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Spider-Man 2 won't be swinging into cinemas until the end of June, but that hasn't stopped Activision announcing plans to develop and publish games based on Spider-Man 3, which is currently pencilled in for release sometime in 2007.

Last year, Project Gotham Racing 2 raised the bar for online-enabled racing games, integrating the Xbox Live service so completely that it even downloaded leaderboards and ghost cars in single-player mode. Since then, the game's multiplayer racing has often filled a gap when we've had no one around to tackle face to face, and often we've been sat down with a mate and wound up chucking it on anyway. It's that good.

Thief: Deadly Shadows will creep out of itself on June 11th, publisher Eidos announced this week, and you should see both PC and Xbox versions of the Ion Storm Austin-developed sneak-'em-up tucked in amongst the goodies at your local gaming shop from that day forth.

Sony's PlayStation console has passed a significant milestone in its history, with the 100 millionth unit of PS hardware being shipped earlier this week - almost a decade after it originally launched.

Leeds-based Game Frontier will shortly be running the UK qualifiers for the Electronic Sports World Cup 2004, an annual gaming event with a total prize fund of some $210,000 (approximately €175,000 at today's exchange rate), the company announced today.

Assuming you weren't at E3 (or even if you were), you can download an official, high resolution version of the E3 trailer for Doom 3 Xbox right now via Eurofiles. Please refer to the usage guide if you've never used Eurofiles before or have any questions.

"Halo 2 is going to tip our world upside down," declared Microsoft's XNA chief J Allard last week, as he boasted that the hugely anticipated Xbox-only sci-fi shooter "will be one of the biggest pre-orders in the history of mankind", and forecasted "a million pre-orders" for the Bungie title.

"I don't think we've had a killer app," was J Allard's disarmingly frank assessment of the comparatively low European Xbox Live subscription numbers to date in an interview with Eurogamer last week.

A report which has appeared in a respected American business publication suggests that Electronic Arts may be on the verge of signing a billion-dollar deal for the exclusive rights to use NFL player names and likenesses.

E3 generally consists of a lot of swallowing. Amongst the things we can print without getting in trouble, there's overpriced water, hype and fluff, lots of coffee, and this year we even wound up shovelling paralysingly icy Ground Control 2 mints down our throats. Unfortunately though, it's not all sweets, caffeine and press spooge - E3 is also more than often guilty of swallowing up smaller games and announcements and refusing to spit them out.

Sonic Advance 3 is due out in Europe on June 18th, and to celebrate publisher THQ has managed to get the Hedgehog's esteemed creator Yuji Naka to sign 25 exclusive SA3 prints, and now plans to give them all away via its website. All you have to do to win one is register on THQ's website and then answer a relatively simple question about Sonic's origins before the closing date of July 17th. Once you've registered, you can find the competition page here.

Jak 3 may be the concluding part of a trilogy, but Naughty Dog has no plans to ditch the Jak & Daxter franchise and may produce more games set in the same universe, representatives told Eurogamer last week.

When we saw our first trailer of Frontier Developments' RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, we spent the whole day running up and down stairs twirling our heads around pretending to be the Coaster Cam. We've stopped that now, but we're still excited every time we clap eyes on the minutely detailed 3D world into which Chris Sawyer's classic formula has been transplanted.

You can download a full video of Bungie's Halo 2 multiplayer presentation thanks to our new FREE files service Eurofiles right here. If you've never used it before, you can find full details on how to get BitTorrent up and running and get your hands on the movie by viewing our FAQ document.

A few minutes into Metal Gear Solid 3, sitting through an easily ten-minute-long codec conversation in which our hero, dubbed "Naked Snake" for the purposes of this adventure, is discussing the finer points of an oriental proverb, it's clear that Hideo Kojima and his team at Konami aren't gunning to convert non-believers, nor to rally disenfranchised fans of the original who couldn't get on with the sequel. Judging by the contents of the "Trial Version" - a one-hour-long section equivalent in a narrative and scene-setting sense to the Tanker demo released prior to Metal Gear Solid 2 - and the neighbouring big-screen trailer, which is exciting crowds at one-hour intervals, there's just as much of the self-indulgence that riled a fair few when Sons of Liberty first came to market.

"People think of us as this 800 pound gorilla, but on a global basis our market share is only 20 per cent. We think, 'why can't that be 25 per cent or 30 per cent?'"

Id Software's next game will shape entirely new intellectual property for the software firm, CEO Todd Hollenshead has told Reuters, and development could begin just days after the completion of Doom 3.

