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Do not play F.E.A.R if you have no head.

You are a man. (Apologies if you're not.) You are holding a big gun. You run into a room. People are standing around. Some more race in through doors nearby. They try to shoot you. They're a bit crap at it. You try to shoot them. So are you. Since you can use the health items you picked up earlier, you eventually overhaul them and they flop to the floor, dead. You loot their corpses, then set about finding the way to the next room.

Nine men and one woman dressed in an array of casual clothes are perched in varying degrees of comfort around a low coffee table, upon which are strewn a variety of recording devices, business cards, notepads and pens. Seven of the men are computer games journalists; six from the UK and one European journalist who sounds German. The woman is a Vivendi-Universal Games PR minder employed to monitor the conversation. The man who completes the set is KEVIN STEPHENS, director of technology for game developer Monolith, who oversees the engineering for the company's action division and also manages the core technology group that built the technology behind F.E.A.R. His previous game credits include Claw, Shogo (lead engineer), No One Lives Forever and No One Lives Forever 2 (lead engineer for half the project), and minor involvement in Aliens versus Predator 2 and TRON 2.0. The seven journalists have switched on their recorders and prepare their pens for swift note-taking, and we join the conversation as Kevin Stephens has just repeated his job title for the third time and spelt out his surname - confusion having arisen about his pronunciation of it as though it were a plural of "Stefan"...

If you're into first-person shooters and you have a PC, then there's no doubt that Monolith Productions' F.E.A.R will be one of the games right at the top of your Most Wanted lists for 2005. That's certainly what we thought when we last played it - with poor Tom getting excited enough to write about the opening section and the multiplayer element after a recent trip to Vivendi's Parisian HQ. We got our first opportunity to play other areas of the single-player element recently and will be looking to bring you our first impressions of the game later this week. But first, we grabbed a one-to-one with Kevin Stephens, Monolith's director of technology.

Ubisoft has released a free seven-mission campaign called Iron Wrath for Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, which is available through 3D Gamers this week for the US and UK versions of the game.

Capcom Eurosoft is asking fans of the Resident Evil series what they would most like to see in the fifth game in the series, which was confirmed in March by producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi.

Sony is planning to release a new battery charger for PlayStation Portable users in Japan next month, GameSpot reports this week, although there's no word yet on a more capacious chunk of Li-Ion love.

Clearly undeterred by the fact that the last Resident Evil film was so awful that we started gnawing through our own intestines in hope of escaping - before we realised there was a green "EXIT" sign in the corner - Constantin Film AG is apparently setting about producing two more films in the series.

You can see how it happened. Not how the film was good - I mean, nobody knows how the hell that happened - but rather how the game of the same turned out to a really bad Golden Axe 2005 nightmare where standing behind tables and chairs is sufficient to overcome Sith Lords, your incredible telekinetic lifeforce gift can only be deployed on specific markers, your mentor camply scythes through your suspension of disbelief by announcing, "My stamina's increasing!" at odd intervals, and you're completely incapable of seeing anything more than three metres left or right of you despite being able to deflect laser blasts from behind your head. This is meant to be a path to the dark side, not a bloody guided tour!

Oregon-based developer GarageGames Studios has announced plans to develop games for Microsoft's next-gen Xbox 360 console, acquiring BraveTree Productions as part of a new expansion.

Sony Computer Entertainment boss Ken Kutaragi has claimed that the PlayStation 3 is being positioned as a supercomputer capable of running multiple operating systems, with the Linux system to be pre-installed on the machine's hard drive.

It's official - downloading games is the new going to the shops. First we had Nintendo's revelation that you'll be able to access classic titles from its expansive back catalogue to play on your shiny new Revolution console - at a price, of course.

Interesting times at Planet Konami, with the company yesterday finally getting around to showing off its latest batch of UK-developed titles. Long-term Konami followers will realise that this is still very much a novelty, with the Japanese publisher finally looking to break free from the shackles of its long-term policy of producing only home-grown titles. Konami will certainly be looking for a big improvement on its UK output to date, following on from Apocalyptica and Casino, Inc. - two inauspiciously low-key efforts that represented a bit of a false start for the company's European ambitions.

Munetatsu Matsui - editor-in-chief of Famitsu Xbox, well known for its close connections to Microsoft's Japanese operation - has stated that a grand total of 20 launch titles are lined up for the Xbox 360's November debut.

A set of specifications purporting to be for Nintendo's Revolution console have appeared on the Internet, outlining a system with impressive graphics capabilities - but the company has confirmed that high-definition outputs won't be supported.

