These images appeared on the Command & Conquer 4 website as a bonus to newsletter subscribers, teasing a new medium for the beloved real-time strategy franchise. Joystiq seems to think the images could be indicative of a comic book, and EA has been loving on the video game comic book business lately, but I agree with Joy that it could be too obvious. Perhaps an animated cartoon of some sort, with these images serving as storyboards? A really difficult coloring book? Decorator napkins?

See, this is where you guys should take over the speculation. It's not my strong suit.

Newsletter Subscribers Exclusive Sneak Peek [Command & Conquer via Blue's News]

During the Dante's Inferno panel earlier today at the San Diego Comic-Con, director Vic Cook explained just how deep Dante would travel in the animated feature.

"You're gonna love it. We've got bodies flying around. We've got Dante literally being shoved up a monster's butt."

Um...what?

Perhaps I just heard that wrong. I figured they would take extensive liberties with the original work, but there's no way they would get that extensive, would they? Let's see what the game's executive producer, Jonathan Knight has to say.

"In the original game script we wrote that Cerberus was going to shove Dante up his ass...it was a crazy, crazy scene. We just couldn't do it in the game for a lot of reasons. To have that moment that was in the game script that was cut from the game to show up in the animated feature is just really cool."

...okay then. Might want to keep that in mind when you see the Dante's Inferno DVD on shelves sometime in 2010...you know...if you're into that sort of thing.

Aside from the monster anal, Cook also hinted at a scene set in the Lust level, directed by anime director Dong Woo, that was absolutely mind-blowing, over the top..."I can't even talk about it because there are children here." So don't worry about spoilers. The worst is yet to come!

Return to Castle Wolfenstein is yet another prequel to the original Wolfenstein 3D, because that's what you have to do when your protagonists kills Hitler in the first act. U.S. Army Ranger William "B.J." Blazkowicz is back, taking on Nazi zombies as only he can. In retrospect, the two follow-ups made his eventual defeat of Roboter-Führer seem like a walk in the park.

For once, this trailer isn't about showing off the innovative free running 3D engine and physical environment - it is a bit of animation (in the cartoony sense) that provides some more background about the dystopian setting and the traumatic events that have set our heroine on course to clash with the gub'ment.

Stylistically, it reminds me of the O-Ren Ishii anime from Kill Bill - no bad thing, in my humble opinion. Plot-wise, not much is revealed, but attitude? Attitude it most definitely has.

I'm sorta digging GameTap's Re\Visioned series. The idea is that they choose a iconic video game and hand the character over to ten teams of artists and writers to reimagine different elements of the icon. The ten-part Tomb Raider Re\Visioned animated series includes a number of interesting takes on the most famous video game heroine, including a humorous story of her untold young adulthood and more serious takes on her adventures, but by far the most interesting is Gail Simone's "Pre-Teen Raider" a look at Lara Croft as a young boisterous and sticky-fingered private school student.

The look of the young Croft and the short's script are both the product of Gaile Simone, who worked with Six Point Harness to put the six minute video together.

Simone, perhaps most known for her work on Birds of Prey and Wonder Woman, said she was approached by the GameTap folks because they were looking for someone with comic book experience. It was an added bonus that Simone also happens to be a big fan of the Tomb Raider video games.

"The very first Tomb Raider that came out, I played all of the way through," she said. "The last one, Legends, I played all the way through too. It was the first game I've played all the way through in a long time."

Simone, a feminist writer known for her talented comedy-action stories, said she was drawn to Croft because she wasn't the typical heroine.

"She's an adventurer, educated, classy, strong doesn't need to be rescued by someone else," she said. "She goes all over the world."

GameTap "asked me to pitch them a few concepts and (Pre Teen Raider) was my favorite," she said. "I thought it would be fun to explore what she would be like as a kid. I thought it would be a blast to show her that way."

And the end result it, an animated short that Simone describes as having a "lot of velocity. I'm excited about the visual look of it. It's very fun, it moves very fast, the jokes are funny."

Instead of trying to go back to the creative minds who initially gave life to Croft, Simone said she looked to the adult Croft for insight into what she would be like as a child.

"I just thought about how her character is as an adult," she said. "In order to grow up and have that personality what ideas she would have as a pre-teen."

I asked Simone if she was bothered by the seeming duality of Lara Croft's popularity. On the one hand she is popular because she is a representation of a smart, strong feminine hero, but on the other she is worshiped as a bombshell.

"I'm used to working with that," she said. "I write a lot of female strong feminine heroines. I'm not distributed by a female character being beautiful. I get disturbed by a bunch of video games that all look the same and all have the same focus."

While Pre-Teen Raider was a one off created for GameTap, Simone said it would make sense to turn into into a regular animated show.

"I think it would be fun."

Tome Raider

Super 78 is back with the sequel for their funny, very well animated Wii commercial spoof, Wii: Hold On Tight. It seems they wanted to create an overarching storyline with character arcs for this fake commercial series so this one takes up right where the last one left off. Super 78 Creative Director, Brent Young told sister site Gizmodo a little about the reasoning behind the sequel...

We had this fantasy that someone was going to call from Nintendo or some where and make us an offer but that never happened. Really we did this sequel because we had so much fun watching how so many people watched it and responded positively to it... we wanted to develop the characters that we established in the first spot The Wiimote has a new and stronger display screen one that is impenetrable if he smacks into it. Nunchuk, the smart one, needs to figure out how to get out of the situation..

Obviously a lot of work went in to making this because it looks extremely professional. I just hope that if they do receive a phone call from Nintendo, it's from the marketing department and not from a lawyer. Flynn De Marco
[via Gizmodo]