1992 was the year Bill Clinton became US President, Charles and Di split and, on the 11th April, when Nintendo launched its new console in the UK. The Super Nintendo Entertainment System cost £150.

UK Nintendo fans had been waiting nearly a year-and-a-half for the console's launch (nothing unusual at the time) ever since the Super Famicom first released in Japan in November 1990.

The SNES would go on to sell over 49 million units: less than its predecessor, but enough to make it the clear winner of the generation. The Sega Mega Drive, its main competitor, sold 39 million, the TurboGrafx-16 sold 10 million.

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They don't make them like they used to. Apart from, perhaps, when they do - and then they're quite possibly better than ever before.

At the turn of the century the world was in love with the polygon - which isn't the best of news when your best work has traditionally been on two planes. To say Japanese boutique developer Treasure was struggling would be an overstatement - games like 2000's Sin & Punishment and 2001's Freak Out showed the developer of mini-masterpieces such as Gunstar Heroes and Radiant Silvergun was able to port its hyper creativity to three dimensions.

But games like Wario World - a rare home showcase for Nintendo's anti-hero that, while far from a disaster itself, was most definitely average - and the woeful Dragon Drive D, a title that the developer refuses to credit on its own homepage, saw a definite downturn, with a sense of apathy creeping into an output previously renowned for energy.

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"Zelda - it sure brings back memories," said creator Shigeru Miyamoto as he walked on stage following the orchestra's rendition of the score from forthcoming Zelda adventure Skyward Sword.

"We have prepared a game for each of our hardware systems," he explained.

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The review aggregation site blamed poorly detailed credits for the decision.

"We have no plans to bring it back. Right now we just want to see if we can build the database, take a shot at it, see what we can do," co-founder and games editor Marc Doyle told GamesIndustry.biz.

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Yesterday reports emerged that Metacritic had begun collecting the score distribution of developers and working out an average career score.

It determined whether a game developer played a part in the creation of a game by having a gander at the credits entered on GameFAQs, which, like Metacritic, is owned by CBS.

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It collects the score distribution of developers and works out an average career score.

Industry legend Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda and Donkey Kong series, has a career score of 80.

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The Tokyo Game Show polled 1171 attendees at this year's event and asked them which consoles they currently play the most (thanks, Kotaku).

18.7 per cent said they played Sony's PlayStation Portable the most. The PlayStation 3 comes in at second with 13.7 per cent, and the DS/DS Lite in third with 13.1 per cent.

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Speaking in an interview with Japan's Famitsu magazine, kindly translated by 1Up's cryptography department, Miyamoto explained, "During much of development, the controls were A for shoot bullets, B to dash, and up on the control pad to jump.

"The bullets wound up becoming fireballs later - we originally thought about having a shoot 'em up stage where Mario jumps on a cloud and shoots at enemies, but we dropped it because we wanted to focus on jumping action. The sky-based bonus stages are the remnants of that idea, you could say.

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The executive is known for her appearances at Nintendo's press conferences at E3 2008 and E3 2009, and her ability to carry off white trouser suits.

Dunaway will leave the company on 1st October for unspecified reasons.

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Golf has never been my sport. I tried it once. You have to hit the ball really hard. It just felt wrong. I couldn't bring myself to hit anything that solid such a long way. Someone could get hurt! Clearly, crazy golf is more my sport. (I still believe I'm going to get rich with my idea for full-scale crazy golf. Actual windmills for the windmill. Convert a hillside into a clown's head. It's the best idea any human has ever had.)

But despite a lack of desire to play it in real life, golf games have always appealed to me. Whether it was playing Linx with a golf-enthusiast university housemate in 1998 to get over a break-up, or scratching a groove into the touch-screen of my new DS with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005, the simple pleasure of hitting a ball into a hole has been a recurring theme.

One golf game stands above all others for me. One appealed on a different level. Mario Golf: Advance Tour, for the Game Boy Advance, is exactly the golf game I want to play, pretty much all the time. It's golf. It's an RPG. It's enormously silly.

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Comparatively, black people, old people, women and children rarely ever take the limelight.

The study, finished in 2006 but only just published, had gamers play 150 best-selling games for 30 minutes. Researchers filmed and then picked apart the evidence, according to NewScientist.

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Pajitov and Tetris Company co-founder Henk Rogers explained that Tetris sells more copies now than ever, thanks to mobile phones, and that the Western world will soon emulate the casual-game explosion of Korea.

"People ask me, 'Are you still alive? I think you are a legend,'" Pajitnov told Kotaku. "I expected [Tetris] to be a good game - not worse than anything else. I never expected this."

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"The games [Shigeru Miyamoto] has worked on have a high batting average to produce big hits. However, he is not God," said Iwata, speaking in an investor briefing.

"Even Miyamoto himself cannot hit the mark every time nor always predict how long it takes to complete development."

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The Mario, Zelda and Wii Fit maker topped the poll last year, but now falls behind the likes of rapper Lil' Wayne and South Korean pop star Rain.

Miyamoto's 614,641 votes and average rating of 9 per cent do beat Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, however, who are at 44 and 45 respectively.

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The aim is to offer all kinds of software on the DS Shop and DSiWare services when the redesigned handheld launches across Europe on 3rd April.

This "major app strategy" was aired during a top secret Nintendo Developer Conference earlier this week, according to Develop.

