The new title from Petroglyph Games is looking better and better, especially after seeing the new screens posted at jeuxfrance.com. Published by Sega, and developed by RTS veterans from the former Westwood Studios,“Universe at War: Earth Assault”, puts the player in the middle of a galactic conflict between three warring factions. This title will be Petroglyph’s first original Real Time Strategy IP and is scheduled to release sometime in 2007.

Petroglyph’s first foray into the PC market was Star Wars: Empire at War

Check out the new screens here.

Sega and Marvel just set up a multi-year partnership to make babies video games based on the Hulk, Thor, and Captain America. The press release says we should expect these games for “console, handheld and PC platforms,” though no timetable was mentioned, other than loosely being set to come out around when the corresponding movies do. (Cap and Thor are currently planned for ’09, with Incredible Hulk for ’08.)

The agreement got set up after Marvel decided they were pleased with Sega’s early development work on the upcoming Iron Man game – not the surest way to gauge a game’s success, but here’s hoping it works out for them. After all, no one wants to smite some bad guys with Mighty Mjolnir more than I do. And if we’re really lucky, maybe they’ll even take a few notes from Hulk’s most recent run in the video game world.

Hi, I’m Crazy Taxi: Fare Wars! I want some candy. I’m not a regular Taxi, I’m fighting a war over fares. Isn’t that CRAZY? Now give me some candy!

Remember all that NiGHTS talk? Yeah, its officially no joke now.

French gaming supersite Jeux-France got a hold of a game mag from Portugal, and now the first screen of the Wii sequel to NiGHTS are before our eyes. Thank goodness this web is as wide as the world, otherwise we might have had to wait days for the inescapable official announcement. Take a look at the screen here.

The time has finally come to take direct control the genderless jester! Now, given how few people actually had a Saturn and this game, is it possible they’ll find some way of re-releasing the original? Either the Virtual Console or a bonus on disc would be well worth it to get the cult classic into more hands.
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The video game crossover you’ve waited your entire life for is now a reality.

Mario and Sonic will finally compete on the Wii and Nintendo DS… on a game licensed by the Olympics.

I’m speechless. Official site is up. If we don’t get Sonic in Smash Bros now, I’ll be real mad.

One of the best kept secrets of the original Sega Saturn was the Panzer Dragoon series. It was a mash up of 3-d polygonial graphics (which were ahead of their time even to this day) and old-school rail shooting action. You took control of a dragon rider, and it was your goal to bring down an evil empire. The story might have been all too typical, but it was window dressing for the intense sky-high combat. There were two more entries in the series before the Saturn was laid to rest, and the fate of the series was up in the air. That is, until 2003, when the series returned on the Xbox with a vengeance.
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I’ve done a fair amount of trying to debunk this one. It keeps coming up at forums and I keep saying “No guys, this is just an early April Fools” because frankly we’ve heard this talk before.

Official Nintendo Magazine (which is the like the Nintendo Power for England) published this teaser on the last page of their April issue. The image of the stars could easily imply a lot of things, but the most direct conclusion was an update of the Sega Saturn game NiGHTS Into Dreams. Many blogs ran this image as truth, many ran it as rumor, and most ran it as a joke. I, on the other hand, wasn’t going to run it at all until we had better evidence.

Now we’ve got some. Chandra from ONM has come out and said “This is not April Fool” but also won’t confirm what it actually is becuase, hey, they still want you to talk and buy the mag when it comes out.

So with a new NiGHTS game coming further into the realm of reality we have to deal with the next big hurdle… the fact that Sonic Team hasn’t made a good game in several years.

First of all, pay no attention to the low scores given by other media outlets. This game is the best game to make use of the Spawn license (besides his appearance in the Xbox version of SoulCalibur 2). Surprisingly, it was a third-person shooter made by Capcom. The gameplay is a fusion of Quake 3: Arena and Powerstone. Players select from 37 characters (most of which are unlockable and 12 being available at the start), each with their own array of weapons and powers, and blast their way through several stages in either arcade or story modes. You can also play the standard multiplayer modes for up to 4 players in stages with variable environmental settings. The character selection included nearly everyone from the Spawn mythos, even Cagliostro, Sam, Twitch, and a few alternate versions of Spawn himself. It’s a shame that the game engine was used in only one other game, Heavy Metal Geomatrix. It would have interesting to see more shooters by Capcom done in this style.