The bleeding of information about the PlayStation Phone continues. Want some video of the PlayStation Phone in motion? Some gaming? A look into the PlayStation Pocket software launcher?

Then hit the jump.

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Watch the fuck out! That’s the Mars Opportunity rover rolling up on a crater. Don’t do it! Life’s worth living! This picture is pretty awesome. It’s of a piece of technology we placed down to explore an alien world being seen by another piece of technology we jettisoned into space and traveled 35-million miles.

Righteous.

Via.

Hello Earthlings of certain proclivities! Salutations. This is Press Start!, the column where I break down the week in gaming. I drudge together five happenings that caught my eye in the Video Gameverse. The list doesn’t reflect importance, or anything other than my personal preference. Hit the goddamn fucking comments box with your own input.

Buckle up, take your accelerant of choice, and let’s party.

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#1: Characters From Street Fighter Break Into WWE, Paralyze People.
The characters from Street Fighter don’t give a shit. They routinely smash the living shit out of cars just ’cause. In the middle of a god damn tournament, they’ll thrash your whip with snap kicks and shit. So why wouldn’t they cross franchise boundaries and whip the ass of unsuspecting dudes in spandex?

There’s no good reason why they wouldn’t. And now they are.

Some good chap used the character creation tool thingy in Smackdown vs. Raw 2011 to create twenty or so Street Fighter characters. Which, if I’m not mistaken people can download onto their PlayStation Boxes. This is fucking fantastic. If I bought the game I’d be all over this shit.

Superheroes in a wrestling game? If John Cena doesn’t deserve a spinning lariat from Zangief, who the fuck does? As I’ve blathered on about, the Street Fighter characters are a righteous addition because they call back to the golden days of wrestling. Back when the characters weren’t just assholes in denim shorts. They were assholes fighting for Communism, or capable of voodoo, or undead dudes who dropped tombstones and carried around creepy ass urns.

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#2: GameStop Has 3.6 Billion Dollar Holiday, But This Is Failure.
Fascist pig video game whoring multiplex GameStop made 3.6 billion dollars over the holiday season. What was the general reaction to these numbers? The joint’ stock fell by 6 perfect. This is despite the store’s profits rising by a poetically fitting 6 percent. Buh?

Listen, I’m not a economist. The only numbers I can crunch are those of my bank account. And as a graduate student making a shit stipend, the numbers are dismal. After the holiday season, you can hear echoes off the chambers of my savings account. So I’d take 3.6 billion dollars. Fuck, I’d take $5,000.

So what lead to the stock falling? The lack of growth. Despite the sales numbers, stockholders (is that what they’re called?) weren’t happy with the percent of growth. I see, I see. Other contributing factors may be the lack of suitable increase in GameStop’s used gaming market, which only grew 1.7 percent, or people who bought in for the holiday season but are not throwing up deuces and leaving.

Disagree with these reasons? I didn’t think them up, I’m just reporting.

Don’t shoot me.

But a 3.6 billion dollar disappointment? Amazing.

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#3: Super Mario At The Ice Capades Will Prolapse You.
I miss the 1980’s. Nothing made sense, and because of that, anything made sense. Take for example this segment from the 1988 Ice Capades. Hosted by Jason Bateman and a hot ass (I hope she’s legal here) Alyssa Milano, it features Super Mario and friends skating around in what can only be described as delirious awesomeness.

Bateman and Milano are rocking out playing some Super Mario backstage when – gasp! – the unthinkable happens. The original Nintendo catches a virus and allows the characters to escape the confines of their shitty grey cartridge.  Trust me, this is amazing.

Also, let it be a lesson to you. Video games are dangerous. Everything your parents hear on the Boob Tube is correct: these games can fucking kill you. One minute you’re boppin’ shit for coins, the next minute Bowser is unleashed on the tangible realm. Looking for some ass to crush. Ask Princess, that shit hurts. Hurts done bad.

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[Enlarge.]

