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Microsoft Japan has cancelled Xbox MMORPG True Fantasy Live Online, citing quality and development progress concerns, although Microsoft US has since characterised the cancellation as a decision to streamline product portfolio rather than a reflection of the quality of the game. The game had been in development at Japanese Dark Cloud/Dark Chronicle developer Level-5.

Electronic Arts scored its fifth number one of the year today, with multi-format film licence Harry Potter - Prisoner Of Azkaban debuting at the top, displacing EA's former chart topper UEFA Euro 2004 Portugal in the process after a two week run at the summit of the UK All Formats chart.

Launching a new massively multiplayer game is a task fraught with difficulty. Apart from all the usual concerns about quality and stability, there's also the question of server hosting, managing payments and user accounts, and of course the bigger problem of keeping thousands of gamers simultaneously occupied without allowing the fantastical veneer to crack and flying shards of unreality to pierce the experience.

In Frank Castle's world, wrong do-ers had better watch out. For many arch criminals, the idea of a few months or years in chokey is all part of the deal - but what if you knew that the consequences of your illegal actions would result in you being chucked headfirst into a wood-chipping machine, or fed face down into a Piranha pool? Would you be quite so blasé in your flagrant disregard for the law if you knew Mr Castle was about to pay you a visit and intimately acquaint your face with the nearest kerb? You might have second thoughts at the very least.

Sam Fisher's turning out to be a nasty piece of work. No longer content with merely bonking people on the head and gliding unseen, as quiet as the dead, Ubisoft's stealthmeister wants to show us how many evil death manoeuvres he can come up with. And we love him for it.

Dutch firm Engine Software has become a licensed Nintendo DS developer as of this week, something the company describes as a "logical next step" having supported Nintendo platforms and handheld from the Super Nintendo and Game Boy right up to the Cube and GBA. No specific titles were announced, but Engine will rewrite its GBA Music Replayer Library middleware to support the fledgling handheld format. Head of development Ruud van Moosdijk said he was personally "very glad" to have expanded their relationship with Nintendo. "No matter how long you work with Nintendo they keep amazing you with new innovative ideas, which simply result in an explosion of inspiration. I am confident that the DS will bring new enjoyment to developers and consumers alike."

Ubisoft has announced that sign-ups for the European beta of EverQuest II will go live on Monday, June 7th, with the test programme set to start in July in conjunction with testing in North America. Interested MMORPG fans should make a point of hitting www.everquest2.com as early as possible on June 7th - and we do mean early. This one will be popular...

Namco's Katamari Damacy follow-up will be called Katamari Damacy Oni and will feature four-player online multiplay, according to a report picked up on by The Magic Box this week, remaining on PS2 exclusively.

Snaking through the flotsam and news-um of an average Thursday morning, MotoGP 3 (sorry, MotoGP: Ultimate Racing Technology 3) has thundered past us and onto release schedules. Publisher THQ hasn't been very forthcoming with specific details, but we do know that Climax - developer of the first two critically acclaimed titles - remains in charge, and that it's due out worldwide between July and the end of September 2005.

Commandos Strike Force has been confirmed as the name of Pyro's first person shooter spin off to its popular RTS franchise - due for release next year on PC, PS2 and Xbox via long-term publishing partner Eidos.

Vivendi-Universal Games confirmed its pre-Christmas line-up this morning, with as many as 15 games scheduled to slug it out for the all-important pre-Christmas spend.

It's always the way - unless you're the sort of determined soul who's permanently hooked up to the interweb then you're unlikely to be online at the same time as your Xbox Live buddies and end up missing out on yet another Gotham or Rallisport session. Worse still, you might end up not hearing about the downloadable extras or the Tournaments available until everyone's past caring. But no more.

Driv3r is the most important videogame launch ever. Never before has an entire company's fate rested so heavily on the release of one product, but Reflection's long-overdue sequel is that kind of game, and Atari is doubtlessly slightly peeved that in the last three years it has had to watch from the sidelines while Rockstar, Sony and even Activision have cleaned up in mission-based driving stakes. All that pent up aggression and realisation that "we could be doing that!" has resulted in one of the most concerted marketing campaigns ever attempted for a videogame - and we're not even in the launch month as we scribe!

