If you only play one game today, make it Sepe's Cumshot. In this you control a disembodied hand and stimulate the penis of a man called Sepe. The poor thing starts off limp, but stroke it a little and see what happens. As you work it more furiously, Sepe's cock engorges with blood, and his body hulks up. He's loving it! You can finish him off yourself.

Sepe's Cumshot is a funny game - and a big part of that is how your wrist is moving like it would during male masturbation. By that critical measure of how closely the mechanics and theme intertwine, Sepe's Cumshot is probably the best sex game ever made. But you could hardly call the competition stiff.

Sex in games is generally dreadful, and some of the time it's outright nasty. But these days there's more than ever before. For western developers it's a topic either avoided or incorporated unconvincingly. For indie devs it's less taboo, so smaller 'sex' games tend to be more original. And what about you, the player?

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Wii exclusive role-playing game Pandora's Tower will hit UK shop shelves on 13th April, Nintendo has announced.

JRPG Pandora's Tower asks players to climb spiralling dungeons full of enemies. You can then harvest their meat to feed to your girlfriend Elena.

Elena has been cursed and is slowly turning into a monster, but feeding her morsels of monster flesh will help.

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A demo version of Metal Gear Solid 3D: Snake Eater will slither its way onto the 3DS eShop this Thursday.

The trial will give gamers a forked tongue-taste of the stealth shooter classic. It has been completely revamped for the 3DS with sparkly new graphics and touch screen controls.

And if you have a new-fangled Circle Control Pad Pro, it will work with that too.

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EA-published role-player Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning has launched top in the UK all-format charts.

It beat last week's number one, Final Fantasy 13-2 down to second place.

Tentacle-wielding shooter The Darkness 2 debuted in third.

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2010 shooter Call of Duty: Black Ops has the greatest video game ending of all time, according to Guinness World Records.

It polled over 13,000 fans to find the best video game ending ever for an entry in the Guinness World Records 2012 Gamer's Edition book.

This report is spoiler free.

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According to NPD data for the month of January, Activision's shooter beat out Just Dance 3 to the top spot.

Skyrim finished third, NBA 2K12 fourth and Battlefield 3 fifth. There were no new entries in the top 10.

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Tekken boss Katsuhiro Harada was convinced to bring the fighting series to the 3DS after watching passionate Nintendo fans playing Super Smash Bros.

Namco producer Harada witnessed the diversity of Nintendo gamers playing at the US Major League Gaming tournament.

"Super Smash Bros. had everyone from adults to kids, even women so I thought they would be all playing cheerfully together," Harada revealed in a new Iwata Asks interview.

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SoulCalibur 5 has entered the weekly Japanese software chart at number two, but sales are well below its predecessor.

The latest entry in Namco's beat 'em up series sold a modest 34,328 copies on PlayStation 3 in its first week on shelves, compared to the 74,607 SoulCalibur 4 managed back in 2008.

It was beaten to the top spot by last week's number two, Resident Evil: Revelations. Capcom's 3DS adventure saw sales drop 70 per cent week-on-week to 43,575, but that was still enough to take the chart crown.

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A video game adaptation of forthcoming sci-fi blockbuster Battleship launches this April, publisher Activision has announced.

Developed by Silent Hill: Homecoming studio Double Helix Games, it's "a blend of strategic naval command and first-person action gameplay."

The game won't follow the movie's plot, instead telling a standalone story set in the same universe. See the screens below for a closer look.

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Through a locked gate, down a winding path and by a still pond a few miles outside of the leafy village of Twycross, England, a bonsai tree stands. It was a gift given to Rare by Shigeru Miyamoto, the most famous game designer in the world, as a thank-you for the game developer's critical and commercial success in creating games for Nintendo, the most famous game maker in the world.

For Rare's staff arriving to work at 8:30 sharp each morning, it has served as a reminder of the company's heritage, of who they are, of how lucky they are to be a part of something so admired, so rare. An unassuming trophy of past glories, it's also an inspiration for future goals, a symbol carefully cultivated to weather trends, transcend fashions; rooted, a gnarly resolution.

On 20th of September 2002, Microsoft paid $375 million for this bonsai tree and all that it symbolised: creative excellence, technical mastery, innovation, originality, soul and the precious fingerprints of Nintendo. The fledgling Microsoft Game Studios, desperate to acquire world-class talent that could help establish its game console, saw in that tree everything it desired to become.

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Activision has announced Skylanders Giants, the follow-up to toy/video game hybrid Skylanders Spyro's Adventure.

It introduces over 20 new figures, including super-sized giants and characters featuring light technology. There are also new challenges, a new story and better integration across console, handheld and mobile devices.

Included are eight new figures that are more than twice the size of the main skylanders cast in both physical and virtual form. These are the Giants.

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High-quality graphics in video games can be a distraction, Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi has claimed.

The director of Wii role-player The Last Story believes developers would spend their time better by focusing on other aspects of their creations.

"Now that high-quality graphics rule supreme, you can reproduce what you want to communicate visually, but at the same time, I don't know how to put this, but there's an element that's slightly excessive about it all," Sakaguchi said, speaking in a new Iwata Asks interview. "You end up communicating too much to the player."

