Forza Motorsport 2 pushed back to June 2007

Microsoft's Forza Motorsport 2, which was originally expected to launch in time for Christmas this year, has been pushed back again - with Peter Moore saying it will be out by the end of June 2007.

The title was originally revealed to have slipped from its Christmas slot to an early 2007 timescale at the Leipzig Game Convention in late August, and has now dropped a few months further down the schedules.

The delay of the game - whose first iteration on the Xbox platform was critically acclaimed and hailed as Microsoft's answer to the huge Gran Turismo franchise on the PlayStation - does weaken Microsoft's winter and spring line-up, at a time when the firm would have been hoping to capitalise on PS3 supply difficulties and the late European launch.

However, it does give Microsoft an astonishingly strong line-up for the first half of 2007 - with Forza 2 joining key titles Crackdown, Shadowrun and Too Human on Microsoft's first party release schedule for that period.

The new dates for those titles were announced by Microsoft's games boss Peter Moore in an interview with MTV, where he also revealed that he has recently played a version of Halo 3, describing it as "everything people would expect to see in a next-generation version of Halo."

Halo 3 is widely expected to launch on the Xbox 360 in time for the holiday season in 2007.

However, Moore did confirm that the recent withdrawal of Fox and Universal from the Halo movie project, while by no means a fatal blow to the firm's ambitions of bringing the franchise to the silver screen, does mean that the movie will not be released until 2008 at the earliest.

"For the magnitude of what the script is - I've read the screenplay - and what we need to do to uphold the 'Halo' universe for its legion of fans in the way they want to see a movie being made, no, it won't be next year," he explained.