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The exhibition, housed at the Strong National Museum of Play, boasts over 15,000 items. These include games and hardware as well as materials providing evidence of videogames' impact on American life: advertising, publications, toys, books and so on. Those attending will apparently be able to play many of the relics on display, too.

The Strong National Center has further plans for a major, long-term exhibit tentatively titled The Revolutionary World of Electronic Play, which it hopes to open in 2012.

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"This is a job where you have a plan and you polish it endlessly while getting help from others. If Nintendo's games fail to stand out as games that aren't made that way proliferate, then it shows that the creation process is for nothing, which made me very sad," the designer told Famitsu.

"That was especially obvious during the GameCube era; Nintendo titles were hardly even discussed by the general public back then," he continued.

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As reported by 1UP, Hopper appeared on US TV show Late Night with Conan O'Brien recently. The actor has now been in nearly 150 movies, and Conan the O'Brien asked whether he regretted signing up for any of them.

"I made a picture called Super Mario Bros.," Hopper began. "My six year-old son at the time - he's now 18 - he said, 'Dad, I think you're probably a pretty good actor, but why did you play that terrible guy King Koopa in Super Mario Bros.?'

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Few pregnancies have been as painful and protracted as Mother 3's. The follow-up to Super Nintendo classic Earthbound, a game that won a dedicated following for its cute and funny modern-world styling of the Japanese RPG, was first announced twelve years ago. Numerous false starts and broken promises later, lead designer Shigesato Itoi finally announced its imminent Japanese release for the Game Boy Advance on his blog in 2005.

As the latest instalment in one of Japan's most beloved RPG series, Mother 3 raced to the top of the pre-order charts before enjoying considerable success at retail, a feat that still failed to secure it a Western release. Despite Earthbound's status as a sacred cow amongst gaming's cognoscenti, it sold poorly, a performance that scuppered this sequel's chances for a Western release. Shigeru Miyamoto himself said of the game: "We had high hopes for Earthbound in the US, but it didn't do well. You might not know this, but there was a 'Please Make Mother 3' petition, which received 30,000 signatures! After that, we thought, 'Wow... Earthbound fans are really solid.'"

"Really solid" is understatement when it comes to Mother's followers, whose dedication often beggars belief. So when Nintendo's localisation producer Nate Bihldorff confirmed in an interview that the publisher had no plans to take Mother 3 outside of Japan, it was no surprise that a group of fan translators sprang into action. Extracting the text files from the Japanese GBA game, the team began the painstaking work of translating the game's thousands of lines of dialogue before reinserting them using the Earthbound English language font. Finally, on 17th October, over two years after the group began its work, a fully translated patch was released onto the Internet, freely available for anyone with a digital copy of the game to play via emulator.

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This Save the Videogame campaign launches at Nottingham's GameCity Three festival, which takes place next week, from 30th October to 1st November.

Here, revellers will be invited to star in short video clips pledging support for their favourite games. Some developers have already done so on the Save the Videogame website, and a showreel of theirs and other industry pledges will be shown on the day.

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The latest film, Giratina and the Sky's Bouquet: Shaymin, was released in mid-July in Japan and has commanded around GBP 16 million. The story is probably about a boy with spiky hair who traps animals in balls and makes them fight each other.

Pokmon films have had a hard time in the West, but coupled with the heap of games based on the franchise and the television cartoon, the franchise is one of the most lucrative in the whole entire world.

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The event is taking place at the Old Truman Brewery from October 28th - 29th as part of the London Games Festival. GamesIndustry.biz is our sister site for trade types, of course.

Now THQ, SEGA and NCsoft Europe have confirmed they will all be there looking for fresh talent. Other companies already signed up include Rare, Ubisoft Reflections, Crytek, Rebellion and Kuju.

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The new service, called BBFC.online, has already been signed up to by companies such as Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros, and 20th Century Fox. Over 600 downloads have already been given BBFC ratings certificates.

While BBFC.online will cover a variety of online content it will not, according to the BBFC, attempt to censor the internet nor will it have anything to do with rating online games such as World of Warcraft.

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The site is now up and running over at Eurogamer.pt. It's being published in partnership with LusoPlay, a leading gaming community in Portugal which was established by Tiago Silva in 2006. LusoPlay will be merged into Eurogamer.pt as part of the deal.

"We were very impressed with the success Tiago and his team achieved with LusoPlay," said Eurogamer managing director Rupert Loman, pushing things around a map with a big stick.

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Apparently it'll be out later this year, but the publisher has yet to confirm an official title or state what platforms the game is in development for.

The original Marvel: Ultimate Alliance was released back in November 2006 on PC, all the PlayStation platforms, both Xboxes, Wii and even GBA.

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Well, he did invent Mario, Donkey Kong and Zelda, not to mention Wii Fit more recently.

Miyamoto got nearly 2 million votes - 300,000 more than the runner-up, Korean pop sensation Rain. He also saw off the likes of Heidi Klum, in fourth place, and the Dalai Lama, at number 207.

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He has been voted for over 2500 times so far, which puts him at 31 out of 200 candidates; one place ahead of David Beckham and one spot below Warren Buffett. His average rating is 56 per cent.

His "pros" are making games like Mario and Zelda to become the "father of modern videogaming", apparently, as well as making the Wii and recent smash hit Super Mario Galaxy.

