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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.

Microsoft's tough demands for the proposed Halo movie may have turned off many large Hollywood studios, but the firm's gamble may still have paid off - with Universal and Fox reported to be nearing agreement on a deal to make the film.

Konami is currently hard at work on a new PS2 spin-off from the Suikoden series, according to Japanese magazine Shonen Jump.

The PC version of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time - quite possibly this writer's favourite multiformat game of the past half-decade - is set to be released on budget this Friday, 17th June, as part of a new line-up of Mastertronic "PC Gamer Presents..." games.

Sony has shipped around 100 PlayStation 3 development kits worldwide so far, according to SCE boss Ken Kutaragi, but the company is currently struggling to meet demand from developers and publishers for the hardware.

Amazon.co.uk has launched its traditional summer sale and, for once, there's quite a bit of substance lurking around the £10 mark and just above, particularly on PlayStation 2 and Xbox - with offers split between a dedicated "summer sale" page and a more extensive "clearout" section.

Speaking exclusively to our sister site GamesIndustry.biz, Dan Morelle, MD of online retailer ElectricBirdLand, has announced plans to hold a secret meeting of independent retailers prepared to take a stand against Sony's clampdown on PSP imports.

Square-Enix has confirmed to Eurogamer that Europe is likely to get a Limited Edition version of the Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children UMD, complete with 30 minutes of bonus scenes from the original FFVII - just like our Japanese friends.

Microsoft's Xbox 360 will have better graphics performance than the PlayStation 3 despite the better on-paper specifications of the Sony console, according to graphics chip designer ATI's Richard Huddy.

Ah, the sights and sounds of Game Stars Live. The persistent throng around the Halo 2 and Pro Evolution Soccer 4 stands; the persistent thong around the chiselled backsides of legions of rent-a-totty, as they squeeze up against gold chain-wearing chavs and get their picture taken; and of course the hotpants-wearing silicone adverts doling out PlayBoy merchandise to ten year-olds. We shall miss them all - assuming we don't wander back over at some point this weekend to pick up one of the man-size Spider-Man cutouts we forgot to collect before we left last night.

Rather like our trip home from the pub last night, Burnout 2: Point Of Impact was about getting close but not quite ploughing headlong into traffic and cartwheeling into the air and dying horribly in a heavily fractured and crumpled mess wrapped around the nearest crash barrier. Burnout 3: Takedown, released today, recognises the fact that near misses are only exciting up to a point. Hence the expanded Crash mode, which is, in the words of our esteemed editor, "almost an entire game on its own" - something that's bound to sound like music to the ears of anybody who's ever sat in a group and argued over whose turn it was to try and get a gold medal at the junction du jour in Point Of Impact. Like the music of screaming metal and death, in fact.

With Tom busy sampling all that Amsterdam has to offer with the aid of Vivendi-Universal's flexible friend (do we even want to imagine the levels of madness that are going to occur later this evening?) it's up to me to inform you of this weekend's retail-related chaos. That's if your time isn't already taken up by mad ginger scouse fellows with an army of dogs, Clay Pigeon shooting, Archery and Stag weekend madness, followed by a Sunday spent wondering exactly why people in this country insist on forcing as much alcohol down their necks as possible in the name of fun. Tip: throbbing hangovers aren't fun; drink three pints of water before bed and feel like a king in the morning while your partners in crime swim in an alcoholic fug for the rest of the day and curse you for being so bloody chirpy.

I know (yes, I know - I'm not having that scumbag Reed borrow this column for a week and talk to you in the first-person and then expect me to revert to the default royal 'we', no sir) that... there's... a sunbeam... touching... Actually, I bracketed that up beyond repair. Let's start over: I know... that a lot of you read 'What's New' quite regularly. I don't really understand why, but then I don't understand fusion propulsion either and I've never found that to be a problem (except for that one time). But, bearing in mind that a lot of you seem to return here to scroll past my incongruous ramblings and find out which games are coming out every week, you might be interested to know that there is actually some rhythm and rhyme to the way 'What's New's is constructed.

Horses are the new ants. You may have noticed I was AWOL yesterday. Actually you probably didn't. But I was. I was at a Goodwood Charity Day. Several things stand out in the memory: realising that horses look faster on TV, standing cross-armed as everyone cheered the Charlton Hunt, picking up a few spectacular conkers on the walk back to the car, and backing three winners out of six using the old "close eyes and point" technique. Much to my companions' increasingly penniless bemusement.

Today we seem to be in the eye of the storm. Having been struck by wave after increasingly crushing wave of high profile titles over the past month, today's release list is lower on volume, higher on content. It's the bunker bomb of October Fridays, and it's going to pound the pennies out of your pocket with as much fury as the average winter weekend's dross-strewn crater of 4/10s and unfamiliar TV spin-offs can ever manage. And I know it's bloody autumn.