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Kirby-themed Breakout puzzler Block Ball headlines this week's Nintendo eShop update.

First released on the Game Boy in 1994, the new digital version costs £2.70/€3 and is available to download from this Thursday.

Classic NeoGeo brawler King of Fighters '97 arrives on the Wii's Virtual Console, meanwhile. It costs 900 Points (about £6.30).

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Final Fantasy 13-2 has entered the UK all-formats chart in first place, ending FIFA 12's reign on top.

Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, a trilogy of classic MGS games now made a little prettier, arrived in second.

Fellow new entry SoulCalibur 5 was fifth, behind Battlefield 3 and FIFA.

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We all know the clones. And often, we welcome them. After all, you can't play Blizzard's World of Warcraft on a phone, so Gameloft's Order and Chaos seems like it fills a hole and doesn't hurt anyone. Cloning isn't new, either. From Pong, probably the most copied game on the planet and allegedly a copy itself, to Breakout, success has always bred various degrees of imitation.

Cloning is a history full of strands - character mascots, the fascinating story of Tetris and the ranks of imitators birthed by any popular title. But over the last year, clones have multiplied to what feels like saturation point. They're bigger business than ever before - a business that, in some ways, is a guarantee of profit.

At the moment everything is focused on Zynga, an enormous company built in large part through copying popular games, and last week Nimblebit, developers of Apple's 2011 Game of the Year Tiny Tower, released this image. It spoke a thousand words, though it can be whittled down to two: "thieving bastards." Zynga tried to acquire Nimblebit first and, after being rebuffed, simply hunkered down and copied Tiny Tower instead - producing the remarkably familiar Dream Heights.

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THQ has revealed how it plans to offload the 1.4 million unsold uDraw units responsible for dragging down it latest quarterly financial report.

A spokesperson for the publisher told Kotaku that, to the best of their knowledge, the leftover stock is not being dumped.

Instead THQ hopes too offload the devices at a greatly reduced price tag, "perhaps at non-traditional game retailers and discount stores."

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Sega's all right: its video games business may be "sluggish", but its slot machine, arcade and amusements businesses are improving.

Thus, balance, and a black-coloured net income of ~£285 million for the nine months ending 31st December 2011. That's down a marginal 6.6 per cent year on year.

Key games picked out by Sega's money people were Mario & Sonic at the London Olympic Games, with 2.390 million sales (Wii), and Sonic Generations (3DS, PC, PS3, Xbox360) with 1.630 million sales.

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Revenue from the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of THQ's uDraw tablet peripheral was a staggering $100 million below the publisher's expectations.

Speaking during an investor Q&A earlier today, CFO Paul Pucino revealed that the publisher has around 1.4 million unsold units collecting dust in its inventory.

"Revenues were lower by about $100 million," admitted Pucino.

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Telltale Games' episodic Back to the Future: The Game will be released for PC, PlayStation 3 and Wii in Europe during the first quarter of 2012.

Originally launched in five downloadable chapters, publisher Deep Silver has confirmed the entire game will arrive on European shores in disc-based form.

PS3 and Wii versions will launch across Europe, while boxed PC editions will only hit "some" territories, Nintendo Life reports.

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Embattled retailer GAME has confirmed it is in talks with its lenders over its current credit troubles.

Its lending syndicate is reviewing the company. In a statement GAME hinted it may sell its overseas operation.

GAME has a strong presence in Europe and Australia. It has 94 shops in Australia, 197 in France, 288 in Spain and Portugal and 67 in Scandinavia.

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Disney has bought a controlling stake in UTV, the Indian media conglomerate that owns UK games publisher UTV Ignition.

As reported by the BBC, the news comes a month after India's cabinet approved a proposal by Disney to pick up shares in UTV that it didn't already own.

It appears to be a move on Disney's part to increase its media presence in India, though the buy-out does mean it now also owns Ignition, whose recent releases include hit word game Quarrel, oddball survival horror Deadly Premonition and acclaimed Japanese action title El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron.

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From Software's mech battler Armored Core 5 and Capcom's Resident Evil: Revelations both scored big debuts on this week's Japanese sales chart.

The PlayStation 3 SKU of Armored Core took the top spot, shifting 163,906 units, with Resident Evil close on its heels at number two, with 146,559 sales.

That's a solid debut for the 3DS title, outstripping first week Japanese sales of Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube.

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Gamers can play the latest two Bit.Trip releases over a month before their UK release.

Bit.Trip Saga on 3DS and Bit.Trip Complete for Wii will be playable at the free London-based Nintendisco event next week. The fun begins at Camden's Barfly on 7th February, from 7pm to 1am.

Rising Star Games will sponsor the retro gaming club night and provide Bit.Trip-inspired drinks and offers.

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Technical specifications for Nintendo's next-gen Wii U console are still in flux, according to Dead or Alive 5 developer Team Ninja.

Wii U game development is "very easy" and "almost exactly like on the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360", Team Ninja revealed to NGamer magazine (thanks, Gamefront.de) in an interview discussing the Wii U version of upcoming hack-n'-slash Ninja Gaiden 3.

