Tom and Jerry Tales announced for DS

What with competition from YouTube, MySpace, and DirtyOldSlappers.com, Tom and Jerry is no longer quite at the forefront of children's entertainment. A shame, given that these wayward mammals were bothering the nation's morals long before GTA arrived on the block.

After all, barely ten seconds of a Tom and Jerry cartoon goes by without Tom (the cat) getting electrocuted, squashed, drowned or blow-dried due to the actions of his nemesis Jerry (the mouse). They deserve better.

Can Tom and Jerry Tales on DS relaunch the careers of these ageing animal superstars? Erm, maybe...

Warner Bros has just announced it's working with Eidos and developer Sensory Sweep to get a game featuring the cruelty-prone pair onto Nintendo's dual-screened machine by autumn.

As you'd expect, you play Jerry the mouse trying to outwit Tom the cat. If that sounds easy to fans of the cartoon, where would the challenge be in playing Tom? Even coming to a sticky end doesn't hamper the moggy's spirits – forget about nine lives, this cat has nine million.

Anyway, we're waffling: we've not been told much about the game, rather ominously. Besides the obviously cartoon-faithful art style visible in the screenshots, we're simply promised vast, colourful environments, in which you have to avoid Tom's booby traps in order to get Jerry back to his mouse hole.

Some readers may think the presence of a big bucks cartoon tie-in, lack of information about the gameplay, and the very short press release simultaneously covering both the DS and GBA versions suggests a top-flight title is just about to explode onto the DS shelves.

We'll call you glass half-full types, and we're glad to find such sunshine still endures in this dark world.

Everyone else is invited to click "Track It!" to be immediately alerted if we discover Tom and Jerry Tales is more than simply cheesy.