Cardiff-based music specialist Only 1 Music is holding a unique Guitar Hero competition in its flagship retail stores in Cardiff, with the very best player winning a week’s studio time in Only 1 Music’s state-of-the-art recording studio, complete with engineer – a prize worth £1500.

Test Drive Unlimited challenges players online to experience the most exotic and fastest vehicles on more than 1000 miles of diverse Hawaiian roads. Gamers win races, challenges, missions and tournaments to earn credits and purchase new cars, bikes, rare performance parts, clothes, apparel, homes and garages.

Following reports of flying Wiimotes, broken HDTVs and windows, Nintendo announced that it will replace all broken straps for it's Wii console, affecting all Nintendo Wiis sold worldwide, inluding those currently on store shelves. Although not admitting any blame, Nintendo said the straps do not present a problem if used correctly. The Japanses giant has also recalled 200,000 AC adapters for its DS and DS Lite consoles, but in Japan, not overseas.

During the recent Spike TV Video Game Awards ceremony Epic Games president Mike Capps stated that they have been working on new content for its recently released gritty action game Gears of War. The question on everybodies mind however was whether the long time PC developer was going to jump on the microtransaction bandwagon or not. Putting the discussion to rest Capps said, "We always take care of our customers, we always give them stuff for free, and we're going to keep doing that forever. That's how we do it, man. This is Epic."

Another day, another batch of game trailers was released. Instead of giving them all their own posts, we grouped them, and so far there are trailers for:

• World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade - Intro Trailer
• Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 [PSP/PS3/X360/PC] - Trailer
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl - Aftermath Trailer
• Fuzion Frenzy 2 [X360] - Trailer #4
• TNA Impact! [PS2/Xbox/PS3/X360] - Trailer
• Far Cry Vengeance [Wii] - Trailer #3
• 
  
  We will update this throughout the day when new trailers become available. Read more for download links ...

Perpetual's President Chris McKibbin confirmed that his company has laid off about 30 people on the development staff but points out that its MMO Gods and Heroes is almost content complete, and trimming down the team to 80 people is a natural progression as content production roles come to an end. However, in order to make Gods & Heroes the best game it can be, the decision was made to push back its Q1 2007 launch date to summer 2007, so Perpetual can continue play-testing and tuning to deliver the highest quality game possible.

In Pirates of the Caribbean Online, players try to become the Caribbean's most legendary pirate, all while forging alliances, hunting for buried treasure, battling evil undead forces and facing off against enemies from the movie franchise.

After a false start earlier this week, Microsoft has released the December backwards compatibility update, with a few extra additions. This free update currently adds 37 original Xbox games that you will be able to play on your X360, although some are region restricted. Titles of note are recent games such as Scarface, Splinter Cell Double Agent, MK: Armageddon, and favorites such as Psychonauts...

Go loco in the seedy underworld of Los Toros as Ramiro Cruz, avenging the assassination of his father by creating maximum carnage in the inner circles of the local kingpin Cesar Morales’ drug cartel.

The sentence has been passed, now you must bring order in a world of chaos. Start with a small, low security prison and build it into a maximum-security super-max. Valusoft has released a 60 min time limited demo, which you can unlock after purchasing a license key.