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Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Sorenson said there's "too much of an emphasis on the sports aspect of who's winning and losing".

"I think [the console war] is totally irrelevant. Even in the history of the business, other than something like the Dreamcast, you can do decent business on lots of platforms," he continued.

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More than 20,000 people took part in the survey. Apparently 40 per cent played a game online last year, and 90 per cent of them did so on a PC. Less than 20 per cent played a console title online, and half of them did so on an Xbox 360.

Xbox 360 owners spend more time playing online than PC and PS3 owners. Children aged between 2 and 12 are responsible for 25 per cent of the online gaming that goes on, while the figure for 18 to 24 year-olds is just 10 per cent.

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We don't tell you, not because we don't want to (we do) or because we've edited it out in post-production (we sometimes have to do that too, but if you listen live you'll always hear the full thing).

We don't tell you because we're really easily distracted. One second we'll be about to tell you something amazing, the next second we'll be playing one of our amazing barely-games related features, like A Pint of Rice Wine and a Packet of Octopus Please (industry gossip / Japanese lessons recorded by a game developer in Tokyo) or Derek Williams' Free Market Economy (synthy sales ramblings recorded by a market stall trader in Doncaster).

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Two of the designs feature the little green Eurogamers men. Then there's a black shirt bearing the legend 'BETTER THAN HALO', and another promoting 'M070R81K35'. They're available in sizes Extra Large to Olsen, and are priced at GBP 16. Yes, each.

"These are the best t-shirts I have ever seen, and they definitely make men more attractive," said Eurogamer deputy editor Ellie Gibson. "Why, just now I passed Tom in the corridor and thought he was Sawyer out of Lost."

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Published as part of our sister-site GamesIndustry.biz' widely-read weekly newsletter, the GamesIndustry.biz Editorial offers analysis of one of the issues weighing on the minds of the people at the top of the games business. It appears on Eurogamer after it goes out to GI.biz newsletter subscribers.

It's been a long time since any industry pundit was willing to bet on the success of Toshiba's HD-DVD, but the protracted war over the future of high-definition content delivery continued regardless. Staggering and limping its way through a litany of awful sales figures and high-profile studio defections, HD-DVD was the zombie format - struck with lethal blows from all sides, but refusing to fall down and stop twitching all the same.

This week brought merciful respite, and the end, when it came, was swift. Months of horrible news for HD-DVD snowballed into an unstoppable force after its studio support crumbled just before January's Consumer Entertainment Show. A month and a half later, Toshiba has finally pulled the plug - cutting the format's life support and consigning it to history's gallery of noble technological failures.

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Turns out the rumours were true - there won't be a PS3 version of Frontlines: Fuel of War after all. THQ has also binned the PS2 version of Destroy All Humans!: Big Willy Unleashed, so it looks like the game will only get a Wii release now.

And it's goodbye to Juiced and Stuntman. THQ hadn't announced any further instalments in either series but now it's confirmed there won't be any in the future.

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Bramwell joined Eurogamer eight years ago and has since worked his way through thousands of features, countless news articles and seven laptops. His genius was formally recognised last year when he won Best Online Writer at the Games Media Awards, which we like mentioning because we know it makes him cringe.

Former editor Kristan Reed will move into a sort of Queen Mother role as editorial director of the site. Britain's fourth best womens in games, Ellie Gibson, will become deputy editor / Princess Diana.

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Mario is over twenty five years old. Simply in terms of longevity in a constantly evolving industry, that's quite an achievement. Really, how many other characters from the dawn of gaming are still remembered, let alone starring in major AAA new releases? Is the world holding its breath for a new Pitfall Harry game? No sir, it is not. Unless you're cheeky and count Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. Hmm.

Anyway, with Super Mario Galaxy already causing well-groomed pundits to throw words like "bright, bold, unrepentantly loony" around the place this seems like a good excuse to re-rewind back to the start and take a look back of this illustrious history. For the sake of space (and my sanity) we'll be focusing on the main Mario titles, with regular diversions into some of the stranger corners he's found himself in. Spin-offs like the Yoshi and Donkey Kong series, as well as remakes and puzzle games, will be mentioned where relevant but for the most part it's the core Mario series we'll be running our calloused fingers over.

With that small disclaimer out of the way, let's journey back to the neon plastic wonderland we called 1981. Many remarkable and world-changing things debuted on the global stage in that year; Indiana Jones, Princess Diana, Bucks Fizz, that Clint Eastwood movie with the orang-utan that punches people. But it was a different sort of truculent ape that really inflamed the trousers of the entire planet, one with a fondness for throwing barrels and stealing women...

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Eurogamer.fr is a joint venture between Microscoop and Eurogamer Network, adding to our growing network, which already includes Eurogamer Germany and will soon grow to include Spain, too.

The new site is headed up by Editor in Chief Laurent Guerder and Deputy Editor in Chief Jérôme Bohbot, and adds to Microscoop's existing portfolio of French technology and games publications, and our own exciting portfolio of Eurogamer, GamesIndustry.biz, and when I get drunk and email the Guardian.

