New PAL Releases Roundup

Never a man to do anything by half, or without sunglasses on, Tomonobu Itagaki announced his exit from Tecmo this week with a lawsuit and an attack on his boss. Meanwhile, there's the small matter of Team Ninja's final game with Itagaki at the helm, Ninja Gaiden 2, which is out tomorrow in Europe.

In it, you play as a man with a sword who runs around hacking demons to pieces. It has camera and performance issues, and the difficulty spikes are about as flattering as Itagaki's descriptions of Yoshimi Yasuda's behaviour as "unbefitting of a publicly-listed company". But there's a bloody streak of spectacle throughout the Ninja Gaiden games and this one's the best-looking and most exotically appointed.

In other words, if you're an Xbox 360 owner who isn't tempted by the rebuffed Lost Planet "Colonies" edition (3 new single-player campaign modes, 10 new weapons, 5 new playable characters, 4 new multiplayer maps and 7 new multiplayer modes, according to the rather sterile box description), NG2 is your best bet. If only to show Tecmo that silly old Itagaki was probably worth the money after all.

Elsewhere, Mass Effect charts its RPG-shootery path onto PC at long last, while LEGO Indiana Jones takes the brilliant LEGO Star Wars framework and wraps it up in everyone's favourite whip-cracking snake-hater and all his friends, assuming you can remember anyone in the Jones films besides Marion, Gimli, Shortround and the monkey. Can you play as the monkey? Answers on a spit-covered cinema ticket.

Looking ahead...is not the remit of this bit of the website, so we won't tell you what's out next week. Take it.

This week:

• Dracula Origin (PC)
• Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit (PS3, Xbox 360)
• Etrian Odyssey (DS)
• Everybody's Golf 2 (PSP)
• LEGO Indiana Jones (PS3, 360, PC, Wii, DS, PS2, PSP)
• Lost Planet: Extreme Condition - Colonies (PC, Xbox 360)
• Mass Effect (PC)
• Midnight Play Pack (DS)
• Ninja Gaiden 2 (Xbox 360)
• Sports Island (Wii)
• Stratego (DS)