If you thought last week's onslaught of releases was nuts, it's starting to look like this week will be even more insane. Aside from all the other games coming out this Thursday (or Wednesday night for us Americans), you can also add Gameloft's NOVA 2 to that list. Also, since this is the last Thursday before the pre-Christmas iTunes Connect lock out, it's safe to assume any game you've heard rumblings about being released this holiday season will also be appearing for download.

This new NOVA 2 trailer shows quite a bit of vehicular combat, which has always been my favorite part of Halo games. Of course the NOVA 2 thread in our upcoming games forum is going crazy with anticipation, and we'll do our best to provide an in-depth look at the game as soon as its released.

If you were looking forward to spending this holiday season curled up next to a fire with a goblet of eggnog in one hand and your iPhone in the other playing Square Enix's upcoming tactical RPG Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions for iPhone, you're going to need to come up with alternate plans. According to a recent note posted on Facebook, the game now has an incredibly vague release window of "spring 2011". If they stick to releasing this upcoming spring, the soonest we'll see Final Fantasy Tactics is somewhere in between March 20th and June 21st , the official beginning and end of the 2011 spring season.

This marks the second time that Final Fantasy Tactics has been pushed back, as originally the game had a release date of September 15th. The good news of all this is, unlike some big-name developers who seem to hold game releases to coincide with marketing plans and release schedules, Square is delaying the release to make the game better. Comparing the last screenshot released to these new ones today shows a considerable improvement.

The Facebook page is rather vague, but it sounds like the game now has full 3D maps which can be panned and zoomed around using standard iPhone swiping and pinching gestures. Also, the entire UI has been redone to be touch friendly. It's hard to say how much these screenshots represent the final version of the game as well, since they're sized at 720x480px, a resolution not found on any iOS device. Either way, Final Fantasy Tactics is high up on my list of games I want to play next year.

According to the folks at tech gadget site KnowYourMobile, yes it is. They have posted a video on YouTube showing a very playable version of the game running on iPhone, which they apparently caught a glimpse of during a visit to EA Mobile's offices in London. The video is shot from kind of far away, and doesn't really show a whole lot, but is unmistakably Mortal Kombat on an iPhone. As a huge fan of the 2D Mortal Kombat games, I would be immediately skeptical of controlling such a game with a touch screen, but the video shows a virtual stick and button setup that seems to perform pretty well, and the game is running at a decent speed.

With the long-awaited Mortal Kombat franchise reboot slated for early to mid 2011, a version of the series on iOS would make sense. EA Mobile also recently released a version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 for JAVA, so it's conceivable that they could have had an iOS version in the works as well. It's not known whether this is a port of the Ultimate Mortal Kombat that hit the Nintendo DS a few years ago, or possibly a version of the Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection HD for consoles that was leaked a few months back but has yet to actually surface. If it does end up being a collection of the first 3 arcade games, then consider me overjoyed.

Feel free to speculate about the game with members in our forums, and we'll be eagerly anticipating any additional information or official word from EA Mobile on this release. KnowYourMobile has said the game will be launching in December, and with nearly half the month already gone I'll be interested to see what becomes of Ultimate Mortal Kombat on iPhone in the next couple of weeks.