When it comes to buying games for other people, it's usually elderly grandmothers who get the most stick. We're not sure what the luckless octogenarians did to earn such distinction - which sees them regularly implicated in the purchase of less than seminal videogames on birthdays and during the festive season - but short of buying DRIV3R and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in some sort of shameful discount bundle, they'd have to go some way to top the exploits of a friend of mine's mother, who recently distinguished herself by not only failing to buy the right thing for her 20 year-old son, but managing to grasp the wrong end of the stick so firmly and with such dire consequences that my luckless chum is not only out on his arse but also separated from his girlfriend of six months into the bargain on account of his reaction.

It's been a while but, after a fairly sizeable hiatus, up and down the land today people will be flapping their arms vigorously in front of groups of others, making complete fools of themselves and reminding the world that EyeToy still exists, and, yes, it has given us some games that are worth buying.

Funk. DJ "The Funktipus" voiced by George Clinton.

The world's biggest specialised Massively-Multiplayer Online games finally comes to Europe. Part of your mind can't help but ask... well... who cares?

Loonies. All of them. And look at how many! We know it's not easy - working out when to release games to achieve maximum awareness and make the most of their sales potential - but you have to question the sanity of some of the people working in the industry today who have released games - no matter the quality - in direct competition with a product so completely and utterly unstoppable as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Owning PCs is an expensive business, and a dangerously loveless one with regards to gaming in the last few years. The latter half of 2004 has brought more than its share of winter sun, however, with Doom 3 and Rome: Total War giving the slightly faithless good reason to upgrade their graphics grunt. But today the prayers of the masses are answered. Football Manager 2005 is out. In the shops. And everything.

Then it struck me. A ball. Gaily tossed by a since-repentant flatmate.

This week's What's New is brought to you by the number 7. Without prejudicing reviews we haven't posted yet, Call of Duty: Finest Hour, Crash 'n' Burn (or "Crash 'n' Bum" as our front page font seems to insist) and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within are all games we sort of expected to be good-to-ace, and all have slotted neatly into that above-average-but-not-quite-brillifabulent bracket reserved for games that aren't quite as good as all the stuff we were recommending with such gusto last month.

Bollocks. I thought I was being clever. I'd got everything done in advance, I'd worked out which games were coming out, and I don't think too many people noticed that Eurogamer basically shut down last Friday at around 1pm when we all descended on Brighton for our Xmas party to go bowling (and admire Rupert's once-in-a-lifetime feat of six consecutive strikes), gambling (and admire Rupert's once-in-a-lifetime feat of covering all the bets except the ones which came up and losing lots of money), eating (and admire Rupert's once-in-a-lifetime feat of eating more food than me) and dancing (and admire Rupert's once-in-a-lifetime feat of... actually he dances all the time, like when he talks. And when he poos). Anyway, long and short of all that is that as Kristan rang up Nintendo to ask about review code in the car on the way down, we realised Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls had actually come out. And I realised I thought it was coming out today. Sorry about that.

It's official: going for a walk in the rain to check out the new Sainsbury's Local up the road and buying a sandwich whose nutritional information implies that even the bread and lettuce are made of mayonnaise [ulp] is not a great muse. But it is a soggy and guiltily tasty way to fill a few more minutes before blindly wittering on about a release list comprised entirely of games I haven't played, only one of which has received anything approaching critical acclaim from my peers.

Did you catch up on much? I didn't. I've still got a large stack of unfinished games sat on my left speaker. I blame a mixture of festive excesses, celebrations and a worrying recurrence of migraines for various stolen evenings, which I had expected to spend wearing down my thumbs on analogue sticks and not pint glasses, pork pies and Nurofen.

Poor old Leon Kennedy. Zombies would've been fine. He'd know how to deal with them. They shamble, they groan to announce their presence, and as long as you can keep them at arm's length you've got plenty of time to deal with them. Jill Valentine and co. were missing a trick, really - all they needed was a big hula hoop and they could have saved all the herbs they liked for the giant spiders, Nemeses and what-have-you that lurked ahead. Leon though has a bigger problem. A big plastic hoop would be about as much use to him as a foam finger with "Brains Over There!" written on it. In Resident Evil 4, which the US press is currently frothing over more than an open-air Alka Seltzer warehouse in a monsoon, he's got more pitchfork-wielding lunatics chasing him than Prince Hitler. And this lot don't just want an apology; they want to hold him down while the local Leatherface impersonator does a number on his neck with a fricking chainsaw. And he's meant to save the president's daughter from this lot, too. At least our Royals know better than to wind up in cultish forest-clad shantytowns in South America swapping pleasantries with possessed weirdoes, eh?

Question: What do the Airbus A380, the Bush inauguration, Burnley FC and 24-hour pub licensing laws have in common?