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Metal Gear Solid designer Yoji Shinkawa has been hired to lend his design talents to the movie Godzilla: Final War movie. The reputed designer will work on the monster makoever design, as well as general assorted costumes and gadgets, and will also be working with fellow designers Katsuya Terada, Shinji Nishikawa and Yasushi Nirasawa. The official MGS website quotes Shinkawa-san as saying: "I never thought I would participate in the making of one of the Godzilla movies, which I have admired since my childhood. There's nothing more satisfying for a Japanese man than that!" Well, quite.

Cult Japanese classic Katamari Damacy is to get the sequel treatment according to Japanese newswire Nikkei.

THQ seems to be working on a new Evil Dead game, if the film's star Bruce Campbell is to be believed. (And we wouldn't really want to mess with Bruce.) Speaking in a recent interview with Ain't It Cool News, the erstwhile Ash remarked that "We've got these Evil Dead games coming out left and right," as he tailed off a long response about the possibilities of an Ash resurrection on the silver screen. "The new one's coming out next year, next spring. I did the voice for it for Cranky Pants," he added. Cranky Pants being an internal THQ studio, and THQ having published the last couple of Evil Dead titles (including the sadly rather lamentable Fistful of Boomstick), it seems a safe bet to say we'll be on the receiving end of another barrel load of undying one-liners sometime in 2005...

Planet Moon Studios, developer of Armed and Dangerous and Giants: Citizen Kabuto, has decided to create games exclusively for the PlayStation Portable, with producer Aaron Loeb citing Sony's desire for "new ideas" as a key reason for making the switch.

Electronic Arts has released a short clip of Criterion's Burnout 3 in action, demonstrating a pretty obscene high-speed crash that results in a car being flung hither and thither and bits of it sheering off and flying everywhere.

It takes a lot for a 400MB-plus demo to creep anywhere, let alone evade detection, but fittingly it's Garrett the master thief who performed this very feat over the weekend, somehow managing to propagate across the Internet without raising a single alarm. Some might argue that he had the combined might of the Memorial and Bank Holidays on his side, but then planning is nine tenths of any deception, right?

Fans and potential fans of virtual fornication are bound to find something interesting on the Internet this week thanks to a Singles demo, 1.4 patch, and news of an online distribution deal which allows you to pick up the entire game online for £16.99.

Sports Interactive today released the beta demo of the much anticipated NHL Eastside Hockey Manager, its first project since the company's highly publicised split from Eidos earlier this year.

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If Gran Turismo 4 Prologue is an Advanced Skills School for GT nuts, then perhaps this column ought to re-brand itself. How about Shopping Machismo Tour Prologue? You like that? Really? Jesus. To be honest, we'd probably prefer something more akin to Hyper Street Fighter II. After all, HSFII is an amalgamation of Street Fightery bits and bobs from the past 15 years, and this... this is an amalgamation of screaming down the telephone at incomprehensibly idiotic retailers sampled from the past 15 minutes. High-Street Fighter Tour Prologue. Sorted.

Nintendo has yet to decide upon a target format for Mario 128, although the development team spearheaded by Shigeru Miyamoto has been running various experiments on GameCube and even Nintendo DS.

For all the screenshots and video footage, STALKER may still have some convincing to do. After all, we know it's graphically beautiful and wrapped around the premise of a post-disaster Chernobyl, but how does it actually play? We've been all the way to Kiev and back to try and see for ourselves, but we're still waiting for significant gameplay revelations, leaving us to rely on measured optimism. We'd love to get carried away with the stupendous visuals, but we've been burned too many times - the best we can do is hope that it blossoms into a game to match the quality of the environments, and prove GSC Game World's various doubters wrong - in style.

The UK arm of Sony Computer Entertainment has confirmed that Gran Turismo 4 is still on track for a November 2004 release, despite rumours from sources close to Sony that the PAL version has slipped to early 2005.

Eagerly-anticipated PC shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow Of Chernobyl could be ported to next generation consoles, GSC Gameworld's head of communications Oleg Yavorsky has revealed.

Electronic Arts' UEFA Euro 2004 is the top selling game in the UK once again, with the chart largely unchanged from the previous week as Sony's Singstar and Microsoft's Rallisport Challenge 2 both failed to dent the top ten.

It says a lot: sitting with a bunch of journalists that work in the video industry last night, not one of them even knew about The Chronicles Of Riddick, much less that it's the follow-up to Pitch Black, or that it starred Vin Diesel. Given the movie industry's crippling lack of awareness over here, what are the chances of its videogame spin-off having any luck? Suffice to say that too few journalists and magazines are getting excited about the game, and some of them are going to be feeling pretty foolish when the game comes out of nowhere and makes people's eyes pop out of their heads.