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Hidden & Dangerous 2 producer Lukas Kule has revealed in an interview that Illusion Softworks is working on an expansion pack for the highly rated World War II-based tactical action game, which came out last Friday and made it to No.19 in the Chart-Track Top 40.

EyeToy: Play - the PS2 title that uses a webcam to control various mini-games and projects the player's image onto the screen for all to see - has sold more than one million copies in the four months since its release, according to Sony, and that's just in Europe - with US and Japanese launches still to come in November.

GameCube's much-publicised recovery has slowed already according to the latest set of ChartTrack hardware figures which reveal that Xbox has once again overtaken Nintendo's console.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds is one of those games that could go either way. It's not particularly good, but its numerous flaws don't really congeal rancidly enough to completely derail it. It's still just about fun, and despite some of the worst design we've encountered all year, you still probably wouldn't chuck 'er out of bed for the gaming equivalent of letting out rancid farts. In your face. Like the first, Collective-developed, game, it pits vampire-slaying ex-cheerleader Buffy Summers (sadly without SMG's voice over) and her Scooby gang of social misfits and demonic ne'er-do-wells (all of whom do enjoy the correct vocal support) against a vessel of striking evil, and with a mixture of occasionally chuckleworthy dialogue and kick/punch/stake combat propels them through a series of familiar and not-so-familiar locations, throwing in the occasional brain-mushing puzzle or boss fight to add a bit of colour.

With Worms 3D out this Friday on every format under the sun, Team 17 is keen to encourage as many of you as possible to buy it instead of the many other treats sneaking onto retailers' shelves this weekend. Obviously we are too, having decided that it's one of the most entertaining multiplayer games of the year in yesterday's review, so we're pleased to see there's another demo out this week - featuring two levels, a new weapon set, and a single-player game against medium strength AI. Sounds like the perfect taste test. It even claims to fix a few compatibility issues that hung over the first demo.

For those of you who, like us, spent an entire weekend lost in the purple nights of a throbbing Normandy battlefield, Activision has happily released a second single-player demo of Infinity Ward's Call of Duty. In it, players get to take on the Dawnville level, set directly after the Burnville demo that appeared originally.

Ubisoft has released a third downloadable level for Splinter Cell via Xbox Live, according to reports. Dubbed "Vselka Submarine", this new level invites you to stealth your way through a submarine base having handily infiltrated it in a previous downloadable mission (the surprisingly named "Vselka Infiltration").

Having recently discovered Christmas, Nintendo has announced a couple of limited edition Game Boy Advance SP bundles to celebrate the success of Pokemons Ruby and Sapphire and claw yet more cash out of parental paws. Due out on November 28th, the Pokemon "Super Paks" will each comprise a colourful GBA SP (red and blue Pokemon variants), a matching console carry case and a copy of Ruby or Sapphire, and will ship in boxes rather like the one you can see here. Each 'pak' will retail for 170 Euro (about £120).

Publisher Acclaim has settled its differences with Dave Mirra over shameful T&A peepshow BMX XXX, and will shortly announce a new game bearing his likeness. Back in February, Dave made headlines by filing suit against Acclaim over the alleged game - the, er, allegedly contract-breaching game - demanding $21 million and bitching about the game on various grounds.

EA scored another No.1 success this week following the PS2, Cube and Xbox debut of FIFA Football 2004, deposing Konami's rival footy title Pro Evolution Soccer 3 to No.2 in the process.

It's an indisputable fact: simple ideas often make the best games. And deathmatch is one of the simplest and best of all. There is but one objective - kill everyone else. Obviously to do this you'll have to draw on a generous arsenal of heavy ordnance, learn your way around your chosen arena and establish how best to keep your own health points on the plus side of the morgue, but despite the numerous advents of clans, cliques, mods, hacks, bots and config files, it remains one of the purest multiplayer options ever dreamt up. It's surprising, really, when you realise we've yet to see the definitive online deathmatch game for the home consoles...

You owe me, Team 17. You owe me hours of lost youth, cooped up in my bedroom while my mother pleaded with me to come down and join the rest of the family in the garden for a barbeque. "Busy!" said I, hunched over my Amiga as the warm summer sun strained to make its way through the closed curtains. There were Worms to kill, you see. They all had to die, and die they did. Some nine years later and here I am, my better half nagging me from the living room. "You don't understand. There are Worms to kill, dear..."

Sega and Team 17 are running a competition to dig up the finest Worms 3D fan site on the web, which will be crowned the Official Worms 3D Fansite, or the Official Unofficial Worms 3D Site, or the... never mind. The prizes up for grabs certainly seem worth brushing up on your HTML skills for, with a 2.8GHz PC up for grabs (from Packard Bell) as First Prize, and Leadtek A340 GeForce FX5200 Ultra TD video cards for five runners-up. All those numbers must mean it's pretty expensive.

After Max Payne proved so popular with mod authors (and may your various gods bless those Kung Fu modders), developer Remedy was always keen to give the community something to play with early on in Max Payne 2's lifespan. Barely 10 days after its US release then (and pretty much on time for its European debut), you can now get your hands on the 22MB mod toolset direct from Rockstar's Max Payne 2 site. A readme file is included with the tools, of course, and Remedy is planning to release an official tutorial very soon - and encourages budding modders to visit various fansites to locate user-made tutorials and tips.

