Gearbox senior producer Brian Burleson has openly described the Wii U as a “powerful, powerful machine”. Burleson explained that although he’s unable to talk about the specifications of Nintendo’s forthcoming console, he personally believes that Aliens Colonial Marines Wii U will ultimately be the best version of the game.

“[Creating the Wii U version] has been pretty easy. The Wii U is a powerful, powerful machine and it can do a lot of cool new things. And so the game itself, moving it over to work on the Wii U was not much of a chore.”

“Now the interesting thing is finding out all the cool ways you can use the controller to do new stuff with it. You can imagine all the cool things we can do, with this franchise and having a thing with you, right?”

“You can imagine some cool features, for sure,” Burleson said. “It’s not hard to imagine some cool features.”

The Wii U’s power, though, is “one thing I can’t talk about”, he said. “Actually nailing the specs, they haven’t come out with them yet.”

But, the Wii U version of Aliens will “be better” than the PS3 and Xbox 360 version in terms of visuals, he confirmed. Why? Because of “more modern tech”.

How, exactly, will it be better? “You’ll have to wait and see,” Burleson teased. “Just trust me on that one.”

Sega is set to publish Ron Gilbert’s unannounced game from Double Fine Productions. The news was revealed by Segabits who successfully unravelled numerous puzzle pieces laid out by Sega. Expect Sega to announce the game and the platforms it is being developed for shortly.

Gearbox software and Sega have confirmed that Aliens: Colonial Marines won’t be making an appearance at next months E3. There was speculation that Aliens Wii U would be a timed exclusive for the console, but this is now sounding unlikely. Sega announced earlier today that Aliens: Colonial Marines won’t be released until next year.

Monolith Soft, the Nintendo-owned development studio behind the fantastic Xenoblade Chronicles, is helping develop Sega, Namco and Capcom’s Nintendo 3DS exclusive Project X Zone. The game is a 2D beat-em-up which features famous characters from the three aforementioned game studios. Fan favourites such as Ken, Ryu and Mega Man will all be making an appearance.

Sega released its financial report for the 2011 fiscal year which shows that the developer and publisher managed almost 1.8 million sales from 18 different Nintendo 3DS games. However, in the current financial year (April 2012 – March 2013) Sega only has plans to release a mere 3 Nintendo 3DS games, and is forecasting sales of around 380,000. Of course the development studio could be planning to announce a batch of new Nintendo 3DS game at E3, but if not, this could be seen as rather worrying news.

Sega has announced that it won’t be attending this years Gamescom event which takes place in Cologone from August 15th to the 19th. The publisher claims that the timing of the event didn’t work with its planned release schedule, and that it had made a “commercial decision” to skip it. Nintendo announced last month that they won’t be attending this years event.

“Sega has made the decision not to attend Gamescom this year.”

“Unfortunately the release timing of our 2012 triple-A titles and new projects don’t work with the mid-August scheduling of the show. The decision will not mean that Sega will never attend Gamescom in the future, this was simply a commercial decision made for 2012.”

Sega of America associate producer Matthew Hickman has listed on his online profile that he’s part of a team working on a digital game for Wii U as well as PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade, and PC. We should hopefully hear more about the unannounced digital title at E3, which takes place next month.

Joe Neate, the producer behind the recently announced Sonic & All-Stars Racing has attempted to explain the similarities between the game and Nintendo’s Mario Kart 7. Neate says development for Sonic & All-Stars Racing started before Mario Kart 7 was revealed to the world.

“The key thing is that vehicles can transform, so you can not only race on land but on water and in the air too. There can be up to three surfaces per track, meaning you can have cars racing alongside boats during certain sections, for example. The second part of the transformation element is that the tracks can transform in different ways.”

“When Nintendo showed MK7 in more detail we realized it was more focused on kart customization. So you have this option to not fly as such, but what we call ‘falling with style,’ and this gliding is something we had considered during pre-production on our game. But we decided to go with full 3D flying for our game, so you’re not forced to land after a certain amount of time. Obviously you have to take the flying route, but it’s full 3D movement and it’s a proper flying model.”

Gareth Wilson, Design Director at Sumo Digital has told Eurogamer that the development team behind Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed created the game with future platforms in mind. Wilson couldn’t comment on the possibility of a Wii U version, but it seems incredibly likely given the game will be released later this year. The original Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing performed well at retail for Wii.

(created “with future platforms in mind,” says Wilson – but no, he can’t confirm or deny a Wii U release)

Sega has released the first footage of Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed. Sega announced the game earlier today for Nintendo 3DS, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. Sega announced a few of the characters that will be made available which include Dr. Eggman and AiAi from the Super Monkey Ball games, Gilius Thunderhead from Golden Axe and Vyse from Skies of Arcadia. It’s also rumoured that Vectorman and Ristar will make an appearance. Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed is coming later this year.