Amidst the usual barrage of less-than-note-worthy DS titles, this week's big release is the sequel to the 2001 FPS Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Hitler's got the usual evil army, and it's gonna be up to you to infiltrate and beat them from the inside. There's a few more you might want to check out, so read on for this edition of On Shelves This Week.

Have you guys seen "X-Men Origins: Wolverine"? I haven't but I hear they totally butchered Deadpool's character in the movie. Be that as it may, Raven Software, the development studio behind the X-Men Origins: Wolverine video game, has expressed interest in making a Deadpool game.

Heads up, Marvel fans! Screaming Mimi is coming to Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 (DS, Wii, PS3, PSP, Xbox 360)! She's more popularly known as Melissa Gold, or the powerful Songbird. Now the artists of the MUA2 team talk about making the pretty screamstress look pretty in her Ultimate Alliance debut.

Snikt! Unleash those adamantium claws, bub. We're watching the first ever trailer for the upcoming X-Men Origins: Wolverine game. It's in pure CG animation and looks almost exactly like what you see in the trailers for the movie. Man, the only thing lacking here in this trailer is Deadpool. (Well, yeah, him and a whole bunch of gameplay footage too.)

Wolverine's one of the deadliest fighters ever to be dreamed up by Marvel, and his new video game sounds like its going to live up to his reputation. He has influences in God of War, Devil May Cry, and... Super Smash Bros. Well, why not? Kirby kicks butt too, you know.

With Raven Software taking on other projects, the development of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2: Fusion (DS, Wii, PS3, PSP, Xbox 360) has fallen to Vicarious Visions. Creative Director Dan Tanguay and Art Director Bryan Schutt share their thoughts about the experience, and why they think they're up to the challenge.

There's more than a month to go before Quantum of Solace (Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, DS, Wii, PC) comes out, but Activision's 2009 game lineup has revealed that a new James Bond game is already slated for release next year along with three new IPs. More in the full article.

If you've been having fun with the Hexen II port on your PlayStation Portables, then brace yourself for more homebrew goodness because developer jurajstyk has just updated the game to version 1.1.

But just like the first build, you will still need the original game installed on your PC before running this game. This port is really something because even though it is based from Peter Mackay's PSP Quake port, the source code employed in the game is the one used for the classic FPS by original developer Raven Software.

With all that said, here are the changes to Hexen II for PSP v1.1:

• Fixed:
• Rendering errors that could be observed at some places
• Two kind of errors are fixed :
• 1. Problem with surfaces not being drawn sometimes  (visible at village2 map at room with hidden portal )
• 2. Problem with rendering beyond the edge of surface (visible at demo3 map at section with bell and underground passage)
• Switching between transparent and opaque water no longer requires map reloading
• Some fixes related to model transparency rendering
• New Features:
• Support for suspending and resuming game
• Music playback trough MP3 implemented with MAD audio library (can be switched on/off from options menu or from console)
• Optimized sky drawing (three modes are available now : original, optimised , single color)

The download package below contains Hexen II for PSP v1.1 itself, the source code, as well as several documentation provided by jurajstyk. Be sure to read all those first before installing this on your PSP units.

Download: Hexen II for PSP v1.1

First, the good news. PSP homebrew coder jurajstyk has just announced the release of a homebrew port of the Hexen II classic FPS game. This is based on Peter Mackay's PSP Quake port, with source codes taken from the original Hexen II (PC) by Raven Software, and compiled using PSPDev Environment for Win32.

As for the lowdown on the reported features and bugs version 1.0 carries:

• Working:
• Software rendering.
• Single player game and Portal of Praevus single player game
• Sound
• Save/Load
• Console commands
• Command line commands (through 'hexen2.cmdline' file)
• Multiple screen resolutions (trough command line params)
• User made maps loading (from console or command line params)
• Demo recording and playback (from console)
• On Screen Keyboard
• Missing:
• Music playback (disabled)
• Untested:
• Multi player (creating multi player game works)
• Known issues:
• No progress bar displayed when starting/loading/saving game (disabled because of stability problems)
• Restart or reload of a current map necessary if value of console variable 'r_transwater' is changed (otherwise water surfaces will not be rendered correctly)
• User made mods with modified progs.dat files will not work
• Sprite models with width or height that is not multiple of 4 can cause game to crash
• Some weird graphical artifacts can be observed sometimes
  

Before you guys get too excited about loading PSP Hexen II to your portables, take note of this very important detail (ergo, the Bad News): You will need to have an original copy of Hexen II installed in your PC, as key files needed for the PSP port can only be found in the original game. Also be sure be sure to check out the file readme for details on controls and development. Enjoy the download, but be sure to stick around in case of updates.

Download: PSP Hexen II v1.0

Activision announced today that Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, Raven Software's highly anticipated action/RPG, has just been scored by a trio of award-winning composers.

Chance Thomas (Peter Jackson's King Kong, Lord of the Rings series), Cris Velasco (God of War) and Mark Griskey (Best of LucasArts Original Soundtrack) produced over 50 minutes of original music for the game, including the superhero and boss battle themes, multiple game level themes, and in-game cinematics.

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance will be the first superhero game available this fall for all next-gen gaming systems. If you're interested in knowing about musical scores for other games, you might find this previous article interesting. Check it out.