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Activision's movie license Spider-Man 2 has stayed on top of the UK software sales chart for a third week, as a period largely bereft of major new full-price releases saw no movement in the top four titles.

Nintendo has started trailing its line-up for the inaugural public Game Stars Live event taking place at London's ExCeL conference centre this September 1st to 5th, and promises that we can expect more to come including games "never before seen by UK eyes".

Nintendo is planning a summer road trip to show off a number of its forthcoming games "months before they are available to buy in the UK". The Nintendo Konga Beach Road Trip (yes) will visit eighteen locations around the UK (or at least, around England) and consists of a 40-foot articulated lorry decked out like a Hawaiian beach bar, featuring all manner of Nintendo titles.

The inevitable third title in the NBA Street series will go online on both PS2 and Xbox, published Electronic Arts has announced. NBA Street V3 is currently in development at EA Canada and due out under the "BIG" label in early 2005. It's also due out on GameCube in the same timeframe, albeit without online support.

DreamCatcher Games has announced Cold War: Behind the Iron Curtain, a new PC stealth/espionage adventure thingum due out in the UK in Q4 2004 with Mindscape handling distribution. It sounds vaguely interesting. Apparently we get to play a freelance journalist called Matt Carter on the run in the USSR in the 80s. He winds up in a KGB prison barely half a day into the country, for no obvious reason, and it'll take lots of fighting, infiltrating and improvising to get out and prevent the government's overthrow - across 23 non-linear levels that touch on Lenin's Mausoleum, Chernobyl and other familiar places. Get your screenshots here.

id Software programmer Robert Duffy has updated his .plan this week expounding on the differences between the graphics and sound quality levels in Doom III, and which you can expect to work on particular hardware set-ups. And given that "most production levels in Doom III contain more media assets than all of Quake 3: Arena," that's bound to be a concern for most.

Empire Interactive has released a one-track playable demo of Mashed, Supersonic Software's quirky little Micro Machines-style racer, which is already out on PC and consoles, and which we rather like around here.

Having announced some new IP last week, UK developer Warthog has revealed that it's also in the process of returning to the space-based Conquest RTS series, and has the original game's development team hard at work on Conquest 2: The Vyrium Uprising. You can find some screenshots of the game here.

Having had nothing to say on the subject all year, Microsoft has finally broken its silence about the Ninja Gaiden's Master Ninja Tournament for Europe, revealing that it will run from August 2nd to September 2nd, and that ninjas will be fighting to win a trip to Tokyo and katanas signed by Tomonobu Itagaki amongst other things.

Electronic Arts' report on market outlook following its first quarter results last week has indicated that while further price cuts to the Xbox and PS2 are unlikely in North America this year, new prices may be forthcoming in Europe.

It's been a turbulent year for Jak so far. First there were since refuted reports of his demise, then we discovered that his latest adventure sees him expelled from Haven City and left almost for dead in the surrounding wasteland, having failed to guide the city through a resurgence of Metal Head forces. Nevertheless, we're not giving up on him, and we're looking forward very much to the third - and perhaps concluding - chapter in his development. Speaking in a Sony-directed Q&A session prior to E3, Naughty Dog creative director Daniel Arey offers some insight into what we can expect. And of course you can find our thoughts on the game, including comments from Naughty Dog's game directors Evan Wells and Amy Hennig, by heading here.

Despite the demise of the films - if you can call it that - The Lord of the Rings is still very hot property indeed. This year's effort from EA seems to be focussing more on the discerning gamer and less on the fair-weather fan devoted to a quick action fix. The Third Age, a turn-based RPG dripping with all the polish you'd expect from such a high-profile franchise, is quite obvious being made with the intention of "mopping up" the afterbirth of what has been a grotesquely successful exercise in franchise manipulation. For the Shire, and all that.

Electronic Arts may be a lot of things, but 'controversial' isn't often one of them. Even with illegal street racing and World War II multiplayer games on the shelves, the world's biggest games publisher manages to maintain its bankability without having its morals rifled through by bloodthirsty investors and consumers. It shipped "a family product" about killing people in Vietnam, for heaven's sake.

SNK Playmore has apologised to hardcore NeoGeo fans for problems in the home edition of Samurai Shodown V Special, and instigated a recall in order to make up for them. "We deeply apologise that we could not meet up to our customers' expectations on our last game release for the NeoGeo," the company said of SSV Special, which reportedly suffers from bugs in practice mode, abnormal damage rates and hang-ups, amongst other things. Fans are also disappointed at the absence of fatality moves from the arcade version, having not been told about their absence and then forked out around £200 for a cartridge. It seems, however, that the recall will not only fix the bug issues, but also reinstate the fatalities, so there is at least some sort of lining around this particular cloud - despite doubtless incessant flaming within recent days.

Given our love for F-Zero: GP Legend on the Game Boy Advance (read some of our love notes here), we were pleased today to discover that Nintendo appears to be producing another F-Zero title for its ever-popular handheld.

