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According to the ECTS press panel, XIII is the best game in the room, something Ubi Soft seems keen to emphasise. We can only assume organisers CMP came round with a few Velcro-strip “Best of Show” placards, because a perky French lass was busily attaching several to the demo pod we were playing on yesterday afternoon barely an hour after the awards...

Pivotal Games' Conflict: Desert Storm II has gone straight in at number one in the UK, displacing LucasArts' epic RPG Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic after only a week in the top spot.

Vivendi last night launched a two-level single-player demo of Lord of the Rings-based real-time strategy saga The War of the Ring. As of this morning, it's available from numerous outlets, weighing in at 120MB. The full game is due out in November this year.

Final Fantasy X-2 is due out in Europe (and all PAL territories) in early 2004, and will be published by Electronic Arts, after the EA Partners division of the world's biggest publisher swooped in and flashed its cash for Square Enix.

Although it might like to pretend otherwise, with a silly scoring system and an abundance of chalk, tennis is little more than a couple of opposing players walloping rubber at one another until someone wilts. Perhaps for this reason, the best tennis games have always been simple affairs dominated by really addictive gameplay. Back in the day we lost hours and hours slogging balls off cliff-tops in Smash Tennis, past Peach's outstretched umbrella in Mario Tennis and of course into the path of Carlos Moya and chums in Sega's almighty Virtua Tennis series.

A report this morning is quoting an unnamed source within Nintendo as saying that the company is planning to slash the price of the GameCube to under €100 on October 1st, marking the first shot in the Xmas price war.

Anyone for tennis? EG was recently one of a few select publications chosen to see Power and Magic's new Xbox-exclusive tennis game in Paris. None of the resident hacks were quite sure what to expect. A tennis game? In France? It certainly didn't sound promising. An expensive meal and a steady stream of Microsoft-funded alcohol seemed to confirm our fears, leaving us almost too hungover to play the game itself. However, we battled through and were pleasantly surprised to see a great looking, well-implemented game of tennis.

There it is! (It was hiding!) Although Codies' X03 releases bore no mention of a PC version of the ambitious-sounding Race Driver 2, we've seen one today confirming that a beige box version is also underway and will be released at the same time as the Xbox version, which is of course exclusive to that console. And, after Microsoft stuffed TOCA Race Driver shots on the X03 press disk instead of shiny new Race Driver 2 ones, Codies has released actual shots of the game today for all to see.

Grammy-winning musician Mya, best known to us as "one of the other ones" in that scary Moulin Rouge music video (in which Christina Aguilera looked like a demented flamingo), will perform the original theme song for EA's new Bond game, Everything or Nothing.

Polyphony Digital's online-enabled Gran Turismo 4 has slipped until 2004 in Europe and the US according to representatives on both sides of the Atlantic. This is sure to come as a bitter blow to GT fans expecting to get their hands on it this Christmas after a strong showing at The PlayStation Experience, and rumours of a planned PS2/GT4 bundle which seeped out of SCEE earlier this month.

Activision has plucked a release date out of the air for Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided, the ambitious massively multiplayer online RPG which has been doing a roaring trade in the US. According to its publisher, Galaxies will be released on October 31st in the UK, Nordic and "Rest of Europe" regions (cheers guys), and in Spain, Italy, France and Germany a week later on November 7th.

Rebellion may be having a bit of a rough time with Dredd vs. Death (slagged by the press thanks to supposedly unfinished review copies), but they aren't really helping themselves with this demo. Unless their demographic really is that obsessed with shipping containers and Red Bull advertisements. Still, we haven't played the final game yet, so it would be churlish of us to get truly upset with it, and the "Beta Demo" wording at the top of the readme is definitely PR for "not representative!" We'll see.

PC gamery types keen for a go on Capcom's Chaos Legion are probably already aware that it's due out on November 14th. But unless you visit other sites in the morning before us [cheeky rascals! -Ed] then you won't realise that Capcom has released a 104MB demo! The readme.txt is less than helpful in figuring out what's included (although we now know that a 64MB video card is a bit of a must, as is DirectX 8.1 or higher), but a bit of searching around yon interweb reveals that it supports eight languages and resolutions up to 1600x1200. Still no word on the actual demo content, but you can get a good idea of the game's worth from our review.

EA's been going a bit bonkers with its preview code of late, and as fast as our calloused hands can type up our thoughts on its latest sure fire hit, another one screeches through the door demanding our attention. Be upstanding for Need For Speed: Underground, the sixth in the decade-long series and the third game in recent memory to subtitle itself with Underground. Need. New. Subtitle.

Ah. Nothing like a good, leaked demo on a Monday morning, is there? The game itself is due out on November 7th, so the appearance of a demo (borrowed from the American PC Gamer cover CD) of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is quite well timed. And it's only 83MB! More than the 10MB maximum that we would sweat over back in the days of 33.6Kbps modems and Hexen II demos, mind, but these days our cable modems laugh in the face of 83MB...

Lords of EverQuest, Sony's MMORPG derived strategy game developed by Rapid Eye Entertainment, has been released in demo form, giving players the chance to try out a tutorial mission and then battle for control of the demo map over the Internet using two of the Shadowrealm lords. The demo weighs in at quite a hefty 373MB and you can grab it from 3D Gamers and GameSpot amongst other mirrors.