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The first Metroid presciently set the tone for the future of the franchise by appearing first on a struggling format and only reaching foreign shores after lengthy delays. Metroid was initially released only for the Famicom Disc System in 1986. The FDS was one of Nintendo's first attempts to monkey around with new storage methods, but its success was limited and it never made it beyond Japan. One year later, Metroid finally appeared on the plain old NES in North America and then, another year later, we pox-ridden Europlebs were deemed worthy of having a copy to call our own. Hmm. Sounds familiar.

Despite this rather awkward staggered release, the rather revolutionary nature of the game was immediately apparent. The story seemed obvious enough - a tough bounty hunter called Samus Aran is given the task of ridding the planet Zebes of malignant lifeforms known as Metroids, before evil space pirates use them to destroy the blah blah blah. And at first glance it seemed like a fairly predictable shooty platform game, albeit one where you could shoot in one direction and run in another. But those who tried playing it like a platform game soon found themselves stumped. Where's the end of the level? Why can't I get through there? What do all these pick-ups do? WHY HAVE I TURNED INTO A BALL?

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You know, people who think the moon's made out of cats, or want a wolves-only highway that costs 900 million dollars. Or who have watched every episode of The West Wing and want to point out that the thing about the Russians using a pencil in space is made up and that Mandy is hot and getting rid of her was STUPID.

Anyway, the idea, we're told, was inspired by one of those wacky US presidents, Andrew Jackson, who installed a big block of cheese in the foyer of the White House "for any and all who might be hungry". (I also slightly fancy Rob Lowe.)

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As reported by the Guardian, Brown was speaking at his monthly press conference. He stated, "Where there is pornographic or violent material, any parent is going to be concerned.

"This is not the Government telling people what they should do... This is society reaching a conclusion with all those people involved about what are the legitimate boundaries.

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The concert will take place on 22nd October at the Royal Festival Hall, where members of the Philharmonia Orchestra will recreate music from blockbusters like Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy, Warcraft and Sonic. Even retro titles like Pong and Donkey Kong will get a look in.

There will also be a special arrangement from Halo 3, composed by Marty O'Donnell and performed live by the orchestra for the first time. Although you might be a little busy actually playing it by then.

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Bioshock won the award for Best Xbox 360 game, while Crysis took the accolade for the Best PC title and Mario & Sonic at the Olympics was voted Best Wii game.

The awards were open to any title that was being exhibited at the show, which wasn't going to be published before the show started - meaning that Bioshock only just made it in.

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Games like Gundam, Donkey Kong, Zelda, Mario and Housekeeping Diary helped the DS continue its retail rampage – totting up 153,834 units shifted for the week.

Wii sales were also up on last week at 73,938, thanks to best sellers Mario Party 8, Wii Sports and Wii Play. Launch titles. Scoff.

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But the rest of the top ten was almost entirely dominated by titles for Nintendo platforms, the only exception being multi-format Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix at number six.

Pokmon Diamond remained second for another week, while Wii Play jumped two places to third. More Brain Training was fourth, with Mario Party 8 in fifth.

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This is QuakeCon, and this is not unusual. What is unusual is the next contender. Eyes behind goggle-like sunglasses, hair slicked back, jaw set firm, he announces: "I am Lord Alucard. You don't get to know my name." The audience isn't happy. A guy next to me stands up and starts heckling, but he's drowned out by all the others doing the same. On-stage, our friend grabs the mic. "And guess what - all your girlfriend are belong to me." If it's cringe-making to read, imagine how it was to watch. And then all of a sudden we're laughing again, because the show's presenter has simply walked past him and started talking to the next guy. As Alucard vanishes into the night, the presenter glances over his shoulder. "Geez. We're just trying to have some fun."

And we are. I've been schooled in neutrality by a half-dozen E3 conferences packed to the rafters with the fanboys Nintendo's mysteriously stopped bussing to Los Angeles since USA Today started returning its calls. I've been at LAN parties before. I'm here to report. But even my Brit-abroad detachment is thawing under the heat of a thousand suns. Dallas is quite hot, you know. To begin with I feel like David Attenborough skulking around behind a camera and a dictaphone, observing. By the third day, I'm sitting in a hotel room full of knackered Quake experts, one of whom (mercifully female) is busily showing me her tattoos, as we laugh at Gladiator on the telly. Earlier I set up a petition to lobby for a duck joke that lost out in the NVIDIA stage show comedy contest. I've just come in from talking politics on the veranda with a couple of Texans. And I don't know it yet, but later I'll stalk the halls of the BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) section, introducing kids from Oklahoma to Bookworm Adventures Deluxe. At this point, I'm hugging the gorilla. And, whisper it, QuakeCon is one of the most socially engaging events I've ever attended.

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The New York Post decided to file a suit against the German director after he produced two promotional websites for his film Postal parodying the US newspaper.

Only his version, which featured a similar layout and colour scheme, contained rousing images of terrorism in the Middle East and promotional excerpts for his new movie Postal.

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Four separate installations will be presented in Hall 5 from August 23rd - 26th, where visitors will also be able to try their own hands at creating minor pieces of art.

Public_play is the first of the quartet and will be spread over 500 metres against the backdrop of sights from around Leipzig. Among the works featured here will be digitally-stretched ropes to skip over, classic arcade title Pong played on a dress, and four computers playing Ludo against each other.

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That's compared to 60,000 across the three days of the 2006 Electronic Entertainment Expo trade event in Los Angeles Convention Centre.

