Today the creators of City of Heroes, Cryptic Studios, announced their next project: Champions Online.  Champions Online is based on the Champions paper and pencil RPG originally published in 1981 by HERO Games.

According to the HERO Games (creators of Champions and the HERO System rules), Cryptic has purchased both Champions and Dark Champions IP.

Click 'Read the full story...' for the press release.

The Safehouse got a special invite to attend the Tomy Comic-Con party at the Rock Bottom Brewery to party and  see a preview of their Wii game Dragon Blade: Wrath of Fire. I accepted (really the free food and drink after a hard day at the Convention Center had nothing to do with it!).

Comic-Con International 2007
SAN DIEGO, CA –

Comic-Con Is Big. How big? Really big. For the first time in its existence, Comic-Con was completely sold out. Not just the 4 Day Passes, but the individual day passes as well. Considering that the main exhibit hall of the San Diego Convention center is 1,500,000 square feet this is no small accomplishment.

Each year Comic-Con has been growing in attendance. Freaks and Geeks just keep coming in droves. This geek went of course. I also enlisted the help of fellow Safehousers, Nymm and More to help with Comic-Con coverage.

Today NCsoft made this announcement on the Auto Assault website:

NOTICE: Today NCsoft is announcing that it will be closing down service for Auto Assault at the end of the summer. The service will close at midnight on August 31, 2007. As of today, any player currently in the service with an active billed account will not be billed again. If players have previously purchased time via multi-month billing or time cards that extends their service past July 31, NCsoft will reconcile these accounts appropriately. There will be more announcements coming soon regarding the shut down of Auto Assault and its impact on current accounts. Please check back at www.autoassault.com for more information.

It slipped past my radar unnoticed until now, but last week NCSoft and Destination Games announced that they're accepting applications for closed beta testing of Tabula Rasa.

The beta signup page can be found here.  Minimum specs are as follows:

Recently Multiverse and Fox announced that they would create a Massively Multiplayer game based on the Firefly TV series.

Here is Multiverse's press release.

As per the press release on Cryptic Studio's website:

Today at X06, Xbox’s annual official industry event in Barcelona, Spain, Microsoft Game Studios announced further details around its eagerly awaited project based on the Marvel universe of Super Heroes. Microsoft and Marvel Entertainment confirmed that Cryptic Studios has been named the developer of “Marvel Universe Online,” the highly anticipated massively multiplayer online (MMO) video game exclusive to Xbox 360 and Windows Vista.

What do you get when you cross a money-oozing professional athlete, an indie comic mogul, and an icon of high fantasy story telling?

Green Monster Games, LLC

Curt Schilling: President
Todd McFarlane: Art Director
R.A. Salvatore: Creative Director

An "out of left-field" (pardon the pun) powerhouse trio have come together to deliver another title into the MMORPG gaming world. The title/genre is yet to be announced...