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Nintendo's Game Boy Advance SP passed the first anniversary of its launch in North America this week, with the diminutive handheld officially the fastest-selling console ever in the territory.

LucasArts currently has no titles in the works for GameCube, with none appearing on internal schedules, EuroGamer has learnt. That's right, kids: there are no GameCube Star Wars games currently on the slate.

What is it about the Japanese's sense of the macabre? Did Shinji Mikami lay awake at night dreaming of zombies after playing Alone In The Dark? Did he long to hear the "gnurrrrrrrgh" death rattles of 1,000 tortured undead souls, and the soft squelching sound of putrefying flesh rousing itself into twisted irrational battle one last time?

Luxoflux's True Crime is on its way to the PC in the next few months, and one of the key additions is multiplayer modes. Hardly surprising really, given that it's overflowing with street racing and beat-'em-up bits. What is perhaps surprising though is that it'll be one of the first Grand Theft Alsos to bother with multiplayer - unless you've dabbled in the user-made Multi Theft Auto mod for the PC Rockstar titles, that is. But we digress.

If you've played a first-person shooter in the last two or three years, then you know exactly what rag doll physics can offer a game. Essentially it's floppy models. Floppy models that roll around like Teflon-coated sacks of potatoes in a gale, tumbling their way down stairs, hanging over railings, folding up like ironing boards and generally looking energetically flaccid. It's quite an effect.

Authorities in China authorities have reportedly banned Codemasters' PC first-person shooter IGI2: Covert Strike on the grounds that it "hurt China's national dignity and interests."

20 years ago there was only one game developer you could really trust. Going by the justifiably arrogant and typically long-winded Ultimate Play The Game, this Ashby-De-La-Zouch based company had - in just over 12 months - churned out six bona fide classics on the Sinclair Spectrum. Cookie, Pssst!, Trans Am, Jet Pac for the humble 16k version, and Lunar Jetman and Atic Atac for the 48k.

GameCube will not be the recipient of a game based on upcoming footy tournament Euro 2004, with both EA and Codemasters declining to make versions of their upcoming footy games for the console.

Nintendo of America plans to release Cube/GBA hybrid The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventure (known as Four Swords+ in the Far East) across the pond on June 7th for $49.99, a price that includes a GameCube/Game Boy Advance link cable - something of a necessity for the largely four-player ARPG outing. Unfortunately though there's no word on Nintendo's plans for Four Swords in Europe. And we mean "no word". Absolutely none whatsoever. We spoke to Nintendo Europe earlier and it's not on the current Cube schedule at all. If we do get it, we're guessing it won't be until late autumn or early winter. Bah.

[Well they certainly fooled us. Word on the e-street is that the scan to the left - which purports to have been taken from a copy of Japanese magazine Shonen V-Jump - is a fake. It seems that someone, somewhere has brought Photoshop and Final Fantasy together, probably not for the first time, and conned a whole bunch of us into getting unduly excited. Such is life. Still, we're good sports, so feel free to point and laugh at the story we were hoodwinked into writing... -Ed]

EA Partners has signed (we should get a key mapped to that phrase, really) a deal with Chris Taylor's Gas Powered Games, which will see the celebrated Total Annihilation designer working on a new PC real-time strategy title due for release in - blimey - 2006.

'Diablo veterans' are the new 'Medal of Honour developers', it would seem. Following last week's announcement that Bill Roper and co. at Flagship Studios would be working exclusively with Namco, EA has this week announced an exclusive worldwide publishing deal with Castaway Entertainment, another group of chaps who worked on the Diablo series at Blizzard North.

Electronic Arts' increasingly active EA Partners division has secured the signature of another unlikely title this week in the shape of Koei's Samurai Warriors. Known as Sengoku Musou in Japan - where it did rather well - Samurai Warriors is another feudal Japan-themed tactical action game from Koei's internal Dynasty Warriors development team, Omega Force, and differs from its sibling series mainly in terms of historical theme.

Electronic Arts' latest James Bond 007 offering was neither shaken nor stirred by the launch of major PC titles Battlefield Vietnam and Unreal Tournament 2004 last week, with Everything or Nothing taking the top spot for a fourth week.

