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The Vanguard: Saga of Heroes open beta will close just before midnight on 23rd January according to Sigil Games Online and publishing partners Koch Media and Sony Online Entertainment.

America's Electronic Software Rating Board has craftily included a listing on its website for Wii and PC versions of Driver: Parallel Lines.

According to the latest issue of Dengeki, Square Enix is preparing a Final Fantasy XIII demo for July this year.

If you've ever played any of the Far Cry games on other platforms - like the fantastic PC version - you'll be aware of certain key things that define the series. Number one is definitely fantastic graphics; ever since the glorious island environments of the first game, developers have built on the powerful engine to create ever more impressive visuals. Second to that, undoubtedly, is the AI of your opponents, who work as groups and intelligently utilise the cover provided by jungle environments. A third pillar, added more recently in updated versions of the game, is excellent multiplayer support.

If you've been lurking around Eurogamer TV, you may have noticed an exclusive trailer for PS2 and PSP title, Free Running.

Those of you with keen eyes lurking behind your rose-tinted specs will already have noticed this week's new additions to the European Virtual Console: Street Fighter II and Super Probotector.

Bethesda has confirmed that Oblivion expansion The Shivering Isles is in development for PC and Xbox 360, due for a spring 2007 release.

Microsoft has refused to comment on rumours that Xbox Live Arcade games are now allowed to use up to 250MB, or even 450MB under some circumstances.

Microsoft and Q Entertainment are taking over again next Xbox Live Wednesday to deliver a trio of content packs for Lumines Live.

Good news and bad news for those of you slugging it out in the third of Activision's Second World War 'em ups: there's a new Xbox Live map pack available, but it, er, doesn't work.

DS mind-benders have sold in steroid-like proportions, especially in Japan, where Brain Training has made the Nintendo handheld outrageously successful.

It's a gimmick! It's a fad! It's a silly toy! It'll never stand up against the might of the vastly more powerful PSP! Who wants to play games on a touch-screen anyway? What developer is going to use the second screen for anything other than a stupid map or something?

The first video for Codemasters' Brian Lara International Cricket 2007 is now available on Eurogamer TV.

It might not be a platform in the traditional sense, but massively multiplayer games have become such an important part of the gaming landscape - and so distinct from everything else on the market - that this year, we've decided to treat them as a platform in their own right rather than grouping them in with PC games as a whole. After all, there are plenty of PC gamers who simply don't do MMOG - and probably quite a few MMOG players who simply don't do other games.

World Snooker Championship is effectively two games in one, these days - thanks to the American audience's apparent aversion to the sombre and gentlemanly world of snooker, the pool championships (in all their many forms) have been built up over the years to the point where they are now more numerous and just as comprehensive as the snooker tournaments. Good news for pool players, I suppose, but as a snooker fan it just looks like more and more versions of the exact same thing to me - a pattern that has arguably come to define sports games these days. In most cases (snooker's in particular), we've been making them long enough now to have perfected the mechanics of the particular sport. For official licences, progress now lies in making them look and feel as authentic as they play.

Despite the success of Net Nanny, the Internet continues to turn everything upside down, all day long, often in front of the kids, and just as often against the odds. Instead of lining their copper pairs with gold, the ubiquity of broadband has sent phone companies into a mad panic. Instead of drowning among the proles, our maligned TV heroes have been reborn as cyberspace heroes. And instead of relegating simple games to the hyphenated subdomain of anonymity, it's proven a springboard to wider fame, whether it's Cloning Clyde on Xbox Live Arcade or, as we see here, Codemasters' attempt to wrestle money out of office time-waster Bliss Island by sticking it on the PSP.

I wasn't really sure what to make of it when Sonic Rivals dropped out of a jiffy bag onto my kitchen table. Only days after suffering my way through the agony of Sonic the Hedgehog on the Xbox 360, the unwanted appearance of yet another Sonic game felt nothing short of downright cruel. Had I done something to offend Kristan, Eurogamer's review commissioning overlord? Was this to be my punishment - an eternity of frustration at the hands of a spiky blue hedgehog? We used to be friends, man.

Last night, HMV Oxford Street found itself surrounded by warlocks and orcs, warriors and night elves, paladins and mages and priests.