Nintendo has remained hush on the Wii U's final capabilities - unsurprising considering the fact that the console's abilities are "changing constantly", Team Ninja's Yosuke Hayashi has revealed.

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Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto has shifted his main focus from overseeing established series like Mario and Zelda to creating fresh game ideas.

Miyamoto hopes to find Nintendo's next "big hit", and feels that's his "basic job".

The latest Mario and Zelda games credit Miyamoto, although his role was more a supervisory one.

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3D Classics Kid Icarus soars onto the 3DS eShop this week.

Nintendo has been giving the game away free since the start of January to anyone who recently registered two Nintendo-published games.

But from this Thursday's update Kid Icarus is available to all, albeit at the cost of £5.40/€6.

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3DS exclusive Resident Evil: Revelaitons has entered the UK all-format charts in sixth place.

The horror adventure is the first major 3DS game to chart this year and is the 3DS's seventh-largest launch so far.

FIFA 12 was top of the pops for a sixth week running. Last week it became the highest-grossing sports video game ever.

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Club Penguin is no hybrid chocolate bar.

It's a browser MMO about cartoon penguins and their snowy online world of mini-games and igloo decorating. It's a giant; a business boasting 150 million registered accounts and 10 to 15 million active monthly users. And a portion of those pay £5 every month.

Lane Merrifield created it for his children.

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Super Mario 3D Land is the first Nintendo 3DS game to sell over five million copies.

To be exact, the wonderful platformer has shifted 5.03 million copies globally since launch.

It's easily the best-selling 3DS game. Mario Kart 7, in second place, has shifted 4.54 million units around the world.

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Gamers are now ready for new home consoles, Nintendo has said.

Pointing to declining sales of the PlayStation 3, Wii and Xbox 360 in the US in December, Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata said "the market is now waiting for a new proposal for home consoles".

In the US in 2011, Microsoft's Xbox 360 enjoyed "large momentum", Iwata said. The Wii edged out Sony's PlayStation 3 in terms of sales, but Nintendo did not see the console sell as well in December as it usually does.

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Foxconn, the enormous Chinese manufacturer that pieces together products for Nintendo, Microsoft and Apple, among many others, has been the subject of numerous recent reports of atrocious working conditions and employee suicides.

With every new story, commentators are invariably quick to ask "why don't the platform holders hold Foxconn accountable and demand change?"

Well, an anonymous former Apple executive has offered a little insight as to why that doesn't happen.

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It's the sequel to PokéPark Wii: Pikachu's Adventure, a mini-game fuelled adventure where Pikachu explores a theme park.

This time around Pikachu is off to save some trapped Pokémon. Nintendo said there are 200 of the little blighters to meet in the game.

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Nintendo has predicted it will finish the financial year with a greater loss than expected after making far less money than hoped.

When the current financial year ends on 31st March 2012, Nintendo expects it will have made a total loss of 65 billion yen (£534.87 million), significantly more than the 20 billion yen originally forecast.

The company has announced an overall loss of 48.3 billion yen (£397.5 million) for the current financial year up until the end of December 2011.

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PlayStation Vita sold another 15,219 units in Japan last week, but that figure marks the handheld's lowest ever weekly total.

Sales fell from 22,538 the week before, according to Japanese chart company Media Create (via NeoGAF, although hardware numbers were largely down across the chart.

3DS sales shrank to 80,960, down almost 20,000 but still enough to outsell the rest of the hardware chart combined.

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GameStop shops in Northern Ireland have closed, as the company continues transferring all UK business online to the GameStop website.

Pictures of closed GameStation stores in Northern Ireland were taken at the weekend (and posted on TheGamingLiberty). Apparently staff were told on Sunday.

"We are transferring all of our UK business online to www.gamestop.co.uk," read a post by GameStop UK on Facebook. "We will honour all outstanding deposits and gift cards on www.gamestop.co.uk please contact - help@gamestop.co.uk for further assistance. Have a lovely day!"

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Ancient aerial Game Boy platformer Balloon Kid releases on the 3DS eShop this week, Nintendo has announced.

Balloon Kid is a sequel to the classic NES game Balloon Fight, in which players tapped A to guide a boy holding helium balloons around obstacles.

In Balloon Kid, you play as a girl. Dusted off on 3DS, it costs £2.70/€3.

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FIFA 12 has now made more money in the UK than any other sports video game ever.

Naturally, that includes any other title in the FIFA series to date.

EA's annual footy fixture notched up a fifth consecutive week at number one this week, its seventh since launch.

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From StarTropics to Star Fox Adventures, many a Zelda clone has aimed for the stars. But only one brought the stars to us. Quite literally, in fact.

In Okami's opening moments our canine sun goddess Amaterasu summons a dragon deity in the form of a constellation by filling in the missing star with her 'celestial brush'. This godly device allows players to manipulate the environment and manifest objects. Fancy changing the time? Draw a sun or moon in the sky to switch between day and night. Want to blow up a cracked wall? Paint a cherry bomb beside it. Need to traverse hazardous liquid? Create a lily pad as a makeshift raft, then scribble a gust of wind for a gentle push.

