Pikmin returns to the East, the strange anti-Pussy Riot game, and the microwave of the future

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Pikmin 3’s first week in the Japanese wild has gone well, coming in at #1 on the software charts and boosting Wii U’s hardware sales by nearly 300%.

San Diego Comic-Con kicks off today for a long weekend of panels, teasers and skin signatures. Check back on Saturday when Video Games Live! streams their San Diego concert for free on Twitch TV.

Didn’t get enough out of Indie Game: The Movie? Have no fear! Now there’s Indie Game: The Movie – Special Edition, replete with 300+ hours of additional content and even more existential angst from Phil Fish. 

It’s a sad day for sports video game fans. NCAA announced yesterday that it will no longer renew its licensing contract with EA Games. EA is unfazed.

Forgotten by most but adored by the lucky few who played it on Game Boy Color, Shantae returns on the 3DS Virtual Console today. Crazier than its animation is the fact that a Game Boy game released in 2001.

A Brit goes to France to learn about Japanese games: The Guardian’s Simon Parkin at Japan Expo 2013.

Someone is still in Sonic’s corner.

Remember Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer for Putin” last year? The Russian Orthodox Church countered the feminist punk-rock group with a video game called “Don’t Let Pussy Riot Into the Cathedral,” released at a Christian youth festival in Moscow last week. Gather your matroyshkas and check it out. 

Will the long-rumored Apple Television finally bear fruit? If the acquisition of PrimeSense means anything, look for Apple to out-Kinect the Xbox One with gesture controls and all the Angry Birds you can thwack.

Calling all Dreamcast cultists: Seaman lives? Nintendo has registered a trademark for “Mysterious Partner: Legend of the Fish with a Human Face.” The only way this news gets better is if it’s a Snorks game.

Turns out that Chuck E. Cheese started out as a way for Nolan Bushnell to make more money off of arcade games. “We were selling coin-operated games at about $1,500 or $2,000 a pop. In their life, they’d make $15 to 20k. It didn’t take rocket science to say I’m on the wrong side of the equation,” said Bushnell. 

An enterprising coder has used Raspberry Pi, a tiny programmable computer sold in the U.K., to integrate voice-commands and barcode scanning into his microwave. Cooking Mama meets Barcode Battler, anyone?

Arrivederci!