Meet UGC 12158. Or as he calls himself in bars to pick up chicks, Biggie Spiral. You’ll notice a resemblance between Biggie and our favorite galaxy: Sir Milky Way. Namely, that they’re both gorgeous spiral galaxies. Phil Plait, who has worked with Hubble images for years, decided to crunch the numbers on this gorgeous galaxy:

So I went to the release page for it, and when I saw the distance, I was shocked: that galaxy’s not big, it’s freaking  huge.  I figured it was part of the Virgo cluster, maybe, 60 million light years away or so. Nope: it’s a whopping  400 million light years distant, which is a long, long haul. That was stunning to me; if it’s that far away the galaxy really has to be a bruiser. So I grabbed a raw image from the Hubble archive and measured its size in pixels, which I could then convert to a spatial size given its distance.

And I can still hardly accept this, but UGC 12158 is  140,000 light years across. I measured it twice, two different ways, to be sure. That’s the biggest spiral I’ve ever heard of! Mind you, the Milky Way is in the top tier of galaxies in the entire Universe when it comes to size, but UGC 12158 whips us by a clean 40%!.

Good lord. I had no idea that the Milky Way Galaxy was an impressively sized galaxy until Phil Plait dropped that knowledge bomb on me. But still!, this galaxy is 40% bigger? Brain. Doesn’t compute. Wants to, but cannot.

Via.

I don’t give a fuck about the PlayStation phone, and for that reason I haven’t covered it here. Until tonight. According to Kotaku, the Chinese website IT168 got its grubby paws “on a version of the phone (which it carefully points out may not be the final, production model) and put it through its paces, detailing not just the device’s hardware specs but some other interesting tidbits as well.”

Interested in the specs, as well as some images of the phone? Hit the jump, you slags.

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I’m just a fan.

That’s the truth of it. Maybe you already know this. But as I said, that’s the truth of it. I don’t know if it’s a bad thing, or if it’s a good thing. To aspire to be nothing more than a fan. At this point in my life, at this point in the site’s life, maybe it isn’t even worth reflecting upon.

I’m just a fan.

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Some old lady in Britain dropped 14 dress sizes and decided to celebrate in the most logical way imaginable: getting an enormously creepy Twilight back piece. So basically she has a mural of teen virgins on her wrinkly back. Fucking brilliant!

But this lunatic instead done. No. From the DailyWhat:

She plans on covering the rest of her body with Twilight tats, starting with her arms: “There are still a few bits to do. I am going to get my arms done before my 50th birthday in summer. I love Robert Pattinson. I want to tone up so I can get his character Edward Cullen on my stomach.”

You do that, you fuck. Flip the script for a second. What if a 49 year-old man got a huge tattoo of Miley Cyrus or one of those other tween douchebags? He’d be called a pervert.

This old lady is a pervert. Case closed.

The Andromeda Galaxy is our boy. It’s the nearest spiral galaxy to us, and someday we’re going to collide with it. The good news is that we have some time to prepare for it, since it isn’t going to happen for another three to five billion years. Calm down. Sit down. We got time. Over at io9, they break down a gallery recently done by the European Space Agency. The ESA created the gallery by using “three different kinds of light: visible, infrared, and x-ray. These three very different views are then combined together to create one amazingly beautiful composite image.”

Want to see the images? Hit the jump.

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Earlier this week we got our first glimpse of Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man. Now today running throughout the various pipes and tubings of the internet are excerpts from The Los Angeles Times‘ interview with him. Taken from The Envelope, the awards blog for the Times, Garfield opens up about the first two weeks of filming the new Spider-Man flick.

Hit the jump for excerpts, and an insight into the new Peter Parker. Hint: he seems less doughy and dorky than Tobey McGuire. I like.

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The line-up for Marvel Vs Capcom 3 continues to grow, as does the thunder in my pants. Anyone with a knack for anything Capcom or Marvel has got to be in on this shit, regardless of their feelings towards fighting games. Right? Well, probably not. But I can’t play them for shit, and I’m still sweating this title. Today trailers were dropped for both Haggar and Jean Grey. X-Men and Final Fight! Hells yes.

Hit the jump for their debut trailers.

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