It's impossible to ignore that all of these items and abilities were ripped straight from Nintendo's flagship series, but the difference is in their implementation. The magical effects of Link's ocarina or wind baton bare no sensible correlation to the player's interaction. You'd play a ditty, watch a cutscene, then poof - wind! Drawing with the celestial brush is a more tactile action and the results correspond directly with your input. This is one of those grand ideas, deserving to be as revered as Portal's titular gun.

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Who could have predicted that 77 million PlayStation Network accounts would have been compromised last April? Who could have known that 3DS would at first struggle, then fly? Who could have guessed what the Wii U would be? Why, an analyst of course!

These future-gazing mystics are paid to try to discern the future from their money-shaped tea leaves. They weigh in on hot topics, declare the fate of companies; they watch, they listen, they never sleep. Who better to peer into the shrouded year ahead and tell Eurogamer what to expect?

Introducing: Jesse Divination! Michael Predicter! Peers Harding-Rolls! And Nicholas Lovesalloutcomes!

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Japanese import publisher Rising Star Games has announced a bustling 2012 release schedule for Europe, with an increased emphasis on 3DS games.

Rising Star confirmed it would handle publishing duties for five 3DS titles this year, including retro rhythm title Bit.Trip Saga and the latest Harvest Moon farming sim games.

Rune Factory Oceans, the latest chapter of Harvest Moon's spin-off RPG series, will also arrive. But the PlayStation 3 and Wii game will only launch in Europe on PS3.

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Dance-yourself-skinny series Zumba Fitness has now boogied past the six million sales mark, publisher Majesco has announced, probably from the back seat of a new limo.

The publisher managed to shift a million units of Zumba Fitness' sequel, Zumba Fitness 2, Gamespot reports. The sequel released on Wii in late November - less than two months ago.

Majesco previously announced that the original Zumba Fitness had notched up three million copies last August, meaning two million have joined the dance cult since then.

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Update: VideoGamesPlus.ca has begun emailing customers to inform them of the site's apparent security breach.

VGP admitted it was "currently investigating a security issue" in a generic email addressed to users, passed to Eurogamer this evening. The company recommends users change their passwords "as a safety precaution" and apologised "for any inconvenience caused".

Original story: Popular import retailer VideoGamesPlus.ca has reportedly been hacked, resulting in 21,000 of its customers' details being posted online.

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Sony's new handheld sold 18,361, down from 42,915 the week prior. That put it in fourth place in the hardware chart, with 3DS in first, PlayStation 3 second and PSP third.

It was a slow week all round, with the Christmas/New Year sales bump finally winding down. The 3DS sold 100,668 to take the top spot, down from 240,819 last week.

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The latest entry in the long-running series features 80 minigames and a variety of different modes.

New additions this time out are co-operative boss battles and Party Adventure Mode, which sees up to four players traversing the board in a vehicle while attempting to railroad opposition onto more challenging squares.

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Are videogames art? What's your reaction to that question? For me it's always a weary groan of resignation, followed by skipping the rest of the article. Perhaps that's arrogance, because for a sizeable chunk of the gaming audience it is a very big deal indeed, and a topic that won't go away. When there's a flashpoint, such as a couple of articles by the film critic Roger Ebert, no one could miss the storm. But whether games are art is not a question that needs answering, and these pieces are a useful tool for explaining why.

I'm not going to spend this article arguing with Ebert, but it's worth briefly reminding ourselves of what was said and done. The first salvo came after a review of the execrable movie version of Doom. In response to a comment from a reader, Ebert said "As long as there is a great movie unseen or a great book unread, I will continue to be unable to find the time to play video games."

Pretty cranky stuff, but each to their own. By March 2010 Kelee Santiago of thatgamecompany was delivering a talk at Ted in direct response to Ebert: 'Stop the Debate: Videogames are art, so what's next?' Santiago showed Waco Resurrection, Braid, and Flower while offering reasons for why games like these should be considered as art.

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In much the same way that the music industry struggles to define indie music, so indie games is a term that's increasingly slippery in the hands. Most would agree that an indie game is one produced without the financial backing of a publisher, but as the lines of sales and distribution blur with each passing year, so the indie label becomes less trustworthy. Your game may be wearing Converse, but does it bleed My Bloody Valentine?

Where once indie gaming propped up the mid-budget games, which in turn propped up the triple-A blockbusters, there are few rules of scale, budget and polish that can be applied in classifying indie games in 2012. Fez, due for release shortly on Xbox Live Arcade, is a sprawling pixel epic, five years in the making. Likewise, Jonathan Blow's forthcoming The Witness has been financed by the millions he made from the success of Braid, an island founded on mainstream achievement.

If you still consider indie to mean only low-budget or left-field, then you risk overlooking what could be the most creatively vibrant, exciting and ambitious area of video games this year. So what trends can we expect over the next 12 months of indie gaming?

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While Modern Warfare 3, FIFA Soccer 12 and Saints Row: The Third were all topping the PS3 and 360 sales charts in the final week before Christmas, in comparison, the five best selling games on the Wii were Just Dance 3, Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games, Zumba Fitness, Zumba Fitness 2 and The Legend of... actually no, the fifth spot went to Mario Kart Wii, while sixth, seventh and eighth went to Skyward Sword, an ABBA dancing game and "Now! That's What I Call Music: Dance and Sing".

