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Former DMA Design man Dave Jones and his Dundee-based development studio Real Time Worlds have signed their massively-multiplayer turf war title to South Korean publisher Webzen and plan to launch it in 2007.

The first evidence of Core Design's labours since it was "refocused and restructured" in the aftermath of Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness has come to light this week in the shape of "Smart Bomb", a PlayStation Portable puzzler which involves defusing bombs.

"Wild Things Interactive Ltd is pleased to announce the UK launch of the Resident Evil 4 Chainsaw Controller," says this 'ere press release. Not half as happy as we are - having agonised for literally several minutes before deciding not to import it last month.

(Well, it's a better headline than "World of Warcraft Euro sales trump American success", isn't it? Anyway...)

After Hardware Online Arena on the PS2, we weren't all that fired up about Fired Up, but this really surprised us; in fact it's an early favourite amongst the Euro PSP efforts we've tried. Between the single-player story mode (eight hours of collecting tokens, killing enemy vehicles, and scouring every nook and cranny of three two-kilometre-square free-roaming environments for bonuses) and the eight-player wireless multiplayer (a mixture of Hardware-style deathmatch and team-based vehicle combat modes and straight checkpoint racing affairs), it's a game that always has something to keep you occupied.

Although the original Singles was a touch impotent when it came to tackling EA's monopoly on the making-little-people-happy genre, it obviously aroused enough interest at retail to prompt a sequel - with publisher Deep Silver and developer Rotobee announcing Singles 2: Triple Trouble this week for release in May.

SEGA Europe is seeking beta testers for MMOG The Matrix Online, which we now know is due to launch in Europe on 8th April with a US release taking place a fortnight earlier on 22nd March.

Following the critical and commercial success of its Games Workshop-backed real-time strategy title Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, publisher THQ has announced that its subsidiary Relic is busy at work on an expansion.

Mastiff has announced plans to publish a PS2 and Xbox version of arcade dance game Pump It Up: Exceed, although it's not clear when it'll come out yet or whether it'll make an appearance outside the USA.

It's the last diary entry. We knew we needed some vague climax to our four-week mission into the heart of Paragon City. We thought we'll save the universe. Or something.

No one can be told that Shiny's working on another Matrix game; you knew that already. However, Atari has finally given the persistent rumour of another Matrix title substance by announcing that The Matrix: Path of Neo for PS2, Xbox and PC will be released in Q4 2005.

Magazine publishing giant Future has confirmed that it is to acquire rival publisher Highbury House, in a deal worth around £97 million which will give the company almost total dominance of the UK videogames magazine market.

A listing on EBgames.com for a Nintendo DS title called "Metroid Pinball" due out this 5th December has prompted speculation that Samus's morph ball may be about to take on a starring role on the dual screen handheld.

About a fortnight ago we mentioned in passing that a group of homebrew development enthusiasts had managed to get something to appear on the Nintendo DS handheld using a pass-through.

Sony has announced the forthcoming summer release of a new third-person PS2 action-adventure developed by Edinburgh-based VIS entertainment.

Sony will release four more movies on the PlayStation Portable's proprietary UMD format in the States on 19th April, the platform holder announced on Friday, and plans to start shipping UMD movies in Japan soon after "with Europe to follow".

Digital Jesters and French developer Nadeo have decided to reward fans of the original TrackMania by making a beta version of the sequel available to them a full two months before the game is expected to ship on 8th April.

Neatly enough, we're far more likely in the Eurogamer household to have a TIF over which is better, FIFA or Pro Evolution Soccer, than we are to actually drag Sony's This Is Football series out as a neutral alternative. And, going into a room with Football, London Studio's PSP footy effort, we weren't expecting to be that excited by it. That was until we realised that a) it's a pleasantly enjoyable game of football in the first place, capable of making you look pretty damned good and rendering some fabulous goals, b) it's still got that brilliant "deliberate dive" function that so tickles us, and c) the "Challenge" mode transforms it into a football game with a high score system. Which, as it turns out, was just what this series needed to turn our heads.

When the time's right to look back at this console generation's most important games, surely TimeSplitters 1 and 2 will rank among them. Sure, both games had fairly throwaway single-player story modes that took only a few hours to crack, but both also sported the hilarious and original Challenge mode and a control system so slick we swear it's never been bettered. Throw in an amusing and unique visual style and you've got a series that stands out from the generic mass of po-faced me-too sci-fi schlock that every publisher and his dog has churned out. Colour us excited about a long-awaited third in the series.

An all-star cast has been revealed for the forthcoming Batman Begins videogame, with the voice and likenesses secured for all the forthcoming blockbuster movie's key characters.

Konami Europe has revealed that it plans to release a second Xbox-exclusive dance mat game at the end of March. Dancing Stage Unleashed 2 features a number of new gameplay modes, extensive Xbox Live functionality and more than three dozen songs.

Eidos Interactive has announced that it is shutting down Ion Storm Austin, developer of seminal PC first-person shooter/role-playing game hybrid Deus Ex, at the cost of some 35 jobs.

High street giant GAME has reduced the price of its chart titles to £29.99 from today as part of an aggressive ten-day promotion - a move which is likely to provoke an ugly confrontation between publishers and retailers over the coming months.

Sony has demonstrated how the "Game Sharing" feature of the PlayStation Portable can be used to download a selection of small games to another PSP system and store data in RAM, but has yet to demonstrate single-UMD multiplayer functionality or other features to rival Nintendo's "DS Download Play" component, while this website can reveal that European developers were joking that "no one really knows how it works" as recently as last week.

Eagle-eyed Nintendo fans have unearthed a pair of trademarks registered with the Japanese Trademark and Patent Office late last year, prompting plenty of speculation as to how they may be used but no official clarification.

"The knights are drawing in." We know that doesn't work in any context - the days are actually getting longer at this time of year, and this is a one-player effort involving a solitary former soldier set against hordes of his fellow undead. But we like it. It sounds clever. And we're not changing it now; we've come too far. What was it Kieron said the other week about beginning with jokes or anecdotes? Well there you go. Anecdote: this one time, last night, we couldn't sleep at all. All knight.

Traveller's Tales' other PSP racer be-- wait, we've done that. In qualitative terms, Formula One, as a racing sub-genre, seems to operate in tandem with the real thing. Just as ITV's Follow-The-Schumacher arguably needs a kick up the backside, so does the videogame equivalent. Whether Formula One PSP manages to provide it is something we're not too sure of, but we certainly had quite a lot of fun toying with it for the half an hour or so it was within our grasp last week.

Atari has announced a new PC empire-building sim that charges players with "making it big" in a detailed facsimile of New York City. Due out in Q4 2005, Tycoon City: New York has players constructing and customising hundreds of businesses and famous landmarks set around the city.

Brand new publisher Rising Star, which aims to bring quality Japanese software like Harvest Moon to Europe, has announced further details of one of its lesser-known charges - PS2 action title Swords of Destiny, which is due out over here in June.

Regular readers will recognise that (gah - frigging third-person) "the person writing this feature" isn't usually the chap who handles our rally game coverage. Contrary to the spurious claims "your truly" would usually be tempted to make, this is not because Kristan steals them all as soon as they come in. It's more to do with apathy. Rally games just don't do anything for (ugh) "this writer". No disrespect to the developer, but "your humble correspondent" felt a humble spell of shut-eye was probably in order when WRC was passed around last week. (It's turning into narcolepsy, this sleep thing, and sodding Sky+ didn't record that Robert Winston documentary on How To Sleep Better.)