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Software for next-generation home consoles looks set to be more expensive than current titles, with comments from leading publishers such as Take Two, Activision and THQ all pointing to premium price points for AAA next-gen titles.

A new development studio has been launched in Manchester to work on one of Acclaim's most promising titles - with former employees of the firm's Manchester studio re-commencing work on Interview With A Made Man.

Twelve million units apiece of the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation Portable consoles will be shipped worldwide in the financial year through to March 31st, 2006, according to the latest projections released by Sony.

Ubisoft will officially unveil the next Prince of Persia game, which has yet to be subtitled, at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo between May 18th and 20th in Los Angeles. The game is due out on PS2, Xbox, GameCube and PC in the "second half of 2005". You can find some screenshots here.

PublicBeta, an organisation dedicated to pushing live events and publishing the best new material about videogames and videogame culture, has announced that it will be celebrating the relaunch of its website by offering its first videogame book Difficult Questions About Videogames for free for a limited time.

Following the success of the EverQuest series of massively multiplayer online games, Sony Online Entertainment is now working on an action MMO and will show the game off at E3, according to SOE president John Smedley.

Namco has revealed that it plans to release Namco Museum 50th Anniversary, "the single largest compilation of Namco Arcade Classics ever" on PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, Game Boy Advance and PC this August in the States.

As the UK's oldest gamers prepare to shuffle along in their comfy shoes and plastic rain hats to this summer's Classic Gaming Expo, Retro Gamer editor Martyn Carroll has revealed details of the magazine's plans for the event.

Following Namco's recent announcement that Soul Calibur III will be a PS2 exclusive, producer Hiroaki Yotoriyama has now revealed that the game will not offer online play.

Max Payne developer Remedy has named and started teasing us about its forthcoming PC and next-generation console game, releasing a couple of screenshots and a 51-second trailer.

Gaming and virtual reality accessories manufacturer eDimensional has dismissed online rumours that it is in licencing talks with Nintendo.

Read on to hear what we thought of J Allard's recent surprisingly candid interview, and then either read the full transcript yourself, or download a movie of the interview direct from Eurofiles. For details on how to make use of our free file service, click here.

In the concluding part of our interview with Epic, Messrs Rein, Sweeney and Willard discuss how cross platform development is very much at the forefront of their plans for Unreal Engine 3, and that its scalability has been vital in providing an engine that could "last many years to come". In a refreshingly candid discussion, the Epic main hit back over suggestions of becoming "an engine company", how they rate themselves alongside ID and Valve, the expansive possibilities of the technology and massively multiplayer games...

Earlier this month, we popped over to San Francisco to play some games with Electronic Arts. Amongst the lovely chaps we happened to meet up with was one Alex Ward of UK-based Criterion. He does live just down the road from us, of course, but for some reason we wound up nattering to him thousands of miles away in California. It's a tough life. Fortunately for you though, we weren't so drowned in leisure that we couldn't manhandle the conversation away from what we were meant to be doing there - discussing EA-published title Burnout 3 - long enough to sneak in some discussion of Burnout on the PSP, mysterious first-person shooter Black, and what Criterion plans to get up to in the future. What follows is a few excerpts from our chat with Alex, and do be sure to check back tomorrow for the rest of the transcript. Or EA will probably hurt us...

Few development studios have the creative luxury of developing a title for 18 months without publisher input, but that's exactly what Just Add Monsters [editor's note: since renamed Ninja Theory following the break-up of owner Argonaut] has been able to do since it started prototyping Heavenly Sword early last year. Building on the experience gained in developing the excellent, but overlooked Kung Fu Chaos, the small Cambridge-based team found publishers unreceptive to another cartoony fighting game. Realising this, JAM began work on the prototype of a more mature-looking sequel entitled Kung Fu Story, full of crazed destruction and improbable but easy to pull off moves straight out of your favourite kung fu movies.

Next-generation consoles (by which I, in this context, and all the publishers in the world in every context mean Xbox 2 and PlayStation 3. You know, the phrase "Next-generation consoles" is, to my mind, a neatly ambiguous term that allows publishers to either support Revolution or plausibly deny they ever intended to when it actually turns out to be a rotating banana wrapped in pasta housing a microchip that mimics Shigeru Miyamoto's higher brain functions during an acid trip and projects them onto a giant statue of Charmander reading philosophy) are boring. So, enormous, self-indulgent sentence scything caveats aside: Next-generation consoles are boring. "Ooh, la di dah, this one's got those eight mega rivets per cubic glockenspiel synaptic Hoover bananas." Fantastic. We can all basically assume that the games will a) look nicer, b) sound nicer, and c) be able to do more complicated things and much greater volumes of them. Right? Okay, granted, not everyone's as nonplussed about console hardware transitions as I am, but whether you agree or not it's certainly good news for you, my dear reader, because it means that when I do finally get to talk about next-generation console games, I'm bursting to start looking forward after months of peering at Darth Vader's toaster and pretending to care about whether the next will actually make my toast for me.

So gaming is moving out of the 3D era into the "HD era" is it?

Following the recent emergence of some strange rumours regarding the PSP's regional coding systems, Sony has stepped up to dismiss them as absolute tosh and nonsense.

The home video divisions of Fox, Universal Studios and Paramount are all entertaining the possibility of releasing films for PlayStation Portable using Sony's proprietary Universal Media Disc format, according to a report.

In what publisher NCsoft says is a worldwide first for massively multiplayer online games, new RPG Guild Wars is to launch in both Europe and North America during the same week.

Following the recent emergence of rumours surrounding a possible sequel to PC first-person shooter SiN, Ritual CEO Steve Nix has hinted that it could well be on the way.

The first version of TA Spring, a remake of classic real-time strategy game Total Annihilation, is now available for download from the Spring website.

The GameCube version of Resident Evil 4 will stretch to two of the console's proprietary mini-DVD discs, Capcom has reportedly confirmed over the past week, although unlike its Cube-exclusive predecessors it won't be the game's content that justifies the second squirt of silicon.

Nintendo has denied reports that GameCube title Odama, a curious mixture of the pinball and strategy genres, has been canned and re-envisioned as a Nintendo DS title.

The Nintendo GameCube may be wheezing its way to the end of its life cycle - mournfully aware that it'll be completely forgotten when the new baby comes - but still it rages against the dying of the light with the announcement that WWE Day of Reckoning 2 will be a Cube exclusive.

As promised, Ubisoft has launched the first downloadable content for Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 2 this week in a package consisting of three new maps derived from existing larger offerings, two new gameplay modes, eight new weapons, five new kit restrictions and six new multiplayer skins. It weighs in at 1745 blocks and costs nowt.

Bungie is promising "a major announcement" this week offering details of its new maps for Halo 2 amidst rumours of a full-blown expansion for the game.

The King of Fighters series is going 3D this summer with the release of KoF: Maximum Impact for Xbox.

Following last week's confusion over a possible Halo 2 add-on, Bungie has confirmed that a multiplayer expansion pack will indeed be in the shops by the end of June.

Ubisoft is set to release a big fat expansion pack for the Xbox version of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 2.