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It seems there may be more going on at the Rare HQ than just work on Xbox 360 titles Kameo and Perfect Dark Zero, if hints on the developer's website are anything to go by.

Nintendo DS duo Pokémon Diamond and Pearl will be released simultaneously in Japan next year, according to reports, while a third game named Pokémon Ranger is also expected to appear.

Atari has announced that its new Flashback 2 plug-and-play console will feature classic Activision titles Pitfall! and River Raid.

Ubisoft has no plans to release Lunar: Dragon Song for Nintendo DS in Europe, the publisher told us this week.

British censors have stated that the controversial Hot Coffee mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas won't change their rating for the title - but Australian censors may be on the verge of banning the title from sale.

So what's more important to you - the roof over your head or the characters you've created in your favourite MMORPG?

David Kirk, chief scientist at NVIDIA and leader of the teams behind the GeForce 7800 and PS3 graphics chips, has revealed that the company plans to work closely and extensively with Sony in the future.

We all moan when the games industry packs up and suns itself for a couple of months, but we'd rather look on the bright side of this situation. For a start, this release drought leaves the high street stores desperately trying to spur demand with all manner of tempting sales. Even a cursory glance at the many sales on at present reveals that a whole range of relatively new releases are being discounted to scarily low levels in an attempt to get stock moving. Unreal Championship 2 on Xbox for £14.99 anyone? The deals are out there...

Budget games are a big deal. We're not all made of money, as the saying goes, and, as the prices of major new games start to tumble faster and faster, the number of high quality games shipping out at a budget price point is on the up. Just last week in fact, Sony revealed that PS2 Platinum titles would soon hit £14.99 in the UK, and surely it won't be long before Nintendo and Microsoft follow suit.

The studio behind the Age of Empires (and Age of Mythology) series is working on a new massively multiplayer title, a job listing on Ensemble Studio's company website has revealed.

Hip Interactive Europe has issued a statement this afternoon explaining that it will be continuing business as usual despite the bankruptcy of the North American division of the company, Hip Interactive Corp.

A post by site administrator Chris Pickford over on the Bizarre Creations forums has revealed that there's no guarantee Xbox 360 title Project Gotham Racing 3 will run at 60 frames per second.

CEX marketing and PR manager Jonathan Cronin has confirmed that the high street retailer is no longer selling imported PlayStation Portable consoles.

Europe could be just about to let one the greatest PS2 titles ever made pass it by, and not for the first time. Yet again, some inexplicable political skulduggery has ensured that yet another outstanding Sony America-developed title will be released by Sony Europe without the required pre-awareness and sufficiently beefy marketing clout, almost guaranteeing a tragic underperformance of a truly stunning game.

Yes, they've gone and done another one. And as you could probably guess without us telling you, Mario Party 6 features yet more-mini games starring the plucky plumber and chums, with more coins to earn, more power-ups to collect and more game boards to make your way around.

The story of the Gizmondo should be written down in the history books, passed on from generation to generation and posted on the wall of every games industry bigwig in the country. Its message is this: if you give a console a completely stupid name, it will face ridicule and mockery - no matter how powerful the machine is, what the games are like or how many members of Girls Aloud you invite to the launch party.

Nintendo really is turning into the Willy Wonka of games companies. While others continually churn out perfectly exciting gaming confectionary (the equivalents of Yorkies, Mars Bars, Milk Buttons and so on, with the occasional Chomp or Curly-Wurly thrown in to confuse the taste buds), Nintendo seems to spend most of its time working on the kind of gastronomic peculiarities that make you convulse pleasantly, or chocolate biscuits that you have to coax out of the packet by cooing gently.

Taking an old classic and buffing it up for a new generation is a road we've been down many times before - and it's a road fraught with pitfalls. The kind that jogs our rose tinted spectacles off our nose and causes them to get crushed under the wheels of this unstoppable retro bandwagon. However many times ancient arcade classics get remade, there's something so wonderfully pure and unsullied about the originals that we can't help but plead that the rights holders just let them rest in peace, forever cloaked in glorious fug of our heads.

Following on from Monday's hardware review, now we come to the really important stuff: the games. The Gizmondo sure looks good on paper, with a 400MHZ processor, 128 Bit 3D graphics accelerator and Bluetooth connectivity for multiplayer gaming, but how does the system fare when it comes to actually playing it?

