Close your eyes - not if you're driving! - and picture a Facebook game. What do you see? A farm, most likely, or perhaps a city block or even the inside of a fifties diner. (If you see Triple Town, of course, you get a free biscuit and a chummy punch on the shoulder.)

There's definitely an increasing number of good games on Facebook, but many of the things you'll encounter offer little but charmless toil: plant this, scrub that, build this, tell your friends. Could I have some money now? Could you tell your friends I'd like some money, too? It's like having a tapeworm that lives in your gut and eats five-pound notes. Occasionally, it will poke its head out and have a quick round of Ludo with you. Like!

PopCap's approach has always been a little different. PopCap's games all have monetisation, of course, and, yes, they do work a touch better if you enjoy them alongside your friends, but they're not about clicking and waiting, planting and tilling.

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Back when I worked in a game store selling third-party controllers to unsuspecting customers (on the basis that if I ever recommended an official pad, I'd be on permanent stockroom duty) an import-savvy shopper informed me that Famitsu had announced a crossover between Namco and Capcom. My automatic assumption was that this had to be a fighting game, and that Capcom had somehow struck a deal with Namco and was about to bring the likes of Ryu and Jin together in the ultimate 2D mash-up. Boy was I wrong.

Namco x Capcom turned out to be a tactical-RPG, and when a fan translation patch surfaced a few years later I saw for myself that this was a million miles off 'The King of Iron Fist Tournament with a Shadaloo twist' that I'd imagined. But it did get me thinking as to how a crossover between the world's most popular 2D and 3D fighting game franchises could ever work.

Street Fighter has always been about condensed command lists with special moves that rely on charge and circular motions, while Tekken is defined by its limb-based buttons that focus on juggling. And although they share the concept of one-on-one combat with health bars, multi-hit combos and a three round format, in every other respect they're the polarised bookends of a diverse genre.

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2K's Spec Ops: The Line is riddled with conflict and contradictions. It's partly about the culture clash that's played out across the dunes of Dubai as the Middle East crashes violently into the consumerism of the West - a parable told in the tidal waves of sand that splash up against the city's shards of concrete and glass in the game's near-future vision.

But there's another, more curious conflict at Spec Ops' own dark heart. Here's a tale of the dehumanising horror of war, its story leaning heavily on Conrad (and a little awkwardly too, with its Kurtz-inspired character clumsily renamed Konrad). And at the same time, here's a game about the simple pleasures of slamming your shoulder into a wall before lining up headshot after headshot after headshot, in combat that's physical, muscular and entertaining.

Can 2K and developers Yager Development have their cake and eat it, providing a moral tale and a meaty shooter all at once? A tour through a handful of Spec Ops' campaign missions doesn't present a comprehensive answer, but it does give a glimpse of a game that, with its own internal conflict, promises to be more interesting than many of its peers.

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Lumines wasn't any old PSP launch title. It was the PSP launch title, and arguably the best pure puzzler since Tetris (a title it held onto until Drop 7 came along, of course). The synesthetic concerns of Q Entertainment, which first strutted along in ten-inch platforms in 2000's Space Channel 5 before taking a turn for the metaphysical in the following year's Rez, were melded perfectly with simple, grid-based puzzling. Like Rez before it, Lumines felt like a celebration of club culture - or, with its lazy rhythms and ability to consume whole hours, more a celebration of post-club culture.

It was the launch title in part because of its brilliance, and in part through a lack of anything else worth getting particularly excited about. For a year at least, the PSP was a Lumines machine - a situation that, in light of the Vita's bustling launch line-up, is unlikely to be repeated this time out.

The years since have seen Lumines spread like a sweet virus, although its appeal has been watered down a little, its rhythms gradually becoming easier to resist. Sequel has piled upon sequel, and each new iteration has struggled to add much of substance to the original - which is always a problem when you get it so very, very right the first time around.

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Motorsport is glitz and it is glamour. It's the teardrop curve of an F1 car as it reflects Monaco's harbourline, its perfect swoop capturing a moment of speed in carbon fibre, or the romantic siren call of a V8 as it bounces across the housefronts of the Mulsanne Straight in the dead of night.

That's one ideal, anyway. There's another world of weekend heroics where the smell of simmering bacon grease mixes with that of engine oil and damp grass, and where the cars, with their punctured bodywork and torn-off doors, capture a moment of violence rather than one of speed.

I used to go there myself, when trips to the likes of Silverstone and Brands Hatch were out of the question. Here, in a track marked out of discarded tires in the backwaters of Bovingdon, drivers would take out their frustrations on one another, turning each other to pulp over the course of a slow Sunday afternoon. It's a spectacle that, for its lack of airs and graces, offers just as much as any Grand Prix or sportscar race.

