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Activision has continued its winning streak by spending a third week on top of the All Format charts with Spider-Man 3, GamesIndustry.biz is reporting.

Rockstar has announced that both 360 and PS3 versions of Grand Theft Auto IV will be available in a Special Edition box come release time in October.

Final Fantasy's feathery mascot has played poster-chick to some of Square Enix's most unlikely genre excursions. From Mario Kart style driving in Chocobo Racing, Rogue-like dungeoneering with Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon through to the Monopoly-style board game Chocobo De Dice there seems no limit to the situations and styles Square-Enix is able to crowbar the yellow chicken into.

Metroid Prime 3 will be out in that there America on 20th August, Nintendo said today, in one of those press release things full of release dates.

The first premium content pack for MotorStorm will be available to download from the PlayStation Store in June.

Crafty coders playing the Halo 3 beta have unearthed references to a four-player co-op mode.

Microsoft has unearthed a new expansion for Age of Empires III, which is due for release this autumn.

Activision has signed up Transformers film stars Shial LaBeouf and Megan Fox to reprise their roles in the game.

A Sony spokesperson has confirmed to GamesIndustry.biz that an 80GB PlayStation 3 is to go on sale in Korea - but said there are no plans to launch the model in Europe.

New information on the website for Sony Computer Entertainment Korea suggests that an 80GB version of PlayStation 3 will be arriving in the territory next month, GamesIndustry.biz reports.

Having transformed its free-roaming motoring franchise into a Driv3r-shaped car crash of almost epic proportions, Atari attempted to put things straight with last year's Parallel Lines. Unfortunately the steering was still slightly off, and it wasn't quite enough to redeem a racing game that had become a write-off. Enter Ubisoft and $24 million dollars, and now, less than a year later, arrives the latest attempt to breathe life into the still-ailing brand: Driver 76. It's a prequel to the previous game, and as the title suggests, it dispenses with the dual-timeline structure of that game, sticking with New York in 1976 instead.

Testing a theory, I conducted an experiment. Calling up a friend who plays PC games but whose technical knowledge ends at realising that he needs to buy (or beg me to build for him) a faster machine every few years, I enquired as to whether he had a physics card. As predicted, he was frightened and confused by the question. Without one, he asked, was his PC somehow incapable of physics? But he could use the gravity gun in Half-Life 2. That had physics, right? So what was he missing, oh God what was he missing? I might as well have asked him if his rig had a water card, or a skin processor. Attempts to explain the purpose of the physics card didn't help greatly, and only further highlighted one of the factors keeping the nascent tech dead in the water. The Ageia PhysX physics accelerator card is trying to fix a problem that no-one thinks they have.

Build your own RPG! Just select one answer to each question below, and you'll have a complete design brief for your generic fantasy hack'n'slash roleplaying game, bound to be accepted by any number of publishers who long ago decided that storytelling, believable characters and variety are just irritating baggage nowadays.

It's easy to imagine why Mario Strikers came to be. There's a GameCube prequel for a start but on a deeper level, we know that Japan loves football almost as much as Britain. Japan also loves Mario and the combination is a match made in, well, Shigeru Miyamoto's liver spotted super brain. But then this isn't a game made in Japan, it's made in Vancouver - a short drive away from FIFA developers EA, where team FIFA are working on perfecting David Beckham's new hairdo and debating on how much Wayne Rooney's bottom lip should wobble when things really kick off. Next Level Games have no restrictions of realism to hold back Mario Strikers from becoming the strangest take on the beautiful game we've ever seen. Forget ball physics, just ask yourself how do you make a save while a giant turtle shell is heading towards your testicles. It's a question Barthez never had to seriously consider outside of his surreal nightmares but here, it's all part of the fun and strategy of playing football with the plumbers and the princess.

