Few people can justifiably claim to have had a hard day at work once they've seen what Jack Bauer has to go through in a typical day at his job. Many of us have already seen just how stressful life as part of the Los Angeles Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) can be, in just 72 hours we've witnessed Jack's wife murdered, his daughter getting repeatedly kidnapped, and even watched him chopping off his daughter's boyfriend's virus-ridden arm. With an axe. It's no wonder his heart's struggling to cope.

Plenty of time may pass from season to season, but that doesn't mean that it was time uneventfully spent. Take the gap between seasons two and three - what happened during that time that saw Kim Bauer recruited to the LA CTU, Jack teaming up with Chase Edmunds, and the aftermath of the assassination attempt on President Palmer?

Rather than just making the educated guess that many of us less solvent types probably would (or already have done), SCEE has decided to ask 20th Century Fox and 24 scriptwriter Duppy Demetrius to tell us exactly what happened - but only through the medium of a PlayStation 2 game.

As well as featuring fan-pleasing writer credentials, 24: The Game will also star the voice and likenesses of the characters memorably portrayed by Kiefer Sutherland, Carlos Bernard, the lovely Elisha Cuthbert, and many other stars from 24's first three seasons. The programme's pulse-raising music will also make the transition, as its award-winning composer Sean Callery has also been enlisted to create a new score especially for the game.

Keeping firmly in the spirit of its source material's complex storytelling, 24: The Game deals with multiple, concurrently running character plots and divides them up over 100 missions - that's roughly one mission every 14 minutes.

To keep things suitably fresh and interesting, the gameplay will frequently switch between a variety of styles, from on-foot shooting, stealth, and puzzle-solving sections, to driving challenges, suspect interrogation, information decoding, and even scrutinising satellite images. It'll all be backed up by the series' trademark visual flourishes, so yes, there will be plenty of plot-driving windows appearing all over the place.

If you think you're ready for a real hard day's work, get ready to spend a whole new 24 hours in the life of Jack Bauer when 24: The Game comes exclusively to PlayStation 2 this autumn. The clock is ticking....