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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?

Rob Fahey is sitting alone in his bedroom flicking through press releases and online retailers on his computer. He notes that the ESPN range of American sports titles appear to be out on Play.com, but nobody else admits to having them. Rob gets up to fetch a drink. As he approaches the kitchen, a blur of chunky muscle erupts out of the cupboard under the stairs and smashes him into the ground. The blur is Tom Bramwell - pretending to be Terry Tate, Office Linebacker. He appears to be doing this because NFL Street 2 is the only game out in Europe this week.

They're about to rip my face up and start again.

Of all the worlds we'd rather inhabit (and there are quite a few - Disneyworld, World of Leather, whichever world it is they're using to hide the geek-loving supermodels), the worlds of Star Wars and Warcraft are certainly high up on the list.

In a week that began with my quaffing l'escargot in a Parisian bistro on holiday, and has since seen the UK government pledge £280m to tackle a school meals crisis and our own Rob Fahey's decaying jaw explode in, his words here, a two-foot arc of blood and puss, it's just as well our gaming platter is neatly divided between the succulent and the soul-destroying. On the one hand we're eager to tuck into Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Viewtiful Joe 2, La Pucelle: Tactics, the PS2 incarnation of Full Spectrum Warrior, and Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean - a game that raises questions like "Where have all these wonderful GameCube RPGs come from all of a sudden?" and "How exactly do you lose an ocean?" On the other hand we're worried about ordering Stolen and needing our stomachs pumped for a refund two days later, and Red Ninja: End of Honor looks as though it can just fork off.

Back when I was at school, my form tutor was a very charismatic French chap called Mr. Bernaz. He was the Jose Mourinho of secondary school education. When France won the World Cup, he turned up wearing a sash bearing the colours of the French flag. When we flouted his rules, he locked up our puffer jackets and made us write lines. But he had an empathetic streak a mile wide, and when we actually gave him the respect he deserved he indulged us. He was even sporting enough to take us on in a mini Quake tournament in the IT rooms a few times, and he wasn't bad at it.

"I don't like strategy games." Bet you've heard that one before. I have. But while some would say it's disappointing, perhaps it's just a misunderstanding. I don't personally find that games like Act of War can hook me in the way that they do "hardcore RTS fans", but if you put Advance Wars or Fire Emblem or even Sim City in front of me then I'm happy as a peon in a mine. Are they all not strategy games?

As is somewhat traditional around here, the middle of April has seen the start of the end of something embarrassingly expensive and the end of the start of something expensively embarrassing. Yes, reports suggest the Queen is going to stop dragging hubby abroad to inadvertently mock the locals, and yes, we've only got a couple of weeks before our politicians stop talking bollocks on television and let us pick and choose. And watch Paxman laying into arseholes of the week again.

On the way to lunch with an old friend on Monday...

A spin-doctor for the British government was once famously sacked for sending an email around on September 11th suggesting that it might be "a good day to bury bad news". Well, we doubt anybody at Eidos is going to get sacked for the orchestration - if indeed it was deliberate - but there's certainly something a little Jo Moore about Eidos this week, with the PS2 and Xbox versions of the widely panned Championship Manager 5 sneaking into stores today under cover of, a) the entire UK games industry, realistically the only bit of the world that cares, packing itself off to Los Angeles, b) review code only arriving on the day of release, c) the Xbox 360 unveiling having taken place the previous evening, and d) Malcolm Glazer distracting the entire footballing nation with his inevitable but, even writing from the perspective of a Liverpool fan, frankly rather worrying takeover of Manchester United. Granted, Eidos probably didn't know about the last bit, but it's a happy coincidence, no?

More than three years after the original game was released, Microsoft has revealed that an Xbox sequel to Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions is currently in development.

There's a logo printed on the front of the box saying this game was given "9/10" by some magazine, but we think there's probably been a mix-up at the printers. Perhaps they got it upside-down and actually meant to reward it "01/6" - which would've been a lot closer to the mark for this disappointing return of wrestling to Xbox.

Nintendo currently has no plans to bundle Super Mario 64 DS with Nintendo DS hardware in the UK, according to a statement released by the platform holder this morning which reads: "We currently have no plans to bundle Super Mario 64 DS with Nintendo DS hardware in the UK."

Microsoft has admitted that Xbox consoles manufactured as recently as January of this year may need to have their power cables replaced.

Talks between Japanese electronics giants Sony and Toshiba aimed at reaching an agreement on a unified next-generation disc format have collapsed, says SCE president Ken Kutaragi.

Ubisoft has signed up to publish Sniper Elite for PC, PS2 and Xbox in the UK. Screenshots are available here.

What a year it's been for Nintendo. These days, when the reborn, revitalised Japanese gaming veteran proclaims in its blurb that its latest GBA game is "unlike anything else out there" you'd better believe it.

Polyphony Digital's PS2 exclusive racer Gran Turismo 4 has held on to the top spot in the UK sales chart this week, despite strong challenges from a host of new releases - four of which make it into the top ten ranking.

Two new handheld versions of old days games are currently in development for the Nintendo DS, according to Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu.

Japanese publisher Square Enix has confirmed that among the projects it is developing for next-generation consoles are a new Final Fantasy game from the team behind Final Fantasy X, and a new massively multiplayer game from the FFXI team.

Shares in publisher Atari took a tumble yesterday after president and CEO James Caparro resigned from the company after less than seven months in the job, surprising both investors and the Atari board itself.

Europe has always been seen as the poor relation in Nintendo's global plans - but with sales of the DS in the region rapidly approaching a million units just a few short months after launch and impressive annual growth, that may not be the case for much longer. We sat down with Nintendo's head of European marketing, Jim Merrick at the E3 show in Los Angeles to find out more about the company's plans for the rest of the year in Europe - including the growth of the DS, the arrival of the Game Boy Micro, and how Christmas is shaping up for the GameCube.

Shigeru Miyamoto says Nintendo is still in the process of designing the controller for its next-generation Revolution games console.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has denied rumours that the company plans to distribute its first-party back catalogue for free on the forthcoming Revolution console, but said that some old games may be used as bonus or trial content.

Nintendo virtually conceded the next generation console war today in Los Angeles, unveiling a new console that, rather like the DS, focuses far more on the game experience than hardware evolution.

With just hours to go until Nintendo's pre-E3 conference kicks off in LA, first pictures of its next-gen Revolution console have appeared on the Internet. You can take a look at Revolution here.

Obviously Nintendo would have liked to invite the whole world to its press conference this morning in LA (and made a pretty good go of it actually, having to set back the start time about 45 minutes as fire marshals bitched and whined about people standing at the side of the auditorium), but naturally that wasn't possible.