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Xbox Live Europe is closing in on its first official birthday (it was actually born in November, but like the Queen prefers to celebrate post-beta), and in keeping with tradition Microsoft has announced plans to celebrate - by giving away €330,000 worth of cash and prizes to the owners of randomly selected Gamertags.

Annual updates to videogames tend to be greeted with a fairly generous dose of cynicism from more hardcore gamers. At best, many would argue, they are simply feature creep updates, which would be better addressed by mission packs. At worst, they are nothing short of shameless cash-ins. There's no breed of gamer more hardcore (in a soi disant fashion if nothing else) than PC first-person shooter fans, either. Ask most of them their opinion of EA Sports' regular-as-clockwork release schedule and you're unlikely to hear very many positive words.

To celebrate the launch next Friday of Savage: The Battle for Newerth - a delicious union of real-time strategy and first-person shooting from S2 Games - Britsoft publisher Digital Jesters is running a mod-making competition in conjunction with NVIDIA and PC Format magazine. A whopping €2000 is up for grabs for the winning individual or mod team, as well as five GeForce FX graphics cards.

Sunday March 14th is an important date for Manchester. Partly because City are entertaining United in the league that day, and partly because the first in a nationwide series of LAN events is taking place at the Armitage Centre, and runs over the course of the same weekend. The series then proceeds south to Bournemouth, Leeds, Northampton, Portsmouth and Bristol in the following weeks.

Sega's Sonic Heroes has taken the top spot across all console platforms in the UK for a second week running, as the small selection of new releases last Friday failed to dent the Full Price Top 40.

KOEI has announced plans to release PS2 RPG Disgaea: The Hour of Darkness all over Europe this May. Developed by Nippon Ichi Software, Disgaea is a tactical RPG in a similar vein to things like Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, and along with Suikoden III has been one of the big "where the hell is it?" stories amongst European RPG fans since its release in Japan and the US last year.

Japanese publisher Sega has announced that Sammy CEO Hajime Satomi is to take over the role of chairman at the company, replacing current chairman Hideki Sato, following Sammy's purchase of the top shareholding in Sega last year.

Sony continues to horde all the Namco toys in the PS2 pram this week with the announcement that Smash Court Tennis Pro Tournament 2 will also appear exclusively on Darth Vader's Toaster sometime over the summer.

As promised when the website launched a couple of weeks ago, People Can Fly has released a single-player demo of its biblical first-person shooter Painkiller, in which a bloke who has just been killed runs around purgatory shooting at the locals in search of a reason why he wasn't allowed into heaven.

Sony has revealed the track listing for Singstar, the karaoke party game from the team behind EyeToy at Sony's London Studio. It's a singing game along similar lines to Konami's Karaoke Stage, in that it measures your vocal skills (pitch, tone, timing, etc) and provides feedback, but it also includes EyeToy compatibility allowing players to see themselves singing along. It's described as a singing game "with a twist", so we're guessing that's meant to be the twist.

Circle Studio, the developer founded and staffed by ex-Core Design folks in the wake of the latest Tomb Raider debacle, has announced that it is to use Criterion's RenderWare middleware to ease production of the two projects it currently has under wraps, both of which are scheduled for release on PS2 and Xbox in 2005.

Konami of Europe has announced it plans to release PS2 sing-'em-up Karaoke Stage this May, featuring a number of tracks which didn't make it into the critically acclaimed US version.

Konami has launched a new official website for PS2 and Xbox survival horror title Silent Hill 4: The Room at www.sh2004.com. As you know, we don't normally mention websites (disgusting places!) but this one happens to have a two-minute-forty-six-long trailer of the game, which looks decidedly encouraging.

Baffling comments from Nintendo presidents past (Hiroshi Yamauchi) and present (Satoru Iwata), which kick-started last week's media hoo-hah over the platform holder's hardware ambitions, have now surfaced in their entirety thanks to the Nikkei Industrial Daily. And given the firm tone of a statement released last Wednesday - "Nintendo is staying in the console hardware business and still plans to launch our next home console in the same timeframe as our competitors" - you have to wonder what exactly Nintendo's executive couple were thinking when they made their now infamous comments.