As a Nintendo fan who grew up with a SNES and N64, these sales figures are a little hard to digest, because while I'm all for the expansion of the videogames industry I don't want it to come at the expense of core console games. And even though No More Heroes 2, Monster Hunter Tri and Sin and Punishment 2 have helped save thousands of AA batteries from dying in wasteful silence, they've been the exception rather than the rule.

But then August came along and something unusual happened. After being disappointed time and time again by the "Japan-only" stigma that struck Captain Rainbow, Fatal Frame IV and Sandlot's Zangeki no Reginleiv, Nintendo of Europe finally came good by localising Xenoblade Chronicles. Was this the act of a company trying to get back in touch with its core audience, or was Nintendo simply filling in a gap during the yearly summer drought?

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Two versions of platforming classic Prince of Persia will be re-released this week, Nintendo has announced.

Wii fans can download Prince of Persia's SNES incarnation from Thursday. And 3DS owners will be offered the Game Boy Color version on the same day.

The Prince's Game Boy Color appearance was back in 1999. This week on 3DS the game will cost £4.50/€5.

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FIFA 12 holds onto first place in the UK top 40 chart for a fourth week running, following another quiet seven days in January.

Sales fell for every top 10 title. FIFA 12 sales dipped 54 per cent; sales of Just Dance 3, which finished second, fell 21 per cent.

Skyrim was third, and Battlefield 3 fourth - a place higher than Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 for a second week running.

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THQ has denied cancelling its 2014 line-up of games - but the future of ambitious Warhammer 40,000 MMO Dark Millennium Online is less certain.

The publisher responded to a gloomy rumour spread on Twitter by video game executive Kevin Dent. He heard that the Warhammer 40,000 MMO and the THQ 2014 line-up had been cancelled. Dent had also heard THQ was "offering" itself for sale to Asian companies.

THQ's response, via a statement offered to VG247, read: "THQ has not cancelled its 2014 line-up, and has not made any decisions regarding the planned MMO.

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Vaguely psychedelic dancing series Just Dance has amassed 25 million sales since the first game arrived on Wii in 2009, Ubisoft boasted.

Just Dance 3, the most recent game, has been bought 7 million times since its late 2011 arrival (October on Wii, 360; December on PS3).

Popularity vindicated, Just Dance was flown to Japan and Korea, where the game has sold more than 500,000 copies.

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The AIAS shortlist for the 15th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards - i.e. the game Oscars - has been revealed.

Game of the Year 2011 contenders are Batman: Arkham City, Portal 2 (Eurogamer's Game of the Year 2011), The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception.

Uncharted 2 scooped an incredible 10 AIAS awards two years ago, including Game of the Year 2009.

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was the best-selling game in the USA during 2011, according to sales tracker The NPD Group.

Just Dance 3 came in second, followed by The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Battlefield 3 and Madden NFL 12.

The full top 10 was as follows:

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Call of Duty game Modern Warfare 3 sold fewer copies than Black Ops in the UK in a comparable time frame.

In 2011, Modern Warfare 3 shifted 2,814,609 copies, the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) has revealed (using data provided by weekly counter GfK Chart-Track).

In 2010, Black Ops shifted 3,266,298 copies.

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Naruto, that weird spiky-haired manga beat-'em-up franchise that spits out games you probably ignore, has achieved 10 million sales now.

Streamers!

North American people bought most of the Naruto games (4.3 million), followed by Europe (3.8 million) and then Japan (1.9 million).

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The 3DS has started 2012 with a bang, seeing a significant hardware sales bump and a raft of software in the top five.

Nintendo's handheld was, yet again, the best-selling console of the week, moving a very healthy 240,819 units. That's up from 197,952 last week.

Its nearest competitor was the PlayStation 3, which sold 74,459.

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Modern Warfare 3 was the best selling video game in the UK last year, UKIE and GfK Chart-Track have revealed.

Call of Duty games have now topped the annual pile three years on the trot.

FIFA 12 finished as the second best selling UK video game of 2011, followed by publisher sibling Battlefield 3.

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"Guys, after we've finished drinking Mojitos, betting on the wasp races and torching double decker buses for the evening, who wants to come back to mine to play Boom Street, a Wii-based Monopoly variant in which you can buy and sell shares as well as purchasing and upgrading properties?"

Boom Street, I suspect, is going to be something of a hard sell to your peers - regardless of how much you all like a trip to the wasp races. Mario, Luigi, your Miis and even the Dragon Quest gang are all present and correct, but this is no party game collection. There are mini-games, but they're brief, rare and generally rather dull. There are boards themed around Yoshi's Island and Delfino Plaza, but the colour and flair is all cosmetic. Beneath it, Boom Street is a surprisingly complex turn-based affair based on the intricacies of the financial markets. It takes a very long time to play a single match, its depths aren't immediately apparent, and the best way to learn what to do is just to get stuck into one of the ponderous tutorials and embrace your confusion.

