Those cool, high-flying, shell-backed dudes are back! And they're set to get out of their sewer-headquarters to leap onto the PC, Xbox 360, Wii, PS2, PSP, PS3, DS, GBA and GameCube. Whew, that sure is a whole lot of ground to cover.

But no worries, 'cause the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles won't be getting there at a snail's pace. In fact, Ubisoft has already revealed that they will will be available for these platforms - except for the PS3 - by March 23 of 2007. Its film adaptation will also be out that month.

So get ready to order loads of pizzas, 'cause that's surely one treat these guys wouldn't want to miss.

As for you, you can check out the "making of" video by clicking on the Read link below.

Gamasutra has a feature out showcasing the analysts' take on how the console wars will turn out this holiday season.

We know you guys are probably sick and tired reading about analysts and their take on what will happen to consoles. You know the drill. They say that console A won't meet numbers. They say this will win over that. They say that the console B can cause so much fun that due to the excessive amounts of peace, love, and joy, an inter-dimensional portal will open summoning the evil robotic Santa Claus from Invader Zim... or something like that.

Anyway, here's some of the more pertinent bits of what the holiday console picture as they see it.

Some of these were quick to point out which hot games we should be looking out to get as gifts:

Anita Frazier, The NPD Group - Zelda! The game with the highest degree of anticipation appears to be The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Other titles I expect to finish well for the holiday season ar...

Get out of here even if for just one moment you thought Microsoft wouldn't say anything regarding console launches from rival companies. Of course they would say something, and what better way to do it than with a Microsoft-owned MSN article. While the article didn't mention specifics, the X360 came out as the victor during the earlier stages of the war.

"Retailers had a great four-day run and pretty much everything is gone. Sony dropped the ball and Nintendo didn't do that much better," the MSN article mentioned.The article then continued, "Retailers and analysts across North America confirm that the hottest selling gaming console this past weekend was the Xbox 360."

It seems that the article was based from the reports that there have been an apparent lack of Wii and PS3 stocks because of very high demands. "Microsoft was the big winner. They had lots of systems and they had them priced right with game bundles that gamers were interested in," the article conclud...

"A video game more expensive than the most expensive film." It is in these words, albeit in Dutch, that elusive title Killzone made its presence felt once more after a long deafening silence from Guerilla Games. Accordingly, Dutch newspaper "de Volksrant" caught up with game director Arjan Brussee for an interview that confirmed some rumors and spilled a little bit of new information.

Yesterday's rumor about microtransacted expansions didn't last long as Brussee ascertained that Killzone will indeed have downloadable components. "The Killzone that is in stores is only the beginning. New 'chapters' will be downloadable," announced the director.

Aside from that, the Dutch article focused on the game's production cost. To those of you who are wondering, the first sentence actually refers to World War II film Zwartboek, the priciest film in Dutch history (16 million Euros/ US 21 million). Brussee boasted, "Our budget tops the film. We're working on the biggest multimedi...

John Hight, director of external development at Sony's Santa Monica studio recently said this interesting bit:

Sony's third party publishers will undoubtedly provide updated versions of classic arcade games.
He said this during an interview at FiringSquad. Of course don't expect Sony to have the initiative to get people to put their arcade classics on their Network. You see, in the same interview he also says this:

First party development wants stylish games that are fun. Our goal is to provide gamers with cool experiences that they ve never seen before.
Of course they're giving third party people lots of incentives to develop for the PS3, for one thing they've got a huge 500MB download limit at the end of their fishing poles. It seems that they're making an effort at welcoming third party devs when they are developing downloadable games for the PS3, this despite the recent rumors about them being a bit too greedy.

If you've got a good concept f...

When we first got our PS3, the first thing we noticed about the 12 lb. beauty is that the thing is damn shiny. One of our editors commented that it felt like we just bought a car. Next thing we noticed about the console is that the glossy casing gets dirty quite easily. After removal from the box, our console has two big oily hand-prints on its sides... the thing just plain gathers oil and dirt like a rally car.

Apparently we're not the only ones having dirt problems. Kotaku's PS3 is gathering uber amounts of dust and from the looks of it, is well on its way to growing its own habitat on its shinny black casing.

  
A lot of you have suggested in the comments section already that wax and other cleaning implements could be used as a good prophylactic measure against dirt, dust, hand oil, and white-stains from over eager friends. Kotaku's thinking they should've held out for the silver model. We're thinking we should just invest in skins and face-plates....

The PlayStation 3's potential is vast but it can't match the Xbox 360's features in its current iteration. By Chris Kohler.

A handful of launch titles vie for a spot in your new PlayStation 3. Some deliver the high-def goods, but others give new shades of meaning to the word "lame." By Chris Kohler.

Half the room's saying "hopefully it is (the scalping b...)". ITworld reports that as the launch hype fades into history, so do the auction profit margins for eBay PS3 and Wii resales. Of course we've been observing this trend over the past week - and this doesn't include the ten dollar eBay PS3 (is that a fish I smell?) - but here are the latest final sale prices ITworld has on eBay Wiis and PS3s:
PS3: US 650 and US 910 (ave. retail price for PS3 on eBay: US 1,370)MSRP: $599 for the 60GB, $499 for 20GBWii: US 413 postlaunch, as opposed to US 428 total average eBay final auction price since LaunchMSRP: US 250Okay, it might seem that, at first look, Wii eBay prices might still be standing strong, whereas the rush is indeed over for the PS3 (even considering the MSRP of the 20GB). But looking at the dates of the Wii auctions, as ITworld did, and you'll see that a staggering landslide majority of Wii eBay auctions happened after the launch hype, reflective of the greater...

We're hoping it's just a software thing that can be resolved with an update, but that's still speculating. A thread at the NeoGAF forums is running live with reports of SIXAXIS literally seizing up in PS3 games. For one reason or another, the game will not respond to controller input, as summarized by GamerReports: "From time to time, the SIXAXIS pad will literally lock in one direction for a few seconds, and will not stop until a button is pressed or the camera is moved."

GamerReports calls it directional lock. The NeoGAF member who started the thread calls it "SIXAXIS epilepsy". We call it worrisome.

Our presumption that it's potentially just a Bluetooth communication problem between the SIXAXIS and the PS3 comes from the NeoGAF forums as well, where one member suggests a possible, albeit temporary and slightly inconvenient fix. In his case, the seizure crops up when the system is started remotely - the controllers are not connected to the PS3 via USB.
...