Games Convention runs from August 23rd to 26th and incorporates business and public areas across its 115,000 square metres.

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Customers have until July 15th to agree to new terms which give "permission to gather information about your online activities on our web site and with Nintendo’s products," a Nintendo statement said.

The company said the move was necessary "To allow us to implement additional features on our website, to improve our products and to adapt them to our users’ needs and preferences."

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So when we threw up our list of E3 line-ups last week, there was some surprise. "From the looks of it, nothing has really changed," one of our beloved forumites, spongebob, observed. "There's enough games to satisfy everyone." What's more, the staples remain: major press conferences will be held by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, as usual, prior to the show opening. Even the growing prevalence of publisher-specific events like EA's annual summer gathering, Ubisoft's UbiDays and Sony's Gamers' Day elsewhere on the calendar, and the enduring profiles of Leipzig's Games Convention (August) and the Tokyo Game Show (September), won't stop the likes of EA, Vivendi, SEGA and Namco bundling us into countless screenings and demos.

The key to this is actually rather simple: websites like Eurogamer have always been filters for what's at E3, and, with a lot of the extraneous nonsense gone by default, there'll simply be less to filter out. The majority of what you experience - a huge influx of new videos and screenshots, and previews of the latest games based on demonstrations from developers - will endure. For the place where business gets fun, it's business as usual. Long live E3.

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This year Microsoft's up first, followed by Nintendo and then Sony. From your perspective in Europe, it will all happen on the same day: Wednesday, 11th July. Microsoft is at 4.30am, Nintendo at 5pm and Sony at 7.30pm.

As usual, we'll be sitting in the audience tapping feverishly into our laptops to bring you Live Text coverage. See how we capitalise that. It's very exciting. And we wanted to make sure you knew when to expect it.

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Let's begin by mentioning Saw and Hostel. Truth be told I have seen neither of these films but it seems it is important to talk about them when expressing an opinion on the Manhunt 2 Controversy. Normally people wait about three paragraphs until mentioning Saw and Hostel but I have never been afraid to rock the boat so here goes: you know Manhunt 2, it's not as bad as Saw and Hostel is it? Eat that, censors!

Now I have to talk about whether I have actually played Controversial Rockstar Title Manhunt 2. If I had played it I would say so, several times, to illustrate that I am good enough at having opinions about games to have been allowed to play it by Rockstar, probably at their offices off the Kings Road in that room with the big telly and no windows where you are not allowed to touch anything unless they say so.

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Predictions of the end of the face-off between Toshiba and Sony over next-gen DVD standards have been rife for the last few years. But while hopes that it would all be over by last Christmas were wildly optimistic, it seems certain that a dominant format will have emerged in plenty of time for this year's holiday season.

The reason is simple. Blu-ray, always the favourite to win but never seemingly having the momentum to fully outpace its rival, has finally started to pull ahead in a meaningful way. The finish line is in sight.

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Eidos' Tomb Raider Anniversary is at number two this week, with Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End at number three - with only 183 sales separating the two games.

Forza's nearest competitor, Colin McRae: DIRT, only manages to debut at number four this week, just ahead of Nintendo's Wii Play at five.

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The Wii sold 338,000 units throughout May, which was more than both the 155,000 Xbox 360s and 82,000 PS3s put together.

The domination slid with a vengeance into the handheld market, where DS shifted a meaty 423,000 units - just shy of doubling the PSP 221,000 total.

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According to the sales charts for the week ending 10th June, the pair racked up more than 79 per cent of all activity.

The DS took the gold medal with outrageous sales of 117,193, dwarfing the 24,711 figure from PSP. To date, Nintendo's dual-screen menace has trounced Sony's slender marauder by more than three to one.

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In the videogames industry, as in any industry, there are several companies which have always been the bridesmaid, never the bride. No matter how profitable, successful, critically acclaimed or downright long-lived they have been, they've always existed in the shadows of their peers.

No company more so than Codemasters, which has been a fixture of the British videogame publishing industry for over two decades. At various points in the company's lengthy history, it has been very profitable, vastly successful and significantly critically acclaimed - and its longevity, of course, is in no question. However, Codemasters has arguably never felt like an A-list publisher, even at its most successful.

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Fut-sa! is obviously this week's big release, but Mercury Meltdown Revolution is probably the more lusted-after, given the scarcity of good new Wii releases. A lot of Wii games rely on broad-stroke gestures with timing as the decisive factor; Mercury's one of the few that takes the Wiimote up on its capacity for precise input. It also offers analogue control, and it's built around one of the PSP's best puzzle games, and one that not many people bothered with, so there's all sorts of reasons to buy it. Learning how to play it should be easy too, allowing as it does for us to fall back on the most enduring of our "gamer skills": rolling our blobby hides through tight spaces and then plonking our arses on the floor.

Meanwhile, those tooting along with the EG review train lately will be aware Dave was quite enamoured with Wartech Senko no Ronde, and that's out. All I know about it is that Ubisoft's said they'll send it to me for free. 10/10 EIGHT THUMBS UP.

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First in our mashing molars has to be Dirty Dancing from Codemasters. But despite obvious images flashing into your head, this will actually be a casual puzzle action game for PC. Bizarre. Still, you could always put your feet up on the Microsoft Surface coffee table touch-screen hybrid and drift into a dreamy state then fawn over Patrick Swayze. He's cool.

