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Get your lateral thinking caps on, ladies and gentlemen: Syberia is back to torture our poor grey matter once again. It's not often we find ourselves reporting on point and click adventures, but French developers seem to like them - even some of you lot do, judging by some of the comments. Anyway, Microids has kindly put up a demo to Syberia II on its website, weighing in at 82.3MB, and it’s likely to run on even the most steam powered PC.

Ah, we do love PC versions of console games and their ability to screw up multiple times. But praise be the patch and the broadband connection; where would we be without it?

The latest issue of the Official Championship Manager Magazine will be available from tomorrow, and Eidos is offering the magazine online "totally free-of-charge". [I thought we called those "emails"? -sneezing deputy]

EA resumed its reign at the top of the chart this week, with the US giant's James Bond 007: Everything Or Nothing making its debut at the top of the UK All Format chart in its first week on sale, as well as claiming top slot in the PS2, Xbox and GameCube chart.

Midway is having another crack at reviving the Gauntlet franchise, and, as rumoured late last year, has given John Romero the task of supervising the development on the project.

The 'research' level for Far Cry emerged on the interweb over the weekend (cheers Shadrach) for download and can be pasted into your demo installation.

The most bizarre news story of the day undoubtedly relates to Devil May Cry 3, the as-yet-unconfirmed sequel to Capcom's chaotic hackandslash.

Vivendi-Universal Games is inviting 5,000 gamers to join in the worldwide beta test for its upcoming RTS Ground Control II: Operation Exodus.

Strange rumblings emerged from the US this weekend, concerning the next Tomb Raider title and a certain Warren Spector.

Every year we literally fall off our chairs when we settle down to gorge on the stats that ChartTrack and ELSPA produces in their annual software report. Of course, all most of you hear is that game sales are up every year, and 2003 was no exception. In fact, for the first time ever, ChartTrack's 6,500-strong retailer panel broke through the billion pound mark (£1.07bn) in the process of selling 47.86 million items of software. And what's more impressive is that those figures only represent an estimated 85 per cent of the total market, with some huge retailers such as Toys 'R' US not on the panel, as well as a lot of one-man-band Indies.

It had to happen: EA – as it’s been doing all year – has confirmed our suspicions and announced a follow up to GoldenEye, and will be releasing the game on PS2, Xbox and GameCube this Christmas.

As I half expected, last week's call for more reader reviews has been well and truly answered. Since begging for your help seven days ago, our depleted supplies have been replenished to the point that this week's Reader Reviews is the biggest instalment in living memory. Submissions have piled up relentlessly, and this week we'll be delving in to those that stuck to the proposed retro vibe, mining attics for nostalgic thrills and pouring rose-tinted excitement into a Word document.

Publisher Midway has announced a loss of some $28.6 million for the fourth quarter of its 2003 fiscal year, which ended on December 31, representing a deepening loss for the company as revenues plummet due to restructuring efforts.

As you may recall, earlier in the week we took a little look at the demo of prohibition era mafia-themed strategy title Gangland, in which players get to build up their own little criminal empire using a gruff sounding Sicilian immigrant.

An empire-building sim based around a mafia crime family. In hindsight, Gangland seems like such an obvious concept. Who wouldn't want the chance to extort money, whack snitches, dodge feds and work their way up from hired muscle to crew runner to capo regime to Don Vinmugzo? We've all seen how well the life of a wise guy can work in third-person games like DMA's Grand Theft Auto and Illusion Softworks' Mafia, so - discounting the above-average Gangsters RTS from way back when - why not with the mechanics of empire-building RTS and Sim titles? Aiming to answer that question, Postal 2 publisher Whiptail delivers Gangland this Friday, and thanks to the recently released demo, we've been able to get a feel for its criminal potential.

Pandemic Studios president Josh Resnick has apparently confirmed reports that the developer's secret "Project Y" is an Xbox-exclusive third-person shooter called Mercenaries, set in the not too distant future, in which you get to pick sides during a four-way scramble for the remnants of a devastated North Korea. Resnick, who also founded the Full Spectrum Warrior and Star Wars: Battlefront developer, reportedly told GameSpot that current code "looks stunning".

