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Sony has announced the full list of tracks for SingStar Popworld, the latest instalment in the hit karaoke series.

Sony has announced that the third instalment in the Soul Calibur series will only appear on PS2, confirming reports that Xbox and GameCube owners will miss out.

A judge in California has ordered Sony Computer Entertainment to pay $90 million in damages to Immersion Corp in the latest court verdict on a case over the rights to the force feedback technology used in the Dual Shock controllers.

Square Enix has unveiled the first game based on its Code Age brand concept.

Lonely rolling stars will be flaring up again this summer as Namco reveals that Minna Daisuki Katamari Damacy - or Katamari Damacy 2 for the sake of what little sanity the original left us with - will be released in Japan on 7th July.

DC Studios has acquired the rights to develop State of Emergency 2, the sequel to Rockstar's 2002 street brawler.

Back in the olden days, adverts were simple affairs. Whether it was car manufacturers showing off the actual car they were selling, Bernard Matthews informing us that his Turkey Drummers were "Bootiful" or a load of monkeys dressing up as removal men to sell tea, you knew where you were.

With just over a month remaining until Microsoft reveals its next-gen console at E3, the company has unveiled what it describes as an "all-star line-up" of publishers already committed to Xbox 2, including the likes of EA, Rockstar, Ubisoft and Vivendi.

In a bid to prevent a repeat of the Betamax versus VHS battle, Sony has announced that it is prepared to negotiate with other technology firms to agree on a standard format for the next generation of DVDs.

With less than a month to go until Xbox 360 gets its first unveiling on MTV, Microsoft has revealed a few more details of the planned special - hinting that it'll be more of a taster than a full rundown of the console's capabilities.

Technology firm Broadcom has announced that it is to provide wireless networking technology for Nintendo's forthcoming Revolution console - preliminary details of which are expected to be revealed at E3 next month.

Japanese semiconductor giant NEC has announced that it has been tapped to provide embedded DRAM chips for Microsoft's next-generation Xbox console, which will be used as part of the graphics solution in the system.

Following a spate of recent leaks, none of which Microsoft has been prepared to comment upon, news reaches us from the USA that the Xbox 360 next-generation console logo will feature swirly green lines on a white background. Microsoft is, er, unprepared to comment, reminding this website that a logo has not been revealed.

The first details of Blue Dragon, the new Xbox 360 RPG from the creator of the Final Fantasy series, have started to emerge.

Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley has responded to the calls of angry Star Wars Galaxies fans demanding a withdrawal of the latest upgrade for the MMORPG.

Life, they say, is a marathon, not a sprint. This is a good thing for Nintendo, because one thing that's become apparent about the DS is that touch controls and dual screens aren't really suitable for racing. The PSP might do a Paula Radcliffe and run out of juice sooner on its way round the course (did no one think to plug Paula into the mains for a bit?), but over a shorter distance the likes of WipEout Pure and Ridge Racers are fast and elegant. By comparison, racing games on the DS move with all the speed and grace of a gin-soaked octogenarian.

Q Entertainment's having a pretty good month. PSP puzzler Lumines has been on sale in America for less than a week, but already there are signs that the yanks are head over heels in love with it. More so than we expected, in fact. Lumines, which might be described as Rez creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi's baby, literally turns the falling blocks puzzle genre on its side, tasking you with arranging blocks in a play area that's about twice as wide as it is tall. Squaring same-coloured blocks together sees a horizontal line that moves across the screen again and again wipe them away on its next pass - all the while the action is not so much heralded as enforced by a varied and varying soundtrack comprised of popular Japanese dance acts. There's no question that it's great. We just wonder, big-numbered US review scores freshly in mind, what the same critics will make of Q's other puzzle game out this month in Japan, Meteos, which we're finding far more enjoyable.

Rant alert. Don't worry. We'll be brief.

Ah, golf. A game of two control systems, if not halves. On the one hand we have systems that give you direct responsibility for the shape of your stroke, allowing you to measure the backswing using an analogue stick or, in the case of the recent DS version, a stylus. On the other, we have the more traditional system that merely expects you to specify length and then stop a cursor in between pair of lines to swing.

