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It seems it's not just us blood-thirsty westerners that enjoy the homoerotic adventures of Marcus Fenix, as Gears of War penetrates the Japanese charts at number seven this week.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attourney - Justice for All will be released in Europe on 16th March.

You'll have to forgive the lack of a clever introduction to this review. The original plans involved some witty observations about the disappointing lack of robot servants in my home (possibly including a domestic insight into the state of my laundry basket), a dig at the utter uselessness of Honda's stair-climbing Asimo, and a brief sighing look back at the golden age of robots we were promised by science fiction authors decades ago. The whole affair would have been capped off with a clever tongue in cheek mention of the fact that we're also still waiting for flying cars. It would have been, in other words, a satisfying if not entirely unpredictable opening paragraph which would have put you into a fine mood to read a quick review of a game with friendly robots in it.

Weeks after telling our sister site GamesIndustry.biz that the developer would remain independent, Ritual Entertainment has been acquired by growing casual games specialist Mumbo Jumbo.

Nintendo sold 3.19 million Wii consoles by the end of 2006, it said today, announcing record profits.

Pope Benedict XVI has described videogames that "exalt violence and portray anti-social behaviour" as "a perversion".

EA is readying a DS compilation of its favourite casual games for release on 26th March in Americaland.

Episodic gaming might not make business sense for Mark Rein and Epic. It might not even be working out for Valve the way it had hoped, and Ritual's episodic adventure appears to have stalled too. But for Telltale Games, it appears to be working a charm.

Along with the news that the PlayStation 3 is launching for definite really really certain on 23rd March, we also have a list of prices for the basic line-up of peripherals.

Typical. You spend a good 28 seconds trying to come up with a convincing list of launch titles and then everyone's favourite "semi official" Sony trumpet Three Speech goes and posts them anyway.

Sony has officially confirmed that PlayStation 3 will launch in Europe on 23rd March and cost GBP 425 / EUR 599.

Ubisoft's latest release schedule is showing all PlayStation 3 launch titles as TBC in Europe (TBC insofar as no one knows when the PS3 is actually launching in PAL territories as yet).

You'll have to peg your eyes open tonight, as details of the PAL PS3 launch will be released at midnight GMT.

Vivendi has refused to give a solid release date to next-gen PC RTS World in Conflict today, saying that "internal rejigging" of development schedules means "spring" is as specific as you're going to get right now.

It might be the first to appear on the PlayStation 3, but Armored Core 4 is actually the twelfth game in the series. The chances are, though, that you won't be too familiar with any of the previous 11 games in the Armored Core series, so here's a quick rundown: create or customise a big robot (called, appropriately enough, an Armored Core, or AC) by choosing from hundreds of body and weapon parts. Then fight other big robots, either in one-on-one arena battles or in more elaborate missions. It's a simple formula, which conceals an enormous amount of depth. But it's not a formula that, so far, has had a huge amount of commercial success outside Japan and the US.

Often when it comes to assessing the cross-Pacific paddle of a treasured Japanese videogame - particularly something of a musical bent - it's a case for us of bemoaning the inevitable infusion of Western cultural icons. Like Avril Lavigne. Worse, you're forced to note that even lifeless, incomprehensible babble in another language, or happy cartoon scrawls with outsized heads and mental flapping arms, sweep you along on waves of sympathy far greater than any of those inspired by the phoned-in nonsense scraped from the reels of an LA recording booth, or squeezed from the underpaid pencil of whichever intern's borrowing the "artist" credit that morning.

Lumines Live's promised downloadable content packs are now available to download from Xbox Live Marketplace, but you'll need to set aside more than a few minutes to grab them.

Codemasters is planning to launch Colin McRae: DIRT simultaneously on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC in June, the publisher told Eurogamer this morning.

Sega has waxed lyrical this morning over the "very cool" and "unique" aspects of its newly signed PSP oddity, Crush.

This is the most complicated simple game you'll play in a while. It's the cheerful fling that quickly and quietly becomes something serious, something so intense it's mentally exhausting in all the right ways. Supreme Commander is unashamedly RTS, reduced to the nuts, bolts and panels of bewildering icons that have always defined that most PC of all game genres. Its only pretension is to be really big - it doesn't have Total War's grand strategy map or Company of Heroes' merry gene-splicing of the formula, nor does it need them. It just needs to be huge, and that's where the complexity comes in. Hundreds of units, each with their own handicaps and potencies, maps that'll wear your mouse-arm out to pan entirely across, and constant battles on a good half-dozen different fronts simultaneously. The objective is only ever to kill the other guy, but when there's so much to think about at once, it ain't easy.

Since the launch of the Wii a month or so back, the focus has been, understandably, on the big launch releases for the system. Zelda and Wii Sports, in particular, helped make Christmas 2006 one of the most memorable in years. Friends who'd been out of touch with games for yonks were almost weeping with joy at the likes of Wii Sports Bowling, and vowing to get a Wii as soon as they came back in stock. Meanwhile, normally reluctant family members were clamouring for another round of Golf or Tennis, and what could have been a dull days watching old movies became magically transformed into hilarious and competitive multiplayer magic.

Like many stalwart publishers, Capcom has been busy spilling its retro guts over as many platforms as it can manage lately. And why not? When you've amassed a back catalogue as vast and impressive as this legendary company has over the decades, it seems almost rude to keep them locked away in the vaults, or, at best, the preserve of the emulation community. Besides, emulation has come so far that we're now, finally, in the position of being able to play perfectly replicated versions of our childhood faves on handheld systems like the PSP.

Microsoft's Peter Moore has issued an open letter to the press with the aim of getting us PUMPED about the impending launch of Windows Vista - and primarily emphasising just how important the company believes games will be to the operating system's success.

Dave will be pleased: less than six months after the original version of the sequel, Samurai Warriors 2 Empires is due out here on 16th March.

Early access to the full version of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes will be offered to players who've pre-ordered from 26th January at 10am PST (6pm GMT), Sigil Games announced overnight.

Mario Kart 64 will be next week's addition to the American Virtual Console for Wii, bringing the total of currently available US titles to a massive 42.

Nintendo was pretty reluctant to release a follow-up to the NES. Having commanded a vice-like grip on the North American and South-East Asian game markets, it waited until its opponents had all shown their hands before trumping all of them with the Super Nintendo - or SNES as it became affectionately known.

Kicking off a series of regular updates on the Virtual Console releases, we thought we'd check out what the NES channel has to offer, and see whether these old 'Famicom' relics offer anything more than blind nostalgia appeal to a few veteran gamers out there.

To the wide-eyed European gamer in the late 1980s, the idea of owning a machine capable of playing arcade perfect ports seemed like a fantasy. But if money was no object, the release of the TurboGrafx-16 in Japan on 30th October 1987 went some way towards fulfilling that fantasy.

Ubisoft's first Driver game since it acquired the licence in 2006 will be for the PSP.