This game is based on a trilogy of novels by Russian author Alexander Zorich, which present an alternate future where the Russians end up dominating outer space. As they struggle to control their extraterrestrial colonies and work with four different alien races, you take command of a ship and help quell uprisings and explore the universe. Complete planetary systems are modeled, and you can take your ships all the way from high orbit down into the atmosphere for your peeping pleasure. Hopefully you've developed some extrasensory abilities along the way as well, because it looks like you'll need them to keep track of everything happening on-screen at once. The Tomorrow War will be out for PC gamers later this year, and with any luck there will be an English translation coming soon after.

Daniel Dociu of ArenaNet has worked on many pieces of award winning art, including the Crab Fort above, and the Fish Fort, which looks like it could be a great model for a drive through fish restaurant. He won two Master Awards from EXPOSÉ 4, one for Environment Design (the crab fort), and one for his Urban Canal which won in the Cityscape category. You'll get 'em both if you pick up the book from the showcase.

He was raised in Transylvania, worked as a toy designer for years, and now focuses on creating concept artwork for Guild Wars. If we can find proof that he's actually a vampire, he might officially the coolest concept artist haunting the halls of gaming companies to this day. The link below includes massive versions of the above artwork that make for perfect wallpapers. [ConceptArt.org]

• In 1978 Taito was a Japanese company that was struggling to make a profit on Pachinko machines. With the rise of electronic arcade games, Tomohiro Nishikado designed Space Invaders and created history.

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• The game was inspired by Atari's Breakout, by the descriptions of the aliens in H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, and by a freaky dream that Nishikado had about aliens appearing in the sky instead of Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. Which means you get lines and lines of relentlessly invading creatures, who all happen to look like an octopoids.
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• Arcades opened in Japan featuring nothing but rows and rows of Space Invaders games, so if you thought your corner convenience store with Galaga and Pole Position hardly had any choices, think again.
  
• The game was so popular in Japan that it caused a major shortage of coins, and they had to quadruple yen production to keep up with the demand.
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• Space Invaders was one of the first games to feature endless gameplay, as previous games had all worked on a timer. If you were good, you could go on blasting aliens forever... or until the game ran out of memory.
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• The upright cabinet version of the game in arcades actually had the monitor below the eyeline of the player, and the gamefield was reflected onto a piece of plastic on the back of the cabinet, which had cool artwork painted on it. The resulting combination had the gamefield on top of a lunar landscape.
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• The original Taito version of the game used joysticks, but the American version from Midway used buttons to control the laser cannon.
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• The game ran on an Intel 8080 as its processor, running at 2 MHz.
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• It was estimated that the game pulled in $500 million in its first year of release in the arcades alone, which still makes it one of the most profitable games ever developed.
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• In 1980 a version of Space Invaders was released for the Atari 2600, and it quickly became one of the "must have" games for the system.
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• Versions came out for other home gaming consoles, but due to copyright infringement they would have to be retitled. Like Space Armada for the Intellivision.
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• Coca-Cola even asked Atari to create a version for the 2600 called Pepsi Invaders, featuring invading letters spelling out Pepsi, so you could blast them out of the sky. Coke gave the 125 cartridges out to its employees.
  
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• Numerous sequels have appeared in arcades over the years, including Space Invaders Part II (or Space Invaders Deluxe), Return of the Invaders, Majestic Twelve: The Space Invaders Part IV (or Super Space Invaders '91), Space Invaders DX, and Akkan-vaders (or Space Invaders '95: The Attack Of The Lunar Loonies).
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• Guillaume Reymond created a human version of the game in 2006, which you can watch in all of its glory right here:
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• Shigeru Miyamoto, who created Donkey Kong and a slew of other games for Nintendo, has said that Space Invaders was what inspired him to get into game development.
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• The cover for Boston's "Don't Look Back" album was inspired by Space Invaders.
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• In an episode of Futurama, Fry fights off invading aliens because he's a master of Space Invaders. All he needs to rock the game are a two-liter bottle of Shasta, and a Rush mix tape.

You'll control a squad of four Colonial Marines in the game, issuing commands and dealing with their different personalities as you investigate the disappearance of Ellen Ripley and the team of Colonial Marines she left with aboard the U.S.S. Sulaco. Key areas in the game include the derelict spacewreck from the first Alien movie, and the LV-426 colony from Aliens. You'll use weapons like the pulse rifle, the M240 flamethrower, and the M56 Smart Gun that Vasquez kicked much ass with.

The thing sure looks a bit like Doom meets Quake, but we loved the world of the Colonial Marines so much that we'd watch a television show or movie about them even if it didn't have a single Alien in it. Oh wait, we did... and it was called Starship Troopers. Actually, there were a lot of aliens in that, except they looked like bugs instead of creepy H.R. Giger nightmares. Still, we loved it and have high hopes for Part 3, especially if it includes shower scenes.

Colonial Marines was originally being developed for the PS2, but was cancelled by Fox back in 2001. Then SEGA announced in 2006 that they were working on a game set in the Aliens world, and it'll be out for the PC, the PS3, and the Xbox 360 in late 2008. Which of course means we're going to have to wait on it, a lot more than 17 days. As Hicks would say. "17 days?!?! We're not gonna last 17 hours!"

It'll leave your retinas in a bit of pain, but it's the only time we've ever seen anything come close to approximating the view from inside one of those Hot Wheels loop-de-loop courses we used to play with back in the day. Some of the lines in the trailer made us cringe a bit, and we'll be missing the ultraquick dialogue and the speed lines... but we're marginally starting to look forward to what these races look like both in the movie, and in the game. We just hope you can use all of the gadgets that the Mach 5 has to offer while you batter your opponents.

