Affirming suspicions that the countdown on Ubi’s Rainbow Six website is indeed that of an announcement of a next-gen Rainbow Six title, 1Up put up a teaser of their own: the April issue of EGM reveals Rainbow Six: Vegas, the first next-gen game in the series.

The April issue will offer full details of the game, along with screenshots. They have put up a screenshot on their site, although no platform was mentioned for it.

After having Majesco drop out on The Darkness, 2K Games today announced that it will be publishing the game. In the works at Starbreeze Studios, the developer behind the excellent Chronicles of Riddick game and based on the popular comic book franchise, The Darkness is scheduled for release next winter.

In the game, players assume the role of mafia hitman Jackie Estacado. On the night of his 21st birthday, Jackie is possessed by “The Darkness,” an ancient demonic entity that gives Jackie spectacular powers. The story, written by Eisner Award winner Paul Jenkins, follows Jackie and his fight with the fictional Francetti mafia. As the story unfolds, the player will learn to utilize traditional weapons and the extraordinary powers of The Darkness.

A movie based on the comic is also being worked on. It will be produced by Platinum Studios and Dimension Films and is currently in pre-production for projected release sometime in 2007.

Planning an expanded presence at GDC 2006 is Epic Games, who announces that it will be showcasing Unreal Engine 3 at the event as well as presenting key technical achievements over the past year.

The studio will demonstrate the engine within their ExpoSuite, ES128, located in the main exhibition hall. Epic will be showcasing PS3 and Xbox 360 support, FaceFX cinema-quality facial animation, new physics-based animation and other technical stuff.

The company will also include dedicated space in the Career Pavilion to “search for the industry’s best game developers.”

Cyanide, the studio behind Chaos League, has launched the official “Loki” website, announcing the hack n’ slash action-RPG. The game will allow players to take on the role of one of the 4 heroes of the game: a mighty Norse fighter, a fierce Greek warrior, a powerful Egyptian magician or an Aztec shaman - as the player tries to rid the world of Seth, who wishes to establish a “wicked reign.”

Below are six screenshots from the project. Loki is due for release this September. More information can be found after the jump.

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Getting juiced up is THQ, who confirmed today that it ha acquired Juice Games, the studio behind the urban street-racer Juiced.

Juice Games is currently working on a PSP version of the racing game titled Juiced: Eliminator, which is due for release this June. The studio is also working on titles for “a new generation of console platforms,” according to its website.

Bad times for people at Lionhead: Gamasutra reports that The Movies Planet posted earlier that the Black & White studio will be having a number of layoffs, which was later confirmed by Lionhead’s Community Director Sam Van Tillburgh, who does not go into much detail other than this:

“Over the last few months Lionhead has been working on plans for a new AAA world class game. As work on a number of its titles draws to a close, a pool of 100 super talented developers at Lionhead are available to create a new super team at Lionhead. This will be in addition to an existing team which is working on an amazing next generation title.”

“This strategy was presented to Lionhead this morning in a company meeting, but sadly it will mean some redundancies. We are still continuing our support of The Movies, with new downloads on the Propshop, an add-on disk in summer, and the announcement of the winner of the Chrysler competition at E3.”

Coming as a surprise to many, IGN has disclosed that Rockstar’s latest project is a… ping pong game exclusive to the Xbox 360! Yes, like you and me, IGN was surprised at the revelation too, but Rockstar affirms that the game, like its other titles, will be fun to play and will be different than other table-tennis (are there any?) or sports titles out there in the market.

Simply dubbed “Table Tennis” and in development at Rockstar San Diego, the game will be exclusive to Xbox 360, and by the looks of it, will take full advantage of the hardware. The title will retail for $40, which is twenty less than the premium 360 users have to pay.

The site has an interview with Executive Producer and President Sam Houser on the game. Here’s the opening:

IGN: Our jaws are a-drop. Rockstar has become the center for urban cool in videogames over the last five years with games such as GTA, Manhunt, and Midnight Club. Why on Earth would you go and make a game based on table tennis? (And more importantly can you switch the way you hold the racquet from Western to Eastern styles?)

Sam Houser: Mainly because we absolutely love table tennis and wanted to try and make something that could show the audience what could be possible — on a relatively focused level — in the next generation of videogames. Our mission brief at Rockstar has been clear to us from when we founded the company — to make titles with innovative game play about subject matters we were interested in. We have always been a company that likes to take risks, and do things differently from everyone else. For us this does not just mean gangster films, or car chases or westerns (much as we still love them), but anything that we think is interesting and has not been successfully handled elsewhere in a videogame. From our perspective, table tennis fitted the bill perfectly — especially as games with a very strong two-player component are very fun to make — and play! Above all, Table Tennis allows us to showcase what we believe the key characteristics of the high definition era of console gaming will be. These are not just higher resolution graphics, but using higher resolution graphics and hugely advanced animation systems to impart physical and emotional information to the player, so that the control and tactics of the game are more real and more diverse than on current-generation titles. To put it another way — improved animation and higher resolution graphics on their own are not enough — but when they can directly improve the quality of gameplay and experience, then they become very interesting. We were keen to test out these theories on a smaller scale, and Table Tennis felt like the perfect fit. And, yes, you will be able to hold the racquet in both styles.

Both Turbine and Codemasters have announced that the latter will publish Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar in Europe. Codemasters will be responsible for the distribution, hosting, community management, technical support and billing for the title when it launches in the first quarter of this year.

The MMORPG’s Euro site and forums have gone live following the announcement.

Shooting down rumors of a Xbox 360 version of World of Warcraft, Blizzard’s COO Paul Sams, speaking to MCV, bluntly stated that there are no plans of porting the popular MMORPG to the Microsoft console and that they’d never “allow the WoW gameplay experience to suffer,” because of PC-console ports.

He also said that Microsoft’s Xbox Live architecture is “very protected from all sorts of outside influence, so shared play between 360 and PC owners would be very tough.” The company will never even consider the possibilities of a 360 WoW if that hurdle can’t be overcome.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t mean that the console won’t see any Blizzard projects. “Nothing is in place at the moment, but we may be looking at something along those lines in the future,” concluded the very-discreet COO.

A Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers demo has been released, offering the chance to sample Pandemic’s tactical-action shooter sequel. It’s a 416 MB download, featuring an intro movie and a tutorial mission, from 3D Gamers, FilePlanet, FileFront, Gameguru Mania and Worthplaying.

Bringing over Legend of Mir 3 from Asia o North America is iEntertainment, who announced that the game has entered the open beta testing phase. Quite popular in Asia (over 1 million worldwide players), Mir 3 will provide players with over 40 maps, 15 extended Quests with over 100 stages, and continuing Daily Quests.

A rather long, but impressive video of Spore is up on Google Videos (embedded below) that shows off some action from the upcoming Will Wright game.

A Rogue Trooper website has gone live, offering information and media on the upcoming action game based on the 2000 AD comic strip. The site is an introduction into the world of Genetic Infantrymen (GI) with detailed information on the characters and weapons in the game. Videos, wallpapers, artwork, along with 360 screenshots from the title are also available on the site.

Rogue Trooper ships this Spring for the PS2, Xbox and PC.