Eurogamer has learnt that Eidos will release European versions of Thief: Deadly Shadows for both Xbox and PC in June this year. A specific date has not been decided as yet.

The loss of a cherished loved one is always difficult to bear, particularly when the loved one in question was funny, outgoing, adventurous, and torn from our hearts before its time. Sam & Max: Freelance Police (or Sam & Max: Corporate Victims as our T-shirts will soon read) still had plenty to show the world, but for reasons-unfathomable were not bankable enough to justify their continued development.

It might be hard to imagine a world after Half-Life 2, but sooner or later (our money's on later), the game is going to ship to retailers, we're all going to play it, and life will return to normal. Even for Valve.

Okay, okay, you can stop averting your eyes. You are in no danger of seeing your humble review-ulator in the throes of Dancing Stage Unleashed. In fact, you've responded to our request for more reviews with such gusto that we'll be running another instalment later in the week at this rate. Not bad. Interestingly, a lot of you chose to pick the same games as one another, too.

A number of staffing changes have been announced at the top of Microsoft's Xbox operations, with Shane Kim taking over Ed Fries' old role on a permanent basis while Peter Moore and Mitch Koch have been promoted.

Sony loves Killzone. A PS2 exclusive developed by Dutch firm Guerrilla Games, it's already being hailed as a "Halo beater". And that's just by the press. Never mind what the PR folks think.

It's not all that difficult to surmise what 'might' be on display at Nintendo's pre-E3 press conference this May - Nintendo DS, Mario 128, that sort of thing. But when a Nintendo insider told us today they were certain that sequels to two of the biggest Nintendo titles in recent years would form the centrepiece of the presentation, we felt it was too important to ignore.

Nadeo has issued a version 1.2 beta 3 patch for build it/race it PC oddity TrackMania, which we so enjoyed when we got our racing gloves on it last Christmas. The new patch is quite large at 90MB, but it's probably worth the trouble for fans - the promise of underground tunnels amongst other new blocks ought to be enough by itself, but there are also some bugfixes in there and a new menu interface. Can't argue with that.

Up to now, real screenshots of Resident Evil 4 have been difficult to find. Without the aid of shady forum threads and scanned magazine pages, all we've had to go on is a number of outdated shots of lead character Leon Kennedy as he strolls around typically luscious environments, and it's pretty obvious now that these bear little relation to Shinji Mikami's actual vision of the game.

The rarely-used Digital AV port on the back of the GameCube console is to be removed from future revisions of the hardware in a move designed to save production costs, Nintendo has confirmed today.

Late last year, Sony told us that GT4 Prologue - a bite-sized, budget-priced teaser for Polyphony Digital's latest "driving simulator" - wouldn't make it out of Japan. We weren't all that surprised. The game would be out within months as far as we knew, so it made sense.

Probing Halo 2 screenshots is a lot of fun, and according to recent surveys "fun" is good, so we were more than happy to see a new Halo 2 screenshot when we stumbled drunkenly toward Bungie.net this morning.

Half-Life 2 has been swimming in clichés for almost a year now. Expectations have "gone through the roof" since E3 last May. Its "breath-taking" and "jaw-dropping" technology is a "quantum leap" in terms of what we've come to expect from games. It is "the full package", promising a world that combines "unparalleled visual quality" and "realistic physics" so that its "believable characters" are in a position to deliver a "brand new experience". With "improved AI" helping them along.

Publishing giant Square Enix has given a further signal of its intent to extend its lucrative Japanese mobile gaming business into other markets, with the acquisition of American wireless developer UIEvolution.

Rumours of a sequel to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic appear to have been confirmed this weekend. According to reports, US gaming mags Electronic Gaming Monthly and Computer Gaming World will take an exclusive look at 'KOTOR 2' in issues arriving in newsagents towards the end of April.

Nintendo has altered plans to release GBA title Kirby's Star: The Great Mirror Maze in Japan this week, following the discovery of what we can only assume was a fairly show-stopping 11th hour bug.