Mario & Sonic's Olympic start slips

Kane & Lynch isn't the only new game confirmed to join a November 20 murderer's row of new releases. Sega today said that the Wii edition of Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games will also launch that day, with its DS counterpart coming in a distant second in the first quarter of 2008. The Wii edition previously had been announced for a November 13 release date, while the DS edition had been expected by the end of the year.

Despite the stiff competition on November 20--the Xbox 360 role-playing game Mass Effect and the PlayStation 3 action game Uncharted: Drake's Fortune will also be released that day--Sega has high hopes for Mario & Sonic's retail prospects. Speaking at the Tokyo Game Show last week, Sega corporate director Masanao Maede predicted the game would sell four million copies, on par with the success of the original Sonic the Hedgehog game for the Sega Genesis.

As the name implies, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games pits the major mascots of Nintendo and Sega against one another (and 14 characters pulled from their supporting casts) in 20 actual Olympic events. In addition to the standard track and field events, the game will also feature fencing, table tennis, gymnastics, and skeet shooting.

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games will be released in for the Nintendo Wii on November 23 in the UK and Europe, with the DS version set to follow in Q1 2008.

For more on the game, check out GameSpot's previous coverage.