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The townsfolk have been listening to Shepard pulling the old "Commander who shouted 'Reaper!'" ruse for some time now. First she (he, if you're feeling obtuse) shouted 'Reaper!' when she discovered that the caretakers of the Galaxy were about to sweep up all known galactic civilizations. Then, in Mass Effect 2, she shouted 'Reaper!' after she'd fought against a big icky monster that had been made from human body parts, and had all/most/some of her underlings killed in the process.

Did the intergalactic townspeople listen though? Did they pay attention to this particular Shepard, and her sad tale of a sexy secretary being mulched and, as a consequence, all her fish dying? Of course they didn't. The Earth people were too busy worrying about what their Cerberus faction were up to, the Krogans were whinging about the Genophage putting the kibosh on procreation and the Quarians were preoccupied by wondering what their own faces looked like. Typical. The cretins even stripped her of her rank for something she did in the DLC. Tch.

So now the Reapers have finally showed up, guess who has to clean up all this mess? That's right: muggins here. Good old reliable Commander Shepard - back to save the day with a brand new sexy space adventure.

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You come to Syndicate with expectations. It's unavoidable. Your eyes can't help but flit over the screen, desperate to find nostalgia that's survived unscathed. Occasionally they succeed. The fabled Eurocorp corporation, that jagged and efficient-looking world map, the spotlight street lamps and the cold and business-like mission run-downs all trickle cold fire through your synapses.

After a fashion, however, bright eyes grow dim. You feel a slight heat in your head while your emotion chip boots up, your brain fuzzes over and consequently (thankfully) teardrops do not fall. You just kill, and kill again. During my hours with Syndicate's co-op mode I certainly felt Bullfrog twitches (once I saw a comrade's flapping coat and said out loud "Syndicate coat!") yet each time my mood was swiftly stabilised.

Co-op missions may be loosely based (very loosely) on the original game - but at no point does pressing RB let you see your surroundings in Rosetint Vision™ where everything's isometric, the explosions are the greatest thing 1993 has ever seen and, if you listen hard enough, you can hear your Mum shouting that your tea's ready.

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Jan 27th, 1868. A snowy plain just outside of Kyoto. The battle of Toba-Fushimi is about to take place. A small battalion of Imperial soldiers shiver as they face down a force of the Shogun's finest warriors advancing across a handful of rivers, hopelessly ineffectual at preventing the samurai from their coming attack. Hundreds of these majestic samurai warriors riding on noble horseback are drawing near. Playing as the Imperials, I'm hopelessly outnumbered. Traditionally, I wouldn't stand a chance. But these are hardly traditional times.

From the trailers released so far for Fall of the Samurai, you could be forgiven for thinking of the ill-fated Satsuma rebellion that made Tom Cruise sad in The Last Samurai, but while set in the same period of turmoil, Fall focuses on the earlier 1869 Boshin War, a civil conflict that barely lasted two years. A brisk timeframe to contend with as you struggle to determine the course of Japan's embrace of industrialisation.

But don't go thinking Fall is going to be a couple of scant missions and some new DLC outfits. This is a proper old-school expansion pack with all-new toys, a different beast entirely from Shogun 2's campaign. This was a period in Japan's history that saw it transform overnight from a feudal agrarian society into a steam-powered industrial powerhouse. To represent the lightning pace of development, turns on the campaign map take up a mere two weeks. Better pack an extra pair of mittens, as that means Winter now lasts a morale-shattering six full turns.

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Several months ago Tom Francis, whom you should know from his writing for PC Gamer, went to Seattle to interview the team at Valve. When he sat down with Gabe Newell and Erik Wolpaw, something really weird happened. They asked him how his game was coming along.

His game, as it happens, was coming along pretty well. I saw a rough demo of it at around the same time, and I've just now played the newest version, which has art by John Roberts and Fabian van Dommelen, music by Ryan Ike, Francisco Cerda, and John Robert Matz, a new mission structure that ties its individual levels together in a witty fashion, and an IGF nomination for excellence in design. Newell probably wants to kick him in the nuts, frankly.

The game's called Gunpoint, and it's a stealthy action-puzzler in which you play a secret agent for hire, breaking into hi-tech buildings and stealing various cyberpunk MacGuffins. It's the future as rain-slicked corporate nightmare, but the game looks more like The Spy's Guidebook than Bladerunner. Meanwhile, with its 2D cross-sectioned levels and flashes of nasty humour, it feels a little like a grown-up version of Bonanza Bros. And that's a compliment.

