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This developer diary for The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena discusses the Dark Athena itself, a mercenary ship run by Captain Revas. Riddick is caught aboard the vessel and discovers the Ghost Drone program, which allows mercenaries to use modified human hosts to fight remotely. Check out the Ghost Drone trailer shown after the jump. Assault on Dark Athena is scheduled to release in early April.

Download HD Assault on Dark Athena Developer Diary #3 (409 MB)
Download HD Assault on Dark Athena Ghost Drone Trailer (261 MB)
Check out all Assault on Dark Athena downloads

We have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Vin Diesel. The actor has made some really poor movie role choices (Babylon AD anyone?) but he clearly loves games. He's got two games due out in the next few weeks from his production company Tigon Studios. One is Wheelman, the Midway produced action-driving game that has just gone gold and will ship to stores on March 24. The other is The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena with Starbreeze developing and Atari publishing in early April.

But according to a article at Destructoid, those project pale in comparison to what Diesel wants to do next: an MMO title called Barca BC that will have the player live the life of a Carthaginian soldier in 200 BC fighting alongside Hannibal in the Punic Wars. Diesel knows it takes a long time to develop an MMO game (he estimates that it could be another four years to make the game a reality) but he insists, " . . . it is something that is something very high on my priority list of games we're working on." We believe you, Vin.

The 2004 Universal Studios sci-fi movie The Chronicles of Riddick was, well, not good. Not good at all. The film, starring Vin Diesel, was a sequel to a much smaller scale (and much better) sci-fi film called Pitch Black. The sequel, however, was a failed attempt to turn the franchise, and Diesel's character of Riddick, into a huge Star Wars-like epic. The end result was a movie that took itself far too seriously and fell apart.

However developer Starbreeze Studios and publisher Vivendi Games crafted a sold first person action game based on the Riddick character. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (which actually takes place prior to the events of Pitch Black) was one of the best looking games for its day and its combo of first person shooter combat with some melee gameplay was very satisfying. It remains one of the best movie-to-game translations ever made.
A couple of years later, Vivendi Games revealed that Starbreeze was working on a remake of Escape from Butcher Bay with revamped graphics, a new single player campaign and the addition of multiplayer for the first time. However very little was revealed about this remake from the publisher after its announcement. With Vivendi Games' merge with Activision to form Activision Blizzard last year it seemed like the game had been forgotten.

Thankfully that turned out not to be true as Atari announced late in 2008 that it had picked up the publishing rights to the remake, now titled The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. Atari recently sent over a partial PC build of the game's single player portion to Big Download so we could put it through its paces.

While Atari has picked up the rights to the upcoming first person shooter remake-expansion The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Eurogamer reports that a true sequel to the first Riddick is in the works. The news comes from Ian Stevens, the head of production at Tigon Studios who first came up with the concept of the game that was later developed by Starbreeze Studios.

Stevens states, ""[The full sequel] is ambitious and that is definitely going to follow the precedent that we set with the first." In the mean time Assault on Dark Athena will have a new single player campaign and multiplayer features in addition to a graphical remake of the first Riddick game, Escape from Butcher Bay. Atari plans to release the game sometime in 2009.