The Electric Playground crew took a few minutes to talk to Kramez about one of our biggest games releasing this year, Monster Hunter Tri. Kramer gives a run down of some of the big ways we're changing Monster Hunter, and how that experience is making the most of the Wii. Everything from tons of customization, beautiful and huge environments, awesome monsters, and fully loaded online play. 

Capcom and Nintendo have been teaming up all this week to host Monster Hunter Tri schools all over Europe. There's been a few stories popping up about the events, but one caught our attention at spong.com. 

See some pictures from the event, new screens, new info, their impressions, and more right here. 

We're very proud of our community here at Capcom-Unity, and we strive to get you fans involved with our games as much as possible. Recently we had a contest for you to design weapons exclusively for the western release of Monster Hunter Tri, and the results were fantastic. One of the winners designed the new Switch Axe, Sinister Saints. The artist, Shawn M. Mallette (Shawnzy), recently took the time to talk to me about his inspiration behind the new weapon:

"Right from the start I wanted to do a Switch Axe. Really like the idea of them. But I actually went through a number of concepts before settling on a sort of light vs. dark theme. I got the idea to try and make a weapon that was a bit more "artsy". Something that was more like a sculpture. I figured in a setting as rich as the Monster Hunter world, there'd be a good number of artisans and sculptors. So I took the basic idea of a light/dark, good vs. evil concept. Which fit nicely into the dual nature of the Switch Axe. I wanted the "dark" side to be sorta visceral, made from monster skin and bones, while the "light" side would be ores, gold, and prettier materials.

Read the whole interview the jump!

After I had the basic idea for it, I started working out how to piece it together. Since the Switch Axes are a bit more complex, I had to break it down into pieces, and make sure that it would look ok in all forms. A lot of tweaking went in to make sure pieces lined up properly, while at the same time trying to not make it too complex so that it would be too much work for the developers. Which in the end they took some liberties with it, which I'm fine with cause they really made it fit into the world of MH better than my initial concept. I had gotten complaints that it didn't look like it fit into MH that well, and I understood where they came from. It was funny though, because as soon as I sent my entry in, there seemed to be hundreds of things I wanted to change and make better. In the end, I was thoroughly surprised I won, because I thought I could have done much better on it.

It makes me really happy to hear that the Monster Hunter team loved it, because I've been a huge Monster Hunter fan ever since we recieved the first PS2 game here. For me to be able to become even a small piece of that means the world to me."

One of the cutest parts of Monster Hunter is definitely the Chacha. Not only does he help you in your hunts, gathering items, and even using his various masks to help out, he also has tons of fun dancing!

Unity favorite and pro hunter, MoisesL, has put together a cute and funny video of the Chacha reacting to your gestures while on a quest. Enjoy!

We love our fans, so much so that we held a contest for fans to create and name weapons for Monster Hunter Tri. That's right, we asked you guys to make content for the game. We revealed the results a while back, and now we're happy to show off the in-game renders of the weapons. 

The Lion's Bane is a new Great Sword based off the creation of Jan-Wah Li.

The Sinister Saints Switch Axe is based off the design of Shawn 'Shawnzy' M.

And the Tenebra is a Long Sword which was named by Jack 'JDK' Kelly.

Once more, fantastic work by the community. And these weapons are so special to us that instead of putting them in just any quest, we've decided to make these weapons a part of the Event Quests in the game. You can only get these weapons by specifically playing the event quest it's tied to. 

Awesome fan made weapons, new quests, and tons more info about Tri coming soon. Plus there's some good news coming soon for fans who pre-order... Stay tuned for that. =)