With Ninja Gaiden due out in the States on March 2nd following another slight delay, the hype machine is steamrollering everything else and conjuring a sort of mania we haven't seen since the first shots of Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball trickled out of Tecmo many moons ago. And this time the game's bound to be good! Bonus.

When VU Games launched Crash Nitro Kart, it did fairly well critically and then settled into the same rhythm as most Crash Bandicoot titles - slowly building up sales so it can baffling eclipse its more accomplished rivals. We're guessing VU Games has no idea where that damned Bandicoot gets it, but he's certainly a dead cert on every platform.

Irem Software, the Japanese developer behind earthquake escape title SOS: The Final Escape (Zettai Zetsumei Toshi in Japan, Disaster Report in the States) has announced its latest project for the PS2 - a story-driven firefighting action-adventure called Sakurazaka Shouboutai, or Fire Company.

St. Valentine's survivors can look forward to offering their nearest and dearest a heart-shaped box of inter-racial fantasy conflict this evening thanks to Blizzard. Keen to show their affection for the chocolate selling special occasion, the WarCraft III developer has released a new Bonus Map called Heart to Heart.

LucasArts has released news details and screenshots concerning squad-based tactical shooter Star Wars: Republic Commando, the teaser trailer for which brought the crowds at last year's E3 to a standstill as they traipsed past a giant Lucas wall-screen on the way from entrance to exhibition hall.

The latest issue of Japanese magazine V-Jump contains the first screenshots and details of Konami's Zoku Bokua no Taiyo, the sequel to Hideo Kojima's quirky handheld project Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand.

Electronic Arts has purchased long time collaborator and million-selling developer NuFX, Inc. for an undisclosed sum, following the success of its NBA Street series of arcade sports titles, the second of which - NBA Street Vol.2 - sold more than 1.5 million copies across PS2, Xbox and GameCube.

Small packages are often better than they initially appear. Junihno, Kylie... er... Prince? This week's release list is another good example. Just four new games are lined up on the shelves this Friday by my reckoning (not counting Ubisoft's Gates of Discord EQ expansion, which was released yesterday), and with one exception they'll easily take you sailing through the weekend and have you partying like they're £19.99.

Thanks to an unfortunate hard disk problem (for "hard disk" read "IBM Deskstar", and for "problem" read "Click Of Death issue"), last week's promised bounty of retro reviews has failed to materialise. I can only apologise and hope that those of you who submitted work prior to February 6th have gone one better than me and kept it backed up. Please resubmit anything that fits that bill and it will appear here in the next instalment.

British publisher Digital Jesters is making something of a name for itself with amiable oddities like TrackMania, and has announced this morning that its latest charge, Savage: The Battle for Newerth, will debut in the UK on February 27th.

As promised in CDV's recent preview of its 2004 line-up, World War II themed real-time strategy title Blitzkrieg will receive a standalone expansion pack, Burning Horizon, sometime during the second quarter.

Funcom yesterday announced expansion pack Anarchy Online - Alien Invasion, due out this summer, the next chapter in its MMORPG saga that aims to strengthen its science fiction leanings.

A court in California has handed down a hefty jail sentence to a man who is described as one of the leaders of infamous game piracy group Razor1911, which was one of the best-known online providers of cracked game software.

Remember the Onimusha 3 "Soul Controller"? Course you do - there aren't many other wireless katana peripherals doing the rounds (more's the pity, really).

We're a bit late with this one, I know, but nevertheless I'm thrilled to inform you all that SNK plans to ship Metal Slug 3 on Xbox in May 2004. In North America. D'oh! With the proposed PS2 release supposedly shelved (or at least decidedly inactive), this will mark the game's first appearance on a major home console since its arcade debut in 2000. It should look like this.

Ubisoft has revealed some details about Sam Fisher's handheld return, following on from last year's surprisingly enjoyable GBA/N-Gage title. Aping the story from the home console versions, handheld Pandora Tomorrow also absorbs some of Sam's better-known abilities and increases the scope for stealthy progression - a good thing really, as the original may have been short, but it was certainly quite repetitive by the end.