Take a first look at Speed Racer [Palgn]

The first image stands in stark contrast to the shot above, which shows some Mad Max-looking humans celebrating the downing of a baddie. In this edition of Fallout, you play a character whose father has wandered beyond the edge of the safety of Vault 101, a massive fallout shelter that's been sustaining some of the survivors near Washington D.C. You have to set out after your dad, which of course means you'll be attacked by anything and everything, and will probably involve you getting your hands on some cool guns and popping caps in mutant ass.

We know for sure the first game will be based on one of the games that Ender plays during his training, but the company wants to turn this into a series, and eventually they're going to have to tell some sort of a story. Of course, in the book, the game is literally everything.

In the novel, Ender Wiggin is selected at the age of six to attend the Battle School, which the military uses with the hopes that they'll one day train a great military leader who will lead the fight against the "Buggers," an insect-like race that is at war with the humans. They do this by teaching via video games and simulations, and without spoiling things, those become extremely important. Games range from simulations computers, to what amounts to zero-gravity versions of Laser Tag.

Warners is developing the movie with Wolfgang Peterson at the helm, but they abandoned work on the game that usually accompanies every big scifi film these days. Does that mean they couldn't crack the idea and decided to leave it up to someone else? If you've read the book, you'd probably say yes.

Ender's Game In The Works [Sci Fi Wire]

Looks like Wall-E's little bug sidekick will make it to the game as well, so that might be a bit of a spoiler news: he doesn't get squished and sent to insectoid heaven in the flick. Players will be able to play head-to-head in the multiplayer version of this game, so we're not sure if that means multiple Wall-E's or what. but we're sincerely hoping they don't rush this game out to coincide with the flick, giving us a crappy game that vanishes from shelves in the blink of an eye. If it does, at least we'll have this artwork to fondly remember it by. Wall-E: First Screenshots [Team Xbox]

Although the acting by "Sam," whose significant other was one of the flight attendants on the vanished flight, is more than a bit hammy, the site creators have built a lot of clues and games into his conspiracy website. You'll be visiting other sites, doing research, zooming in on photos for clues, calling phone numbers and generally driving yourself bonkers until Lost returns to the airwaves on January 31st.

Cheesy as it may be, this is as close to Lost as we've come in a long, long time, and it is successfully making us drool for new episodes. Chances are that the writer's strike might make alternate reality games and viral marketing like this the only teat we'll have to suck from until they start filming new episodes. Here's to hoping I'm not trying to track down Cylon DNA by visiting different websites in three months time if Battlestar Galactica doesn't come back soon.

Bionic Commando was originally released back in 1987 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in Japan, featuring "Rad" as the bionically gifted hero. He had to use his arm to fend off scored of Neo Nazis and defeat a resurrected Adolf Hitler as the final boss. When they brought this game over to American, however, they changed the Nazis into "Badds" and Adolf because "Master-D," who sounds like a rapper.

Capcom's updated version of the game features the return of Nathan "Rad" Spencer, his arm and a real backstory. It's ten years later, and he's been betrayed by his government and sentenced to death. The game will be fully 3D and features Mike Patton, the former lead singer of Faith No More, as the voice Rad. If Rad ever once says, "You want it all but you can't have it," then I swear to god I'm hurling my controller through the window.

Anyhow, here's what Rad's bionic-upgrade arm can do:

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• It has a grappling hook attached, letting him swing across gaps a scale buildings. Which comes in useful because in the original game, you couldn't even jump. Maybe those bionic arms are really heavy.
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• He can whip barrels, crates, debris, and other things you find scattered around in video games at his enemies, using that hook-arm attachment like Indy.
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• He can deflect bullets with the arm, Wonder Woman-style.
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• In the original game he could use it to tap into the enemy's lines of communication, but it's not clear if they'll be bringing that over. It's either that, or slip a tire iron inside, in case he needs to tighten anything up.
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• In the novelization of the original game, the arm could do a lot more, like throw flamed and get people to tell the truth. Although it's unclear how he did that, except maybe by threatening to crush their balls with his steel hand.
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The environments in this game look especially pretty, in a sort of interstate dystopian freeway in disrepair kind of way. According to the developers, "On the very day of Spencer's execution, terrorists detonate a massive experimental weapon in Ascension City, unleashing an intense earthquake that has turned the city into rubble and wiped out its population." In other words, traffic is really going to be a bitch.

We've heard it compared to the video game series Sim City, although it sounds more like a version of the Schwarzenegger / Stephen King film The Running Man than anything else. Gerard Butler plays a convict who is forced to compete in the games. If he wins 30 matches, then he gets set free. Pretty straightforward, right?

Not so fast. costar Alison Lohman let it slip today that although Gerard plays the gamer convict, there's also a player playing him. Which brings us full circle to 1982's Tron. In that movie, we were shown how the "players" in the games were basically slaves serving out sentences under the evil Master Control Program. In one memorable scene, one of the players in the popular "Light Cycles" game dies, and we see two kids playing the game in an arcade. They shrug their shoulders and walk off, having unknowingly killed off some poor sucker.

So if you take one part The Running Man (win the game to be set free) and toss in a bit of Death Race 2000 (the government forces you to play in a game that is popular all over the nation) and mix it liberally with Tron (human gamers controlling the lives of players), you'll come out with Game... or a big tasteless mess of bubbling goo.

Alison Lohman's got 'Game' [MTV Movies Blog]