But not as ice-cold as street-racing, which we'll be getting in fresh doses thanks to EA's new Need For Speed ProStreet game. It's got photo-real graphics and better physics than gravity, and will be heading to just about every platform so it can dominate the charts for weeks - just like Spider-Man is doing at the moment. Well, it's either that or the new FIFA 08 outing that Tom flew all the way to Canada to get his chops around. But he likes it, which makes his expensive plane journeys worthwhile.

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What does Sony need to do to make people buy PlayStation 3? It's fairly clear that whatever the magic ingredient may be, the company hasn't found it yet. PS3 is selling, certainly, but it's not selling in remotely the kind of volume needed to challenge Xbox 360 - leaving aside Wii's flyaway sales curve.

Something needs to be done to give the console the kind of spark which will make the market warm to it. But what? All of the talk surrounding the PS3's lacklustre first few months in the market to date has focused on the reasons why the console isn't doing well. Contributions to this debate have ranged from entirely justified criticism of the price point to to rather questionable claims that Sony's problems are down to people on the Internet being nasty about PS3.

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Disney Interactive's Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End enters the charts at number two this week, with Nintendo's Mario Strikers Charged Football debuting at number three.

EA's Xbox 360 and PC strategy title Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars is at number four, with Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer 6 at number five.

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INT. CARDBOARD BOX, MIDDLE OF WARZONE - DAY

287,000 BBFC CERTIFICATE STICKERS and UMDS sit next to one another in pitch darkness while SNAKE talks to GENE on codec. HUMOUR enters.

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Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars was close on its heels at number two, while the budget release of PES6 hogged the third spot.

Wii Play continued to show its popularity at number four, and Cooking Mama followed at five. EA's yearly updates of Tiger Woods: PGA Tour '07 and FIFA '07 were at six and seven this week.

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This week's big reveal was that Halo 3 is due out on 26th September and a day earlier in the US. We'll be using those 24 hours as the reason everyone beats us. Unless, that is, we can put in some decent practice on the Halo 3 multiplayer beta, which launched this week and then got patched. Well, it's a beta, right?

Speaking of fights, Sony's not ducking out of the next-gen battle, and ramped up this week at its Gamer's Day event in San Diego, unveiling not one, not two, but over several new games. Folklore is a new fantasy adventure from Game Republic, and PAIN is a curious downloadable game where you throw someone into a city and watch him bounce around comically. Both are PS3-exclusive.

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It's got a few new features to get to grips with, like the new Soul Shrine that creates an endless stream of monsters to whack, a sparkly dungeon with a fancy Kaiser Dragon boss, and an unlockable music player. But other than that, not a lot's changed, and you'll be free to enjoy the 1994 SNES classic virtually unchanged.

Which is a good thing, because the sixth game in the Final Fantasy series was fantastic - a break away from the familiar direction of Hironobu Sakaguchi. The job system of the fifth was done away with in favour of "background abilities", which, coupled with an enormous cast and detailed story attracted massive critical acclaim.

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An experience that must be all too familiar at Bungie, where this week saw the highly anticipated launch of the Halo 3 beta followed by the highly unanticipated Crackdown access launch catastrophe. But if there's one thing you can rely on it's that Bungie bounces back. "It's been a long day for a lot of people," Bungie wrote on its website, "but we're happy to announce that effective immediately, a title update for Crackdown is available on Xbox Live that will fix the issue that previously prevented you from downloading the beta". As a goodwill gesture, the developer whose AI programmer bought us dinner at The Cheesecake Factory in Bellevue on Sunday which was nice of him added that the beta has been extended from 6th to 10th June to make up for the debacle. That includes an additional weekend among other things (notably Thursday and Friday).

Guffaws all over the Internet, then, and a bit of consternation on our own forums. "The supposedly brilliant Live network has been struggling immensely ever since the beta was launched. My system keeps locking up when I access a Live service via the blades, and it's happening to pretty much everyone else as well," someone generalised. Another echoed the sentiment: "They keep banging on about how many 360 owners are using Live, so if they know how many people are out there, you'd think they'd have the network strong enough to cope. It wouldn't be so bad if it was even just the busy games which were falling over, but it's not. The whole thing is buggered, and that seems rather poor to me to be honest." At which point someone added: "But, but, it's a beta." Which it is, and apart from the now-fixed access issue, it's a well-formed one, that speaks to a concept "evolved" rather than regurgitated. We've already played it and tipped it, and will be offering more of our thoughts in an upcoming episode of the Eurogamer TV Show, which we aim to precede with at least one evening of not destroying ourselves with all the chemicals The Misty Moon can muster. So prepare yourself. And don't bother going to the shops today.

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Electronic Arts' Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars has leapt back up the charts following release on the Xbox 360, from number 20 to number two, nudging Nintendo's Wii Play down to number three.

Discounting has boosted sales of Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer 6, which jumps up the charts from number 35 to number four, with EA's FIFA 07 also climbing to number five.

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It gives us a chance to look over the mooing herd and arrange the heifers into some sort of bite size order, so that you can get your chops around the juiciest announcement burgers this week.

Squeenix kicked off proceedings this week by revealing three new games ahead of its Square Enix Party in Japan this weekend. Role-playing game Last Remnant for PS3 and Xbox 360 was the most exciting of these, but Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon for Wii and Final Fantasy Dissidia for PSP also caused a fuss.

