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Publisher Electronic Arts has announced that it will be switching off the servers for its massively multiplayer sci-fi title Earth & Beyond on September 22nd, just over two years after the game was officially launched.

When Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance was first released, it made more than a few RPG fans uncomfortable. While we were happy to see a new game based on the revered Forgotten Realms universe, we weren't so happy about the choice of genre - unlike the previous games to bear the Baldur's Gate name, Dark Alliance was a straightforward hackandslash. Where 'die' had once been the singular form of 'dice', now it was merely something to scream at hordes of goblin archers...

Another week, another handful of interesting reviews, some of which flirt with controversy, some of which flirt with obscurity, and some of which are just plain flirtatious. I've left out the one from a (mostly illiterate) reader who demanded that I suck his... - you get the idea - for failing to recognise the brilliance of P.N.03. Did I not say nice things about it anyway?

German publisher CDV has announced provisional results for the full financial year 2003, revealing an expected loss of some €10 million for the company following the cancellation of some projects in development.

For the second time in two days we're reporting on a downloadable freebie for a game that isn't even out yet. Even more coincidentally, it's another add-on level for a multiplayer-only first-person shooter - this time crafted for Unreal Tournament 2004 by the hand of level contributor Chris Blundell. Which means that it's official in an unofficial sort of way.

Earlier this year Vivendi-Universal Games' website was briefly updated with an alleged line-up of its planned 2004 releases, which included a number of games we couldn't remember having previously heard about. One of those titles was simply dubbed "Predator", and seemed to be aimed at the PS2 and Xbox console markets.

PC gamers waiting for Activision's True Crime: The Streets of LA to appear on their format can at least console themselves at the prospect of a new multiplayer mode with daft Activision-based character skins. According to the game's producer Brian Clarke, True Crime PC will benefit from nine new skins borrowed from other Activision titles, which can be used in single or multiplayer modes once unlocked.

Typical. I'm on my way out the door (towards the kitchen - I obviously wouldn't brave the outside world), and suddenly I hear an annoying sound effect that heralds the release of the Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow single-player demo.

Sega and Nokia have this week announced another N-Gage breakthrough. "Another one?" I hear you cry. Well, yes. That's what it says. Say hello to Pocket Kingdom: Own The World, a first-of-its-kind "massively multiplayer online mobile game" (or MMOMG, presumably).

Killer 7 has done a roaring trade in hype thus far, largely thanks to its unusual cel-shaded look (which isn't a phrase we get to type very often). In fact, it almost feels a shame to lift the veil this week and find a mere game lurking underneath. Then again, it's also nice to finally appreciate the Capcom Five's outstanding enigma in more familiar terms. Isn't it? Oh all right then, you win, we don't really know how we feel about it any more. Whatever. The following ought to give you an idea of what it's like...

Publisher Take-Two Interactive has announced that one of its founders, Ryan Brant, is to resign as chairman and director in order to focus on the publishing business, and will be replaced by financial expert Richard Roedel.

A little while ago we took a look at a quirky little Sims-alike called Singles: Flirt Up Your Life, which shocked and appalled us by failing to live down to our gutter-crawling expectations.

Battlefield Vietnam has just been released in the US, and it'll be on store shelves in Europe this Friday, so it's fair to say this is one of the nippiest bits of map creation we've seen in a while. A chap called Marc Brassard has apparently cooked up a free multiplayer-only map for BF Vietnam called Valley Assault - a little more understandable when you realise that Marc is one of Digital Illusions' artists. Aha: cheat!

Stepping into a darkened arcade circa 1983 was a magical experience for a wee ten year old gamer. The space age had arrived; a wall of sound, cabinets engulfed in cigarette smoke and mulleted callow youths with bad skin strutting their stuff in drainpipes, ten pence pieces the size of your FACE. A pound could go a long way when you're the king of Donkey Kong, Gorf, Mr Do and Star Wars. This crazy world of 8-bit light and noise was a frustratingly brief affair ("If only mum would buy me that ColecoVision, my life would be complete..."). And then someone had the audacity to install some kind of cartoon machine in the corner that took fifty pence pieces. But it looked like magic. How could they do graphics like that? Its name was Dragon's Lair - a tale of rescuing princesses and the hapless adventures of Dirk The Daring.

Those cheeky chappies at Datel send word of another curious little peripheral for Xbox owners - an Xbox USB dongle (sorry: "Xbox USB Keyboard Converter"), which has an Xbox connector wotsit on one end and a USB port on the other.

Brighton, England, March 16, 2004: European games content and online games technology solutions provider Eurogamer Network announces today the appointment of Patrick Garratt to Business Development Manager (Content).

Red-shirts. Those poor bit parts that always took point on away missions and wound up getting chided, chopped, chewed, chaliced and often choked by any indigenous creatures sensible enough to try and apprehend Captain Kirk. It's clear now that they were the lucky ones. Put a red-shirt in the average stealth-action game, and he'd realise what it truly is to be expendable. Having robbed from virtually every stealth orientated game released since the original Metal Gear Solid, Rogue Ops involves killing nameless guards by breaking their necks, shooting them in the head, sniping them from afar, slicing them up with shurikens, poisoning them with arrows, dumping fossilised dinosaurs on their heads, locking them in silos with detonating nuclear weapons, and of course leaping down and crushing their heads. Take that, Ensign Nobody.