Following hell's descent into sub-zero temperatures earlier this week, Valve's Doug Lombardi has confirmed that Counter-Strike: Condition Zero will debut on the Steam content download service at the same time as its retail debut in the States: March 23rd.

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has announced plans to publish an official Olympic Games title developed by Eurocom this July, ahead of the famous athletics event's return to Athens this summer. Developed in close partnership with the Athens 2004 Organising Committee and International Sports Multimedia - the exclusive licensee of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) - Athens 2004 will feature all manner of track and field events spread across accurately modelled Olympian venues as up to four players compare the skills of various motion-captured sportsmen and women. What's more, it's a PS2 exclusive.

C&VG has fresh reports that Crytek's beachy first-person shooter Far Cry, due out on the PC this March 26th, is currently in development for Xbox internally at Ubisoft, some six months after Crytek first spoke about the subject to Eurogamer at ECTS last August.

Ubisoft and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment today announced their mutual decision to end the co-publishing agreement they set up to cover massively multiplayer title The Matrix Online, leaving WBIE in firm control of the ambitious Monolith-developed MMORPG. However according to statements on both sides the two publishers will continue to work together in the future, and may even have other mutual projects on the go.

Rockstar North's Grand Theft Auto: Vice City has added yet more gongs to its trophy cabinet, winning five BAFTA awards at last night's inaugural BAFTA Games Awards ceremony in London, as well as the Sunday Times Readers Award.

Fans of golf on the go will be pleased to hear that Mario Golf: Advance Tour now looks set to ship in Japan on April 22nd, and, like the Japanese chart-topping Pokémon Fire Red and Leaf Green revamps, it will be bundled with the wireless link-up adapter to support the game's multiplayer options.

Yesterday afternoon, eager to be dragged away from the woeful bore of reviewing Destruction Derby Arenas, I was pleasantly pleased when suddenly my ears rattled at the sound of a klaxon I hadn't heard in a long time. Abandoning my Dual Shock (not, incidentally, the 'dual shock' of realising DDA is nothing like a proper Destruction Derby game and nothing like a proper multiplayer game), I yanked on the marble statue of Jill Valentine that book-ends the various copies of Famitsu I can't read, ducked through the resultant opening and stumbled clumsily into the monitoring and recording station I installed in the underground cave below the fireplace just last week. Knew it would come in handy.

Playing Burnout 2 was enough to shake the jaded cynic out of even the most poker faced old hack. After the promising, but ultimately disappointing original no-one expected this quick-fire sequel to be anything more than that - but it was, and still is, one of the best arcade racing games ever. Needless to say, we're more than a little interested to see how Criterion can top it with the third in the series - imaginatively titled Burnout 3. Our face wobbles just thinking about the G-force in prospect.

With Savage: The Battle for Newerth due out on Friday, European publisher Digital Jesters has announced the launch of a brand new demo of the game which takes advantage of the updated 2.00d code base, meaning all the additional units and structures that weren't in the previous US-only release and indeed the original demo are now available to try before you buy. (And you probably should buy, as we've gone to great lengths to try and emphasise.)

Finally! Following the recent release of the game in Europe by publisher Deep Silver, Egosoft's X2: The Threat - or this week's "next Elite" - is now available in playable demo form, giving those of you unconvinced by its charms an opportunity to get your teeth properly stuck in.

Browsing the ever enjoyable Video-fenky this morning we saw mention that Rogue Squadron developer Factor 5 has recently trademarked a couple of game titles, which can be found by digging around the US Patent and Trademark Office database as ever.

Despite Worms 3D taking a bow on PC, PS2, Xbox and GameCube, reports today suggest that Britsoft developer Team 17's next, as-yet unannounced product will not be appearing on GameCube, something that T17's Martyn Brown reckons is down to the current attitude at retail.

American gamers - and those of you planning to import - can now look forward to getting their hands on Tecmo's much-hyped Xbox exclusive Ninja Gaiden on March 2nd, a full two weeks ahead of its planned release date in Tecmo's homeland of Japan. And they really mean it this time, so hopefully this announcement will bring to an end the regular slippage reports that have dogged the game since its postponement late last year.

Not only has hell frozen over, but Satan has shifted his operations to that ice palace from Die Another Day and changed his name to "Frosty" by deed poll. That's right people - Counter-Strike: Condition Zero has finally received a concrete release date!