using this to make inexperienced players look really bad.

No new vehicles are being introduced for the beta. The Warthog, Ghost, Banshee and Wraith will all make appearances. The only major change is that the chain gun on the Warthog will now overheat.

That enough for you? Everything we’ve seen and heard so far points to Halo: Reach being a huge leap forward over past entrants to the franchise. And Bungie isn’t yet done revealing new features. Stay tuned.

From the looks of it, the 360 will support pretty much any size of external hard drive (over 1GB), and this drive can be partitioned to be partially or fully dedicated to Xbox 360 files—including DLC, XBLA titles, games on demand and general game updates. Ooh, and even Avatar items!!! (Note: You can already play media like movies off of connected drives.)

The catch? Microsoft seems to have capped 360 partitions to a maximum of 16GB, no matter how large the drive you’re using may be. 16GB isn’t much, especially since even the original 360 launched with a measly 20GB drive. [Joystiq]

While Microsoft’s WM7 interface looks amazing, the way it’s making use of Xbox Live is wasteful. Counter-productive. Same goes for Sony; while it’s admirable the company wants to allow PS3 and PSP users to access the PlayStation Network from Sony Ericsson phones, the execution is lacking.

Why? Because both companies, crippled by an inflexible corporate structure, are hung up on the word “exclusive”.

How mobile access to your console accounts should work is via a universal app. A common program you can install on an iPhone, an Android phone, a Nexus One, a Windows phone, a Sony Ericsson smartphone. Because that’s the variety of phones we, as console owners, possess. While every 360 owner has a 360, they don’t all own the same phone.

It’s a philosophy certain sections of these giant companies are in tune with. Microsoft, for example, has an application for competitor Apple’s iPhone, for its Bing search engine. It also releases Office software for the Mac, despite Apple’s computer being, in many respects, a rival to Microsoft’s own ambitions in the personal computing space.

Microsoft does this because, to the people working on Bing and Office, it makes business sense. It’s catering to a market, and in doing so, making money. The problem is, not all sections of these companies employ such common sense. They’re cut off, operating in isolation (and in some cases even competition), so what may seem a logical idea to one area seems like heresy to another.

Clinging to outdated notions of “exclusivity”, then, both Microsoft’s Xbox Live Mobile and Sony’s PlayStation Network will be available only to people owning phones sold by those companies. Own a 360 and an Android phone? You’re shit out of luck, you can’t use it. Own a PS3 and an iPhone? Same deal.

It’s just so…disappointing. Here, years after the release of these consoles and the dawn of the smartphone era, and the first officially-sanctioned services to bring consoles and smartphones together are dead on arrival, rendered useless by the fact that the world’s most popular phone platforms – a list that does not include anything running Windows Mobile (business customers so don’t count) or anything made by Sony Ericsson – are cut out of the action.

Sure, there are home-made options – 360Live on the iPhone is particularly good – but in 2010 we shouldn’t be relying on fan-made projects. I should be able to pick up my iPhone, and while way from home, be able to check my friends list, my Gamerscore and my PSN trophies on something supported by the console manufacturer. Hell, that’s just for starters. I can do that stuff with Twitter and Facebook already. In a perfect world, we’d be able to send messages to other users and queue up our downloads as well.

But we can’t. And probably never will. Instead, one day in the future, we may actually meet a person that was able to take advantage of all these neat new services. And they’ll say how neat they were. And how it was such a shame he was the only person he knew that ever used them, since all his friends already owned iPhones or Androids….