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Important notice: In the following news item, "the world's only virtual universe incorporating a real economy with a convertible currency" and other similar phrases have been replaced by "blah".

Activision has announced the development of a new first-person shooter with a somewhat familiar name. Trinity, in development by Id’s consistent bedfellows Gray Matter, was, if we recall correctly, the name of a project Id was working on before the announcement of Doom 3.

Darkmonth (that's "month", not "mouth") Studios has announced its first original PC title, and is hoping to locate a publisher for it in short order - with representatives showing off a demo of the game to interested parties.

Microsoft has announced the in-house development of an intriguing massively multiplayer RPG called Mythica, based on Norse mythology. We say intriguing because the aim is to apparently blend the “depth and sophistication” of a single player RPG with the social experience of a massively multiplayer game. This is achieved through “Private Realms” technology, whereby a player will be able to his or her own private adventure that focuses on providing rich gameplay experiences and storylines in which their own actions have lasting consequences in a persistent game world.

German devlopublisher [nice -Ed] Sunflowers will be presenting their latest product line-up behind closed doors at E3, somewhere in the Kentia Hall of the LA Convention Center. The presentation should shed some light on what Austraisn Max Design, Germans SEK and Bulgarians Black Sea Studios are up to, along with details of the first planned add-on for Anno 1503 - The New World.

JoWooD has handed off more of its publishing duties to a third party, by penning an agreement that will see Bigben Interactive market and distribute 21 titles (mostly back catalogue) for PC, PS2 and Psone in Germany, France, Benelux and Switzerland. We take it this means that the publisher will continue its duties in other regions - like the good old U of K. Amongst the 21 titles are PC newcomers Spellforce and Söldner: Secret Wars, which are due out soon.

Eidos has released a 2.7MB patch for Praetorians, addressing issues ranging from "minor disk-reading issues" (deleting Safedisk?) and text corrections to gameplay bugs like save problems and the way German cavalry could get stuck. A lengthy list of fixes can be found here, and this is a direct link to the patch file on Eidos' FTP. Remember to honour the Gods before you download.

Lionhead Studios will use RenderWare to fasttrack the development of The Movies on next-gen consoles (the game is also due out on PC), the middleware gurus Criterion have announced. As with previous titles like GTAIII and Burnout 2, which have utilised RenderWare to great effect, Lionhead will be hoping to free up time normally spent on low-end technical components, porting code and so on, and instead focus on what's important to the player.

Somehow we let this one slip past us. Sorry about that. Anyway, Vivendi has revealed that development on the next in the Tribes series was well under way. Tribes: Vengeance is currently being worked on by Irrational Games of System Shock 2 and Freedom Force fame.

Nintendo is announcing that its become best of buddies with Square Enix, and will be exclusively publishing and distributing Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, Final Fantasy Tactics and Sword of Mana for their diminutive portable (that's the GBA by the way). Nintendo says the games are scheduled for launch in the US "this year, followed by European launches shortly thereafter" - handy.

Although we still await the obligatory back slapping official press release, it appears that Vivendi and its Sierra subsidiary have retained the rights to publish the blockbusting sequel to Half-Life.

It’s like London buses around here. First Valve gets around to announcing Half-Life 2 to a salivating public, and then admits that Team Fortress 2 will be updated with its proprietary Source Engine technology.

Sega Europe today announced that it would be publishing Team 17's forthcoming Worms 3D on GameCube, PS2, Xbox and PC. Well you can colour us confused, because we could have sworn Activision were meant to be doing it.

TimeSplitters developer Free Radical has divulged that it will not be developing a TimeSplitters 3 - at least not for its next project, C&VG is reporting. Apparently the team is working on a secret project, rather ambiguously stating: "It's a third-person action title with a bit of stealth in there - it'll be a huge departure from TimeSplitters but is shaping up to be amazing."

Dear old Arnie Schwarzenegger is to have his likeness and voice appear in a videogame for the first time ever with the arrival of Black Ops-developed Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. The game is set to feature movie segments from the eponymous film (due in the summer), and another five-minute sequence shot exclusively for the game.

Activision has launched the official Star Trek: Elite Force II website, which contains a wealth of information on the forthcoming first-person shooter. Probably of most interest is the screenshots section, exhibiting a few previously unseen shots of the game in action, but the site also features fairly comprehensive sections detailing the weaponry, characters and back-story.

If there's one thing you can rely on in life, it's that us poor Europeans have to wait many moons for Capcom's PAL conversions. In the case of the GameCube-exclusive Resident Evil Zero, it'll be March 7th before you get your sticky paws on, confusingly, the fifth in the long running series.