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Goodbye, Spider-Man.

Put it this way: if a picture paints a thousand words, then it follows that a 140-minute film hitting us with 60 frames every second is good for about 504 million. That's a lot of words. So it's an amazing testament to the epic dreadfulness of Spider-Man 3 that none of them is even vaguely printable. The first two films were widely considered spectacular, emotional roller-coasters; part 3 is like having to pay to tie your shoelaces on a zebra crossing in the middle of Le Mans - objects that are moving too quickly to focus on are speeding expensively toward your backside and all you can do is hand over your money and imagine what it would be like if someone gave you 258 million dollars to spend on coke.

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But should we actually care? Is there any more to this heady blend of anime, videogames and porn than antique game mechanics and mildly titillating drawings? Eurogamer decided to find out.

The first part of our research took us to Play-Asia's selection of Hentai Games. A brief warning that the pages ahead contain 'Nudity', 'Strong sexual content' and 'Explicit pictures' confirm that we're in the right place. Further confirmation is provided by the selection of games on offer - a selection that also provides some pretty startling insights into the genre. There are currently some 50-odd titles available in translation at the moment. And they are pretty odd. Picking titles at random demonstrates pretty clearly that even this limited selection of hentai games caters to the broadest extremes of sexual proclivity: there's transexuality (Yin-Yang - X-Change Alternative); gothic horror (Animamundi - Dark Alchemist); historical romance (Enzai - Falsely Accused); human sacrifice (Bible Black: The Game); submission (Absolute Obedience - Zettai Fukuju Meirei); mild incest (Hitomi - My Stepsister) and much, much more. Certainly more than the odd cross-dresser in Guilty Gear, or Dead or Alive's bikini babes.

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First up is Midway's late entry into the crowded WWII genre, Hour of Victory. If the initial reaction is: 'Oh, dear God, no, not another WWII game!', then the second, on reflection, should of course be: 'Well, there's always room for a good 'un'.

In an attempt to prove the worthiness of its war effort, Midway flew us out to the Austrian Alps, and dragged us up a mountain to the imperious Hohenwerfen Castle, whose claim to fame is its starring role as Schloss Adler in classic British war film Where Eagles Dare.

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Pokemon Ranger is the sixth title in the series to hit number one, and becomes the first Nintendo-developed title to climb to the top since Pokemon Ruby four years ago.

Last week's number one, TMNT: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, has been pushed back to number two, just ahead of Wii Play which leaps up the charts from number 24 to number three.

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It will take place alongside the Develop Conference in Brighton on Tuesday, 24th July.

Among those confirmed to be speaking their brains are Microsoft development bigwig Chris Satchell, MotorStorm man Matt Southern, all of Epic Studios including the tea lady, and Nick Burton from Rare.

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So it's with only a Wright-Phillips/Gail Porter hybrid-measure of guilt that I'm offering a glimpse into the chaos behind the magic, as we walk through the usual Wednesday afternoon 3pm panic attack of trying to conjure something to write about for Friday. First call goes to 505 Games (that's a Googlewhack and a half) who will be publishing Gurumin, a quirky PSP action-adventure that's been on my radar since 3.01pm. Childish in style and source - it's about a little girl who makes friends with a monster that only children can see, who takes her through a portal into the monster world - and home to supposedly engaging 3D combat and upgrade systems, it's not going to be here in time to play through the first few levels, and then splash the page with tepid nonsense about a stuttering farm-hand who likes to brush the dog with a rake while singing the title song. This barricades the only avenue open to believably enthusiastic exploration like a rhino that's fallen asleep on a zebra crossing. The other option is poorly-rated parkour prance-around Free Running, but the fact that Ubisoft didn't respond to my approaches is probably just as well, since I've run out of alliteration, and nobody who knows me is going to believe a made-up anecdote that involves me picking up any kind of forward momentum, let alone manoeuvring myself over anything besides a buffet table or a wheel of cheese. Mmm.

Next step is to plead with John for help. John says, why not do a list of games that don't exist, but should? Like "Console Wars", for PS3 and Xbox 360, where every time you put the disc in it loads Chart-Track.co.uk - home of the UK Top 40 - to see which version got more sales, only for you to realise that Chart-Track doesn't break down the individual platform sales numbers for plebs like you, so your stupid meaningless partisanship was, is and always will be utterly futile, at which point the Wii strolls in and kicks everyone in the balls. But, I retort, as our increasingly fictional encounter reaches climax, that's the sort of tired, old, endlessly retrodden, sub-TVGoHome nonsense that any badger with a keyboard could fire out in-between glasses of Ernest & Julio Gallo Sierra Valley Colombard, and What's New is, if not above these things, then certainly only likely to employ and then disown them in the same paragraph - as a sort of ironic arse-covering cop-out that's hardly worth most of your time.

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Florida attorney Jack Thompson, the self-styled enemy of videogames, has been accused of ambulance-chasing before - but never let it be said that he's a man who rests on his laurels. When the deadly, tragic and as yet inexplicable events unfolded at Virginia Tech earlier this week, Thompson went a step further than mere chasing. Within hours, he was once again attempting to further his own agenda in the American mass media.