"I don't like Curious George any more."

When the PlayStation originally burst onto the games market in the mid-nineties, quite a few gamers and journalists alike became preoccupied with one rather odd question - who was to be the mascot for this new system? After a decade of Nintendo and SEGA's platforms being all but defined by Mario and Sonic respectively, it was tough to grasp the fact that Sony had no intention of allowing their console to be led out by a single character franchise - after all, the whole point of PlayStation was to reach an incredibly wide range of people by appealing to a broad swathe of gaming tastes. Undeterred by Sony's apathy on the matter, pundits tried to give PlayStation a third-party mascot - Crash Bandicoot and Lara Croft were both front-runners - but none of them ever really stuck.

When Koei decided to port its mega-successful (in Japan) Dynasty Warriors series to the PSP, the company had an utter masterstroke of genius. Instead of undertaking a straightforward port that would have imposed technical limitations on the hallmark huge battlefields and constrained the free-roaming action and multitudes of combatants, the game was broken down into more manageable bite-sized chunks. Each battlefield was divided into a series of smaller areas, and the action itself was divided across turn-based movement over a map of these areas, and real-time combat whenever you moved into an area held by enemy forces. What's more, you could save your progress between each area.

Having Sam & Max back in our gaming lives is gift-wrapped joy. The fact that Telltale can, in 2007, stay true to the original point and click adventure premise is probably the most remarkable thing about Sam & Max's belated comeback after an absence of some 13 years. Everything else - including the quality of the gags on offer - is one hell of a bonus.

Of all the platforms I've looked at over the past week, Nintendo's handheld and home console pairing of DS and Wii are the most tricky to make predictions for. Despite Nintendo's wealth of superb gaming franchises, the chances are that the top titles of the next year will come out of left field - after all, who could have predicted a couple of years ago that games such as Brain Age, Phoenix Wright, Nintendogs or Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! would become so dearly beloved of DS fans?

There are innumerable retro classics that instantly warrant a place on Xbox Live Arcade. Now and then we sit down over a few pints and get all dewy eyed about the past and reel off a giant list of all those all-time greats that we'd love to revisit. Never once has New Rally-X appeared on that list, and yet here it is, shining proudly as the latest ancient title to be dusted off for the Xbox Live Arcade treatment.

Continuing our whirlwind tour of the gaming delights which are in store for us in 2007, our next stop is that most contentious of platforms - the PlayStation 3. While it'll only be in Europe for three quarters of the year at most, and it's largely accepted that the first year of any console's life is generally a somewhat sparse one on the software front, a quick scan of the release schedules shows that PS3 actually has some very interesting prospects ahead of it this year. It may not be able to match the full head of steam that the Xbox 360 has built up just yet, but if Sony can deliver some of the headline titles on this list on schedule, the PS3's hefty price tag might start looking a little more palatable.

With the flurry of next-gen excitement in the console market over the last couple of years, it's easy to forget that the PC has also continued to evolve at a spectacular pace - and is already trotting out many of the "next-gen" experiences which we're still waiting for the Xbox 360 and PS3 to provide. It's an exciting - if rather expensive - time to be a PC gamer, and of course the platform gets its own major upgrade early this year when the much delayed Windows Vista finally appears. The new OS may not be of much interest to gamers, but DirectX 10, which accompanies it, certainly is - and towards the end of 2007 the hugely impressive PC games we're seeing now will be superceded by even better looking titles using the new API features. Let's take a look forward.

A new demo for Paradox Interactive's strategy title Europa Universalis III is now available for download.

As a child, my parents regularly admonished me for never being happy with what I had. An early and keen believer in the idea that faraway hills were altogether more lush and green, I was not satisfied with the present, but instead obsessed with the future; utterly disinterested in the lolly in my own hand, instead burning with desire for the ice cream shop around the corner. In other words, I was a bloody nightmare of a child who probably needed a clip around the ear.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has declared that the strategy for Xbox 360 is "working perfectly", questioning Sony and Nintendo's next-gen console offerings.

KOEI has announced that PS3 titles Bladestorm and Fatal Inertia, originally scheduled for March, will now launch in summer 2007.