Ubisoft has signalled another round of automatic updates for Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, including a number of changes to the game's method of scoring and the way it penalises players who drop out of multiplayer battles, which ought to do a bit more to dissuade sore losers from dropping out of ranking games.

In these cynical times, a mates-down-the-pub quickie explanation of Shadow of Rome arguably fails to excite. Blending hackandslash, stealth and the Roman coliseum, it sounds like a marketing concept borne out of someone's love for Solid Snake and Russell Crowe. Cynicism? Et tu, Capcom? In practice though, while it certainly draws inspiration from a number of well-known franchises both cinematic and electronic, it's hard not to enjoy the execution of these familiar elements when they're handled with this much gusto.

Japanese game publisher and gambling machine manufacturer Sammy Corp has announced that it is to acquire the remaining 78 per cent of Sega's stock which it doesn't already own, in a deal worth 165 billion Yen (1.2 billion Euro).

It may not be a game as such, but one of the things Sony announced at E3 last week was DJ - Decks & FX, a new virtual mixing deck package crafted by Brighton-based Relentless Software. It's due out this autumn and we have some screenshots here.

Eidos has signed Charlton Athletic's Mervyn Day to work as a consultant on Beautiful Game Studios' Championship Manager 5, which is due out later this year. During his footballing career, Day played for the likes of West Ham United, Leyton Orient, Aston Villa, Leeds United and Carlisle United, and coached Leeds and Everton before joining Alan Curbishley as Charlton's number two in 1998.

Electronic Arts' Euro 2004 climbed to the top of this week's UK games chart, sealing the games giant's fourth number one of the year to date, holding off the challenge from Nintendo's Pokemon Colosseum, which debuted just behind at No.2. According to Chart-Track, the latter has been the Cube's fastest-selling title since Mario Kart: Double Dash emerged last year, and is the eighth best sales week for any Cube title in the UK.

Details of the hotly pursued Need For Speed Underground 2 have appeared on the game's official website, giving us a better idea of how EA/Black Box plans to improve on last year's chart-topping chav racer wet dream. In short, it sounds like the experience of driving around Los Angeles for a week without using brakes.

Although when we first heard about it we envisaged something a lot stickier and picnic-oriented, Capcom Fighting Jam is apparently a new 2D beat-'em-up for PS2 starring characters from a number of Capcom fighting games. According to reports it lets you pick two characters and then choose one to fight with prior to each bout, and maintain the fighting styles (and indeed sometimes the same sprites) from previous titles with a six-button setup any SFII fan ought to be able to handle. Characters we've seen mentioned so far include Ryu and Guile from Street Fighter II, Demitri and Felicia from Darkstalkers, Guy and Sakura from Street Fighter Alpha, Leo and Hauser from Red Earth, and Yun and Chun Li from Street Fighter III. Chunners obviously appears in other SF titles, but apparently she's in the SFIII camp in this instance.

As you may have gathered, they've all (literally all of them) naffed off to the West Coast of the United States to go to E3, and left me on my own here in Blighty. It's not all bad, though - the sun is shining brightly outside, I'm not jetlagged, and unlike Tom, I don't have a restraining order imposed by a Californian court that prevents me from going within half a kilometre of Shigeru Miyamoto. Or a broken nose from shouting "oi, baldy!" at Vin Diesel (true story - well, apart from the broken nose bit).

So. Do you know why it's called GoldenEye? Let's get that out of the way just in case. Short version: you are a naughty former MI6 agent working for Goldfinger, you lose an eye in a battle with Dr. No, and Goldfinger's technicians fashion a golden replacement (which happens to improve your abilities like Geordie from Star Trek).

UK-based Climax is handling the Xbox port of NovaLogic's Delta Force - Black Hawk Down, adding Live support and co-operative missions along with various new maps, modes and tweaks to the arcade-oriented shoot-'em-up ahead of a planned late 2004 release.

"San Andreas is not a city - it's a state." Those words from Rockstar's Dan Houser more than anything ought to inspire the Grand Theft Auto loving crowd (which is 95 per cent of us, judging by the sales figures). Comprising Los Santos (Los Angeles) where you start out, San Fierro (San Francisco) and Las Venturra (Las Vegas), it's an epic environment allegedly six times the size of Vice City, unlocked gradually over the course of the game, and besides the cities it also features all the roads in between, allowing you to race through the desert, countryside, and even over a mountain...

Fans of Konami's output were hardly left wanting at E3 this year (as you may have noticed), but enemies of the publisher's rather awful Turtles scrolling beat-'em-up will probably groan at news of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, which is due out this October on every format under the sun.