This week, Capcom unleashed a file of Ace Attorney-related revelations on the gaming public, most notably the announcement of Ace Attorney 5, or Gyakutan Saiban as it’s known along native shores.

There was no mention of a release date or platform, and we don’t even know who the main character will be, and with the plain logo accompanying the reveal, we haven’t got any clues to go by. It’s possible we might see series star Phoenix Wright return to lawyering, after a successful stint as a brawler in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, but that remains to be seen. All we know is that it’s coming.

Also on the way are re-releases of the first three Ace Attorney games in “HD” for iOS and Android devices, for gamers who haven’t played them enough already.

Of course, notably absent from this news is whether or not these games will even see an English-language release. You might recall the latest game in the series, Ace Attorney Investigations 2, never saw the light of day outside of Japan – despite the relative popularity of the series.

Maybe Phoenix Wright’s pugilistic popularity will help the series ease back into Western gamers’ collections? We’ll have to wait and see on that one.

[source] Famitsu

Capcom’s well-received Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective has landed in the iTunes app store, so gamers who haven’t already played through it on the Nintendo DS can get a crack at it. And why not? It is one of 2011′s nominees for the Broccoli Award AND best portable game in our annual VU Awards.

If you’re an iOS gamer and you HAVEN’T tried it yet, you owe it to yourself to give it a whirl, and Capcom’s making it easy on you by making the first two chapters free. In-app purchases will get you the rest of the game, in blocks for $4.99 a piece, but you can save five bucks by downloading the whole thing in one shot for $9.99.

It’s a little slow-paced to start with, because you can’t speed up the dialogue, but the touchscreen controls work extremely well and with retina display-ready graphics and luscious animation in place, it’s a really great-looking game to boot. Combined with a really clever premise, and you have a great game getting a second shot at life – on the cheap, no less. You could do worse than picking up Ghost Trick for iOS.

Animator Joel Furtado is a long-time Zelda fan, and for his new demo reel he put together this amazing trailer of a Zelda game as he imagines it, like a storybook come to life.

Though his version, “The Legend of Zelda: The Lost Oracle” will probably never be a reality, its echoes of Wind Waker sure get a lot of engines turning. You’ll be remiss if you don’t check this out immediately.

PlayStation Plus users and those on the fence take note, Sony is planning a pretty good deal for the month of February.

The freebies alone make up the subscription price, with The Simpsons Arcade Game and Final Fantasy V being offered up for free this Tuesday, February 7. This is followed up by a very brief giveaway of Far Cry 2 on Valentine’s Day, which we’re sure has some great crying-related lonely gamer joke out there somewhere. Then on February 21, the Sega Genesis collection consisting of Altered Beast, Comix Zone, Golden Axe, Streets of Rage II, Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 drop for free as well.

This is all just February, so as more goodies drop throughout the year, we’ll be sure to let you know when something really stands out.

A year’s worth of PS+ will run you $49.99.

[source] PlayStation Blog

Remember this old Konami gem? It’s been confirmed that it’s finally arriving on consoles after oh, 21 years, and will be arriving on Xbox Live Arcade this Friday, and PlayStaton Network on Tuesday, February 7.

The Simpsons Arcade Game will run you 800 Microsoft Points, or $9.99 in real money, depending on the console you’re using. It’ll feature four-player online co-op (nice!) and new content including the slightly different Japanese version, similar to Konami’s earlier release of the X-Men arcade game.

The achievement for beating the Japanese version of the game, by the way? It’s named “Mr. Sparkle,” which is pretty appropriate.

It’s officially official: Sony has named Kazuo Hirai as President and CEO, replacing Sir Howard Stringer, who will become chairman of the board come June.

We reported the news originally, when there were rumblings that Hirai was to be taking the top seat, but at the time it was thought that the announcement wouldn’t come until April. Instead, the move is effective as of April.

