DS is taking off, and publishers are getting the memo. While the system - like every before it, and every after it - is getting its fair share of licensed products, movie-to-game tie-ins, and throw-away titles, DS is also becoming a platform where virtually any development team with an inspired concept and semi-aggressive budget can throw their creative hats into the ring. Such is the case with 5th Cell's Drawn to Life, published and presented by THQ.

Our first experience with Drawn to Life for DS was over a year ago, as we had a chance to take a brief look at the conceptual title from a then publisher-less developer 5th Cell. In our preview (found here), the ambitious developer-for-hire outlined the concept and story of its latest adventure. Drawn to Life is part action/adventure, part user-created content. Utilizing both developer-made levels and player-made assets, Drawn to Life looks to utilize the DS in a whole new way, blending creativity with core gameplay in a way that no other game can do, and no other platform can facilitate.

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SEGA of America offered up a brief look at NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams at its pre-E3 Day 2007 in San Francisco on Thursday. Producer Takashi Iizuka took onlookers through a slideshow presentation meant to outline his vision for the flight-action title, which is based on a now-classic SEGA Saturn effort. Iizuka-san began by explaining that NiGHTS as a franchise was inspired by dreams.

"I want to explain the concept behind the dreams and how that inspired me with the game. I want to talk about dreams, not as a fantasy world, but the dreams everybody has when they go to sleep at night. Do you realize that your dreams are a way to uplift your spirit? So, behind that -- that's really where my core research started from."

Iizuka-san said he drew inspiration from Carl Gustav Jung, whose research on dream archetypes, including the great mother, old wiseman, shadow, anima and animus, provided the foundation for the characters in the NiGHTS universe. For example, the great mother is represented by the Nightmarens in Journey of Dreams, just as the shadow is actually NiGHTS.

"When developing the game, we really went into detail and thought about what dreams meant to everybody. The real vision behind the concept of NiGHTS was to bring this fantastical dream world to life. With the creation of NiGHTS the character, this was a character that I wanted to bring to life who was in everybody's dreams. With that dream-like character, NiGHTS is a character that everybody could meet in their dreams," said the producer.

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Late Wednesday night from its San Francisco-based Summer Preview event, Electronic Arts pulled back the curtain on a more playable version of MySims for Wii than we've previously seen. For fans still unfamiliar with the project, think Sims, except with a cuddly new makeover complete with Mii-like character designs and environments to fit, and, of course, Wii pointer-enhanced controls. The premise is pretty straightforward, but so far so good. We've got a few more details on how everything works below.

MySims begins with at the character creation level. You're treated to a very basic 3D model and given the tools, combined wIth the power of the Wii remote, to fully customize it. It's not as detailed as we initially suspected. You won't be able to use the remote to manually draw facial features, for example. However, you can with a simple point and tap of the A button modify the looks of eyes, mouths, noses, hairstyles, skin tones, and more. And on top of that, you can tweak outfits to your liking. You don't so much pick a specific set of eyes or nose as you simply click on these facial features and tap the button, at which point the next selection appears. The mechanic, like just about every option in MySims for Wii, is designed to be immediately accessible, but it's also robust enough -- you will be able to create dramatically different Sims characters using the features at your disposal.

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Nintendo's newest console has seen its fair share of "Wii-makes" thus far, including everything from Prince of Persia to Resident Evil 4, and now The Sims franchise. As one of the main Sim titles at EA's press event in San Francisco this week, The Sims 2: Pets is looking to take advantage of the now-bustling Wii community, bringing out the previously-released console title to Nintendo's newest system. And while we can't come down on the decision to bring out The Sims 2: Pets on Wii - after all, IR control works like a charm - it's tough to get overly-excited about a game we played on PS2, Xbox, and GameCube just months ago.

For anyone unfamiliar with the world of The Sims, it's a spin-off franchise from the classic "Sim-whatever" world that has been around since pretty much the dawn of gaming (and mankind). In The Sims, players zoom in on the world of SimCity, and trade in the role of city manager for the life of a lowly Sim slave. Players can create and design their own houses, recreate a fully-functioning family unit, and even take on jobs and relationships in the more social-based Sim title. For The Sims 2: Pets, it's all about bringing in our furry friends from yesteryear, as EA encourages us to recreate or dearly departed pets from our childhood, or play God in creating our very own dream dog or cat.

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At its Summer Preview event in San Francisco on Wednesday, EA showcased an updated build of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for Nintendo's next-generation console. We've seen the title before so this latest impressions will be brief, but even so, the project has progressed since we last tried it out and we walked away from the presentation more optimistic about the affair than we've ever been.

In Order of the Phoenix, which follows the storyline in the book and movie of the same name, Harry is growing up and becoming a more skilled wizard. He takes it upon himself to secretly teach his fellow students some valuable magical lessons, effectively establishing Dumbledore's Army. Meanwhile, his love life is beginning to take shape as he carries on his shy crush on Cho. All of these story details are reflected in the game through dynamic cut-scenes triggered in-engine as you progress.