Released a week or so before Half-Life back in November 1998, the original SiN came out to a hearty ripple of applause. It seemed like a pretty solid Quake II-powered sci-fi FPS about the nefarious Elexis and her plans to hijack a nuclear weapon. It had mutants galore and some memorable moments, but soon, the much-hyped Ritual Entertainment-developed title fell by the wayside once it became clear how great the gulf between the two FPS rivals really was. While SiN was happy to play things by the book (and did so pretty respectably), Half-Life took the book, ripped it into little pieces, pulped it, made another one and re-wrote every FPS rule imaginable. The rest is, as they always say at this point in any introductory paragraph worth its salt, history.

Nintendo got the message, then. When the Japanese giant first rolled Advance Wars: Under Fire into public view last year there were more than a few murmurs of discontent among the faithful when they saw Kuju's action-heavy interpretation of the classic turn-based strategy series. It's not that it was a bad game as such, but the bottom line was that it simply wasn't Advance Wars. If you can imagine turning Chess into a cutesy third person strategy-laced action adventure and then asking Gary Kasparov to express his righteous indignation, you've probably got some idea of the extent of the backlash against what Kuju was planning.

How many games does the tubby plumber and his dysfunctional friends need to star in, exactly? Not content with his burgeoning Soccer career, reviving his side scrolling glories and planning an unlikely future as the leader of a hip hop gang (probably), his family now want to own the party scene on the handheld and it's a Mario game too far that is interesting only in its stunning ability to bore the pants off even the most ardent Mariophile.

Big Mutha Truckers 2: Truck Me Harder. Take a good look at that title, and ponder it for a while. Breathe in its intentionally unsubtle word play (which you'll undoubtedly see replicated in this review, natch). Absorb its facetious humour in the subtitle. Then wonder just how well the racing-cum-trade original did to actually warrant a follow-up (just over 10,000 in the UK, nigh on a million in the States, fact fiends...). Yes, the first game was mildly diverting fun, but sadly not worth anything more than the six out of ten rating we blessed on it with at the time. Then again, it wasn't really for us, was it?

It's not often we bother with getting our hands dirty with the business of reviewing hardware here on Eurogamer; there are plenty of site devoted to the subject for that. But in this case we're prepared to make an exception for Joytech's rather wonderful AV Control Center range. It's something you could neatly sum up in a couple of ways; an audio-visual switcher box with a difference, or just simply the answer to many gamers' prayers.

There's a big problem with Really Good Games, and it boils down to this. They inevitably sell loads of copies, earn their publishers bundles of money, and inspire other publishers to follow their lead in a bid to cash-in on their success.

For someone who plays a lot of videogames - whether you're a reviewer or simply a games fan - there's a lot to be said for any title that does things a bit differently. Nowhere is this more true than in the world of RPGs; console RPG detractors may bang on about the "spiky-haired hero waking up on a beach with no memory and then saving the world from an ill-defined plot to destroy it" stereotype a lot, but even the most dedicated fans of the genre, myself included, have to admit that there's a grain of truth in there. Console RPG storylines are often excellent, but very often their creators fall back on the comfortably familiar faux-medieval setting and clichéd central character set. Witness even Star Ocean - set thousands of years in the future - which still found an excuse to dump you into medieval swashbuckling at the first possible opportunity.

You might have guessed by now that we liked God Of War. A lot. For want of better superlatives, it's simply a great game. A classic game that's near enough the best PS2 action adventure of all time, and is therefore something you should buy as our review goes to some length to point out.

We don't know whether Aurora Watching developer Metropolis Software spent much time peering at the stars during the game's development, but they certainly looked up Metal Gear Solid, because the footprints trodden into the snow by that game are followed in a roundabout way more or less throughout this one.

More details of Viewtiful Joe: Battle Carnival, currently in development for PSP and GameCube, have been revealed by Clover Studio - and word is it's not going to be a typical sequel.

It's been just two months since Xbox racer Forza Motorsport roared into stores and since then no less than 700,000 copies have been sold - and deservedly so, we reckon, since it scored no less than 9/10 in our review.