Thanks to all of you in the Capcom Unity community who have done your duty to this great nation of ours over the years.

Hip hop loves Street Fighter. Case in point: Wordspit's video for his track "Joystick Madness" features tons of sampled SF sound effects and stage music, a line of brawlers at a laundromat MvC2 machine and the MC in question actually flinging a hadouken at one point. What really made me chuckle is the note underneath the video that says: "This is a video response to SSF4 Fight Club NYC Oct 23, 2009 T-Hawk - Juri & DeeJay Demoed." Served?

Did you know that Dead Rising actually started as a top secret sequel to Shadow of Rome? It's true! Inafune-san was just coming to terms with his fairly visionary view of developing games in Japan for a truly global audience, and Shadow of Rome was Capcom's second stab (Ha!Ha!) at making a Western game. SoR didn't fare too well for whatever reasons, but Inafune-san was determined to continue making super-violent, blood-soaked action games fer us short attention span Amerikans, so the SoR team kicked loose the lame-o stealth elements, tossed in tons more weapons, upped the squish factor by about 1000%, made the chariot racing feel more fun... and then morphed Agrippa into a photojournalist (he's covered wars, you know), flipped the Romans into zombies and booted it all into a mall. Sure, why not, makes absolute sense.

I looooooooved Shadow of Rome -- at least all the bits that weren't the stealth-based loser sections. Senor Scott Jones and I once bonded over our love for this looney toons Capcom game while scarfing late night burritos and margaritas and now he's decided to share his love of gladiators with you. Warning: don't get too close or some of his love may get on your jacket, Clarice.

A couple of weeks ago, we told you about new Resident Evil 5 content coming as a new Japanese version of the game called RE5 Alternative Edition. We asked you guys to tell us how you wanted to get your mitts on the content and gave you the option to vote for either digital download or a new boxed product. We let the poll run for a couple weeks and then snagged a bunch of your comments from the original blog posting as well as from threads in the forums and presented it all to the RE5 team in Osaka.  As of this morning, we had close to 1500 people vote for DLC and close to 900 vote for a new physical product. In addition, we had over 300 comments on the blog posting, which is amazing to all of us here at Capcom.

And here’s an example of Capcom Unity in action: based on your feedback, in North American, European and Australia territories, Capcom will be making the new RE5 content for both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 available as downloadable content. You will not be asked to purchase a new copy of the game just to get at the new stuff, just make sure to hold on to your RE5 disc and you’ll be ready to roll in Spring 2010 when we make available new Resident Evil adventures (and some other things we haven’t told you about yet) for you. Keep that in mind when thinking about selling RE5 back or handing it off to a friend ;)

I'll be honest: we had a strong feeling going in that most folks were going to be ticking the box for digital delivery. Seeing as how we were asking you ONLINE to tell us if you would like to nab new game content via the internet, we thought we may have been skewing the results a bit. What surprised us, however, was just how many of you ended up voting for a new physical package. We’re still trying to wrap our heads around this strongly stated position from a vocal range of the community, but we've definitely heard you guys loud and clear as well.

Thanks to all of you as part of Team Unity in helping us reach this decision!

Because I sit in front of a computer almost all day long (which explains my pear-shaped form) and stream the World's Greatest Radio Station, I'm constantly exposed to a multitude of amazing emerging musicians and bands. KEXP played Frank Turner at me earlier in the week and based on that single 3:26 exposure, I immediately sought out his new release, Poetry of the Deed. The fact that the album is distributed in the US on Epitaph should tell you a lot about him right away. Based on the couple listens I've been able to squeeze in, Turner is working a vibe that combines Billy Bragg with Dropkick Murphys, a combo of punk rock passion and Irish soul. Tracks on the album run the gamut from singer/songwriter solo strumming to full-blown rock power. Favorite line thus far: "And there’s no such thing as rock stars, there’s just people who play music, and some of them are just like us, and some of them are d**ks."