And if there was any financial reason Hughes wanted to keep it quiet, we've just gone and blown it on this board.

I'm playing Rainbow Six pretty much exclusively now. Didn't really get on with the whole 'empty an entire clip into an enemy and still wind up getting chainsawed' thing of Gears Of War. Anyone fancies a game, or a quick blast to get the incredibly easy online achievements, my tag is calistan.

Certainly shouldn't be called 'Pardew' now that Jim's hijacked it.

He's been a sacking waiting to happen ever since wham got promoted. Couldn't stand the odious, orange-faced git myself, but a change of manager has to be a Bad Thing in terms of shooting them back up the table.

Anyone remember Madejski giving some particularly harsh criticism of Jack Walker for buying us the title a few years back? I can't find it online but I think his team deserves a right royal thumping for that (and for naming a stadium after himself)

From Football 365's Mediawatch page: 'The energy generated by British soccer dynamo Wayne Rooney as he sprints around the pitch during a match is enough to boil water for 16 cups of tea, according to research published on Tuesday,' reports The Independent. 'The research is part of a programme to try to raise awareness in the face of the global warming crisis caused by burning fossil fuels.' Alas, researchers were unable to calculate just how much energy a fuelled-up Rooney exerted in a Liverpool brothel last summer when he reportedly did his bit for the next generation by energising a burnt-out old fossil.

Plus there's the social stigma of being a 'coretard'. The core model has a white disc tray instead of the chrome one on the proper Xbox, so even when you upgrade to a hard drive and wireless controller, your corebox will be forever mocking you from underneath the telly.

:ph34r:

I love stats like that. After you've spent seven seconds downloading your encyclopaedia, you can cancel your ISP contract and spend the next three years reading the entire thing.

Seems sensible to me as well. If I could save a bit of loading time by sacrificing a few gigs of otherwise redundant HD space, I'd gladly do it. Besides, if you ever find you're running out of room, you could delete the installation data of older games you don't play so much, in which case the only thing you'd notice is that they're slower loading once again. I think the 360 does something similar but it's all automatic. Games cache data in the 6GB sector of the HD that can't be accessed by the user.

His hairdo looks expensive.

They just got done over by Scotland, so that's hardly a recommendation. They'd probably have Barry Ferguson, too.

That's exactly the attitude that gets England fans so disappointed every time they fail to win yet another tournament. Rooney is England's best striker but he hasn't scored since 2004. Gerrard is England's most talented midfielder but I can't recall him ever inspiring the side like Beckham once did. I doubt either of them would be picked for any of the top international sides these days, but McClaren only seems capable of dropping the easy targets.

It's only in the videogames world that you'll get stories like 'Toy You Probably Want To Buy In A Few Months Time Might Go Wrong One Day!!!' My 360 has given disc errors in Hitman and Dead Rising, and frozen up in GRAW. I don't know if better cooling would make much of a difference - Dreamcast had liquid cooling and I remember seeing one of those belching clouds of black smoke out of the side. Still, that might have been because some fool plugged a Japanese machine into the UK mains. Absolutely stank, it did.

Sounds like internet scaremongering to me. I saw one machine at TGS that crashed once and was promptly reset by a Namco rep. You can expect a few teething troubles with new hardware - my 360 has locked up a fair few times, Gamecube crashes frequently - but most users just put up with it. I don't know how anyone can say with confidence that the machine is unreliable when absolutely nobody has had the chance to take one home and test it over the course of several months.

Aaargh! That made me cringe more than the castration scene in Hard Candy.

It's cool as you like but it doesn't half make your arms ache when you're trying to aim carefully. Zelda is *miles* easier with a Gamecube controller. The Wii remote is best for tennis, boxing, pool and all that kind of simplified 'real world' stuff. Nintendo were wise not to go head to head with PS3 -- Wii is like the home equivalent of DS, and who knows, maybe by going off at a tangent like that, it will thump PS3 like DS has thumped the PSP. I wouldn't put money on it, though. Oh, Shevchenko -- sorry, I know absolutely nothing about Superman.

At a videogame magazine company.

I spoke to someone who saw it at X06 the other day, and she said it's the business. Apparently you have to blend in with crowds to get close to your victims, which depends on being able to look and act like the people around you so as not to arouse suspicion. There was a PS3 being demonstrated in the office earlier, with some monster truck game and a FPS that involved shooting little alien spider things. Didn't think much of those two but the console itself is looks a must-have. It's so shiny! It had better come with a polishing cloth.

Maybe someone will release a proper joystick for it. Actually, isn't there already an arcade stick for Dead or Alive on 360? The only slightly offputting thing for me is that it's developed by Kuju, which is hardly a guarantee of quality. Still, if all they're doing is porting the Amiga game and giving it a HD widescreen mode, they can hardly go wrong. I could quite easily give Pro Evo a miss with this on the horizon.

Sensible World Of Soccer coming to Xbox Live Arcade! With online multiplayer leagues, too.

Must be a bit tricky watching three games at once!

Well, it's great to be back in England. Groan....... The PS3s on the Sony stand had the sharpest HDTVs I've ever seen, so Ridge Racer looked a lot better there than it did on the Namco stand. Both were running 1080p.Still, I have to say it does look a bit nicer than 360 whatever it's displayed on. £400 nice? Not so sure. Time to drink away my jetlag!

I've just been playing it at the Tokyo Game Show - had a crack on Ridge Racer 7, which looks amazing, and some mech game that I can't remember the name of. Judging by the reaction here, Sony has absolutely nothing to worry about - the only problem will be manufacturing enough of the consoles. Metal Gear Solid 4 was on video, and looked impressive. It wasn't running very smoothly, though, so there's probably a lot of work to be done. Still, there was a bit where Snake gets in an oil drum and rolls through the enemy soldiers, Monkey Ball style. Ace! And he has a kind of camo suit thing so he can blend in everywhere. Best thing at the show. Nintendo wouldn't let anyone show playable Wii games, so there were just four of them demo'd on stage by girls. Fairly big queues for the 360 but I think that might have been because they were handing out free stuff to players. In the shops, the 360 stuff is tucked away on a rack next to the retro gear and GBA games. Pre-orders for PS3 are all filled, or at least I didn't see any of the pre-order slips anywhere.

I wonder how much that cost. Xbox, monitor, custom case, three months labour... Still, I want one!