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You're Electronic Arts. You're making a James Bond game. You're about to kit out the player with new gadgets from Q Branch. In Bond films, of course, Q Branch was designed to provide comic relief while adding new toys to Bond's play-set, because Bond is meant to be exciting and funny at the same time. He's suave and sophisticated, but also defiantly impish. But this isn't a Bond film. It's a game. You know it's a game. The player knows it's a game. So how do you do it?

PlayStation 2 owners buying Resident Evil 4 later this year will have even more goodies than originally thought, according to Famitsu.

Namco's weapons-based beat-'em-up extravaganza, Soul Calibur III, will be released in Japan on November 24th, according to Famitsu. That's a pretty much a whole month later than the US and European release for the PlayStation 2 title. Namco [hearts] j00.

With Prince of Persia 3 nearing completion, Ubisoft has released details of some of the secondary characters we can expect to see. The developer is pitching the third game as a concluding chapter that "will bring back all the major characters" - and the most significant addition to the line-up has to be Farah, heroine of The Sands of Time (pictured left in her new threads).

Extremely promising massively-multiplayer car-combat title Auto Assault won't be released until spring 2006 at the earliest, publisher NCsoft and developer NetDevil have confirmed.

Japanese publisher Tecmo has announced that it has begun development for the PlayStation 3, with company president Junji Nakamura telling an investors and media meeting yesterday that work on the platform is now underway.

A number of online reports have emerged suggesting that the Xbox 360 version of Square Enix' massively multiplayer title Final Fantasy XI will only play on versions of the console which are equipped with the hard drive.

Half-Life: Blue Shift is now available on Steam for people who own the original Half-Life, or one of the two Half-Life 2 Steam "let me download all the games cos, like, I gave y'all lotsa money" packs. [The Silver and Gold packages. - Ed]

Rising Star Games will be showing off a host of new titles at next week's London-based trade event, Games Market Europe.

The new SOCOM 3: U.S. Navy SEALs blog, created by Zipper Interactive and Sony Computer Entertainment America, has turned up some fresh info about the maps in the forthcoming tactical-action title.

Writing about Xbox ports of PC games is hard. Well, it's not hard to do, but it is hard to start. Those of you who've played the PC version are always going to be skimming for the new bits, and the rest of you are going to want a full appraisal. Striking a balance is very difficult.

More accessories have been announced for Sony's PlayStation Portable as the machine gears up [charges up, more likely - Ed] for its European launch on September 1st, with Datel creating Action Replay MAX and an extended-life battery pack for the handheld.

Ah, Famitsu. Japan's much-loved gaming publication has confirmed the development of Resident Evil on Nintendo's DS, complete with screenshots.

The Suffering's action-oriented take on the horror genre made for a refreshing change for fans with a thirst for the darker side of life when it arrived out of the blue last year. Carving itself a niche as an action-horror title certainly paid off for Midway, too, with the game going on to sell well over 500,000 copies worldwide, and managing to be one of a select few new brands to make any kind of impression on the masses at all.

The film translation of Microsoft's somewhat-popular sci-fi based first-person shooter franchise Halo has been given an official 2007 launch target by Universal and 20th Century Fox, according to a report in entertainment publication Variety.

As Epic Games proved with its Unreal Engine 3 demonstration this year, being able to pause a demo and spin round the action gives you much more credibility than a stream of video or a static screenshot. Electronic Arts isn't letting you do quite that, but it has released a couple of QuickTime 3D screenshots to help get us in the mood for Burnout Revenge.

SEGA has declined to comment on a report stating that the publisher hopes to release Shenmue 3 on a next generation games console.

Codemasters has signed a new sci-fi/fantasy Massively Multiplayer Online RPG from developer CCR, called Rising Force Online.

The recent litigation-bound argument between designer Marc Ecko and New York City mayor, Michael Bloomberg has ended – with a judge ruling in favour of Ecko.

Huzzah! Sony America has finally released the 2.00 update for PlayStation Portable, giving owners of US versions of the handheld the chance to take advantage of an Internet browser, improved video and audio playback, photo wallpaper and image transfers, and some other less exciting benefits. You know, like the ability to not play any user-developed content off the Memory Stick any more.

Japanese publisher Square Enix has announced that it has offered to buy rival Taito in a deal worth around 67 billion Yen (500 million Euro), which would create the third largest game publisher in the Far East.

EA's last James Bond game, Everything Or Nothing (you'll notice we're pointedly ignoring Rogue Agent), was an original story based on contemporary Bond. However, what was most interesting about it wasn't so much the new story, but the way that it built particular gaming scenarios - third-person action, stealth, on-rails shooting, driving, and even sky-diving - around an original narrative. It was what we often expect from a film licence, but without a direct licensee.

The previous two columns have primarily dealt with genres outside of the PC games mainstream. The first took on games that exist in the casual gamer world or art space. The second examined the Shmup [shoot-'em-up - Ed], a founding-stone of our gaming world now relegated to the touchlines. This time, we're looking at something that's a little more central to our thoughts of PC gaming: the strategy game. The twist being that both of today's examples show precisely how limited our conceptions of strategy games have become.

Epic vice president Mark Rein has gone on record with C&VG to confirm that the Unreal Engine 4 is currently in development - and has been for the past two years.

Nintendo of America latest release schedule has revealed that its lynchpin DS title Metroid Prime: Hunters has slipped into next year. The news follows just days after it emerged that the GameCube's biggest hope for 2005 - The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess - has also been moved back into 2006.

Fans of the rather excellent Guild Wars are in for a treat this weekend, as ArenaNet is setting up an extra special event.

UK retail powerhouse GAME has clarified that while it is still taking pre-orders of Microsoft's forthcoming next generation machine, Xbox 360, there is currently no word on how many units the group or country will be getting.

The next home console iteration of the Gran Turismo series is currently scheduled to arrive in 2007 and will be "100 times more detailed" than GT4, according to Polyphony Digital boss Kazunori Yamauchi.

The GameCube version of Electronic Arts' SSX On Tour may be getting visitors in the shape of Mario, Luigi and Princess Peach, after sources apparently saw the game featuring the Nintendo characters.

A dispute between fashion designer Marc Ecko and the New York government has erupted, with Ecko announcing plans to sue the city mayor after a permit for the party promoting the graffiti art-form and his new game was revoked.