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Fans of US-made PC action titles will be pleased to hear that they have a new developer to keep tabs on. Skylab Entertainment (sounds interminable) has been formed by chaps from the original teams at Ritual and GOD Games, and says it is dedicated to developing "the next generation of interactive entertainment for tomorrow's gaming systems," with one title already underway.

Along with a vanilla version for boring people, Empire's Warrior Kings: Battles will be available in a special limited edition pack on March 21st, the publisher has announced, pouring scorn on the behaviour of rival publishers in re-releasing games in "special editions" and so forth to force a second purchase. "Damn their eyes!" the publisher exclaims. They must be talking about Director's Cut and Substance purveyors and full-time Pro Evolution Loonies Konami.

As many of our more ardent RPG-pursuing followers will be well aware, Enix's long-awaited Star Ocean: Till the End of Time is a mite buggy. So what, you might ask? Ah, but this is a PS2 game. Oh. Enix has now issued a joint statement with Sony Japan, aiming to pacify the domestic uprising by swapping out defective discs (if you ship them to SCEJ directly). Not that that's much good to importers, who we'd simply encourage to talk to their importer.

GameStop is indeed guilty of posting erroneous info on make-believe software, if you'll give Elder Scrolls developer Bethesda Softworks the benefit of the doubt.

Sony has confirmed the various bands and artists that will provide audio and video content for Amplitude, the recently announced follow-up to office rhythm-action fave Frequency. A total of 14 groups and individuals have been named, and Sony hopes that the huge variety of styles and genres will help endear Amplitude to a wider audience.

We may not have thought a great deal of The Sims Online during a recent playtest, but we can't get enough of EA's painfully creative PR in the US. This week, they're pimping the new 'secure trading' aspect of the game, which allows players to barter with one another properly, hunting for bargains and arranging complicated monetary and goods exchanges. EA estimates that 4.7 billion Simoleons have been amassed since the game's inception, so finding new and creative ways to spend that cash is obviously very important.

Craig Lafferty, Unreal II's QA manager and associate producer at Legend, has issued a mind-numbingly long and tedious list of all the fixes which are scheduled to go into the game's first patch. If you need something to keep you occupied for the next hour, here's Craig's rundown on the Infogrames forum. There are changes in a number of categories, including crash bugs (we only experienced one fatal crash during the course of reviewing the game, incidentally), performance issues and a miscellany of other, less crucial updates. It does all seem to be fairly targeted, too - of particular interest to us was the chance to speed up player movement, something which seemed a bit sluggish when we played the game.

SWAT fansite 10-David reports rather convincingly that SWAT: Urban Justice - the latest PC instalment in the series - has been delayed until '2004'. After having confirmed a winter 2003 delay, then seen UJ snubbed by Vivendi's German games and beer festival, and also having heard that UJ would not appear at E3, it now appears that it'll be an even longer wait for anything tangible - certainly it'll be a while before we get to bat away CD key requests for it.

As Ubi Soft promised earlier in the week, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield is now available in single-player demo form. Download locations are plentiful, and the content is as we reported earlier this week. And since we love you all, we've even unearthed a direct link to the German language version of the demo. One thing we didn't know - both versions are a whopping 219MB download. Spaß!

Sony's "Jet Li-influenced" martial arts adventure Rise of Honor has stuck its head out from cover long enough for us to get a good look. The game, which is in development at Sony's Foster City studio, features a 360-degree combat system choreographed by Cory Yuen - who managed choreography for Lethal Weapon 4, The One and Kiss of the Dragon - which incorporates fast-paced attacks, counters, blocks and 'super moves' (presumably the gravity-defying ones). Handily, these have all been motion-captured by Jet Li, whose countenance is also clearly at use on the model of the game's hero, Kit Yun (as demonstrated by these early shots on JetLi.com). As Yun, players will be charged by dying Chinese gang boss Chiang with passing a message onto his daughter in San Francisco. This causes endless trouble for Kit, who ends up high-kicking his way through 10 locations, including Hong Kong and San Francisco, in the hope of delivering the message.

Konami is inviting us all to kick up our heels, lay down our plastic and spend a while and a lot in Sin City. In fact, we're being asked to do rather more than that - we're expected to run the whole shebang! As the website says, "if you love Sim games, Tycoon games, Theme games or the movie Casino, you'll enjoy your stay." And your first taste of vice management comes today with the release of Hothouse/Konami's 114MB demo of the game (direct download link). According to Konami, the demo city was designed exclusively for this four objective trial version, and many of the features present in the full game (like transport, real estate and high rollers) are disabled.

Lionhead Studios' next project is to be called The Movies (working title), a kind of Theme Cinema that allows gamers to run their own movie studio, making decisions on what films to make, scripts, sets, directors, and, of course, ac-torrrrs.

Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution has been confirmed as one of Sega's first releases since its return to full publishing duties in Europe, with a summer release date pencilled in for the popular beat 'em up.

Yu Suzuki has been inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (AIAS) Hall of Fame. The award was presented in conjunction with the DICE Summit in Las Vegas last week - not to be confused with anybody's weekly Battlefield 1942 adventures - and recognises the art and science inherent in Suzuki's work.

