Well, that was shocking. Cryptic, Marvel Entertainment and Microsoft Game Studios today announced that Cryptic has been tapped to develop Marvel’s upcoming MMO, Marvel Universe Online, which will be released for the Xbox 360(!!) and Windows Vista, presumably next year. This is a shock because it was only a short time ago that Marvel Entertainment (and DC Comics) had Cryptic and NCsoft in their sights, accusing both of allowing users to infringe on their respective copyrights, by allowing users of NCsoft MMO City of Heroes to create characters resembling well-known Marvel and DC brands. I’m sure somewhere in South Korea, an NCsoft executive is throwing things at the poor intern who has to break this piece of bad news. How this will affect NCsoft is unknown yet, but, I can only imagine that with the release of Marvel Online Universe, NCsoft had better be planning a way around the potential fallout, as City of Heroes and City of Villains players abandon ship to play as Marvel-created super heroes. Though, whether players will actually get to play as Wolverine or Spider-Man remains to be seen.

Read more: Marvel and Microsoft announce Cryptic as Marvel Universe Online developer | Cryptic’s open letter to their fans

Dolby Labs announced today what it’s support for the Nintendo Wii and Sony PS3 consoles will be. The Wii will utilize Dolby’s Pro Logic II, giving audiophile Wii fans a bit of a shot, but, inline with Nintendo’s stance on gameplay over technology. Dolby PLII is a non-digital, “5.1″ technology which is currently used by the last generation consoles as well as the Microsoft 360. The Sony PS3 naturally will be a different story. Costs be damned, Sony went all out, including Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound for games and Dolby Digital with Dolby TrueHD for 7.1 channels of pure Blu-Ray movie playback bliss, for those who decide to sell a kidney in order to actually buy the thing.

Read more: Dolby Labs announce support for Nintendo Wii and Sony PS3

The best move Take Two / 2K have ever made? Quite possibly. After 8 long years of hibernation, the Midnight Marauders, A Tribe Called Quest, have reunited for over a dozen dates of the annual 2K Sports Bounce Tour. All 3 original members are back, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and Q-Tip, as well as a few new remixes from Dan the Automator and an appearance in the game 5they are promoting, NBA 2K7 from 2K Sports, a publishing label under the Take Two house.

Read more2K Sports’ Bounce 2K7 Tour

Ohhhh, today has been just one long Wii revelations party and yes, we’ve already pre-ordered our Wii, booya! After their press presentation, Nintendo issued their official press release as well as their list of “launch-period” games, which is awesome, purely awesome. /Fan rant…

Read the games list and press release after the jump..

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Massive (and I do mean massive) multiplayer space RPG Eve Online is especially unique among the other MMORPGs. Eve’s server structure is setup in a way that all players, regardless of geographic location, are simulataneously playing within the same game world, as opposed to other MMORPGs, which create many small instanced worlds with around 5000 users at one time max. Utilizing extremely intelligent load balancing and a huge distributed computing environment, Eve allows all players to occupy the same game space, at the same time. Recently, Eve parent company, CCP announced that on September 4th, at 1936 GMT, 30,538 simultaneous registered users occupied Tranquility (the live Eve Online server), once again keeping Eve in control of the world record for most simultaneous users in an online gaming world at one time. Congrats Eve and CCP!

Official announcement after the jump..

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10TACLE STUDIOS, the publishers of the upcoming Xbox 360 fantasy action adventure title Elveon, have acquired the future rights to all current and future titles from CDV Software Entertainment, further solidifying 10TACLE’s role as an emerging power player in the German / European games industry. With profit on the rise, 10tacle is consolidating it’s European development and publishing reach, with 6 in-house developers currently operating throughout Europe and no doubt more on the way. “Panzer Tactics DS” is one of the titles involved in the deal, which is being developed by one of Vienna, Austria’s few remaining game development studios, Sproing. No word on if this deal will negatively impact the developers currently under contract, but here’s to hoping it’s a positive turn and 10TACLE’s involvment is successful for the studios who are now working for 10TACLE.

Read more: 10tacle Studios assumes publishing rights to CDV titles | 10TACLE STUDIOS

Ubisoft today announced the upcoming open beta round for Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, the upcoming fantasy action title developed by Kuju. Open beta rounds will begin Tuesday, August 29th at 9AM PT and potential beta testers will be able to sign-up via Might and Magic’s website. Ubisoft are looking to have approximately 100,000 players participate in this final open beta before the release of Might and Magic.

Read more: Dark Messiah – Might and Magic