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By Tony Maher
Contributor

"Street Fighter X Tekken," the latest crossover fighting game, is great start to finish. The title maintains what made each of these franchises into classics, and introduces new accents to keep it interesting. Although each franchise has added recent releases to their histories, Street Fighter X Tekken seems to stay true to the original formulas that made the originals so legendary.

Since the days of my youth, "Street Fighter" has been the series I compare all other fighting games to. I spent many a quarter battling my friends at Maxwell Street Pizza with Ryu, Ken, Guile and the gang for the title of current champion. I honestly cannot count the hours we spent playing Street Fighter on any available system. Since then, there have been many different versions of Street Fighter and many other fighting games. Few of those, however, could hold a Hadouken to the original Street Fighter 2. But Street Fighter X Tekken is excellent as a new incarnation of an old breed.

The PlayStation Vita will have 25 games available for sale on its release date, Sony revealed today.

The Vita, Sony's next handheld, is scheduled for a Feb. 22 release date in the United States. Sony revealed in a blog post today that the following titles will also be for sale at that time in stores or via download:

First Party Games:

• Escape Plan (PlayStation Network only)
• Hot Shots Golf: World Invitational
• Hustle Kings (PSN only)
• Little Deviants
• ModNation Racers: Road Trip
• Super StarDust Delta (PSN only)
• Uncharted: Golden Abyss
• wipEout 2048

I don't think "Touch My Katamari"is a double-entendre, but then again, I don't speak Japanese.

Nonetheless, readers can rest assured that the trailer for Touch My Katamari, a forthcoming title for the PlayStation Vita, is safe for work.

Fans of the Katamari series would of course recognize the K-word and may know that the first game in the series, Katamari Damacy, made Cracked.com's list of games that deserve to be regarded as modern art.

Touch My Katamari is scheduled to be released Feb. 21.

Nintendo's price drop for its 3DS - $169.99 from $249.99 - is the day's biggest gaming news, and probably something gamers and business journalists will be talking about and debating for the next few days, if not weeks.

The early consensus, which I tend to agree with, is that consumers are unwilling to shell out $250 for a portable game console when they can play games on their smartphones. If a customer is already paying for an iPhone or Android device that can play 99-cent games, why pay more money for another device that plays $40 games?

The only reason, for many people, would be that those $40 games are 40 times more valuable to players than what is available on a smartphone. That is not always going to be the case, and even though I like the 3DS, I think it will be Nintendo's last handheld.

And I predict the same thing for Sony's next handheld, the PlayStation Vita. By all accounts, the Vita looks like it will be a terrific piece of technology with a competitive library of games, but I won't be surprised if Sony finds themselves having to lower the Vita's price after launch in order to make up for slower-than-expected sales.