This morning you're encouraged to head to FilePlanet, which is running an exclusive multiplayer demo of Monolith's upcoming No One Lives Forever prequel, Contract JACK.

Major US games retailers GameStop.com and Electronic Boutique have reduced the price of Nokia's N-Gage game deck to $199 only two weeks after the system launched, in a time-limited "instant rebate" offer which also includes free shipping for all N-Gage products.

Software giant Microsoft has announced slightly better than expected results for the first quarter of its financial year, ended September 30, with the figures revealing a 20 per cent climb in revenues from the Xbox.

Remember when the Xbox first came out and everyone wanted to play Halo online? With Live still a year off at that stage, some enterprising punters put together tools to tunnel Halo's LAN signals over the Internet.

ATI has issued a statement this weekend on the status of the Half-Life 2/Radeon bundle offer, which was announced alongside a raft of new ATI graphics products on September 30th, the game's original release date, during lavish launch parties in Munich and San Francisco. Since then of course, Half-Life 2 has been pushed back and back and blighted repeatedly by incidents including the theft of source code and illegal distribution of the E3 demo code through warez channels.

Once upon a time, the only real barrier preventing PC gamers putting themselves within groping distance of malformed malcontents was a publisher's lack of interest - with only Capcom serving up the occasional Dino Crisis-related nugget of terror.

When we reviewed Midtown Madness 3 in July, the promise of downloadable content had the airwaves buzzing during games of Hunter. "I heard they were going to release a new city," chirped one liar. "It'll start soon though," we all agreed. How wrong we were.

Ever since Grand Theft Auto III arrived in our PS2 trays, a "seamless" gaming environment has become a very attractive option, and not just for grisly cop dramas and action games either - Naughty Dog used it to great effect in Jak II: Renegade, Treyarch plans to use it in Spider-Man 2, former Spider-Man handler Neversoft has borrowed it for Tony Hawk Underground, and even the mighty EA is now peddling its own tribute to the Scottish-born Godfather of free-roam gameplay. Welcome to SSX 3, where menus are taboo and you can "go anywhere".

[Looks down.] Well, dunk me in dark eco and call me Daxter, there be lots of games on that thar shop shelf! I hope you're all feeling pretty bleedin' rich today, because there are at least [counts] four games in there which are dead cert, must-get titles. Not even borderline or anything - games like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Hidden & Dangerous 2, Max Payne 2 and Viewtiful Joe deserve a place in your collection. And they're rubbing shoulders with the likes of Commandos 3 and FIFA 2004, which on any normal day we might be instructing you to pick out. Today, it seems, is all about priorities. Which game would you pick if you could only pick one?

Ah, a long overdue ninth instalment (count 'em!) of Reader Reviews courtesy of your collective hand. It's been a while since we posted these, so this is something of a bumper issue, with more reviews than ever before. The good news is that we've lined up a stonking prize for the winner, a copy of Tecmo's absolutely fantastic Project Zero for the PS2 - one of the console's most underrated and oft-ignored classics. We'll be in touch soon - and any winners from previous weeks still waiting on their prizes should keep an eye on the postbox, as we've finally sourced a number of them and should pack them off very shortly.

Valve's Greg Coomer has posted on the official Steam site with a significant update detailing the current status of the digital distribution system and what the company's main priorities are at the moment.

Some games are engrossing, right out of the box. Some games you can pick up in an hour or so. Some games, though, take a little longer to grow on you, eventually keeping you up until the early hours and shredding your meticulously planned social calendar like an Enron invoice. But it takes some getting there. Ratchet & Clank, on the other hand, was brilliant, exciting and a guaranteed hit before it even made it onto a DVD.

CDV's oft-delayed first-person shooter Breed has... been delayed again, until February 6th, 2004, with Development Director Dirk Weber citing compatibility problems that arose at the 11th hour. "Significant problems surfaced during the obligatory compatibility test," he said in a statement on the official Breed website.

Midway. 'Mostly harmless' would probably be a fair description. They've been languishing in a pit of red-faced financial statements and poor review scores for longer than anyone can remember. And yet, recently we've heard quite a lot of encouraging things about them -- they hired a new CEO, David Zucker, then president of Playboy Enterprises, who should know a thing or two about brand management; they got to work on some more interesting games like The Suffering and Freaky Flyers; and then they enticed former Ion Storm-ers John Romero and Tom Hall to the fold.

Obviously feeling the pressure from Nintendo, whose £79 GameCube price cut sent purple joybox sales soaring beyond Xbox, Microsoft has today unveiled a special Christmas bundle offer to entice gamers in their direction.

As promised, French developer Nadeo has released a beta trial version of insanely addictive build-and-then-race 'em up TrackMania, which you can read about in our first impressions piece from earlier this week. And we suggest you do - it's one of the most engaging little PC games we've encountered since the halcyon days of top-end shareware, and boasts the same sort of addictive qualities as Elasto Mania (née Action Supercross).