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Electronic Arts has announced a deal with Rhino Records that will see music from the late 80s and early 90s appear in this year's range of EA Sports titles in the shape of "Throwback Trax", an expansion of the publisher's "EA Trax" soundtrack catalogue.

Bigben Interactive plans to bring Dance:UK to Xbox this July 2nd, following the success of the original dance mat game on PSone and PS2. The Xbox version features high score uploads over Live and a revised track listing, and will come bundled with an official dance mat. It should cost £40 in the UK.

Take-Two and Sega have announced a "binding letter of intent" to co-publish and distribute the latter's ESPN Videogames sports, er, games. The deal encompasses ESPN NFL Football, ESPN NHL Hockey, ESPN NBA Basketball, ESPN College Hoops and ESPN Major League Baseball. It also makes provision for the duo to extend their sporting relationship in future.

Ubisoft has released its 90-second E3 trailer for Prince of Persia 2, and because we love you all like the children we never had because we used the Time Dagger and went back and undid the pregnancy, we've popped the hi-res 20MB version of it up on Eurofiles. Enjoy.

Vivendi-Universal Games and Massive Entertainment have released a three-map multiplayer demo of Ground Control 2: Operation Exodus, which also includes a single-player map from the previously released single-player demo. So it's probably best described as "a demo including multiplayer" rather than "a multiplayer demo". Consultancy? We offer it. We also offer the 213MB demo for download here.

Thief III: Deadly Shadows, due out on PC and Xbox in Europe this Friday, reportedly suffers from an obscure bug that resets the difficulty level to Normal if you ever save and then reload your position.

Cenega Publishing has announced a pair of titles for the Nokia N-Gage. Roots: Gates of Chaos is an RPG set prior to any other version of The Roots, in which the player fights to help the Lady of Life defeat her nemesis the Demon Lord, with four-player Bluetooth multiplayer support. Shade: Wrath of Angels, on the other hand, is a 3D horror game where players have to solve puzzles and problems of logic "that would stump Einstein". Well so what? The apple stumped him for long enough. Shade does have some good ideas though, like being chased through different times and dimensions, mixing various kinds of weaponry from each of them, and of course it has two-player deathmatch via Bluetooth. Both games are due out "in the latter half of 2004 and early 2005," which seems like a roundabout way of saying "sooner or later".

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Movie tie-in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban topped the UK software charts again this week, extending its lead with an 81 per cent climb in sales, while publisher EA also took the number two and three places in the ranking.

We had to split them for memory issues but it is actually making the gameplay better because you have more saving points, because we have watch how people were playing and have changed the location of several checkpoints.

"The majority" of SCI's console product line-up for 2005 will be online according to remarks snuck into the publisher's recent interim results report to the City, meaning that along with Battlestations: Midway (already confirmed), at least one or two titles out of Rogue Trooper, Conflict 4 and Carmageddon should be playable on PS2 Online and Xbox Live.

Having originally released it as part of the bumper European edition of Savage: The Battle for Newerth, Britsoft publisher Digital Jesters has now made the official "Samurai Wars" mod for the game available for free to everybody else. Good news if you bought the game direct from developer S2 Games prior to its European release, or subsequently bought it online from DJs.

THQ has released a copy of its E3 2004 trailer for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, an ambitious PC RTS game currently under development at Relic Entertainment, a studio the Nickelodeon-loving publisher recently purchased.

DRIV3R (née Driver 3) has "gone gold", meaning that it's finished and off to disc duplication plants ahead of its planned and now seemingly cemented European release date of June 22nd. The game will appear in North America a day earlier on June 21st. It's due out on PS2 and Xbox.

Media giant Viacom has considered purchasing leading publisher Electronic Arts, but decided that such a buyout would be unfeasible due to the high price tag attached to the company - believed to be around $20 billion.

Following its recent appearance on registration-only FilePlanet (is registration really that big a deal?), Starsiege: Tribes, the multiplayer FPS that kicked off the whole Tribes dynasty in the first place, is now available to download for free from Sierra's website. It's 135MB and available here. Although that's it for now, don't be too surprised if Tribes 2, also released for free via FilePlanet, joins SS: Tribes on the Sierra download page in the coming days or weeks. We'll be sure to note if and when it does.

Although the game isn't due out in Europe until the end of the month, gamers in the States have wasted no time in exposing the depths of Pandemic's Full Spectrum Warrior with all the force of a bunker buster bomb - revealing that it's possible to unlock a version of the original US Army training simulation upon which the retail FSW is based.

Namco plans to release Tekken 5 and a new Ridge Racer title before April of next year, according to reports based on an article in the Japanese Nihon Keizai Shimbun. Namco has previously claimed that Tekken 5 would appear on PS2 in 2005 - including the estimate in its E3 trailer - although word on the next Ridge Racer/R: Racing title has been thin on the ground.

The seemingly endless Doom movie saga has taken another boring turn this month with the revelation that the movie is back with Universal Pictures, or isn't, or is with the same producer but not the same studio, or something along those lines. It's all a bit confusing.

Last Friday, a demo purporting to be Spider-Man 2 for the PC was uncovered and mirrored all over the Internet. We reported on it and even uploaded it to Eurofiles. Since then however it's become clear that the demo was not officially released by Activision and is not representative of the Spider-Man 2 title in development at Treyarch - i.e. the one that we're actually interested in playing.

Microsoft has made another golf course available to Links 2004 fans via Xbox Live's ingenious Downloadable Content system, the Gallery Golf Club's North Course. Much like January's Kapalua Plantation course, this one is 'premium content' and costs you $4.99 (or whatever the European equivalent is - we haven't had a chance to check in this case), and highlights include the world's longest par-5, the 725-yard ninth. More courses should be made available via Live in the future - apparently at intervals of around two months each.

Football shirts. Perhaps you buy one every season. This reporter does (it's what pays Michael Owen's wages), and there are many more like us. Well, perhaps it's time to give some of them up. Browsing around today, we discovered Radio 5 Live's "shirt amnesty" initiative. What you do is round up your old shirts (the ones at the bottom of the drawer, or that earmarked for the gardening you never do - whatever) and send them off to Shirt Amnesty, who will transport them to areas in Africa where they can't afford to buy them. It's not exactly game-related, but if it's any consolation we did find it on the website of Football Manager 2005 developer Sports Interactive, and it's a nice way to make a difference for somebody who can't afford to sling £40 at a game and then moan about it on a forum at work all day. More details can be found here.

Better late than never, Eidos has announced its E3 line-up, including that enigmatic "third person urban action game with an online component" that the publisher announced it was working on with Highway 1 Productions some time ago, known as Get On Da Mic.

American film mag Variety reckons that John Woo is in line to direct a movie based on Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, with Liev Schreiber and Raymond Cruz reportedly heading up the cast as CIA agent John Clark and his colleague Domingo "Ding" Chavez respectively.

A quiet update to Lionhead's official frequently asked questions (FAQ) document for Fable has shed some light on the game's current release target.

Whether you liked the original movie or not (we did, a lot), Spider-Man 2 is going to be an enormous presence this summer, so you might as well get in on the ground floor with the demo Activision released today of its tie-in game, which is due out alongside the movie on every format under the sun.

There's not much going on at retail this week, which rather aggravates the task of writing a column about new releases, but, as regulars well know, we make our own fun around here. Or, rather, we make fun of our own. Just muddle the words around until it gives you a giggle. Please. We're suffering today. (Which ought to be good value, eh?)

Ubisoft has cautioned Splinter Cell fans not to split-jump to conclusions after plane-spotting types picked up on a new trademark filed with the US Patent & Trademark Office on May 3rd.

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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.