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Our nightmares aren't very creative. They mostly involve being chased by hungry bears and discovering that your legs are made out of lead, or being 18 years old and faced with final year exams that you'd completely forgotten about, or waking up one morning to discover that you've got to review an Army Men game. If we ever did dream about being asked to turn The Godfather into a videogame, though, we'd probably wake up screaming. It's the kind of prospect that the word "daunting" just doesn't quite cover.

Arcade game designer Eugene Jarvis, whose titles include Defender, NARC and Smash TV, is to be honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the IGDA at the Game Developers Conference next month.

Ubisoft is offering the gamers of Great Britain the opportunity to play Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Lockdown on PlayStation 2 for a whole day next week.

Nintendo has unveiled a new Mario Kart game in Japan - but anybody expecting to get a closer look at Mario Kart DS or hear about a new GameCube game may be slightly confused when they learn what the company has in store.

Irrational Games has released a demo of its forthcoming third-person superhero action game Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich. The demo is available from a number of mirrors including the likes of FileFront (full list here) and consists of a single-player level called "The Voice of Doom" and two multiplayer modes.

Konami has refused to comment on reports suggesting that a fifth Suikoden game is in development.

Microsoft is taking steps to try and educate parents about their children's increased involvement in the internet with a series of guides including A parent's primer to computer slang and 10 tips for dealing with game cyberbullies and grifers, which we found linked on Slashdot the other day.

Speculation continues to mount over the future of French publisher Ubisoft, after market leader Electronic Arts this week declined to rule out the possibility of taking a controlling stake in the firm following its 20 per cent share purchase in December.

A number of promotions including television programming sponsorship on the Sci-Fi channel and a two week horror film tour are being planned by Nintendo to support the launch of Capcom's Resident Evil 4 in March.

You know you've been playing too much Splinter Cell when you switch your lights off at home and expect to nod your head forward and activate your night vision. Oh dear. This certainly happened after finishing Pandora Tomorrow, and we're fully expecting similar after-effects this time around, especially given the high hopes we have for Chaos Theory, the third Sam Fisher adventure to hit in little over two years.

Unfortunately, due to a scheduling mishap, this week's What's New will not be full of commentary from my cherished younger brother Edward, whose ruminations on games past and present are near-legendary in the context of whatever else is in my head. He's coming along this afternoon instead to ignore the likes of Gran Turismo ("why can't you park the cars?"), Prince of Persia ("there's no guns"), EyeToy ("you're too fat") and Halo ("I 'ate this") and to complain bitterly about my buying the wrong sort of lemonade ("don't like that one") and biscuits ("you shouldn'ta got these ones"). Fortunately, given his burgeoning pubescence and apparent acceptance of the Kylie calendar I bought him for Christmas (the most embarrassed I've ever seen him), the addition of Dead Or Alive Ultimate to the pile ought to give me something to fall back on. Before I fall over and cry into the fluffy cushions ("these are WAY too fluffy; you shouldn't've got 'em") about the fact that he can probably beat me at an arm wrestle by now. How I long for the day when I can go out and get drunk with him and harness his innocence, selflessness and good looks to appear interesting to the opposite sex by association. (They say true love is blind. It bloody well better be.)

Capcom is reportedly developing a PlayStation 2 game that will bring Resident Evil 4's Hiroyuki Kobayashi and Devil May Cry's Makoto Tsuchibayashi together on the same project.

Valve has updated Half-Life 2: Deathmatch with new weapons, a new level and various other tweaks, fixed various Source Engine bugs and added some new functionality to its Source Software Developer's Kit.

Midway has done a deal to publish Stainless Steel Software's forthcoming real-time strategy game Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War this winter.

Midway this week announced "the rebirth" of the Gauntlet franchise under the direction of John Romero (Doom, Quake) and Josh Sawyer (Icewind Dale) at the publisher's San Diego studio.

The bananas are no longer on the Dole.

Sony has announced details of a Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit-style cops-and-robbers racing game for the PlayStation Portable this week, bringing the total number of racing games announced for the handheld to 472.

Paradox Interactive is working with Pocket PC Studios to adapt Europa Universalis II to handheld formats including Nintendo DS, according to a release on the developer's website, and will release the adaptation later this year.

Codemasters has released a short trailer of its forthcoming PlayStation Portable racing title TOCA Race Driver 2, which is due to launch for the PSP in Q2 2005. You can download it from Eurofiles here and it's about 5MB.

Square Enix president Yoichi Wada has revealed that Final Fantasy XII has slipped beyond its previous spring release date and admits the publisher still isn't sure when it will launch the PS2-exclusive RPG.

VU Games has announced a distribution agreement with Majesco to distribute BloodRayne 2 (PS2, Xbox, PC) and Advent Rising (Xbox, PC) across Europe in the UK, France, Spain, Italy and Germany.

Midway this week unveiled the third instalment in its Arcade Treasures series, which it plans to release on PS2, Xbox and GameCube in the States this autumn for $19.99. Historically these titles have then appeared in Europe for around £15-20.

Sony has revealed that it will charge between $19.95 and $28.95 for movies released on the PlayStation Portable's proprietary UMD format, and has added The House of Flying Daggers to the release list.

Brilliantly, Namco is preparing to release a side-scrolling 2D racing title for Game Boy Advance this April based on Popeye.

The reaction to reports last week stating that component shortages and other factors could potentially hold up the European release of the PlayStation Portable for another three months has been one of apathy and antipathy. Indeed, the most positive response we've seen was one of, "Who cares? WipEout Pure's been delayed anyway." When Sony's American arm revealed last Thursday that it planned to charge $250 for the machine at the tail end of March - with software costs to be added on top of that - there were few besides those brave enough to import who had anything particularly positive to contribute. If we'd been sat at our PCs when the news originally broke, we may well have been in amongst the crowded forums and comment threads blurting sanctimonious babble about Europe retaining its reputation as Sony's Third Place.

LucasArts' Xbox and PC title Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords has gone straight in at number one in the UK charts this week, narrowly beating Blizzard's hugely anticipated online game World of Warcraft.

Japanese publisher KOEI has opened a new development studio in Singapore, and its first project will be an online Romance of the Three Kingdoms title due to launch in 2007 in Singapore, China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan, with America and Europe to follow.

Sony has declined to comment on reports that it's preparing to announce SOCOM III for PlayStation 2 or that a version of the popular online shooter is in development for the PlayStation Portable handheld.

Square Enix has permanently banned the PlayOnline accounts of more than 800 Final Fantasy XI players after they violated the massively-multiplayer game's user agreement.

Although several EG staffers are firmly allied to that other evil black liquid Diet Coke, if we were Japanese we'd probably have to consider buying some Pepsi this coming March in order to get our names in the hat for a new Nintendo/Pepsi cross-promotion giving away a rather special-looking blue-tinted Nintendo DS.