As Ho Chi Minh said to Jane Fonda, have we got a bumper batch of VC fun for you this week! Not only do you get reviews of this week's latest uploads - Diddy Kong's Quest and Mario & Yoshi - we're also going back in time to start bringing you up to date on all the Virtual Console releases we've missed between Kristan's initial launch round-up and this throbbing new weekly column. New reviews of new old games and new reviews of old old games? Sweet potatoes! Don't say we never give you anything.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to review retro games. As recently as a year ago, you knew who you were writing for - the hardcore die-hard gamer who'd been playing since the 80s. But now, with the games of yesteryear available on mobile phones, on Live Arcade and Virtual Console, and on compilations such as this, what was once an underground scene of nostalgic aficionados has crept into the mainstream.

Harmonix art director Ryan Lesser has said the developer is doing all it can to keep Rock Band affordable, GamesIndustry.biz is reporting.

Published as part of our sister-site GamesIndustry.biz' widely-read weekly newsletter, the GamesIndustry.biz Editorial is a weekly dissection of one of the issues weighing on the minds of the people at the top of the games business. It appears on Eurogamer a day after it goes out to GI.biz newsletter subscribers.

It's news city, so be the mayor with our roundup of all this week's events in the feature we're lazily calling "The week in games". Got a better idea? Tell us and we'll steal it.

SCEA boss Jack Tretton has questioned whether Xbox 360 has enough power to take part in a Folding@Home-style initiative - saying he'd be "very disappointed" if the company is just seeking out good PR, GamesIndustry.biz reports.

Vivendi has decided to spread TimeShift onto PS3, where it will join the already confirmed PC and Xbox 360 versions.

Blizzard has revealed that patch 2.1.0 for World of Warcraft will introduce the Black Temple as an instance, home of Illidan The Betrayer.

Square Enix has finally decided to bring Final Fantasy VI Advance to Europe, stamping a 29th June release date on it.

Shibuya, arguably Tokyo's most iconic futuristic geography, fizzes with neon hairdos and mini-skirt vitality. With its distinctive train station and the interminably busy Scramble Crossing, it's a location that has played host to videogames before. But while Jet Set Radio picked these broad streets as much for the gameplay-facilitating multi-tiered architecture as anything else, Square-Enix's forthcoming DS action RPG, Subarashiki Kono Sekai is out to jump on its carefree joie-de-vivre.

The boss of Eidos' new Montreal Studio recently sparked rumours that a new Deus Ex is in development.

To paraphrase Parkin, Eurogamer undrinks and the floor greens itself. We're chasing a bottle of wine with Guinness, Kronenberg and Jack Daniels. We're not drinking responsibly. We're not even "good at pool" drunk, we're just disgraceful. It's all gone wrong. There's a story I, well, am writing now, that a hot American woman was getting a neck-rub from a friend, and I offered to massage the rest of her, with distinctly un-Bramwellian regressiveness. Thankfully she's a good sport, because dignity's thinner on the ground than Nicole Ritchie feeling under the sofa. All we can say in our defence is that the following morning we got up as if nothing had happened. And promptly collapsed in agony, went back to sleep for another 48 minutes, and arose with a song in our throat and a, wait, that's not a song that's, gulp, be with you in a minute.

LocoRoco creator Tsutomo Kouno reckons too many of the games available for PSP are sequels - and that he plans to redress the balance, GamesIndustry.biz is reporting.

Microsoft has started to ban modified Xbox 360 consoles from Xbox Live, describing the move as "an important part of our efforts to try and maintain a fair gaming environment for the large majority of gamers that play by the rules".

Microsoft's Peter Moore has paid tribute to Rare's recent product history, defending the Twycross-based developer against claims that its output has struggled to keep touch with the critical and commercial successes of its output prior to its acquisition by the Xbox platform holder.

The fate of any new console isn't so much about how powerful it is, but the quality of its first party exclusive titles. You only have to look at how significant Gears of War, Project Gotham Racing and Halo have been in establishing Microsoft as a serious player, or how vital Zelda and Mario games are to Nintendo.