When I was around five or six, I had a friend called Tim who lived just up the road from me. He was actually younger than me, but we hung out a lot of the time because he had a Mega Drive and I had a SNES, and we enjoyed playing, comparing and, naturally, arguing about the relative merits of our favourite games - Sonic The Hedgehog and Super Mario World. We were mini-geeks of relatively few long or interesting words, but I can still remember the gist of his argument versus mine. I preferred the pixel perfect precision, momentary bursts of satisfaction and continually mounting tension of a traditional Mario adventure, whereas he enjoyed the speed, accessibility and replay value of the first two Sonic titles. We regularly swapped sentiments along these lines.

Playing Savage brings to mind an old Super Play column called Daydreaming, in which readers submitted ideas for games and the best one each month received a prize. This is exactly the sort of idea people pitched: a strategic and fantastical war game hooked into an evolutionary colour clash - a post-apocalyptic struggle between technologically resurgent man and magical beast - where you can play everything from grunt to general, the nature your involvement and military discipline left entirely to your own discretion. A strictly multiplayer affair, Savage is hard to get into and eventually divides opinion anyway, but in the company of organised savages, it's an incomparably absorbing experience amongst a recent slew of pretty but vacuous shooters. It's the sort of game you dream about.

Kill.switch is an extremely simple game to describe, so I was surprised to pick it up earlier this week without really knowing anything about it at all. Apart from the issue of Sony doing a deal with Namco for its European console exclusivity (which you can read about elsewhere), all I had to go on was a vague recollection about some revolutionary gunfight gimmick which lets you shoot round corners without looking. Well, never fear, because after a couple of days' research I've discovered what else you can do in Kill.switch. You can shoot round corners while looking.

We've all heard of the underground music scene. Most of us have probably even run across the slightly more dodgy underground film scene. But did you know that there was an underground gaming scene? Of course, when I say underground, I literally mean underground.

What do you do after you've saved the world? It's a question that most games shy away from to a large degree; you fight your way through the final dungeon, defeat the evil that threatens the planet, the credits roll and then... What? It's all very well to walk off into the sunset, but once you've finished looking dramatic, it's time to take stock of the fact that it's nearly night time, you're in the middle of the desert and you've got to get on with your life. People who save the world aren't exactly a common breed, and it's fair to expect that they might do something more exciting than settling down and growing tomatoes, but this is a stage games generally don't reach, and it's rare to see a glimpse of what happens after the story ends.

It's almost six years since Unreal redefined the sci-fi shooter and made the Voodoo 2 the most desirable piece of gaming technology of its era. For a while it genuinely seemed like the PC was the only gaming platform worth bothering with, such was its technological superiority over anything else out there. It seemed almost unbelievable how we'd gone from Build-era bitmapped 3D to Epic's glossy tech in a couple of years - but in many ways it was so far ahead of its time that developers and publishers were only too happy to stick with churning out similar looking games for the next five years. It's not too far from the truth the suggest that progress has been slow ever since - a situation not helped by the fact that the next crop of 3D engines out there are stuck in development hell for one reason or another.

If nothing else, EA's latest Bond outing proves that there are some very brave marketing people working in Redwood Shores - creatively lobotomised marketing people, perhaps, but brave nonetheless - because following a couple of half-hearted 007 adventures since the turn of the century, the indomitable publisher has finally realised what everybody else already knows: that it will never produce a better Bond game than Rare's GoldenEye.

Updating a classic 2D franchise into 3D is something of a minefield for even the most experienced and talented development studio. Unless they cheat like hell and create some kind of 2.5D game, designers find themselves faced with the tricky task of working out what exactly defined the success and lasting appeal of the 2D original, and distilling those elements into a new 3D framework. Sometimes they get it spectacularly right, like in Mario 64 or Metroid Prime. Sometimes, well, it doesn't work so well - the disappointing 3D update of Defender being an example that springs readily to mind.

Now that somebody has finally made a game about escaping from an animal testing facility, it seems remarkably apt that it now faces a bunch of figurative guinea pigs like muggins here, all keen to let you know how it turned out. It's a pity though from a marketing perspective, because I could also happily draw parallels between my plight and that of some of the animals scurrying around the tortuous facilities in Whiplash. Actually, playing Crystal Dynamics' latest, I realised I've never felt more like an alligator on a treadmill in my life. Or is it a crocodile?

Yikes, I thought. In these days of forty-hour role-playing games, Hollywood voice acting talent and running along the walls of sepia-tinted Persian fantasies, puzzle games are bound to be a hard sell. What am I going to do? Who wants to hear about connecting blobs and managing chain reactions in these days of acrobatic exploration and brutal combat, where the boundaries of the universe and the flow of time are variables rather than limitations, and there are epic tales of life, love, human tragedy and even alien tragedy to explore?

Some people just aren't good at making decisions. If you find yourself confounded by the choice of washing up liquid or cheese varieties in your local supermarket, or can't make up your mind which movie to watch on an evening in, then Deus Ex: Invisible War might not be the game for you - since for a change, this is a game which really presents you with a lot of decisions to make. Rather than presenting you with a linear selection of puzzles to solve, targets to shoot or platforms to jump on, Invisible War allows you to pick your own path through the game - or at least, that's the theory.

Basing games on movies is one thing, but basing a game on the movie of a Disneyworld theme park ride is almost too much for my pea-sized brain to handle. Much easier to understand is that it's another haunted house game in the mould of Luigi's Mansion or Grabbed By The Ghoulies, with perhaps even a smidgen of Project Zero thrown in for good measure.

As you may have seen reported elsewhere, a US firm called Mastiff (who will be publishing La Pucelle Tactics in the States, if you're trying to place the name) has announced plans to release a 3D version of Space Invaders called "Space Raiders" exclusively on GameCube in the US this April. For just $19.99.