Thompson's appearance on various news broadcasts isn't surprising, but his apparent willingness to exploit Monday's dreadful events is genuinely shocking. It shows not only a low regard for facts and research but arguably for decency in the wake of tragedy.

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Elsewhere, the French publisher has stormed the rest of the top forty with promotions across a range of super-budget PC titles.

Seven Ubisoft games re-enter the charts this week, including Rayman 2: The Great Escape at three and Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 at six.

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No publicity is bad publicity. How many times have we heard that phrase? It has been applied to all manner of different situations, from video nasties to misbehaving celebrities. People like Max Clifford have made lucrative careers from the power of that phrase. In the videogames market, which is the whipping boy du jour of socially conservative types across the western world, the idea has found fertile soil and taken root. Controversy breeds popularity; exposure leads to sales.

I'm not going to argue with that wisdom - after all, the evidence is compelling. Copies of Manhunt were hoovered off shelves when the game was named (incorrectly, as it turned out) as a factor in the brutal murder of a British teenager a couple of years ago.

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Called "Guinness World Records - Videogame Edition 2008", the book will include reviews of the 20 biggest games of the year (8/10), record scores and fastest times, hardware profiles, sales figures and technical achievements made by individual games (e.g. how Viva Piñata is best).

The book will also answer questions such as which pro gamers earn the most money, what's the single highest score ever in a game, and which is the most successful console of all time.

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The Ghost Rider film, which stars Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes, was released in February. Take-Two published the videogame under the 2K Games label around the same time on GBA, PS2 and PSP. Also named in the suit are Sony Pictures, Marvel Enterprises, Columbia TriStar, Hasbro, Relativity Media, Crystal Sky Pictures and Michael De Luca Productions.

Friedrich is accusing the companies of embarking on a "joint venture and conspiracy to exploit, profit from and utilise" the Ghost Rider copyright, according to Reuters.

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Eurogamers allows you to keep in touch with friends, games and the communities you're part of all from one memorable address: gamers.eurogamer.net

You can customise your homepage and the way you appear to your fellow Eurogamers, create your own Groups and join others, keep track of things that interest you, like activity on forum threads you're contributing to, and drag and drop new information feeds to fit your browsing habits.

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This was the business model. With the brand established, the next box, the box this was always about, would be rushed to market at the earliest opportunity, with scant regard for stock supplies or a coherent first-party release strategy. For all that mattered was being first. And, at this stage, by how much first.

Microsoft has done an excellent job of shifting 360 so far in the West. And it has no doubt been helped along quite a bit by the bumper headstart gift-wrapped by the oft-delayed PlayStation 3. And, in Europe, where PlayStation 3 sold through a record-breaking 600,000-plus units over its open weekend, Microsoft has needed every day. It took a while to sort out that pesky release schedule, after all.

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Sales of Sony's best-selling title Resistance: Fall of Man dropped by 66 per cent, nudging it down to number two in the charts, while MotorStorm sales also fell by 62 per cent, as it reversed into the number three position.

Codemasters' multiformat Brian Lara International Cricket 2007 slips into fourth place this week, with SEGA's Virtua Tennis 3 at number five.

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One respondent, who asked not to be named (presumably remembering that the last time somebody named him he ended up "Neville Jeremy") but apparently now has been named by accident in brackets, pointed out that Medal of Honor Vanguard sounds like something you use to stop people breaking into your Transit, and responded "something to do with shops in winter" when asked about brand new Oblivion expansion "Shivering Isles". Meanwhile, Tiberium Wars sounds "like that graffiti". What? "You know, you see it on walls round the way. Timmy Wars Ere." Respondents who tried to be funny from thereon out were forced to pay for all of lunch instead of half, which had originally been the arrangement. Future birthday meals went on to find themselves in serious jeopardy.

So what can we do about the rising tide of names that nobody understands? "The first thing to do is stop slamming names together like Heat editors on a deadline," says newly made-up entertainment analyst Trendy McZeitgeist. "'The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - Shivering Isles' is not an attractive moniker. Dashes and colons should keep their distance - like Amy Winehouse and whatever that other one is called, who TOTALLY hate each other." Former showbiz reporter Fabrie McKate concurs. "The other problem is names nobody understands, like 'Penumbra Overture'. Keep it short and racey, like a song by plucky pop princess Kylie Minogue, who will have no trouble finding a new man - she really deserves one after all she's been through."

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"In the second half of the year we expect to receive further licensing revenues from the film version of Hitman," said Eidos' parent company SCi in its interim results statement. "It has been reported that Deadwood star, Timothy Olyphant will star as Agent 47 in 20th Century Fox's production of the Hitman film. The film will co-star Dougray Scott and will be produced by Luc Besson."

On top of this, Variety reported that Olga Kurylenko (Paris je t'aime), Robert Knepper (Prison Break), Ulrich Thomsen (Festen) and Michael Offei (Casino Royale) will also star in the film.

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According to Gamespot she accused the companies of being "negligent, careless, and reckless with regard to the design and manufacture" of the game, and is seeking damages "for such fair and reasonable amount as may be awarded by a jury of his peers". Which would apparently be a group of toddlers.

However, the PS2 version of Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly - like almost every other game ever - contains a warning on the inside of the manual, highlighting that a small percentage of photosensitive epileptics could be at risk of seizure when playing the game.

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