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Eidos has announced Commandos developer Pyro Studios' latest project, Imperial Glory, which is due out on the PC in early 2005 and promises to be "the most extensive strategy game ever", whatever that means. [Urgent whispers] Oh, apparently it means you can lead one of five 19th century Empires (Great Britain, France, Russian, Prussia or Austro-Hungary) into battle around the globe as you juggle the needs of local politics, trade, international diplomacy, resource management and technology research.

One of this year's most anticipated games is undoubtedly Atari's stompy robot shooter Transformers. We almost screamed our faces off during one particularly manic preview session, so we were keen to have a chat with the chaps down under at Melbourne House, the developer of the unbelievably impressive PS2 exclusive.

Let's get one thing absolutely straight. Devil May Cry was one of the best action games ever made on the PS2. Its mentalist hackandslash action gothic rock style was the perfect answer to doubts over the PS2's graphical abilities, and it was as intense and as stylish a game as there has ever been from Capcom ever since.

Gearbox is readying a new version of Halo called Halo Custom Edition, the developer has announced, giving the game's many fans the chance to create mods and other custom content using the v1.04 codebase of the game as a template.

With the EverQuest 2 beta test sign-ups apparently already sealed up, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment leapt on the large number of MMORPG fans still lusting after something new this week by opening applications for the beta test of The Matrix Online. Although The Matrix has certainly fallen from grace somewhat since the second and third instalments hit cinema screens, this is still bound to be huge, and if you like the idea of running around a fake version of a fake real world then you can sign up for it here. Is it going to be any good? It's the question that drives us.

Leading publisher Electronic Arts has committed to supporting the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS platforms, but the recently rumoured move to develop Xbox Live titles is still under negotiation, according to senior company execs.

As the world and its leather-gloved dog prepare to wrap their eyes round Gran Turismo 4 next week, Konami of Europe has announced Enthusia Professional Racing for PS2, which seemingly aims to compete with the Kazunori Yamauchi's renowned 'driving simulator'. Well, that's not expressly what it says, but you can't really put "the most realistic racing game to date" in your PR and hope to avoid comparison.

Although The Suffering will inevitably wind up lumped with Resident Evil and Silent Hill in the 'survival horror' category, in actual fact it feels more like an 'action horror' title when you get round to playing it. In games like Resident Evil, risking the last half an hour's play every time you take an uncertain step arguably does just as much to promote tension and accentuate every fright as a mutant dog leaping through a window. And while The Suffering is heavy on the otherworldly sights and sounds, it dispenses with the slower pacing and inventory juggling of 'survival horror' titles and throws in a pretty comfortable checkpoint system to boot. A good idea, or a bad one? Well, it's a Midway game called "The Suffering", and we haven't made the obvious joke yet, so the signs are fairly encouraging...

Industry veteran Bill Gardner, who was formerly president of Capcom North America and was instrumental in the founding of the Japanese company's European operations, has announced that he has started up a new publishing and distribution company.

When publishers commission games out to development studios, do they actually bother to consider how crowded the market is beforehand, or are they so mind-numbingly arrogant to believe that going down the me-too route is somehow a worthwhile strategy? Case in point - Eden Studio's Kya: Dark Lineage. We've literally lost count of how many cutesy platform games have landed on our desk for review over the past 18 months or so (it's definitely over 20), and do you know how many of them have been hits? About two of them. Even the very best have floundered. What makes Atari think this is going to work where near-classics like Sly Raccoon and Voodoo Vince failed so dismally?

The drought is well and truly over. And, as if to illustrate that fact, it's raining so hard that you'd think the heavens were sobbing tears of joy (although it's possible they're just sobbing because they've played Star Trek: Shattered Universe). There's a (what's the collective term for loads of good games? Ah yes) veritable bankruptcy of good and indeed top games out this week, including Hitman: Contracts, Project Zero 2: Crimson Butterfly and Fight Night 2004, and Onimusha 3 has just launched in the States, some way ahead of its July 9th debut in Europe.

For all the killers and the hundred-dollar-billers, EA has gone and, er, 'spillers-ed' the details on the name of the next Def Jam Vendetta game. Until now, the EA Canada-penned sequel had been operating under a working title, but EA's latest conference call reveals that we're actually looking forward to a game called Def Jam: Fight for New York. You can read all we know about that game (and find some shots) by clicking... here.

Codemasters has officially announced Colin McRae Rally 2005, this year's inevitable vintage of the celebrated rally series, and the biggest new feature on the cards is an eight-player head-to-head online mode which should be available through both PS2 Online and Xbox Live - mirroring the Britsoft developer's efforts in other franchises like England International Football.

Electronic Arts has revealed the title of the next TimeSplitters game in its quarterly conference call this week, having announced a deal to publish it earlier in the year.

Sega came clean about the console conversion of Outrun 2 today, confirming the game has been naturally ported from the Chihiro arcade board for Xbox, while making no mention of a PlayStation 2 version.