Wandering around Nintendo's DS annex at E3 last year gawping (which, whatever they may have apathetically protested in the intervening period, is what most people were doing), one of the questions that repeatedly popped into our heads was, "Yes, this is nice, but how are they going to make it into a proper game?" With the release of Pac-Pix in Japan recently, we had the chance to find out what became of one of Namco's little E3 demos, which involved drawing Pac-Man on the touch screen, watching him come to life (flapping mouth and all), and directing him around to gobble up ghosts. And on early evidence it looks like we've been given at least one satisfactory response.

Sometimes the simplest game concepts are the most beautiful. Down the years some of the true classics have been almost embarrassingly simple to the point of being able to sum the gameplay mechanics in a sentence. Think of the true benchmark innovations: Pong, Space Invaders, Pac Man, Marble Madness, Tetris, Street Fighter, Wolfenstein, Dune II. All games with a purity of vision and a design influence that lingers one well past their sell by date.

Rise of the Kasai may fail to quench our thirst for what it's best at, but in that sense it's rather like waking up in the middle of the night and guzzling your bedside glass of water; it's so welcome and refreshing that it's hardly surprising you're left wanting more. It isn't struggling to distinguish itself. Instead it seems to be operating in a vacuum; a project often bereft of the marks of conformity that often leave us cold. The name on the spine is symbolic of this: although Rise of the Kasai is the sequel to The Mark of Kri, it feels no compunction in bucking the trend of whacking on a '2'.

Hello. This is Tom. And this is Brambles. Tom likes him some online gaming. Mmm-mmm. PS2 Online, Xbox Live, er, GameCube... with an elaborate system of pulleys and mirrors - he's there. He likes the chatter, the social element, the fun of killing people who really exist; all that lark. He enjoys playing by himself, but he's more likely to buy something that involves chuckling along to some poor sap's shotgun-based facial reorganisation on voice comms with Gordonfreeman46.

Neo24375 jacked out, "Mission's gone bad." Tr1n1ty turned to him, "What went wrong?" "Pretty much everything."

"Trust no one!" screams the tagline for this undercooked Tekken spin-off. Sadly, they might just as well have added "especially Namco!" as Death By Degrees quickly reveals itself to be a depressingly underwhelming action-adventure so full of niggling flaws that you'll probably be seeking some form of counselling after a few hours in its irritating company.

As a general rule, EyeToy games are only entertaining if you're very young, responsible for the very young, or drunk. Or all of the above, but that's a dangerous game.

When is a real-time strategy game not a real time strategy game? Keep that question in the back of your mind. The answer will be revealed later.

It's always been a good title for a videogame. Where most real-time strategy games seem to fall into the X of Y nomenclature, Empire Earth had a certain militaristic grandeur to it. It captures the game's themes better than competing titles like Age of Empires or Rise of Nations. That is, that the entire history of humanity has been the tale of two groups of cavemen hitting each other with increasingly large rocks. No matter who's the victor, the Empire remains.

Star Fox (or Starwing as it was here) is one of my favourite SNES games of all time. I distinctly remember sitting up until around 3am trying to duck, weave, barrel-roll and blast my way through all its myriad space-hoops, caught up in the rapture of dashing as many textureless polygons apart as possible because it was just so well made. It harnessed the balletic thumb-work of a 2D shoot-'em-up in a 3D cast; its "Super FX"-powered polygon visuals pretty much forcing the designers to focus on what you were doing rather than whether you found the half-arsed storyline about fuzzy animals in spaceships interesting or not. I'd play those levels over and over just to do better. It was like strumming your way through the same song for hours and hours; even though you know every word and can twang the strings to every chord, it's managing to do it all in concert that really gets you off.

The noble, sporting ethic of "it's not the winning but the taking part" is all very stiff upper lip, but you can take that age old concept a little too far. Extend the logic to Konami's GT wannabe - the bizarrely titled Enthusia - and you've essentially got a racing game where it's not about finishing first but largely about your ability to driving patiently, skilfully and - above all - cleanly.