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It's been more than forty years since Black Spy and White Spy first started trying to do each other in on the pages of MAD magazine, and what a lot of stuff has happened since then - the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the end of the cold war, the emergence of the Internet, the invention of McCain's Chinese Chicken flavour Micro Wings, to name but a few key events.

Blizzard's massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft has reached another major milestone in its success, with the company today revealing that the service now has two million paying subscribers worldwide.

Publisher Vivendi-Universal Games may be seeking to continue its spate of recent developer acquisitions with the purchase of British studio Swordfish, which recently finished work on PS2 title Cold Winter for the firm.

Microsoft's chief Xbox officer Robbie Bach is to add another string to his bow, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that he will take control of the company's digital music business.

Vivendi-Universal Games has added British studio Swordfish Studios to its roster of internal developers, with the Cold Winter developer becoming the company's third acquisition so far this year.

Microsoft has named the Halo 2 World Champion at the conclusion of its global contest to discover the Halo 2 World Champion. Unsurprisingly, they've named him the Halo 2 World Champion. [I seem to remember you did a joke a lot like this about two days ago. Watch it. - Ed]

PlayStation Portable aficionados have produced a video file that reportedly "unsticks" dead pixels in 60 per cent of cases.

Legendary German director Uwe Boll is in the running to pick up the movie rights to Running With Scissors' equally legendary PC first-person shooter title Postal, according to a report on movie website Dark Horizons.

Electronic Arts has announced that it is to sponsor NBA Europe Live, a new event which will send top NBA teams across the Atlantic to take on Euroleague teams in the NBA pre-season.

It's not just Ken Kutaragi that's full of fighting talk as Sony and Microsoft limber up for the next-gen console battle like a pair of champion sumo wrestlers circling each other warily in the ring.

Rockstar North's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is back at the top of the software charts in the UK, with strong sales of the newly released Xbox and PC versions shifting Star Wars Episode III out of the number one position.

Getting Juiced onto the shelves hasn't been the smoothest of rides. Poised for release in early September 2004, the game's publisher Acclaim dramatically went bust literally days before it was due to hit the stores and the future looked bleak for Juice Games.

This interview was originally published on our sister site, GamesIndustry.biz. Check back there each week for the biggest industry interviews and news. And charts and jobs and other stuff. (Right, disengage pretentious-crosspromotional-narration voice.)

As rumours that the next MoH game is already in the works continue to do the rounds, Electronic Arts is still refusing to offer a confirmation - or a denial.

Nintendogs, the DS puppy sim that has taken Japan by storm, is all set for its American and European releases later this year - and a Nintendo spokesperson confirmed yesterday that European gamers can look forward to new breeds specific to the region, just as their American counterparts can do.

A new trailer for Serious Sam II, the first fully-fledged sequel to the super-fast FPS for PC and Xbox, is now available on Eurofiles.

Atari has confirmed that it will publish action role-playing game Musashi: Samurai Legend in Europe this autumn, exclusively on PS2. Screenshots can be found here.

Rockstar has revealed the first details of Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories for PSP, including news that you get to play as mob boss Tony Cipriani from GTA III.

With just over a month to go until it trots out from the pavilion, Codemasters has revealed the various game modes that will make up Brian Lara International Cricket, and released a new promotional trailer that you can grab from the "downloads" sections of the official website.

Just before E3 (he says, trying to recall what it was like "before E3"), we reported on Vivendi-Universal's plans to announce a mystery PC shooter from No One Lives Forever and TRON 2.0 developer Monolith Productions. And now we know what it is - it's an FPS called FEAR, or First Encounter Assault and Recon. Yeah. We'll stick to FEAR.

One of the biggest frustrations about being a gamer is the weight of expectation that inevitably gets heaped onto promising sounding games. After Tom's almost hysterical loving praise upon being greeted with F.E.A.R for the first time a couple of months back it was hard to approach the game with the same sense of unburdened awe. If someone as openly bored of First-Person Shooters as he is could spend several thousand words attempting to invent new superlatives and end up calling it this year's Half-Life 2 you end up approaching it already expecting to have your nose bloodied at fifty paces. I brought my hanky to cover both bases.

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!