If you play by the easy rules, it's actually fairly straightforward. Boom Street is about making money and, as with Monopoly, your job is to move around a board buying properties - shops, on this occasion, rather than entire city blocks - while hoping that your rivals land on them, at which point they'll have to give you some of their cash. Instead of passing Go, you have to pass the Bank, and if you've collected one of each of the playing card suits that are scattered around the board as you make your circuits, you'll get to level up, earning a nice bonus pay-out in the process. Eliot Spitzer would be extremely annoyed if he noticed that. He won't, of course, because he's knee-deep in Manhattan prostitutes.

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More than 30 million Wii consoles have been sold across Europe, maker Nintendo has trumpeted.

Those numbers were totted the week ending Christmas Day - 25th December 2011.

That makes Wii the best selling current generation console in Europe.

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Once upon a time it was easy. Just 15 years ago most games slotted into their categories with librarian-pleasing snugness. Take the adventure game.

In 1985 they were text games with a focus on storytelling and puzzle solving. Five years later it was the same but with animated graphics and mouse clicks replacing the typing.

But defining the genre now is like hugging fog. The once firm borders of adventures have crumbled and their ideas have diffused out into the wider gaming ocean. Today the definition of an adventure game depends on what school of thought you embrace.

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The game's all about rotating blocks to fit them into given shapes. There are over 100 levels to do this in, all for the price of £4.50/€5/500 DSi Points.

It's nothing to do with the similarly named iPhone hit Doodle Jump, although you may have heard of Doodle Fit before - it's already a veteran of the PC, Mac, iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7 and PSP.

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The best-selling UK video game during the first week of 2012 was FIFA 12. It was also last week's final top title of 2011.

Battlefield 3 edges past Modern Warfare 3 to claim second, with Call of Duty close behind in third.

Ubisoft boogie title Just Dance 3 was fourth, while Skyrim, the UK's Christmas number one, was fifth.

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Update 2: Wii owners can also now join in. The Netflix app is available to download immediately in the UK and Ireland via the Wii Shop Channel (thanks, Nintendo Life).

Update: Xbox 360 owners are also now able to download Netflix. The service is not yet listed on Xbox Marketplace, but searching via Bing will uncover the app ready to go (thanks to the eagle-eyed commenter Peew971).

Original story: LoveFilm rival Netflix has arrived in the UK and Ireland, offering unlimited streaming of movie and TV content via the internet.

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Tom's already offered you a rundown of this year's Actual New Games - the ones that are offering, in their own ways, something unique - and now here's the slightly less glamorous look at the other side of the coin.

They're big business, these blockbuster sequels, and for all that we lament the lack of innovation it's these big-budget series that inevitably garner the most attention and inspire the most devotion from the majority. That's nothing to be scorned - iteration's an important thing in games development and indeed the development of games - and a composite of evolved features designed to fulfil a particular desire, be that the needs of a sports fan or those wanting a fresh shooter fix, can be just as important to the progression of the medium as the advent of a new game mechanic or control concept.

Sequels take many forms and capture our attention for many reasons. Some build their features up year by year, like FIFA and Call of Duty, and will continue to be brilliant when we encounter them later in 2012. Others build on the storytelling or world-building of games a few years past, like Gearbox's brilliant-looking Borderlands 2 or the sure-to-be-spectacular finale to the Shepard's tale in Mass Effect 3. And some are interesting because of their circumstances - Halo 4, for example, is another big-budget sequel on the near horizon, and with a new and as-yet unproven developer filling Bungie's big boots, we're just interested in that out of morbid curiosity as devotion to the series.

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Green and white supermarket Asda believes there are 12 million "outdated" games consoles lurking in homes up and down the UK.

But what does "outdated" constitute?

"We asked people to quantify how many items (from a list) they owned but no longer used," Asda explained to Eurogamer.

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Only seven per cent fewer boxed games were sold last year compared to 2010.

The take for all boxed video games was £1.42 billion. The take for all console video games - excluding PC - was £1.35 billion.

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PlayStation Vita has been beaten by the PSP in Japan's hardware chart for the second week running.

Post-Christmas hardware sales were down across the board, although Vita could still only finish fourth in the weekly rundown, behind the PSP, PS3 and 3DS.

Sony's new handheld managed to sell 42,648 units in its third week on sale (December 26th to January 1st) according to Japanese chart company Media Create (via NeoGAF).

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Back in December the Eurogamer editorial team had a massive public fight about whether 2011 was a good year for games. Well, we had the closest thing we're capable of having to a massive public fight - we wrote polite editorials disagreeing with one another. One thing we all agreed upon, however, was that we would very much like to see more Actual New Games in 2012.

The majority of big games last year - even the very best ones - were regimented and almost processional once they got up and running. When a game presents a list of controls and then shows you a screen filled with things to unlock, even if it does these things by way of a few snazzy cut-scenes and an interactive tutorial level where someone breaks out of a flying prison, an experienced gamer knows how the next 8-10 hours are likely to play out.

