During a Billboard Digital Music Live Q&A session at the CES 2009 in Las Vegas, Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopolous revealed that there will be no new installment in the Rock Band franchise this year. Instead Harmonix will skip a year and put its focus on the previously announced Beatles game, a title built from the ground up in collaboration with Apple Corps., scheduled for release holiday 2009. Whether the new Rock Band title in 2010 will include keyboards, Rigopoulos remained vague, only saying "maybe."

The action-packed game, a hi–definition re-imagined version of 2004's The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena features an entirely new chapter in the Riddick Saga and for the first time, intense online multiplayer combat.

The UK's ELSPA revealed its annual sales figures, revealing videogame sales hit an all-time high in 2008, with growth of 23 percent on figures for 2007 the market has now more than doubled over the last five years. On the other hand Enterbrain reports that the Japanese videogame market is not doing so well with a decrease of 15% on total sales.

The 'Home' 3D online user community service enables users to create their own avatar and explore a real-time virtual community, as if they are playing a detailed 3D game. SCEA is finally adding the Red Bull space in Home, so you’ll be able to get inside the cockpit of a Red Bull Air Race plane and compete against other fliers on the Red Bull Air Race course. Fans who pre-order Killzone 2 through Amazon will get an exclusive costume to dress up their avatar as ISA Soldier, a Helghast Assault Trooper, or something in between. SCEA is also adding Resident Evil: Degeneration-themed T-shirts for all fans of the movie.

Equipped with a variety of unique weapons and gadgets, players will hunt, fight and capture a wide range of supernatural villains in a funny and frightening battle to save New York City from its latest paranormal plague. Last month, the release date was narrowed down to June 2009, and now Sony Pictures revealed its launch will coincide with the 25th Anniversary Edition of the movie on June 16, 2009, as we predicted last year.

For the first time players can engage with the wild world of animals in their natural surroundings in an immersive and tactile way. In this game you are challenged to engage, touch, move and try to control a wide range of animals as you journey deeper and deeper into the forest.

Watermelon's Pier Solar will be the very first all-new game to appear on the Sega Mega Drive/Sega Genesis this millennium. The game is neither a port nor a translation and has not ripped content from any other game whatsoever. The developer revealed that once completed, it will look into bringing its RPG game to Xbox Live Arcade through Microsoft's XNA development toolset.

Acquire is developing the next installment in the Way of the Samurai franchise, currently only scheduled for release in Japan this fall. Way of the Samurai 3 will feature over 100 weapons for you to wield in defense of the poor, lonely, while fending off rivaling samurai clans.

Based on the Aliens movie, Aliens: Colonial Marines, developed by Gearbox Software, is a squad-based first-person shooter where players are part of a United States Colonial Marine squad and must prepare to face an Aliens assault more intense and horrific than ever before. Originally scheduled for late 2008, SEGA confirmed that the game is currently slated for somewhere between April and June 2009.

Disgaea 2 incorporates some of the same features it did in the original to retain its “Do anything & try everything” heritage while making radical innovations that include suggestions from game fans. The PSP edition will get extra content such as a new scenario, new characters and more ...

Tale of Tales' The Path is a short horror story inspired by fairy tales examining the dark side things. What really happened to Little Red Riding Hood in those dark and scary woods?

The doctors of Seattle Grace Hospital deal with life-or-death consequences on a daily basis – it’s in one another that they find comfort, friendship and, at times, more than friendship. Together they’re discovering that neither medicine nor relationships can be defined in black and white. Real life only comes in shades of grey.

SF IV features a mix of returning favorites (Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li etc.) along with new characters created for this game, such as Crimson Viper, Abel, El Fuerte, and Rufus. Characters and environments are rendered in stylized 3D, while the game is played in the classic 2D perspective with additional 3D camera flourishes. Mad Catz announced a full range of licensed accessories which are expected to ship alongside the game's release in Feb. 2009.

SouthPeak Games' Big Bang Mini is a fireworks-based shooter centered around filling the night sky with brilliant bursts of fireworks to take out encroaching enemies.

THQ has picked up 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand in which you play as one of the world's biggest hip-hop stars in an all-out battle to protect 50 Cent's assets and to collect payment from a crooked overlord.

While there is no official announcement yet, except for a teaser trailer, a BioShock sequel is no secret. Details on BioShock 2 are slim but today the first info has trickled through. The sequel will "mostly" be a prequel, and the iconic Big Daddy will feature aesthetic changes, such as a shoulder-mounted wooden cannon, smaller tank on his back, leather outfit instead of the dive gear, and a much more simplified helmet with only three forward-looking sight holes, unlike the multi-directional ones in the original.

UPDATE: Take Two let us know that the forum admin posted old info and concept art, and to disregard the info.

MySims Party turns any gathering into an instant party with 50 mini games (40 in the NDs version) to choose from, each hosted by a different MySim, while MySims Racing will have you rush to the finish line as you face a variety of tricky MySim opponents on a huge variety of exotic tracks!

Set 5 years after the original, San Vanelona's been rebuild after it was hit by a natural disaster. Equipped with double the tricks, gamers are tasked to rebuild their career and revive the New San Vanelona skate scene. As revealed last week, a Skate 2 demo will be available on XBL tomorrow (PSN Jan. 15) and include enhanced character customization tools, a single-player portion, challenges in all-new locations, and two of the game's online Party Play modes: Thrasher's Hall of Meat and Spot Battle.

Project Origin continues F.E.A.R.'s supernatural suspense story of an escalating paranormal crisis that threatens to destroy a major American city. Alma now has free reign, and the consequences will be unimaginable.

Another day, another batch of games shipped to stores. Instead of giving them all their own posts, we grouped them, and so far there are announcements for:

• Saints Row 2 (PC)
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  We will update this throughout the day when new announcements become available. Read more for details ...

Acquired by Sony in 2007, UK based Evolution Studios (known for the Motorstorm franchise) will be moving in with Sony's Liverpool Studio (known for WipEout HD). The two studios have cooperated in the past by sharing the Motorstorm PS3 game engine, as well as technical support for each other's titles, and according to Sony Europe's Michael Denny, it only makes sense that the two developers move under the same roof, as they are in the same geographic location.

Disgaea 3 is a rich and deep Strategic RPG that's not afraid to display a very bizarre sense of humor, a combination that will leave you laughing one minute and fighting cunning enemies the next. Where special attacks can deliver up to 100 million points worth of damage and the power of the PS3 is used to deliver 2D sprites, albeit lots of them!

In Iron Chef America: Supreme Cuisine players battle through a series fast-paced and intense culinary challenges. Each victory advances players closer to a final showdown that will determine who will reign supreme as the next Iron Chef America.

Mushroom Men shows gamers the mundane world from the surreal perspective of a three-inch-high Mushroom Man. Unnoticed by humans, a war rages between the spore factions, and you, as a brave Bolete Mushroom Man, are given the opportunity to wreak havoc by transforming common household trinkets and trash into weapons and tools.

FF XIII provides tangible, intuitive controls while delivering seamless transitions between real-time gameplay and stunning in-game cinematics. The latest in cutting-edge technology has been utilized in development of Final Fantasy XIII, thus making this newest addition to the Final Fantasy series worthy of the title next generation.