It's a scientific fact* that everyone in Japan loves Monster Hunter almost as much as they like cute poop, square watermelons and the occasional inappropriately hot-pantsed robot who thinks he's a boy. The Capcom mothership in Osaka has firmed up this supposition with the official news that Monster Hunter Freedom 2 has become the first PSP game in Japan to ship over 1.5 million units since its release in February. MH is the first game to hit this number in Japan. According to latest data we have here, the PSP currently sports an installed base of 6.5 million units in Japan. This means that 1 out of every 4 Japanese PSP owners has a copy of MHF2 in their collection. So, next time you're sitting on a plastic tarp in Akiba, shouldn't be too hard to find someone to play with. Over 4.8 million units of various Monster Hunters have shipped planet-wide since the first game was released in 2004 on the PS2. In fact, for many Japanese gamers, Monster Hunter on Ps2 was one of their very first online console game experiences. To pile on to the good news, the game also received the "Excellence Prize" in the Entertainment Division of the Japan Media Arts Festival. MHF2 was singled out from over 2000 different entries from more than 40 countries, demonstrating its merits as art. In your face, Ebert! * Not actually science, nor a fact.

If Monster Hunter could be summed up in one Tom Waits song verse, it would be from Big in Japan: "I got the moon, I got the cheese, I got the whole damn nation on its knees, I'm big in Japan, big in Japan." At this point in time, 1 in 5 Japanese PSP owners have a Monster Hunter UMD in their collection. That's big -- crazy big! Kotaku has a story about a Monster Hunter PSP fan "meet up" that recently happened on the streets of Akihabara ("Akiba," to those in the know). In a bit of brilliant Japanes-to-English naming, they called their event "Monster Hunter Portable 2nd Street Real Meeting Place." Can you imagine WoW/EQ fans dragging their PCs out into the street to hang out (those would have to be some real long CAT-5 cables)? Babelfish has helpfully translated a portion of this sign as saying: "10 gill cards you aim toward exchange in the hunter and 1 day of first meeting! Dying, you grudge the handling!" I couldn't have put it any better myself.

So, our compatriots across the Pong Pond at Capcom UK sponsored a Fortean expedition to the (I would suppose) murky rainforests of Guyana in search of giant anacondas and the mysterious didi, which supposedly "rip the tongues from living cattle." Although it seems like it would be difficult for me to type anything more rad than that onto our corporate blog today, this expedition was sponsored in the name of marketing Monster Hunter in Europe. I will wait a moment while your mind boggles. G'head, collect yourself. Now that I have dropped this mindbomb on you, head over to the official Center for Fortean Zoology's Guyana Expedition 2007 blog to track the team's progress in search of critters not normally seen outside the pages of the Monster Manual. Like, now. For the love of everything cool, add the subscription feed to your reader while you're at it. So far, no sign of tongue-chomping forest apes, J-Lo crushing reptiles, lost tribes of Bigfeets or Cthulu, but who knows what the future may hold. Well, Cthulu knows what the future holds, but then again, he's a telepathic sticky green spawn of the stars with an awful squid-head with writhing feelers who brings the End of All Things. So, there's that. For the benefit of our American readers, "the Pond" is that large body of water east of New York, aka "the Atlantic," while Guyana is a country in South America, located south of America, and is not, as it might sound, an ingredient in Red Bull.

As hardcore Monster Hunter fans have already noticed, Capcom recently joined a Nintendo press conference in Japan to announce that Monster Hunter 3 will be coming to the Wii. Slashing monsters by slashing at monsters? Sign me up! IGN has streaming video of the super-short teaser that was shown during the conference, which shows off some of the environments in the game and ends with a message from Capcom's global head of R&D, creative genius and all-around nice guy, Keiji Inafune. Inafune addresses the crowd, saying (loosely translated) "I'm Inafune from Capcom. Today we are presenting Monster Hunter 3. This is the formal sequel to Monster Hunter Dos. All of the video you have just seen was rendered through actual Nintendo Wii hardware. The development team is working very hard to make this a great experience on the Wii, so I hope you look forward to using the Wii controller to hunt monsters to your heart's content. Thank you very much."