There's still plenty of room for those games. As Hideo Kojima remarked recently, there's nothing wrong with giving people what they evidently want. Games like BioShock Infinite, Grand Theft Auto V and Diablo 3 will probably be wonderful experiences that just happen to progress along predictable lines, and you and we will continue to get excited by the ways in which they do that throughout 2012.

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The Japanese videogames market made 8 per cent less money in 2011 than in 2010, new figures have revealed.

Game sales stuttered compared to the previous year, with almost 14 per cent less revenue despite the launch of the Nintendo 3DS and, in the year's final weeks, PlayStation Vita.

Hardware revenue rose - perhaps unsurprising considering the year's dual platform launches - but not by much.

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As reported by The Los Angeles Times, the judgement related to an agreement made in Viacom's original acquisition of the Rock Band studio in 2006.

The terms of the deal stated that Viacom would pay out a bonus of 3.5 times any gross profit in excess of $32 million the studio made in 2007, and in excess of $45 million in 2008.

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The best-selling UK video game during the last week of 2011 was FIFA 12.

EA's reliable sports series beat Modern Warfare 3, second, and Battlefield 3, third, to the top spot.

Just Dance 3 and Assassin's Creed: Revelations were fourth and fifth, respectively.

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The 3DS sold more in its first nine months than Wii did in the US, Nintendo has announced.

Super Mario 3D Land and Mario Kart 7 are the fastest-selling games in the history of their franchises. They are the first 3DS games to sell one million units each in the US.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is the 45th Wii game to sell more than one million in the US.

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The most pirated PC game of 2011 wasn't Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3 or Skyrim - it was Crysis 2.

Specialist site TorrentFreak estimated, using several sources of data, that Crysis 2 was downloaded illegally nearly 4 million times (3.92 million).

Modern Warfare 3 was the second most pirated PC game, having been downloaded 3.65 million times. Battlefield 3 was third, with an illegal download count of 3.51 million.

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The newsletter, which was edited soon after Disney news website Stick Kingdom spotted it, said Epic Mickey 2 launches Christmas 2012 for PlayStation 3, Wii and Xbox 360.

It detailed the game's co-op mode, which sees a second player assume the role of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit "with the power to fly like a helicopter and use electricity to fight or friend enemies and solve challenges".

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As you've probably spotted, we've spent the last week since we broke up for Christmas publishing personal accounts of some of our favourite games of the last 12 months, and we've also named our overall Game of the Year for 2011: Valve's wonderful Portal 2.

Traditionally though we leave it to you to bring order to the chaos of the year just ended by voting for your top games and giving us your reasons. We take your top-five lists and scientifically jumble them all together to create the Eurogamer Readers' Top 50 Games, and then publish it all in one go along with a selection of your comments.

This year we had our largest ever response and we also received far more comments than before - and far more than we have been able to use here, so apologies if you submitted something that we weren't able to use. We did read all of them while compiling the list, and it was fascinating to see where you agreed and disagreed on the games included. The comments we did include are a snapshot of the range of views expressed.

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So what's your favourite Christmas game? One you played at yuletide, rather than actually based on the festive season, that is. You have one, naturally. All gamers do.

The reasons are clear enough: 'tis the season to get games and consoles all wrapped up under the fake plastic tree, and 'tis generally the one time of year when the To Do list for every day is "Sweet FA".

For kids, the summer holiday may seem to stretch endlessly into an unimaginable future, but it's more likely to be spent outdoors, setting fire to things, shoplifting and suchlike; plus the games you really want aren't usually out until the weather turns blue and the afternoons go black.

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Xenoblade Chronicles isn't the best-made game released this year. It's not quite my personal favourite, either. It's not the greatest role-playing game in what was surely a banner year for the genre; nor is it the most exciting new game from Japan or the most welcome comeback. It's not even the best Wii game of 2011. But it was something none of those games were: a lovely surprise.

We should have known better. It had been well received on its domestic release last year. So was it xenophobia that had led us to disregard the Japanese RPG's capacity for invention? Was it elitism that had written off the Wii as anything other than a home for curios, snack gaming and the occasional, dutiful prestige Nintendo release? No, it was bitter experience. The same experience that told us not to expect a game like Xenoblade to ever make its way to Europe, never mind releasing here before North America (where it will see the light of day next year) or selling out when it did so.

Unheralded (except by the fans who campaigned for its release), unsullied by hype, unburdened by expectation, Xenoblade Chronicles was a gift. And when you popped it in the machine, it was the gift that kept on giving.

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Yes! Welcome to episode 94 of the Eurogamer.net Podcast! As the year grinds to a halt, it's time to reflect on the games that have made suffering the internet bearable. But it's not all about working out which game is better than that other game and putting it into a list. Sometimes, it's about the NEWS.

One of those sometimes is this time, so we've prepared a very special end of year special podcast that is all sorts of special, and also a quiz. Senior staff writer Robert "Bertie" Purchese asks the questions, does funny impressions and has no idea what the score is. Eurogamer news editor Wesley "bulls**t" Yin-Poole, US news editor Fred Dutton (who just got off the plane from Baltimore) and website and video administrator and writer wizard Tom "I don't need HD graphics or Achievements to enjoy Zelda" Phillips answer the questions, recounting the biggest stories from one of the most tumultuous years in video gaming history.