British independent developer Kuju has announced the signing of a new development contract, this time with leading publisher Activision, for a title being created at the company's offices in Godalming, Surrey.

We liked Worms 3D. There's no shame in that. Some people might argue there is, but those people are very wrong and mad...

Back in November 2002, a little Xbox-exclusive game called Blinx The Timesweeper launched to critical and commercial indifference, despite a lot of plugging from platform holder Microsoft, for whom the game represented a first stab at character-based adventuring and an adventurous application of the Xbox hard disk technology.

Interplay's not-altogether-brilliant-but-quite-enjoyable-in-a-hackyslashy-sort-of-way Xbox title Hunter The Reckoning is set to relaunch on Xbox this May priced £19.99, giving those of you who ignored it the first time around a chance to pick up on it - that is, if you fancy the idea of hacking away at the undead with groups of friends. Also arriving on budget at the end of May is another Interplay title - survival-horror-in-space Run Like Hell, which boasts a bunch of new features (aside obviously from improved graphics) in its Xbox incarnation.

The camera always lies. If it's not making us look like the latest zombie half-breed candidate for www.ishaggedaminger.co.uk then its mood swings bizarrely round to the other flattering extremes. What a lovely backhanded compliment it is when someone says you're photogenic, when what they really mean is 'you don't look anywhere near as good as that in real life'. Sigh. Project Zero 2, for us, merely reinforces the principle that some things in life really shouldn't be photographed.

Movie licenses generally don't do much for, well, anybody with any knowledge of movie-based videogames, but every once in a while we do come across an exception to the rule, and judging by the preview code we took on last week, Van Helsing could well prove to be one of those exceptions.

Prepare to kick open doors and bring down terrorists and other wrongdoers whilst pretending to be chain-smoking and boozing Irish actors! That's right, folks, Vivendi has announced SWAT 4, the latest game in the tactical PC FPS series, currently in development under the madly tapping fingers of Tribes Vengeance scribes Irrational Games, and due for release in Q1 2005.

Sitting down with Carve, it's hard not to recoil at the sheer naivety of it. It's a very pretty game, it's easy enough to pick up, and it has an extremely well implemented online mode, but it's going to sell about four and a half copies (this being the half), and given Take-Two's royalty-only deal with developer Argonaut, that's not going to carve the mustard. Which is a shame, really, because everybody ought to own one good jet-ski game, and Carve is highly polished and enjoyable and challenging enough to last you the best part of a weekend. At £15-20, surely that isn't a bad deal?

Lots of delays to take note of today, most notably Reflections/Atari's DRIV3R on PS2 and Xbox, which has reportedly tumbled three weeks from June 1st to June 21st on both formats (the PC version is due out sometime later, and the Cube one was canned). Obviously it's not the end of the world, but it's worth noting anyway for any Tanner fans planning to take some time off to accommodate it...

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has officially announced plans to release Gran Turismo 4: Prologue Signature Edition next month priced £24.99 (about €37). The game will be made available in limited numbers across Europe, but sounds like a must for Gran Turismo fans eager to get a taste of the forthcoming fourth title in the driving simulation series.

Fighting fire with fire. Sometimes it's the only thing to do when a game turns up the heat on its customer and decides to do everything it can to pour cold water all over your fun.

The noble art of the button-mashing hackandslash - an ancient art almost as old as old as gaming itself. Plug in joypad, turn on console, disengage brain, mash those buttons until you can see the dents coming through your nails. Perfect after a hard day of soul crushing desk job brain death. Ok, so maybe it's not quite that simple, but Starbreeze's obscure recent release Knights Of The Temple presumably aims to be slightly more interesting than that.

Half-Life 2 - it's rare these days that we get to fire up a word processor to actually write something about the game, and not just the circumstances surrounding its ongoing development. However, amidst speculation that it might not even hit until 2005, and apparent confirmation that the adjusted "summer 2004" shipping target is more to do with development delays than the source code leak, we do finally have some new screenshots to digest, and it continues to paint a pretty picture, even if it's starting to look a bit more like a real game and not some sort of magical voodoo concoction as it did when we first slobbered over it at the start of 2003.

Dualstar Entertainment, the company which manages twin teen celebrities Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, has filed a lawsuit against Acclaim Entertainment alleging that the publisher breached its contract to develop games based on the Olsens.

Yay Midway! After the original Shadow Hearts failed to capture the hearts of supposedly RPG-loving Judases and Landos up and down the land (come on! It was great!), we had very little hope of ever seeing the sequel here in Blighty, or even in the States for that matter. However, perhaps spurred on by the game's success in Japan, perhaps because of some unspoken love of Japanese developer Aruze, or perhaps because the people at the top are just plain friendly (though we doubt the last one), Shadow Hearts 2 is coming out in Europe - under the banner of Shadow Hearts: Covenant. Expect to see it in the shops in late autumn.