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Naughty Dog and Sony will release a playable demo for Uncharted: Drake's Fortune "sometime mid-November" according to AI and animation programmer Christian Gyrling.

Will Wright has said that Spore is about six months away from release on PC, suggesting that Maxis' ambitious life sim is on track to launch in line with publisher Electronic Arts' most recent estimate of early fiscal 2009.

Having struggled to come to terms with the concept of paying more than your average budget price for Dr. Mario and Castlevania, we thought we'd be slightly more tempted by Metroid. After all, this is the consistently brilliant series that has in recent years brought us two excellent Cube and GBA titles, not to mention the seminal SNES classic back in those prime days of 2D. This reviewer was genuinely taken with the idea of rewinding to where the series began, to see what he'd missed in his gaming youth. Now now, there's no need to toss missiles at your humble correspondent; it's just this one was too busy messing around with tape loading errors, colour clash, rubber keyboards and the like to have ever afforded that glamorous NES thing. No sir. In the 80s, more or less the only thing Nintendo succeeded with in Europe was the Game & Watch and a Donkey Kong arcade cabinet in every local chippie up and down the land. The prospect of playing the very first Metroid was as much of a history lesson to the likes of yours truly as it probably is to most people reading this. Given how much love we have for a lot of Nintendo's 8-bit output we were almost excited. This was to be a voyage of discovery.

The Church of England has forgiven Sony for not asking permission before recreating Manchester Cathedral in Resistance: Fall of Man.

If you've already slogged your way through Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, you might imagine that you've seen enough bombs, boomerangs, bows and hookshots to last a lifetime. Well, you haven't, so sit down and stop sulking.

Achievements have been in the news recently. What originally smacked of pointless gimmickry from Microsoft has now revealed itself as a stroke of slowburning, evil genius amongst those transformed into horribly addicted gamerpoint whores (you know who you are, Kristan).

Hyper Sports certainly had ambition. Instead of diligently retreading the steps of its predecessor, Konami's sequel to Track & Field introduced seven new events. T&F's three-button control system (two for hammering at speed, one to cover jumps/gymnastics/breathing/taking steroids) returned though - as did a familiar requirement for brute force and deft timing. The game also proudly holds the gold for "seediest wink ever seen in videogaming."

Jade Raymond wants to meet you lot and answer your questions this Saturday at the HMV on Oxford Street.

In Mr. Do!, players control an evil circus clown who tunnels underground in search of innocent, soil-dwelling creatures to steal fruit from. If these hapless beings attempt to cross his path, he crushes them with apples or throws a power ball in their supple faces. Some might spin this tale in a more positive way, but that just makes them deviant clown sympathisers.

Midway also confirmed to us this afternoon that Blacksite: Area 51 will launch on PC and 360 in November.

Midway has confirmed that Unreal Tournament III will be released on PC here in November.

To play Valhalla upon its release back in 1983, the gamer had to spend a whopping £14.99 for the privilege. For most people this amounted to many weeks of accumulated pocket money, and suggested the game must be something extra special to warrant such a price.

Some would argue that those involved in developing games on the 8-bit computers had a much easier time of it than their equivalents today. With a clean inspirational slate, the creative juices of the game designers could really let rip and turn pretty much any concept, idea or situation into a title the public would lap up.

Would you believe that Tony Hawk will be 40 years old next year? You wouldn't if you'd seen his performance at this year's Leipzig Games Convention, where he wowed the crowd with some of his bestest skateboarding stunts and didn't look like he was getting on a bit at all.

Amongst this Top 50 you'll probably stumble across a fair few instances of reviewers hailing spectacular graphics, the staggering use of 48K of memory, or acts of maverick genius. Well, add Tornado Low Level (T.L.L.) to the exulted selection of games which exhibit all three, because here comes some incredulous praise.

It's nearly a year since we got a Wii, and still the people come. The ex-gamers, the non-gamers, the women, the children, the Dads. "Have you got one, then?" they say. They "don't normally like games", but they've seen the Wii on telly and it looks like fun. They ask if they can come round and play it, and we say yes, and we know exactly how things will go.

Every so often an idea pops up which is both ingenious and dazzlingly simple. The concept of a romper-suited agent being pursued along a train by knife-throwing baddies with only a bizarrely shaped bird for protection might not seem all that straightforward, but after a couple of minutes it all slides amusingly into place.

Pity the poor publisher which tries to sell a first-person shooter right now. At a time when gamers are positively drowning in 10/10 games in the shape of Bioshock, Halo 3, the five-pronged Orange Box (and another half dozen highly impressive also-rans), anything that's scoring less than a 9 is likely to get short shrift from anyone with a wallet. Either Codemasters is supremely confident about Clive Barker's Jericho, or someone forgot to look at the release schedule.

Sony has finally decided that SingStar PS3 will be out in December, after making us fear the worst recently by saying the game was stuck in "release limbo".

Polyphony Digital has signed a deal with BBC Worldwide to let you watch Top Gear on your PS3.

You may not actually be able to play it unless you delete some porn, but Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction does have hidden depths to explore once you do.

Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction may have landed in some US stores this week, putting it a little bit ahead of schedule, but it also arrives with a bug that can potentially stop you playing it. Whoops.

Nintendo of America's outgoing vice president of marketing says that the company is "starting to look at the annual calendar differently" in terms of release date timing, rather than just stuffing everything in Q4.

Tim Schafer has come out and said there is actually no new Psychonauts game being worked on at the moment.

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts has revealed this year's Video Games Awards winners, GamesIndustry.biz reports.

Look at us, praising Portal for its brevity. Life's too short for games these days and when a great one comes along that we can polish off in a few short hours, hey, we'll readily celebrate its existence. Trimming off the excess is one solution for saving time, certainly. There is, however, a rather trickier alternative, and one we can apply here, and that's to get two games on the go at once. An impossible task for the human brain, you might well think, but, ahh, surely the direction things will be heading once you see Chronos Twin's neat party trick.

Those of you interested in working in the wonderful world of videogames (run away, run away!) should pop along to the London Game Career Fair this week.

EA has eased a Need For Speed ProStreet demo onto the Live Marketplace starting grid.

Tim Schafer and his talented Double Fine Productions have popped a fresh listing on their website for a new Psychonauts game.

Atari has whipped a new demo for Eternal Sonata up onto Xbox Live, so that those of you who were unsure about buying it last Friday can try it out.