Fight, Megaman, for everlasting peace!

Megaman 2 = still the best evar.

Agreed cat, but everyone's played Mega Man 2. Only like 16 people ever played Mega Man Legends and only three of them played Mega Man Legends 2.

Sadly, most gamers think Tron Bonne was invented specifically to explain how Servbots are born.

"When a horny robot in a hard hat loves a crazy pirate lady, sometimes they have very special hugs. Hugs involving their Mega Wangs and Robo Bajingoes. And 15 months later one of those asshole birds that usually poops out eggs that explode into baby birds and always knock you into a bottomless pit, instead poops out a Servbot who goes on to a glorious career of kicking Captain America's ass and making cameo appearances in Dead Rising."

What the hell is that bullshit in the sf4 trailer? Meeting random people and playing them? Is this a cultural difference between us and Japan? I rode on a bus for 4 years to downtown Portland, 45 minute ride. I was on my DS for a lot of that, when I wasn't busy knitting, and the only time I saw someone else with a DS was when it was a 10 year old kid was on a field trip.
Didn't the DS game, The World Ends With You, already offer this, and it failed? Fuck, go further back, wasn't that one of the core selling points of the n-gage?

@ Rusty: It's a lot more common than you think. Off the top of my head I can think of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, Dragon Quest IX, Pokemon HeartGold/SoulSilver, all of the Monster Hunter games and Tekken 6 as recent handheld titles that include the feature (or something similar), and those are just the ones I looked across the room and saw on my DS/PSP shelf.

It isn't so much a cultural difference (though it is WAY popular in Japan) as it is just aimed at a demographic that isn't either of us (or most people reading The Merc, really). Kids who spend their recess playing videogames with their friends or college kids who live in a dorm filled with other people their age are two American groups who, at least anecdotally, are getting a lot of use out of the feature.

And if you ever go to PAX, you'll find entire floors of the convention center dedicated to people taking advantage of this feature in whatever games are most popular that year. And by that I mean Pokemon.

As for the Japanese, public transportation in the larger cities is basically the main way of getting around. Since EVERYONE owns a DS or PSP, and thousands spend huge parts of their day packed together in subways, yeah, they get a lot of play out of this sort of thing.

Plus, they don't really seem to have the same affection for World of Warcraft and the like that Americans and Koreans do. Instead they prefer this sort of pseudo-MMO gameplay that you get from stuff like Monster Hunter or what you saw in the SSF43DE video.