Tell me if you’ve heard this before.  It’s the future, and a robotic threat has overtaken the place, threatening to put a damper on humanity unless they’re stopped before it’s too late.  Hello, Terminator?  Yeah, the storyline definitely may not be the most original we’ve seen, but Binary Domain still has more than enough to make up for it.  Though it can’t quite touch last year’s brilliant Vanquish, it comes close, which is more than we can say for a  lot of Gears of War clones these days.

Introduce Virtua Tennis at any given gaming party and you’re likely to get the same sort of reaction.  At first it’ll be one of surprise, with a few people saying, “A tennis game?!”  Then they’ll pick it up and start playing it for a few minutes out of sheer curiosity.  The next thing you know, players will be going at it for hours on end, taking on each other in singles or doubles competition and refusing to give up the controller.  That’s the way it worked with the original Virtua Tennis when it launched on Dreamcast, and how it also worked with Virtua Tennis 4 on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.  Now there’s a version for on the go gaming you can have all to yourself.

BARCELONA -- On the first day of Mobile World Congress here in Barcelona, SEGA showed Sonic the Hedgehog for the first time on a tablet powered by NVIDIA's quad core Tegra 3. Called Sonic the Hedgehog 4, Episode II, the new mobile game will launch some time in the Spring this year. It will come out first exclusively for NVIDIA Tegra-powered smartphones and tablets in NVIDIA's Tegra Zone before rolling out onto other Android devices after. We got a first hand look at the blue wonder doing his thing on the Tegra 3-powered Asus Transformer Prime tablet in this exclusive video.

If something’s good enough, you know someone will bring it back in one form or another.  For Sega, this is a common business practice, as it’s been bringing back several of its old-school franchise to the current game scene, in an effort to generate newfound success.  This includes a number of resurrected Dreamcast classics, along with the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise and Virtua Fighter, which will come back this summer with Final Showdown on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network.  Now another big game is coming back, and Professor K fans will want to listen up…

We've seen countless video games based on the Aliens franchise over the years, both for arcade and for home, and while they may have been exciting, they're hardly the sort of thing that we'd call in-depth.  In fact, the closest we could come to feeling like we were in a true Aliens experience comes down to two games -- the 1990 Konami arcade game and last year's Nintendo DS release Aliens: Infestation.  But that'll change this fall when Gearbox, the studio behind Borderlands, will team up with Sega for Aliens: Colonial Marines, a game that really dials in the feeling of the 1986 James Cameron cinematic classic.

Consoles and PC's have had a slow month interms of new AAA quality games arriving for your respected platform. While January got off to a slow start, it quickly recovered to bring us high quality tittles through digital distribution. Plenty of great downloadable arcade tittles were made available through XBLA, PSN and Steam, giving us many hidden gems on the digital marketplace. Let's look back at the games we reviewed over the past month.  

Sonic the Hedgehog has had a splendid 2011.  There, we said it.  But he really has.  Between Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing for mobile platforms, the awesome Sonic Generations and the surprising return of Sonic CD in downloadable format, Sega really brought him back to, ahem, speed.  And he's not slowing down in 2012, as the company has announced the follow-up to his original Sonic the Hedgehog 4 adventure.