At 51, Hirai is president of Sony Computer Entertainment, and credited with improving Sony’s video game business in recent years, to the point where it is largely considered the electronics giant’s only profitable market. His soon-to-be predecessor Stringer, 69, was the company’s first foreign president, who presided over a rocky period for Sony, whose goal it was to unify its fragmented structure. Hirai, as a Tokyo native and fluent English speaker, is considered the ideal candidate to continue Stringer’s mission and help the company show that it is turning over a new leaf.

[source] Sony

Today Netflix released its Q4 2011 earnings report, detailing among other things its soaring streaming subscriber account numbers, and a higher-than-expected profit of $52 million. Guess Reed Hastings and co. aren’t doing too badly after all, price hikes be damned.

Of note was a particular item at the end of the earnings conference call, in which Hastings confirmed that the company has “no plans” to roll out game rentals, an element that was part of the whole Qwikster spinoff. Previously, this was still under some debate even as Qwikster was being given the axe.

Looks like GameFly will be the only game in town a little bit longer.

[source] Netflix Q4 results

Lots of people have seen Ben Heckendorn’s hardware mods all over the Internet. With his show on Revision3, he’s now like the Mr. Wizard of gadget modding. But this one takes the cake… or the pocket, as it were.

This week, Ben Heck as he’s called, has designed a mod for an Xbox 360 controller, that holds Hot Pockets for you, so you can eat while you play, without ever having to take a break from the action. Which is pretty cool… if you’re willing to eat Hot Pockets. And let’s be honest here, if you’re the type of guy who gets excited for eating Hot Pockets, then this is probably right up your alley.

One of the first big hits of the year on the iOS platform is PuzzleJuice, a very self-aware hybrid puzzler from Colaboratory. Mixing the spatial awareness skills of Tetris, the simple matching fun of match-3 games and the vocabulary busting toughness of word games in an all-in-one free for all, PuzzleJuice is a pretty neat little game.

Of course, the game is more than the sum of its parts. It starts with falling blocks a la Tetris – though in easier modes, you get more than just tetrominoes – but when colors match, you can activate them to create letters. Completing a line turns all the letters in that line to letters as well. From there, players need to form words from those letters to make the blocks disappear. Forming words also causes the nearby blocks to explode as well, which can provide some much-needed breathing room.

Multitasking between falling blocks and tapping colors and finding words can be a tricky task, but there is help in the form of several unlockable power-ups, like “The Kabomb,” which explodes blocks, or “Driller,” which attaches drills to the bottom of some falling blocks to eliminate what’s below, and more.

The game features two modes as well – Zen and Core. Core mode is your more traditional style of play, where Zen mode gives you 90 seconds to get the highest score possible, but blocks drop at your own pace. Core mode, by the way, features two different difficulty settings, with the harder level requiring longer words to explode surrounding blocks, but you get three times the points.

The game is universal, so you can game on your iPod or iPhone, or play the big-sized version on your iPad, which is nice.

The game seems to require a lot of memory, or maybe just features memory leaks, because it is prone to crashing. Sometimes you can only get a couple of games in before it sputters out and crashes, but on a phone maybe that’s all you want. However, other bugs crop up from time to time, with blocks not disappearing when exploding, or two letters overlaying over each other – with the game deciding at random which letter it is when you tap on it.

This, combined with some jittery-at-times controls, and it’s an unnecessary addition to the challenge. We do hope Colaboratory will iron these bugs out with a fix soon, because PuzzleJuice is great fun.

Right now, PuzzleJuice is on sale  for 99¢ as well, thanks to it being featured by Apple, which is a steal – though even at its original price of $2.99, it’s a solid recommendation for puzzle fans of all stripes.

Zynga’s upcoming game Dream Heights is a complete and wholesale theft of Tiny Tower, taking not just the main idea, but the core mechanics and even a lot of the UI as well. Indeed, Dream Heights looks more like a reskin than a new game.

In response, NimbleBit’s Ian Marsh put together this image, released via Twitter.

[source] TouchArcade