Blabbering about the increasingly protracted development of the Far Cry 1.2 patch has become a staple of our news roundup lately, but for once it's more than worthy of mention in grander surroundings: because publisher Ubisoft has now withdrawn it citing "unexpected behaviour on specific hardware configurations".

Xbox exclusive Dead or Alive Ultimate will ship in Japan on October 7th, priced 9,240 yen (€69 / £46), developer Tecmo has announced. As well as the game, anybody pre-ordering the online-enabled beat-'em-up remake package will also earn themselves a poster and figurine of Kasumi, as well as a PC CD-ROM entitled Digital Venus 2004, featuring voice and visuals from various Dead or Alive characters. You can see what that will look like courtesy of The Magic Box here.

Valve Software is hoping to deliver a Half-Life 2 release candidate to publisher Vivendi this August, MD Gabe Newell and Director of Marketing Doug Lombardi have both confirmed this past week.

Software giant Microsoft has announced strong results for the fourth quarter and full year ended June 30th, but the growth of the company's Xbox business continues to lag behind other divisions despite increasing console shipments.

German developer Crytek has entered into a strategic partnership with publisher Electronic Arts which will see it building a new game franchise for the PC, based on entirely new intellectual property.

Last week, while England basked in its trademark grey skies, Electronic Arts was busy showing off two dozen games on a typically hot Californian sunny day. So hot that the poor, frail, pale UK contingent were forced to seek shade like the indoor dwelling Vampires that we are. But it was just as well that we're so rubbish at going outdoors when there were games like TimeSplitters Future Perfect being demoed indoors by none other than the creators themselves. Accordingly, we waved (literally, we had the shakes from the night before) a camera in the face of Free Radical director Karl Hilton and chatted about how the company's latest creation is shaping up, ahead of its early 2005 release. Read on, or download the interview in its entirety over at Eurofiles.

Quiet times. Despite the suffocating humidity we've been experiencing lately (can you sleep? I can't), and the summer holidays kicking in, there's nothing new on the shelves this week. We were under the impression that Army Men: Sarge's War (the former 3DO title rescued by Take-Two) and Samurai Jack (a kiddy title from Sega) were due this week, but judging by the uniformly confused silence on the other end of the phone when we called around just now, and the Out Of Stock notices on every online store we've checked, both are still to come. But hey, maybe you'll have more luck than we did.

We'd almost forgotten how good it looked. Perhaps it was the sights and sounds of a thousand other demo pods at E3, or maybe we're just drinking more than we used to, but we had almost forgotten that OutRun2 is one of the most gorgeous arcade racing games we've ever encountered. But sitting back down with Sumo Digital's ambitious and increasingly expansive Xbox port in Sega's cavernous conference room in London recently, it didn't take long before the superlatives were flowing again.

Although the Vietnam War took place more than 30 years ago, the conflict still stirs up strong feelings amongst Americans and indeed people worldwide. Tackling the subject in videogame form was always going to prove controversial, and up to this point you could argue that we've seen some fairly gratuitous examples. With Men of Valor, however, 2015 is determined to try and avoid making a political statement or offending anybody. Yet, at the same time, they've chosen an African-American man for the lead and aim to touch on some of the delicate racial issues that were unfolding at the time... There are certainly some aspects of the equation that don't quite add up. In the concluding part of our interview with 2015, we asked Cayle George about some of the more controversial aspects of Men of Valor: The Vietnam War...

Sports Interactive is planning to unveil Football Manager 2005 to the public for the first time at this year's Edinburgh International Games Festival, the Islington-based developer announced this week.

The long awaited GameCube version of Mario Tennis will be released in Japan this October according to Nintendo spokesperson Mitsuaki Hagishima, speaking in the Japanese Nintendo Dream magazine recently. More details on the game will apparently be revealed in the coming months.

Microsoft Game Studios in Japan is looking for game creators with some original ideas, opposed to the current trend of pushing sequels and established franchises, judging by a job ad that appeared on the firm's Japanese employment page this week.

Yoshinori Kitase, director of Square Enix's CG DVD movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, has hinted in the Japanese press that a sequel to FFVII is not completely out of the question, according to comments widely reported over the past day or so.

The man described as the "father of Final Fantasy," Hironobu Sakaguichi, has founded his own independent development company, which is working on a new console role-playing game and is considering next-generation development.

The oft delayed PS2 and Xbox versions of Ghost Master should finally be with us this September, publisher Empire announced today, curiously choosing to top-load its press release with the line "Released in March 2003". Yep, the PC version was. So, why the long wait? Apparently it's because the publisher realised that both ports "needed to be overhauled to suit the more immediate 'pick up and play' needs of a console gamer." The interface has now been redesigned - so much so that Empire reckons "all interactions and commands can be easily and quickly accessed with a couple of quick clicks of the pad." It ghost faster, then.