Godzilla prepares to Save the Earth

The brilliantly named Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee is to be followed up this autumn by the slightly less Japlish-sounding Godzilla: Save The Earth, Atari announced this week. Original developer Pipeworks is working on the new game, which will appear on PS2 and Xbox - complete with online options for both consoles.

Atari's Peter Wyse promises the sequel will deliver "more monsters, more cities and more radioactive monster bashing," and there's certainly plenty of evidence to support him. This time out a new single-player mode will see Godzilla fighting to free his fellow monsters from captivity, as the Vortaak launch an offensive against Monster Island. They're trying to get their hands on some indestructible "G-Cells", created with a little help from Godzilla's genetic code, and obviously that would be a bad thing, so Godzilla is left to fight off wave after wave of monsters, mind-controlled armed forces and UFOs. Other environments will include San Francisco, Tokyo, Osaka, New York and Los Angeles - although we're not sure how much more you could trash that place.

Save The Earth will also feature a challenge-based single-player game, mini-games, and straight fighting modes with customisable parameters and support for four players. Online modes will allow for head-to-head, three/four-player melees and two-on-two battles. On the whole it sounds like particularly destructive stuff, and we did enjoy the last one so we're quite keen to see how this is shaping up at E3 next month. As fans of silly throwaway tech, we're also keen on the idea of "dynamically generated gouges" in skyscrapers.

We'll hopefully be rendezvousing with the game's "more than 18" classic movie monsters (so, 19?) at E3, and in the meantime you can check out these screenshots to see the likes of Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Gigan, Mothra, SpaceGodzilla and Biollante getting a little bit rowdy. Bless.