PlayStation®3 news round-up

There are plenty of great games on the way for PS3 - here's a quick round-up of some recent announcements.

It's the time of year for new game announcements, and as you would expect, PS3 is the focus for plenty of the world's top development teams as they work on their latest hits. Here's a selection of games that you'll soon be able to play on PS3.

Rock Band

Harmonix, the team that brought you Frequency, Amplitude and Guitar Hero on PlayStation 2, is working on an ambitious new music game that takes the Guitar Hero blueprint and expands it, as the title suggests, to a whole band. Drums and vocals join the bass/lead guitar for a full-on group experience, and unprecedented collaboration with record companies means you'll be playing along to a wide variety of original master recordings.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

The popular World War II series leaps to the present day for its latest outing. Beyond announcing the modern day setting, publisher Activision is keeping fairly tight-lipped at present - still, the knowledge of a next generation Call of Duty, with modern technology to bring to the fight, will be enough to get fans salivating.

Hydrophobia

Hydrophobia is something of a departure for Blade Interactive, a team more famous for its snooker simulation series, World Championship Snooker. That said, you don't make the world's best snooker simulation without a good knowledge of physics, which is being put to innovative use in Hydrophobia.

A survival adventure, Hydrophobia takes place in a series of flooded environments. The impressive HydroEngine that underpins the game fully simulates water like never before, so that "it behaves exactly as in life; it flows, it makes surfaces and characters wet, it carries objects and bodies and interacts fully with Hydrophobia's entirely dynamic environments". And that's something that simply couldn't be done without the power of next generation hardware like PS3.

Tony Hawk's Proving Ground

Activision's perennial skateboarding game enjoyed one of its finest ever instalments in the shape of its last edition, Tony Hawk's Project 8. The latest version is to be called Proving Ground, and offers a long list of new additions such as seamless integration between single player and online multiplayer skating, and a fully featured Video Editor.

Fans of Project 8's Nail the Trick mode will be delighted to hear that Nail the Grab and Nail the Manual have been added, making the combo possibilities even more mind-boggling than before.

Tom Clancy's Endwar

With Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell already sitting pretty under its phenomenally successful Tom Clancy brand, Ubisoft has added a fourth franchise to the Mr C canon. Endwar is a strategy game built for next generation power, and is set upon the battlefields of World War III. Eek.