Ancient '80s platform gem Ghouls 'N Ghosts is the latest Capcom title to get the online treatment - and is to be an ambitious Massively Multi-player project across all three major console platforms.

Craply-named developer WizKids Media has today announced that Dean Devlin (ID4, Stargate, The Patriot, Eight Legged Freaks, etc) will produce a movie based on the MechWarrior series. Dean is clearly very excited about the project, commenting that "whether I write the script, help with the script or direct, I'm crazy about the material. This is a real passion project for me," he said.

EA has announced plans to release two new Medal of Honor titles on the PC. The first is a full-blown sequel to Allied Assault called, fittingly enough, Pacific Assault, which has been in the hands of EA's LA studio since MOHAA expansion Spearhead was completed last November. And because Pacific Assault shared pre-production work (location research, etc) with console FPS Rising Sun - announced last week - we can expect to see it by next January.

Ah, the perfect thing for Shrove Tuesday - a demo of Enlight's Restaurant Empire has been released this morning, weighing in at a Super Sized 142.3MB and available from FilePlanet. As you'd expect from a game called Restaurant Empire, it's a management simulation with plenty of spinach, chefs and delicate recipes to master. Championship Manger! The full game is due out on April 11th, and we'll be bringing you our thoughts on some preview code we've been toying with in the near future.

For the fifth straight week, EA's The Sims has fought off stiff competition to claim the No.1 slot in the UK's best sellers.

Ubi Soft Montreal, best known for Splinter Cell, is working with Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner on a 21st Century update to the classic platform/adventure franchise. Dubbed The Sands of Time, Ubi Soft is expecting the new instalment to appear on "all platforms" starting in Q4 2003.

SCi has been bombarding us with news of Conflict: Desert Storm on the GameCube ever since it became glaringly obvious there would be a six-month wait between versions. Apparently fearful that the whole world might overlook the port, SCi's efforts today yield yet more PR bumf, highlighting changes "following the global success of PS2, Xbox and PC releases" and announcing a new April 18th release date. Perhaps they've been negotiating license rights for GW2 with Saddam?

Confirming our suspicions that there's plenty more to wring out of World War II, EALA has announced a brand new Medal of Honor adventure for PS2, Xbox and GameCube due out in late 2003. Taking a break from chilly Europe this time, Medal of Honor: Rising Sun will take place in the Pacific Theatre (sorry, 'Theater') of Operations on the Japanese front, and will be split into two chapters. Chapter one, due out this year, will see players control Joe Griffin as he fights side-by-side with brother Donny until they're separated in a dogfight during early fighting. Griffin continues unabated, and we'll catch up with Donny's adventure in the second chapter sometime during 2004.

Russian developer Buka Entertainment (they of WWF Leopard Survival fame) has announced a military chopper sim, Fair Strike. The game is due out later in 2003 and has players fighting terrorists (who else?) in four campaigns set in the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Instead of lots of very boring men in white coats looking at machinery though, Flashhearts among you will be able to jump into an arcade model by adjusting the realism.

The Raven Shield single-player demo is due out this week, this Friday-penned update on the official website claims. The demo will feature the Oil Refinery level from the full game (go go cs_oilrig), which is "playable in all four custom mission modes with three levels of difficulty for each". There will be 16 weapons and four weapon gadgets to pick from.

Planet GameCube has taken to the DICE summit and extracted a progress update from Denis Dyack on all things gaming going on at Silicon Knights. In cryptic fashion (what else would you expect from the Tome of Eternal Darkness?), Dyack confirmed that multiple games are in development, that something will be on show at E3 in May (perhaps not playable though), and that "futuristic psychological thriller" Too Human is still in development. However, he also said that Eternal Darkness' many loose ends may be explored in a new game someway down the line, cheekily refusing to confirm if such a game was anything other than a ruse for some free press.

We don't really understand or keep up with the filmmaking process here at Eurogamer, because we've only ever seen one decent game-to-movie adaptation and we could probably count decent movie-to-game releases on the fingers of one hand.

Playmore, the owner of the rights to SNK's gaming properties, has confirmed that in addition to Metal Slug Advance and King of Fighters Advance, Japanese gamers can look forward to SNK Vs. Capcom Advance in "late 2003".

A sequel to Funcom's The Longest Journey is in the works, adventure game fans will be delighted to note, but they'll have to wait as apparently the concept was only approved earlier this week. If only other developers were so forthcoming with their news.

Intriguing industry scuttlebutt suggests that Sony Computer Entertainment America has six first party online titles lined up for release on the PS2 this year, thought to include Syphon Filter Online and Arc the Lad Online.

This time last year, Take 2 (as it was known) was teetering on the brink, having had its shares suspended following embarrassing accounting irregularities. Fast forward 12 months and the New York based publisher (now known as the far more grown up Take-Two) is positively awash with cash, having posted a 45 per cent increase in both sales and profits, up to $408.8 million and $50.5 million respectively, for the first quarter ended January 31, 2003.