Who can forget the PSN hack? Or Geohot jailbreaking the PS3? Or the Nintendo 3DS price cut? Or the Xbox Live hack-oh no wait that was phishing and there is definitely NO EVIDENCE OF A HACK!? We can't. That's why we're on the quiz.

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The Mario/Dragon Quest Monopoly hybrid was due out 6th January 2012. It now launches in the UK on 28th December 2011.

Boom Street is the UK name for the video game version of Japanese board game Itadaki Street. The aim of the game is to get rich quicker than your opponents through property acquisition and property investment. An in-game stock market lets you buy shares and earn dividends.

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According to Andriasang, as of today, Japanese Wii owners can download something called the Zelda Data Restoration Channel.

Once it's downloaded you just have to boot it up and follow the instructions to patch up the game.

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Final Fantasy 13-2 entered this week's Japanese software chart at number one, but sales of the game were way down on that of its predecessor.

The RPG sequel sold 525,271 to take the top spot, but that's nearly a third of the 1.5 million copies Final Fantasy 13 moved in its first four days back in 2009.

The game is due out on these shores on 3rd February 2012.

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The free download lets you connect with your friends via StreetPass and SpotPass. You can send messages, 2D and 3D drawings, and photos and sound effects.

Also out is Mighty Switch Force!, a platformer from Shantae: Risky's Revenge developer WayForward. You control a cybernetic police officer and shift the elements of the machine matrix of Planet Land back and forth. As you do. Pick it up for £5.40 / €6.00.

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HMV has admitted the current economic climate may cast doubt on its ability to continue trading.

It has the resources to continue in the short term, it said, but it is unsure over its long term future.

The UK shop, which has made a big push into selling video games in recent years, posted its financial results for the first half of the current financial year - and they do not make for pleasant reading.

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The first Dragon Quest 10 story details have been revealed.

The game begins in a small village called Etene, according to Japanese magazine Weekly Shounen Jump (translated by Andriasang).

In the village live two orphan siblings, described by the report as troublemakers. You play one of them.

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You may have noticed that my splendid and lovely colleagues Oli Welsh and Martin Robinson have recently become embroiled in what may very well be the most polite argument in the history of the internet, debating whether or not 2011 has been a vintage year for gaming.

Put simply, their arguments are that Oli struggles to name a single game released in 2011 that is truly new, whereas Martin feels that games have become mature enough to experiment and innovate within established frameworks in ways that are both creatively and commercially satisfying. So basically he agrees but he doesn't mind.

We're not the only gamers saying this, of course. Hell, even The Economist is saying it. According to their recent special report, the core games industry "is now an expensive, risky and hit-driven business, so the developers have become deeply conservative, preferring to build on past successes rather than try something new". Like us, they toss about the idea that this may or may not matter.

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Nintendo of Japan has pledged to fix the game saves of those who have encountered Zelda: Skyward Sword's game-halting bug.

The company is rushing out a downloadable program for affected Wii owners to install on their consoles, a statement on Nintendo's official site reads (translated by Andriasang).

Players without internet access for their Wii will have to send Nintendo an SD card with their game save on.

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The PlayStation 3 version of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim debuted at number four on this week's Japanese sales chart, with the Xbox 360 SKU not too far behind at nine.

Bethesda's epic RPG sold 75,865 on PS3 and 37,037 on Xbox 360.

A solid performance but not enough to challenge the triumvirate of 3DS titles sitting pretty in the top three slots.

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Wholly owned by Nintendo, Retro Studios was responsible for reinventing the Metroid franchise on GameCube with the critically-acclaimed Metroid Prime games.

More recently, Retro developed side-scrolling platformer Donkey Kong Country Returns for Wii and aided Nintendo in getting Mario Kart 7 ready for Christmas by buffing up that game's retro courses.

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Nintendo has revealed a list of first and third-party games coming to its platforms early next year.

Featured in the release schedule are 3DS highlights such as Resident Evil Revelations, which launches on 27th January alongside the Circle Pad Pro add-on.

Kid Icarus: Uprising follows in March, while Mario Tennis, Luigi's Mansion 2 and the fifth Professor Layton game get vague "2012" release windows.

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Fallout: New Vegas developer Chris Avellone hopes digital distribution "stabs the used game market in the heart".

"Of course, one of the greatest things about digital distribution is what it does to reduce the used game market," Avellone told Eurogamer sister site IndustryGamers.

"I hope digital distribution stabs the used game market in the heart."

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 sold 8.9 million copies in the US during its first month on sale, according to analyst firm Cowen & Company.

As reported by Gamasutra, that's nearly 10 per cent more than the eight million Black Ops managed in its first month on sale last year.

Modern Warfare 3's tally apparently only included 100,000 copies of the Wii version. Even fewer customers bought the Windows version, though the NPD data cited doesn't take into account Steam purchases.

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As reported by GameInformer, that number includes unit leader Martin Good. All those affected worked at the Play THQ studio.

"Due to weaker than expected sales of the uDraw Game Tablet, we are taking a difficult but important step to reduce the number of employees that supported this brand," read a statement from the publisher.

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