With Easter looming, one of the non-PS3 related games SPOnG is particularly looking forward to spending more time with is Ignition's Mercury Meltdown for Nintendo Wii.

So it’s interesting to note that the 30-man strong development studio behind the title – Ignition Banbury (formerly Archer Maclean’s Awesome Developments) has just been bought up by Oxford-based Rebellion.

“Ignition [and Atari] are still set to put out Mercury Meltdown for Nintendo Wii,” Rebellion’s CEO Jason Kingsley told SPOnG today.

“We can’t announce yet what the guys will be working on. Essentially we have just saved 30 jobs. We’ll be getting them up to speed with our Asura middleware and getting them used to our processes and whatnot, then we’ll have some big announcements to make pretty soon,” Kingsley added.

Rebellion has been on something of a studio-buying spree of late having snapped up both Tomb Raider developer Core Design and Starship Troopers developer Strangelight Studios, last year.

“We have some big licenses we’re working on with EA and pretty much every other major publisher,” Kingsley told SPOnG.

So watch this space to find out what those are in due course. For now, the Rebellion-developed 'parkour' inspired game Free Running is the next title to come out of the studio, published by Reef Entertainment for PSP and PS2 (pictured) - due 20 April.

The buy-out does not affect the release of Mercury Meltdown on Wii - what is, in SPOnG’s learned opinion, the best version of the puzzler to date and a fairly major release for Wii this Easter.