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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?

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.