Roma Victor developer RedBedlam announced The Escalation, the first expansion for its MMORPG. It features significant updates for the guild and encounter systems, including a sophisticated mechanism for player elections, founding new settlements and even introduces the possibility of conquering, pillaging and looting these player-run settlements.

Majesco announced The Wild West for the Nintendo DS. Developed by Happy Happening and scheduled for a summer release, The Wild West will deliver touch-screen shootout scenarios on the untamed frontier.

Enlight Interactive announced Circus Empire, the world's first ever 3D circus simulation game. Players will be able to design their own circus in three dimensions, complete with trapeze artists, clowns, lion tamers and a variety of other performers, each with their own distinct personality.

Another day, another batch of game trailers was released. Instead of giving them all their own posts, we grouped them, and so far there are trailers for:

• DIRT: Colin McRae Off-Road [PS3/X360/PC] - Trailer
• Spider-Man 3 [PS3/X360] - Intoxicated Trailer
• Guitar Hero II [X360] - Launch Trailer
• Combat Mission: Shock Force - Trailer (2)
• Code Lyoko [NDS/Wii] - Trailer
• 
  
  We will update this throughout the day when new trailers become available. Read more for download links ...

In Pirates of the Caribbean Online, players try to become the Caribbean's most legendary pirate, all while forging alliances, hunting for buried treasure, battling evil undead forces and facing off against enemies from the movie franchise.

Battlestations: Midway follows the story of naval recruit Henry Walker, whose first assignment as a gunner at Pearl Harbor is the starting point of an incredible career at the heart of the US Pacific Fleet in 1942. Eidos has released 2 new historical battle maps and brand new vehicles now available on Xbox Live Marketplace.

BioShock is 2K Games' hybrid first-person shooter, which is in development at System Shock 2 developers Irrational Games and combines elements of sci-fi and role-playing genres. 2KGames' Elizabeth Tobey claimed that if the online petition asking for a Collector's Edition reaches 5,000 signatures, Take Two would listen to the masses and make it happen, although she failed to specify what sort of extras it would include....

Escape from Bug Island known in Japan as Necro-Nesia, is a third-person survival-horror game that takes a quirky, creepy and over-the-top journey onto an island filled with giant evil insects and mutant creatures.

Established in January and based in Helsinki, Finland, Recoil Games, firmed by former Remedy and Bugbear employees, focuses on the creation of action games with the scope, feel and ensemble cast of disaster movies. A large untapped area of the industry and Recoil plans to lead the way with its innovative Cinegames design techniques.

Stardock Entertainment and Ironclad Games announce that Sins of a Solar Empire Beta 1 is now available to all who preordered the game, and its primary purpose is to act as a compatibility test, to ensure that Sins runs beautifully on a wide range of system setups. Beta 1 allows for single-player sandbox games as the Trader Emergency Coalition, while future beta iterations will add progressively more features, leading to the final game release.