Yesterday we posted up the Ikaruga announcement for the American market, today we received details of the European release. Read more for full pressrelease!

ATI Technologies Inc. today announced that it is the title sponsor of GDFest, one of the largest LAN party events held on the West Coast. In addition to its sponsorship, ATI will be giving away 10 RADEON 9700 PRO graphics boards to gamers at GDFest.

Agetec, Inc, today announced the next addition to their Designer Series of games, COLOR QUEST will be available in early May 2003. Created by TAITO with the creative gamer in mind, COLOR QUEST will be released exclusively for the Sony PlayStation2 computer entertainment system.

Ubi Soft Entertainment announces the immediate availability of Scrabble 2003 Edition for the PC. This follows the successful launch of Junior Scrabble in November 2002 and precedes Scrabble for Sony PlayStation 2 scheduled for Q1 2003.

Intrinsic Graphics, developer of the innovative Intrinsic Alchemy game development platform, is announcing today that Flying Lab Software, maker of the award-winning Rails Across America, has selected Intrinsic Alchemy as their engine for game development of their next title on the PC. Recently announced, Pirates of the Burning Sea, is a Massively Muliplayer On-line Role Playing Game (MMORPG) and will be released for the PC in the Fall this year.

Shrapnel Games announced today that the the newest Space Empires IV Gold patch is available from their website. This patch, v1.84, adds features changes and enhancements and fixes bugs.. Among the changes and additions are two new target types added for components: "Ships/Planets/Sat" and "Ships/Planets/Sat/Drone", option to strategems to control how many drones are launched per target in combat, and changes to weapons platform damage when planets are under attack. There are also over 25 fixes in this patch. A complete list of additions, changes, and fixes can be found at Shrapnel Games website.

TDK Recording Media France has acquired the distribution rights for France of the games published by ARXEL TRIBE starting April 1st 2003. Both companies will work closely together to make sure games such as DEVASTATION, HANNIBAL or SLAYER will reach top sales when they are launched in the coming months.

The official boards for Unreal II is updated with some info regarding an upcoming video demo instead of a real demo for Unreal II. Here you have the cut and past:

As much as we'd like to create a 'true' demo, it's simply not possible. Legend have moved on to other projects and the production of a demo - even from already existing levels would require time and effort that we just don't have. It would then have to go through QA - another organization that is working on other projects and cannot dedicate time to a UII demo. It's all about the allocation of 'assets'.

However, as I mentioned above, we plan to put something out that as you say - will allow people to see what the game looks and plays like without any editing or 'tricks'. Raw gameplay.

It's going to be hard to get this video out before launch (the game will be on shelves on the 4th (USA), 7th (Europe)), but I hope that we have it online before too long. We'll try to spread it as far and wide as we did the UT2003 demo.

Acclaim Entertainment today announced that it has signed an agreement with Disney Interactive for the rights to publish video games based on ABC Television's hit drama series, "Alias." Currently in its second season, "Alias" is one of television's most critically acclaimed series. The "Alias" video game is currently being developed by Acclaim's Cheltenham studio and is scheduled to be released in the fall of 2003 across all of the next-generation gaming platforms.

Lionhead Studios is delighted to announce a collaborative project between two of the games industry's most respected veterans, Peter Molyneux and Jeff Minter... Lionhead Studios will work closely with Minter on a new game, "Unity" which is being developed for the Nintendo Gamecube, a new development platform for Lionhead Studios. Day to day development of Unity will take place in Minter's welsh studio, but he will have access to all Lionhead resources including audio, game testing, production and PR.