The following products have a Street Date of JANUARY 25th, 2012:

Technical Readout: 3055 Upgrade ($29.99)

In 3055, a new breed of Inner Sphere BattleMech started rolling off assembling lines—’Mechs specifically designed to counter the Clan invasion—at the same time that secondline Clan ’Mechs began to appear. By 3067 those design have become a staple of the modern battlefield, giving rise to notable MechWarriors and new variants, while the demands of the ever-popular Solaris VII Games have resulted in a plethora of new dueling ’Mechs designed using prototype technology.

Technical Readout: 3055 Upgrade presents the Solaris VII ’Mechs built using prototype technologies. Upgraded in appearance and technology, the designs first presented in the Solaris VII box set and Solaris: The Reaches are now back in print, along with several new Solaris VII designs. In addition to the upgraded appearance of selected Clan designs, all the art work for Technical Readout: 3055 Upgrade is new, providing fresh illustrations of now classic Inner Sphere BattleMechs and Clan OmniFighters.

The ’Mechs in the Solaris VII BattleMechs section are constructed using select equipment found in Tactical Operations. To use those designs, players will need that book.

NOTE: This is a Catalyst-branded reprint, with a new cover and including all appropriate errata. No other changes have been made.

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In October of this year Piranha Games announced the next installment in the MechWarrior franchise: MechWarrior Online (www.mwomercs.com), a premium, free-to-play game based on the bestselling BattleTech universe. In an ongoing weekly information rollout, Piranha Games continue to share the on-going developments of MechWarrior Online with the growing community anxious for the game’s release summer of 2012.

Piranha Games has just published the second Developer Interview with Randall N. Bills; an in-depth discussion with Catalyst Game Labs’ Managing Developer who is acting as the MechWarrior Online Continuity Editor and Fiction Content Manager (Developer Interview 2: Randall N. Bills).

“I couldn’t be more excited about this,” said Randall Bills. “There’s been a wonderful legacy of computer games over the years, but often they’ve strayed beyond the BattleTech/MechWarrior aesthetics and continuity. Obviously concessions must be made when working with a different medium; some things will be different from the board game to accommodate what must be done to create the best possible computer game experience. But the relationship being forged with Piranha Games leaves me confident we’ll create a computer game experience that’ll more closely match the almost 30 year legacy of publications than any previous endeavor. I’m anxious to tackle the challenge with Piranha Games.”

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The following product has a Street Date of February 1ST, 2012:

BattleTech 25th Anniversary Introductory Box Set ($59.95)

Strap yourself into the ultimate suit of armor: the BattleMech. Thirty feet tall and weighing up to a hundred tons, this humanoid engine of destruction is a walking arsenal with enough firepower to level a city block. The BattleTech game system takes you into the world of the 31st Century, where war has become a way of life. You are a MechWarrior. You are in command of the most powerful machine on the battlefield, and hold the fate of empires in your hand!

The BattleTech 25th Anniversary Introductory Box Set thrusts you onto the battlefields of the 31st century. This box contains everything needed to play:

• 24 unpainted, ready-to-play plastic BattleMech minis
• 2 unpainted, premium-quality plastic BattleMech minis
• One 12-page full-color quick-start rulebook will have players into the action in minutes
• 36-page book of pre-generated BattleMech Record Sheets
• One 80-page full-color rulebook
• Inner Sphere at a Glance, a 56-page full-color book of universe background and BattleMech technical data
• One 16-page full-color Painting and Tactics Guide
• Two heavy-duty cards of compiled tables
• Two 18″ x 24″ game-board quality maps

Catalyst Game Labs fully supports game stores and encourages players to purchase from their local retailers. If that is not possible, however, you can pre-order it directly here.

It’s been a long march through a lot of production issues for this much anticipated reprint of the best-selling Introductory Box Set to the perennial BattleTech game line. As you can see from the photos below, it’s finally in our warehouse and now it’s just a matter of re-packing in the Thor/Loki miniatures; hence why the Street Date is February and not December.

Thanks for all the patience!