The entire city of New York has been infested with this specialized virus; one that was designed as a biological weapon that can be targeted against an entire race of people. It has unfortunately been spread across the city and you are the key.

18 days ago your were lying on the cold, hard, surface of the GENTEK morgue, dead, and now you have the ability to absorb the form and memories of the people around you, becoming their doppelganger to find out just what happened to you and why you are alive. You’re name is Alex Mercer.

With 2009 now the latest edition in the beloved series, Virtua Tennis has been a stalwart sports sim on consoles since its emergence back on the Sega Dreamcast in 2000. Of course, a lot has changed since those heady days of 128-bit serving and volleying. With this generation’s near photo-realistic graphics, ubiquitous online options and numerous other advances in game-play and design, you’d expect Sega to serve up a vastly enhanced rendition of the popular title.

But have they? Looking at the amount of detail and copious game options available we’d have to say yes and there’s no doubt Virtua Tennis 2009 is a solid and enjoyable tennis sim. But, and there’s always a but, we just feel there is a lack of innovation in the perennial update that suggests that – though Sega have produced a great game for tennis fans – they may not necessarily have made a significantly new one.

The folks over at Joost have been providing an online service streaming video to the internet masses – if you use a PC, that is.

As of this week, the Joost functionality is available to all PS3 users via the internet web browser direct from the XMB.

With the release of Vidzone just recently, we have to ask if there is a need for this option for the PS3 masses?

After years in the making and months of developmental uncertainty, we finally have the Ghostbusters game we didn’t know we wanted so badly. Back in 2006, Slovenian developer Zootfly lit the five alarm fire that had the internet in a frenzy over a next generation Ghostbusters video game. Sony realized that they had a potential hit on their hands; they just needed the right developer to make this game shine.

But how well can a 25 year old movie franchise translate to a next generation video game and more importantly, to a totally new audience? There are many questions surrounding Ghostbusters: The Video Game but the most important is this, who ya gonna call?

The PlayStation 3 has been lacking in the traditional JRPG department since its infant days as a console. With the release of Cross Edge, we were hoping for a break though game featuring five top developers; Capcom, Nippon Ichi, Namco Bandai, Gust, and Idea Factory, after all, there is a certain excitement about controlling your own personal Prinny, Morrigan Aensland, Meu, and Aurica Nestmile army.

In reality, the game is like a complicated calculus equation. The road to the solution can be long and arduous, but upon arrival, there is a certain satisfaction. That, and the fact that there were probably hundreds of times we wanted to hurl our controller at the television screen and call it quits…

Vidzone is a welcome addition to the six countries that support it from the PAL territory and it offers console owners something never seen before – free, legal and easy access to high quality music videos.

When we first heard about the application coming to Europe last year, it sounded very impressive but as with many new concepts, nobody knew if it could live up to the high expectation behind it.

Considering SOCOM: Confrontation’s deployment to European territories has taken so long – over half a year in fact – it would not be unreasonable to assume at least some of the more egregious network and gameplay issues that have famously crippled the American version would finally now be solved.

Unfortunately, as fans of the SOCOM franchise, and with a responsibility to honestly appraise any title irrespective of brand recognition or past pedigree, we have the unhappy duty to report that, though it is improved to some degree, every snippet of bad press you’ve heard about SOCOM:Confrontation is pretty much warranted.

What Dark Energy have produced is not only an enjoyable pool simulator on the PS3 – admittedly a niche market – but what might be the first friendship killing game.

For when a game can incite a torrent of invectives from even the most timid of gamers – and they giddily come back for more – it’s a sign that Inferno Pool’s designers have tapped into the winning combination of something both equally fun and primal.

It is 8 a.m. on the set of Stan Lee’s ‘Who Wants To Be A Superhero?’, and auditions are in full swing. One by one, regular members of the public appear with their superhero persona, backed up by a costumes made of plastic bags and a notion of the one thing that makes them better than you.

A super-power.

ZEN Studio’s ZEN Pinball is the first of such titles to grace the PSN, and what ZEN have brought to the table (pun intended) is a faithful rendition of the popular genre with all the bells and whistles expected from a game of this sort. Unfortunately, what they haven’t managed to do is bridge the gap towards people who simply see pinball as an archaic game-type; a bygone gaming construct surpassed by new-age wonders such as polygons and particle effects. It’s this slight letdown that results in Zen Pinball being a pleasant distraction rather than the addictive pinball juggernaut it could have been.

Did someone say Homerun? Yep, it is another Thursday and it wouldn’t be complete without our weekly run-though of what’s happening in PlayStation Home.

It is quite a significant update worldwide today so let’s get down to business before we start writing next week’s.

We take a look at The Creative Assembly’s Stormrise. An RTS with a unique control system, the Whip-Selectâ„¢, have the Australian developer unlocked the secrets of creating an RTS on a console that is intuitive, managable and responsive.

Or have they created one of the most frustrating, disappointing and ultimately poorest games in a long time?

Unleashing righteous retribution on the undead is quite in vogue at the moment so if you’ve a penchant for sending zombies back to their rightful resting place – you’re probably like a kid in a candy store these days.

Of course, not all zombie games are created equal and if you’re also a fan of classic horror movies like the Evil Dead series, Brain Dead (Dead Alive in the US), and the more humourous take on undead extermination – Shaun of the Dead – we think this hard decision has just been made a lot easier. Burn Zombie Burn! is a game that you should run – don’t walk – and pick up.

The Resident Evil series is most notable for its single player campaign. In fact, there hasn’t been any true sense of multiplayer until now.

At the games release, gamers could play co-op in either the main story or Mercenaries mode. Now, with the Versus expansion, they can take their anger and frustration out on each other rather than Majini.

But is multiplayer meant to grace the world of Resident Evil or should it stick to the likes of Killzone 2 and Resistance?

Beam over to StarTrekFanKit and you’ll see that director J.J. Abrams will join stars of the new Star Trek movie Chris Pine (Kirk) and Zachary Quinto (not Sylar) in Home with some selected journalists (note: not us) tomorrow for a Q&A session.

To make things easy for all you Trekkies out there who don’t want to miss what’s revealed, we’ve embedded the feed in this article. Obviously it’s offline at the moment but, come tomorrow at 4pm GMT, it will spark into life and roll with the exclusive Star Trek themed insight.

Firmware updates have become an integral part of the PlayStation 3 experience, with new ones coming in every three months on average.

So what do we think of the latest firmware (2.70) and the new additions it brings to the system?

You’ll have to forgive us. After spending over fifty hours creating our comprehensive Games Database (212 games documented!), we were somewhat burned out and a little hesitant to return to the scene of the crime anytime soon.

That said, we’ve definitely neglected our new baby and, since the database’s debut, buckets of new games for the PS3 were announced (or, you know, we’re pretty sure they’re coming).

Rather than just surreptitiously update the Database in the background, we thought you might be interested in the new games that are now tagged and sitting pretty on our virtual shelf.

In the interests of science (or more accurately, vocal destruction) we took up both our microphones and the challenge, and proceeded to sing to every song on the disc.

Here we write about our highs, lows and this author’s bout of ‘razor throat’ somewhere around the middle ‘C’.

Coming up with the goods once again, IGN have delved into inFamous’ much lauded Karma system with a couple of videos to hammer home how the game’s morality mechanism works.

Though Sucker Punch’s new game’s good and evil dilemma was something hinted at in the past, it is only now that we get an indepth understanding of just how the choices in the game will affect the player’s journey through a devastated Empire City.