A week jam-packed with Nintendo news was overshadowed today by an announcement that sent shockwaves through the North American game industry. Thursday afternoon, top publisher Electronic Arts announced that it will acquire VG Holding Corp., owner of BioWare/Pandemic.

VG Holding Corp. was formed in late 2005 when esteemed Canadian role-playing game studio BioWare formed the aforementioned “superdeveloper” with Californian shop Pandemic Studios. The union was funded by Elevation Partners, a venture capital firm with rock star Bono on its board, and brokered by then-Elevation board member John Riccitiello, who became BioWare/Pandemic’s CEO.

At the time, the deal was seen as a break from the traditional developer-publisher relationship, which sees the former beholden to the latter for funding. However, when Riccitiello returned to his old job as EA CEO, many wondered if the move might presage a takeover bid of BioWare/Pandemic. These suspicions were further raised when EA agreed to distribute the Pandemic shooter Mercenaries 2: World in Flames under its EA Partners program.

When the BioWare/Pandemic deal was announced, Elevation made much of the fact the union represented a “combined investment” of more than $300 million, including future funding. Today, the company got a massive return on said investment, with EA paying $620 million in cash to the stockholders of VG Holding Corp. In addition, the publisher will issue an additional $155 million in equity to unidentified VG Holding employees, as well as assume $50 million in outstanding VG stock options, and will lend VG $35 million to fund the transition.

In return for paying a princely sum, EA becomes the owner of both BioWare’s and Pandemic’s original properties. Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age are among BioWare’s original IP, which does not include such licensed hits as the Dungeons and Dragons-based Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, or the DS Sonic RPG. BioWare is also working on an unnamed massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Pandemic is best known for the Full Spectrum Warrior and Mercenaries series, as well as the THQ-owned Destroy All Humans! and LucasArts-owned Star Wars: Battlefront franchises.

However, EA was relatively cagey about which BioWare/Pandemic games will become EA properties. The announcement only mentioned one BioWare (Mass Effect) and two Pandemic games (Saboteur, Mercenaries) by name. However, it did say the two studios have “10 franchises under development, including six wholly owned games.”

Pending regulatory approval, EA’s takeover of BioWare/Pandemic will be final on January 2008. Both studios will become part of the EA Games division, run by Frank Gibeau, with Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka continuing to run BioWare, and Andrew Goldman, Josh Resnick, and Greg Borrud staying in charge of Pandemic. The two studios employ 800 people in Los Angeles; Austin; Edmonton; and Brisbane, Australia.

[UPDATE] In a conference call with analysts after the announcement, EA executives shed some light on the motivation behind the deal. Besides the impeccable pedigree of both studios, Riccitiello said that the “acquisition fills out a gap in [EA’s] genre lineup,” specifically the role-playing and action adventure markets. The executive also cited BioWare’s forthcoming MMORPG as a huge opportunity for “further expansion into the MMO space.”

Although the implication is that the BioWare MMORPG is an original IP, Riccitiello and his associates steered clear of saying so specifically. He did say that the deal will make EA the owner of the Mass Effect, Jade Empire, Mercenaries, Full Spectrum Warrior, and Saboteur properties. The executive also said that EA “expect[s] to bring 10 franchises to market in the next few years; six of which are wholly owned.” [UPDATE 2] No mention was made of Dragon Age but BioWare reps confirmed with GameSpot that the little-seen title is moving forward in development, and is already in playable form.

Later, Gibeau said that number includes “many titles that have not yet been announced that we will be announcing in the near future.” These include “several unannounced titles that are targeted both at the Wii and DS.” The two studios’ combined operations are expected to yield around four or five games each year for the next three fiscal years.

On the financial side, EA CFO Warren Jenson said that that he expects games from the two studios to generate over $300 million in annual income during EA’s 2009 and 2010 fiscal years. (EA’s 2009 fiscal year begins on April 1, 2008.) He later said that number would increase once the BioWare MMORPG launches “in the back half” of that period.