As refreshingly optimised as Half-Life 2 was to run on low and mid range PCs, there's no doubt that a hugely significant chunk of its owners went out and upgraded their rigs with the specific intention of playing Valve's game without compromise, in all its staggeringly gorgeous glory. But while many of us went out and upgraded to a gigabyte of RAM, stuck in a high-end Radeon or GeForce and spent a fortune, it's pretty clear that our PCs had plenty of headroom left - and now Valve wants to take advantage of that with the forthcoming release of a specially designed level called 'The Lost Coast'.

Everyone's favourite bald, barcoded bad guy, Agent 47, is back in action later this year, as the Hitman makes his return to our gaming systems on PS2, Xbox and PC. And with the game expected to make its public debut at E3 in just a few day's time, Eidos has released new screenshots of the game which you can sample right here.

To say that a new single-player Quake has been a long time coming is something of an understatement. It's been positively agonising, with nearly eight years skipping past since id's legendary Quake II took PC gaming to new heights.

You've just created a first-person shooter lauded as one of the greatest ever, selling not only millions of copies of the game itself but also millions of consoles to play it on; what do you do next? If you're Bungie, you knuckle down and start working on a sequel. On the other hand, if you're Bungie co-founder Alex Seropian, here's what you do: you bail out, move to Chicago, start a brand new developer, license the Halo engine and start building something almost - but not quite - completely different.

Don't you love it when games companies go and make something specifically tailored to your specialist subject? A game so up your street that you already instinctively know you'll be the feared conqueror of all who dare to challenge you? A game that Tom has already conceded defeat on six months before its release. That game is Buzz, Sony's latest in its growing range of family entertainment titles that brings the madness of the 'fingers on the buzzers' quiz show into your living room.

Those onetime Britsoft gods at Rare have had a bit of a rough ride from the press in the last few years, and with some justification. Since Microsoft signed a gobsmackingly large cheque to add the studio to its internal development repertoire back in 2002, it hasn't exactly justified its price tag - producing only the fun but not exactly world-igniting Grabbed by the Ghoulies, and the forthcoming, foul-mouthed, Conker: Live & Reloaded. In what must be a bit of an embarrassment for Microsoft, if you wanted to play a really good Rare game in the last few years, the best place to do it was on Game Boy Advance.

Under conditions of security that would shame the average prison, one of the undoubted highlights of our recent sojourn to E3 was the chance to sit down in front of a ten-minute presentation of King Kong, undoubtedly Ubisoft's big Christmas blockbuster for the year. Based on the Peter Jackson-directed remake of the 1933 classic, we got to hear a few words from the man himself, explaining how the videogame gave him the opportunity to use creatures that didn't make the cut and the like before we got to enjoy one of the more impressive demos of the show.

Speaking exclusively to Eurogamer, an EA insider has confirmed that the handheld version of crash-and-bash racer Burnout will indeed get an outing on Nintendo DS.

Codemasters has revealed more details of LMA Manager 2006 for PS2 and Xbox, along with some new screenshots which you can find here.

Although you could argue that Pandemic's first "Spectrum Warrior" title didn't exactly leave us "Full", you'd be hard pressed to convince me that it didn't give us something interesting to chew on. With the sequel, Ten Hammers, the developer has reacted to criticism and refined a number of elements that ought to make for a more enjoyable game - helped no doubt by its newfound distance from the core specification demanded by the US Army for the original training tool upon which FSW was based.

Juice Games, the helpfully named developer of street racing title Juiced, has told Eurogamer that it is already working on projects for the next generation of console formats.

Ever since we first clapped eyes on the tech demo for Black about a year ago it was glaringly obvious this would be a game to watch. A game where the central concept was about "being able to have fun with a gun in an empty room," where "the gun is the star," and one that was "going to do for shooters what Burnout did for racing games". Or in other words, the most insane levels of destruction your eyes have ever seen outside of a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster. When Criterion's Alex Ward talks about recreating the famous lobby destruction scene in The Matrix you nod politely. And then you see it for yourself and your eyes don't even blink for about four minutes.

Few GTA 'inspired' titles deserve to get away with borrowing ideas wholesale as much as Scarface. How so? Well, for a start Rockstar's multi gazillion-selling Vice City was virtually a homage to the Al Pacino movie, while the seminal GTA III featured almost the entire movie soundtrack. In an 'Indiana Jones borrowing from Tomb Raider' display of justifiable mindshare payback, Tony Montana is spraying an M16 in the direction of Tommy Vercetti, if you will.

Namco has revealed more details of Real Time Conflict: Shogun Empires, the forthcoming RTS game for Nintendo DS. Screenshots can be found here, and there's also a new trailer on Eurofiles.

A new demo for Digital Illusions' Battlefield 2, the sequel to hit PC shooter Battlefield 1942, is now available on Eurofiles.