SEGA has just announced that it will release Sonic Rush Adventure, the follow-up to 2005's Sonic Rush, on the DS this Autumn. SPOnG has the first screens at the bottom of the page for your perusal.

The new title will toss Sonic into the high seas in classic 2D style. He'll clash with pirates over seven levels (seven levels, seven seas, coincidence?) on the handheld's dual-screen. You'll get to try your hand at nautical piloting, with Sega promising a fleet of up to five ships, including a submarine, “water bike” and hovercraft, using the DS's stylus.

Players will get down to the serious business of bouncing around and running really, really fast across levels ranging including lush forests, a nasty-looking ghost ship, snow covered mountains, pirate villages and a vast sub-aqua sea cave. At the end of each level the action will break into a 3D boss battle across the DS's two screens.

SPOnG's greatly heartened to see no mention of those nasty things SEGA has called plots in recent Sonic outings - such as Sonic The Hedgehog. There'll be no guff about Flames of Disaster resulting in endless cut-scenes here, thank you very much. If you want to know why that sort of thing's so very, very wrong see SPOnG's review of Sonic for the PS3 here.

Sega and Nintendo have been cuddling up quite a bit, recently. Sonic and Mario are finally getting loved up in Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games. Meanwhile, Nintendo seems to be the only hardware manufacturer capable of providing a platform for a decent Sonic game in the form of Sonic and the Secret Rings.

All available fingers are crossed at SPOnG that the DS will deliver another handheld platformer classic a la New Super Mario Bros.