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While Virtua Fighter was one of the very first 3D fighting games when it debuted in 1993, it has been one of the last big brawling series to take the plunge into online gaming. The long wait for Virtua fans is almost over, as today Sega announced that the game has gone gold, and is on track to meet its October 30 launch date.

Originally released earlier this year on the PlayStation 3, Virtua Fighter 5 features 17 fighters–two of them new to the series–as well as the ability to customize characters with new items purchased with in-game prize money. In addition to online play, the Xbox 360 version of the game features leaderboards and the ability to download matches from the top fighters so would-be contenders can study their fighting styles. Players will also be able to purchase downloadable Virtua Fighter 5 content through the Xbox Live Marketplace.

For more on Virtua Fighter 5, check out GameSpot’s previous coverage.

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Call of Duty 4 is currently topping the wish lists of PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC gamers everywhere, but Activision’s massively popular shooter franchise is coming to the small screen too–or the dual small screens, to be precise. We got a look at Call of Duty 4 for the DS recently to see how it will relate to its cousin on the consoles and to find out how the controls work on Nintendo’s handheld. COD4 on the DS won’t follow the storyline of the console game explicitly. Instead, it will happen in parallel, so you’ll be visiting the same or similar locations as in the console game, sometimes even encountering the same events that you’ll remember if you’re also playing the bigger version of the game. For instance, the DS version will open with a ship level just like it does in the main game, but you’ll be investigating a different ship from the one on the consoles.

In practice, the game plays much like other recent shooters on the DS. You use the stylus to look around, the D pad to move, and the left shoulder button to fire your weapon. You can access your collected weapons and grenades by tapping icons on the touch screen. You can also bring your weapon up and look down its sights for more precise aim by double-tapping the touch screen. In addition to the run-and-gun core action, you’ll get some occasional on-rails action sequences, like manning a mounted machine gun as you buzz enemy positions. The single-player game will include 12 missions. There will also be a four-player, local-only multiplayer mode with such game types as team deathmatch, capture the flag, and hunter/prey, which is sort of a kill-the-man-with-the-ball game. This multiplayer mode will offer nine maps, two of which you can play with a single cartridge through download play.

In the campaign, the game will also have a couple of interesting and surprisingly hectic minigames. One of them is a hacking minigame where you have to rotate a number of tiles around to create connected pathways between a number of nodes on the edges of the grid. The other minigame we saw involved defusing a bomb. We had a limited number of seconds to trace colored wires with the stylus between various connectors on the bomb, and naturally, we had to be pretty spot-on with our tracing to make sure we could disarm the bomb before it blew us to smithereens.

Call of Duty 4 looks like it’s shaping up to be a fairly solid shooting experience in DS terms. The developer seems to have crammed quite a bit of action and explosions into Nintendo’s scrappy little handheld. The DS game is due out in early November, right alongside the console versions.

-GameSpot

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Nintendo has been mostly mum on its original-game download game service WiiWare since the service surfaced in June. Up until this point only a pair of games from off-the-radar developers have been announced for WiiWare: Medaverse’s Gravitronix and Bplus’ Plattchen: Twist ‘n’ Paint.

Ready to take the wraps off its nascent service, the House that Mario Built announced during its Nintendo Conference 2007 Fall that its internally developed Pokémon Bokujou (aka Pokémon Farm) as well as Square Enix’s Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles would be available for download exclusively through WiiWare in Japan. Nintendo did not indicate whether these games would be available in regions outside of the island nation. The publisher had not responded to requests for comment as of press time.

Speaking with GameSpot, an international Square Enix representative confirmed that Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, subtitled The Small King and the Promised Country, will be available in Japan this March. No hard details on the offering were revealed, though the representative confirmed that the game skews more toward strategy than role-playing.

An international rep for Nintendo also confirmed to GameSpot some details on the tentatively titled Pokémon Bokujou. Players will be able to raise on a farm the Pokémon found in the Pearl and Diamond Nintendo DS games. Nintendo also noted that the game will focus exclusively on the Pokémon creatures, and not feature other characters from the franchise.

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