Hogwarts in The Order of the Phoenix is a bigger and more interactive locale than it's been in any preceding Potter endeavor. The school is huge and you can go everywhere, from the Gryffindor Common Room to Hagrid's grounds -- all without any load times. The locales are constantly streaming into view on the fly and as a result the long load times of previous games have been abandoned altogether. When Harry pushes through a castle door and into nature beyond, it just happens.

Harry is able to use a variety of spells as he makes his way through Hogwarts. You can lock onto objects simply by looking in their general direction or cycling between them with the trigger. From there, you can perform magic with a gesture of hand, the way it ought to be. To cast the famous Wingardium Leviosa, you merely target an item and then gesture upward with the Wii remote, at which time the object will hurl upward and levitate mid-air. In quasi-one-to-one precision, you can flip the object around the item simply by twirling your Wii remote. Meanwhile, you can cast other spells, like Accio, by pulling the Wii remote inward. The mechanics feel good and from what we can tell, there's a lot more to come. In one area, EA demoed a sequence where Potter had to levitate a broomstick and make motions with the Wii remote to sweep up the floor.

EA told us that Potter will not be the only playable character in the title. Later in the adventure, you'll be able to control the Weasley brothers during a frantic escape, Sirius Black, and even Dumbledore himself.

The game still needs some polishing where animation transitions and framerate are concerned -- occasionally, characters look stiff and the fluidity can drop -- but we're all impressed by the sheer size of the world and the detail that has gone into the models and Hogwarts. It's an epic-sized environment, but that doesn't mean the little details have gone to the wayside in favor of scale. Take, for example, the fact that so many of the paintings that inhabit the halls are fully animated -- they've been static images in many of the previous games.

We'll have much more on the Wii version of Potter soon.

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The easiest way to wrap your head around The Club is to think of the third-person shooter as a forced-labor Fight Club. A group of hard-as-nails types have fallen into the world of an underground fighting federation, and they can't get out. Rich folks watch the damned shoot the crap out of each other and foot the bill to keep them stabbing people on different continents.

SEGA was nice enough to give the gaming media a look at the title today during a gameplay demonstration by Nick Davies, design manager for The Club's developer Bizarre Creations.

"It's everything that Splinter Cell and Gears of War isn't," he said. "It's kind of the anti-stealth game as we call it."

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For more than ten years, the SEGA Rally series has helped to define the off road genre. The quarter munching arcade title is still wildly popular and profitable today, and many racing fans still enjoy jumping into the arcade cockpit and racing each other for bragging rights. But SEGA is looking forward to taking the Rally series out of the arcade and into the home. This fall, SEGA Rally Revo will peel out on the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. We managed to check it out at a press event for some quick early impressions.

The first thing that we were told was that the SEGA Racing Studio out of the UK will be handling racing for SEGA properties. The team definitely knows its racing, as the more than 60 developers have worked on driving games from various developers like Criterion, Codemasters and Rockstar. With a stated studio mission "to bring state of the art racing to next-gen consoles," the Racing Studio is focusing on three specific facets of gameplay for the upcoming title. The development team wanted to make state of the art graphics, putting attention on the handling of vehicles in various environments and the close racing experience that was key to the competition during games. While we were shown examples of this from the original Sega Rally Championship as a indication of where the series had been twelve years ago on a SEGA Model 2 arcade board, we really wanted to see how this would translate to a game console.

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Sometime this summer, poker fans will be able to soothe their gambling itch with High Stakes at the Vegas Strip, to be available for $9.99 USD through the PlayStation Network. The feature being pushed in this game is EyeToy or other PC compatible USB camera support, which will display the camera's target in the screen's corners during online games. Whether or not players choose to point their EyeToy at their faces or houseplants or something more inappropriate remains to be seen.

Two modes are available for offline play: quick game and career mode. Choosing quick game lets you pick between Texas Hold'em, Super Hold'em, Shanghai, Billabong, and Tahoe poker. In career mode as well as during online play, only Texas Hold'em is playable. Advancing through career mode's various tiers earns points to unlock special shirts, pants, sunglasses and more for your avatar, which you choose to apply to one of the five male and five female avatars. The game starts out placing easy AI around the six person tables, and as you progress will randomly drop in more challenging AI opponents. While we saw the game running, we didn't have much of a chance to actually test out how the AI behaved, so we'll have to bring you details on that later.

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Children's books are often sources for movies and video games. The Polar Express and Meet the Robinsons were both novels that were both depicted across both mediums, and obviously Harry Potter does well in either format. The latest novel to receive a movie and game treatment is Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, from the His Dark Materials trilogy. While New Line is preparing to release the movie this Christmas, SEGA is working hand in hand with them to develop the game. We managed to get a small glimpse of the game at a recent event and came away with new impressions.

The novel of the Golden Compass is set in an alternate universe similar to our own, and follows the adventures of a young girl named Lyra as she journeys from England to the far north to save a kidnapped friend of hers. Fortunately for her, she's not alone in her quest, as she's accompanied by her shape shifting demon Pan and an armored bear named Lorek, who'll help her search for her friend. Lyra also has a special item known as an alethiometer, which helps her find out the truth about people that she interacts with.

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