Koei's Fatal Inertia is one of the lesser-hyped games from E3 2006 that really caught SPOnG’s eye when we attended a behind-closed-doors demo of it last year. A mish-mash of WipEout-style futuristic racing, Mario Kart power-ups and Katamari Damacy collect-and-grow-a-thon, if you can get your head around that as a concept!

Fatal Inertia is the debut title from KOEI's Toronto-based studio, led by producer Takazumi Tomoike, best known for his work on the awesome Dynasty Warriors series.

Strange then (and deeply ironic, considering the title!) that the PS3 version of Fatal Inertia has now been delayed indefinitely due to “middleware issues”.

SPOnG spoke with Koei’s PR rep in the UK this morning who assured us that Fatal Inertia was still in development for PS3 and “definitely would not be canned” as a number of reports have already suggested earlier today.

Lead Game Designer Michael Bond says of Fatal Inertia, "By designing Fatal Inertia's gameplay around a physics engine it not only allowed us to create a truly different driving model, but it also helped us create a set of dynamic weapons with multiple tactical applications… We've based many of the game's weapons on straightforward physical principles, and by doing so we're giving players the freedom to come up with their own creative ways of using them- ways that even we are still discovering."

Fatal Inertia will hit Xbox 360s across Europe this September and PS3 “sometime in 2008.” Check all the new screens right here.