When Mario Party appeared in early '99, it was one of the pioneers of the party game genre, but the second game in the series, released a year later, was arguably the best. Now it's 2002, and Hudson is throwing a whole new party, with 50 original mini-games, five whole boards to traverse, support for four players and an optimistic "Story Mode" to fill the hours between multiplayer parties. But is it really any different to what's come before?

Activison has released a map test for its forthcoming Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory free multiplayer download. The test features one map entitled Fuel Dump, and allows players to play as either Axis or Allies (natch). There are some known issues with the test because... well, it's a test. Anyway, those are outlined in the readme included with the demo. If you feel like pretending to be an unpaid beta tester for a while, you can grab the 101mb installer from 3D Gamers.

Rally games aren't much of a commodity these days. Neither is the promise of six prestigious global rallies, 33 stages, 25 licensed vehicles in five classes, and four game modes including split-screen multi-player. If you didn't know I was talking about Rally Championship from Warthog and SCi, you might just as soon imagine I was talking about WRC2 (Sony), Colin McRae 3 (Codies), Rally Fusion (Activision), Pro Rally (Ubi Soft), V-Rally 3 (Infogrames) or Sega Rally 3. Even if I throw in realistic car damage systems, real car physics, advanced weather effects and actual rallying techniques, I could still be talking about pretty much any of them. And you know that's just marketing guff anyway.

Sony has put us at ease by confirming that it will be showing Gran Turismo 4 at this year's E3, GamesRadar is reporting. A large press event will be held on 14th May, with series producer Kazunori Yamauchi running us through the major features and changes we can expect in GT4.

Ubi Soft has announced its E3 stand contents for this year. These will include the intriguing Beyond Good & Evil, action shooter Far Cry, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the Raven Shield Xbox port, Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, and cel-shaded first-person shooter XIII.

Many moons ago, when everything Nintendo touched turned to gold, the idea of the GameCube and GBA co-existing in link-up heaven seemed fantastically innovative, and provided gaming possibilities that would finally see the convergence of handheld and console gaming.

Online gaming on consoles has been a stop start affair in Europe, but the launch of Xbox Live last Friday across Europe looks capable of providing a service that can drag the online gamer into the living room, with a fast growing selection of games. But will it just be an exercise in expanding your swear word vocabulary or is this really the brave new world of gaming? We sat down with Microsoft's head of Xbox platform, Michel Cassius, and reminded him once again that while France may have good players, they were shocking in the last World Cup...

Last Friday, Shigeru Miyamoto and entourage descended on London's Oxford Street to meet and greet fans of his many games. But before he signed your bare chests and you ran screaming from the building like jubilant teenage girls at a Blue concert, Mr. Miyamoto and Zelda's director Mr. Aonuma spoke at length to assembled journalists in the underbelly of Virgin Megastore. What's more, Nintendo was good enough to take notes - we're sure you'll find them most enlightening!

Dreamcatcher is the latest publisher to expose us to its list of wares for showing off at this year's E3. We can expect to see first-person shooter Painkiller, the World War II-themed escape-'em-up Pilot Down, and X-treme Beach Soccer. Of particular note on its roster, however, is the Xbox port of first-person RPG Arx Fatalis, and BattleCruiser Generations, the fourth title in the acclaimed BattleCruiser series.

Let's cut to the chase straight away: you'll either love Resident Evil or you'll hate it, and most of you will already have your mind made up about the fifth in the zombie-slaying series before you've even clapped eyes on it. Whatever your allegiance, there are fundamental truths about this series that remain as relevant today as they did way back in 1996.

Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando is to be the next instalment in Insomniac’s superb platform series, with a PS2 only release pencilled in for “later this year”, which loosely translated will mean late October/early November.

This is a very rough calculation, but we'd say it took 15 hours before we broke our first pad on Super Monkey Ball. It was as we munched the 'Advanced' banana for the fifteen-bagillionth time, dashing our chances of continuing by going for a distant ribbon up a narrow gangway, ironically in the hope of catapulting ourselves further into the game. Conscious (to some degree) of the short length of the controller cord and the potential of the GameCube to go flying off the shelf, we beat the smirking crap out of a stuffed Pikachu for a whole minute. We survived. Pikachu survived. The pad did not.

In 1991, the idea of Sonic The Hedgehog on a Nintendo console was ludicrous. The idea of seven Sonic games on one tiny piece of at the time unheard of proprietary media, sold for £30 at the average games shop, was even wackier. If you'd turned to us at the time and said that in 2003 we'd be playing Sonic 1-3 on a Nintendo, we'd have said "what are you talking about, man? I don't play videogames, man - games are so uncool!" Yeah well, we all did it, didn't we?