One game that slipped through the net at E3 was the latest Need For Speed title, but it certainly snagged our attention in the relatively serene environment of Camp EA. Up to now, EA's big emphasis has been on the kind of cars none of us are feasibly ever going to own, and if you find this kind of gratuitous phallic extension fest one big turn off then you might have missed out on one of the most consistently fun driving series around.

Yarr! Hello again gentle readers, and welcome to this week's edition of Reader Reviews, featuring over several of your finest utterings on the subject of videogames that you love, hate, or picked out of a hat. This week's "prize" is an all expenses paid trip to your front door to pick a copy of Madden NFL 2004 off the doormat. We have PS2, Xbox and Cube copies, so the winner gets to choose. Gosh!

Not one to be outdone by dripping taps, dodgy guttering or, indeed, leaking demos, Team 17 has released (Gamer's Hell mirror) an official and properly working version of the leaked demo we reported on yesterday. With the leaked English and German demos there were reports of crashes and bugs which included a slightly shonky (new word alert) blimp mode and first-person view, all apparently cleared up for this updated version.

Medal of Honor: Rising Sun for PS2, Xbox and GameCube is still due out on November 28th, according to EA. Apparently the December 5th date previously printed (found on EA's press extranet) was innaccurate.

When EA made a pledge to bring its various sports games to PS2 Online, we all agreed that it could be a significant breakthrough for the broadband gaming service in Europe. It certainly needs a kick up the backside.

"What's new!" they all cry, like dementedly exuberant children's TV presenters discussing current events in mobile phone chic and McDonald's Happy Meals [did you think this intro through at all? -Ed]. "What's new?" I respond, wearily consulting half the interweb in an effort to figure it all out for myself. "Oh! There are actually some good games out today!" "Halleluiah!" comes the response, as everyone ignores my advice (nay, instruction) to go out and buy Golden Sun: The Lost Age and instead troops home with Jedi Academy or Conflict: Desert Storm II.

Hrm. Let's see, let's see... Breed! CDV has announced that its forthcoming first-person shooter Breed will be slipping until the first week of November in the US and UK, because developer Brat wants to make "final improvements" to the title's multiplayer components. Assault, deathmatch, team deathmatch, king of the hill and territory modes make up the frankly uninspiring compliment of multiplayer features.

Like all troubled teens, the GameBoy likes to hang around on street corners of an evening throwing bricks at cars, swigging alcopops and drowning passers-by in imaginative vernacular. Anxious to combat this sort of behaviour before it gets out of hand, Daddy Nintendo has announced that the little handheld will be sponsoring next Monday's Frostfrench catwalk show at The Royal Horticultural Centre as part of London Fashion Week, before jetting all the way across to Olympia for Stuff Live 2003 between September 26th and 28th. "Think of it as community service, little lad," the GBA was presumably told.

Worms. Surely there's nothing we can say about it that you don't already know? I'm not sure if I've met anyone who hasn't played that most accessible of turn-based strategy classics. Being a young sprog whose fondness for the battling earth-dwellers transcended both Amiga and PC ports and consumed much of his teenage years, the idea of a 3D revamp seemed both unnecessary and slightly worrying to me. Team 17 couldn't possibly improve on the tried and tested original formula right? Right?

For many visitors to ECTS last month, there was only one stand which constituted a must-see - namely Vivendi's, housing as it did the theatre where Half-Life 2 was shown to the world again. As it transpired, Valve had nothing new to show us - deciding instead to replay the same excellent but nonetheless painfully familiar videos from E3 - but as the largely disappointed punters left the Vivendi stand, their eye might have been caught by another game which was on show behind the Half-Life 2 theatre (UK Gold edition).

If any game deserved to be made into a movie it was Silent Hill. With all its brooding mystique, sinister undertones, unhinged cast and simultaneously scary and depressing atmosphere there's a rich seam of material to pillage for an enterprising film company.

Tying in with yesterday's first impressions quite nicely, a Worms 3D demo has made its way onto the net. You might well be interested to know however that despite the demo being mirrored by file sites all over the shop, it is actually a leak of the code that was being demonstrated at this year's ECTS. Team 17 itself has denied that it was the source of the leak, so we expect it's currently sat across the lunch hall from Sega with a quivering lip and clenched fists, with a banana bomb poking out of its back pocket.

Oxford-based Rebellion has issued word that Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death will now be released on October 17th for PC, PS2 and Xbox, with a GameCube version following in late November (on the 21st, or so we've heard), in-keeping with the developer's commitment earlier this month to an early October date. Well, it's mid-October, really, but sometimes the Fridays fall inconveniently.

Once the undisputed king of the Rally driving genre, Codemasters came in for a fair bit of flak with last year's slightly disappointing Colin McRae Rally 3. Although the core gameplay was still undoubtedly strong enough to please the faithful, some were disappointed about only being able to drive a Ford Focus, and the company found its flagship product desperately wanting in graphical terms, slipping behind Sony's WRC II on the PS2, and being firmly trounced by DICE's more arcade oriented entrant RalliSport Challenge on the Xbox.