Licenses? Who needs licenses? With newly revealed plans to revive the Tecmo Bowl franchise in 2008, Tecmo joins Visual Concepts in an attempt to prove that football games can be fun without NFL trademarks. Ironic -- considering that the original Tecmo Bowl was the first sports game to popularize the use of official licenses (Tecmo Bowl was an NFLPA licensed game).

How Tecmo plans to flip the script is still a mystery us ... and maybe even to Tecmo itself. Aside from a vague announcement during Tecmo's 'Night Out 07' event, the developer has shown little more than a logo of the new Tecmo Bowl (not the one pictured above) and refuses to discuss the intended platform. "I can't tell you what platform we're making it for. But I can tell you that it's probably not going to be on the platform that you're expecting ... if that makes any sense," hinted Tecmo vice president Mr. Inaga, adding, "This is going to be a brand new game for one of the new systems." Ready, down -- hut-hut-hut-hut-hut-hut...

Nintendo takes a backseat this week while three third-party titles are launched for Wii's Virtual Console. Tecmo, which promised aggressive support back in August, has released its NFL license-free (and not-so-super) Tecmo Bowl ($5) for NES. The other two titles we already knew were coming: Sonic Spinball ($8) for Sega Genesis and Double Dungeons ($6) for TurboGrafx 16.

Though there is no specific VC release schedule (a predicament both Nintendo and Microsoft's downloadable services unfortunately share), we do know that Splatterhouse, Vectorman, and Beyond Oasis have been promised for this month.