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Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. It's an instantly forgettable title. And it's not just meaningless and profoundly generic, it's saddled (like Dragon Age: Origins before it) with the exhausting suggestion that this isn't the birth of an exciting fantasy universe so much as the launch of a new franchising opportunity.

Having spent 15 hours or so in the company of a near-finished preview build of 38 Studios' brisk role-player - out next week - I can confirm that it deserves much better than this limp nomenclature. And yet, it's true that the title fits it like a glove.

'Kingdoms of Amalur': the game's universe is exactly the derivative mishmash of worn high fantasy tropes that you expect after reading those three words. It's been rubber-stamped by some big-name creatives (fantasy author RA Salvatore and comic and toy king Todd MacFarlane), and I suppose it's possible that "every building, tree and creature has a clear and defined history within this immersive world," as the literature claims. But this land of elves (sorry, Fae), dwarves and men initially offers nothing to distinguish itself beyond a similarity to Blizzard's Warcraft that's not so much striking as actionable. (I could swear that I met the Night Elf druid from the original WOW trailer. She even had the same clothes on.)

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Ghost Recon: Future Soldier ain't quite what it used to be. When it first broke cover - and when we last took a serious look at it - Ubisoft's tactical shooter series had evolved into something far removed from the games of old, having become an action-heavy third-person shooter starring a soldier who was, in Ubisoft's own words, "an F-16 on legs". It had turned into Gears of Recon, and it proved an unpopular shift in direction for a series once known for its tactical smarts.

"We'd just finished Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, but that was just an iteration of the first Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter," creative director Jean-Marc Geffroy says of Future Soldier's first pass. "The team wanted to renew the game - they wanted to stay faithful, but they wanted to renew as well. And sometimes, when you're like that maybe you go too far in one direction."

Remember the over-powered exoskeleton, the class system and the player tethering discussed at the game's reveal? Forget about it - all of it - as today's version of Future Soldier is a world away from the one first shown in 2010.

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I wonder if David Ostman, the indie developer behind A Science Fiction Saga, has received a call from Futurama's lawyers yet. His upcoming release tells the story of Anderson Kane - an unfortunate chap who finds himself thrust thousands of years into the future after an incident at work. The involvement of pizza and cryogenic freezing is something that's yet to be confirmed.

Far removed from Futurama's silliness, though, this point-and-click adventure is set in a world touching on Star Trek, Firefly and fellow indie point-and-clicker Gemini Rue. In it, the entire human race has found itself caught up in a vast conspiracy, full of interstellar police forces and private investigators. You'll even become the owner of a spaceship, complete with crew members who begrudgingly accept your space travel ineptitude.

Impressively, all this is in the first game of a planned series. It's a vast undertaking for a solo developer, with a little help from an animator on the side. Is he mad? "You have to be a bit crazy to get into game development," he says. "It's hard work and often little-to-no glory, and you need to be stubborn as a two-headed mule to stick with it."

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"Choose Your Own Death" is one of the strangest video game pitches that's been flung our way in a while. Choose Your Own Death. Okay, so I've thought about it, and I'd like to go with rollerskates, a wonky stepladder, a plate glass window, and the glinting tines of an upended garden fork, please. At my funeral, I want them to play the theme from Shaft, and everybody has to dress like they work at Burger King.

It all makes a bit more sense, though, when you discover that Death is the new protagonist for Darksiders 2. He's taking over from his brother War in a sequel that fits neatly inside the timeline of the original. Think of it as Back to the Future 2, but with a rock-fisted demon in place of Thomas F. Wilson. War has been accused of kicking off the Apocalypse early, and he's out to clear his name: that's Darksiders. Meanwhile, Death thinks War is his kind of people, so, as another of the famous four horsemen, he sets off on his own parallel adventure to see if he can help his brother out. That's Darksiders 2.

As for the element of choice, this comes from a slight change of emphasis. In Darksiders 2, you'll be able to shape Death a little as the game progresses, selecting which armour you want him to wear as you pick paths through his skill trees, while juggling his load out of weapons and magic attacks. It's a mix-and-match approach that mirrors that of the developer, Vigil Games, which built the original Darksiders, in part, from its favourite pieces of the Zelda and God of War series, taking the dungeons-and-gadgets structure of the former, and the pointy melee combat of the latter. For Darksiders 2, all of that stuff remains in place, but the team is throwing in some new inspirations as well.

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CyberConnect 2's central office is equal parts library and games development studio. Before you can get to the 140-strong workforce in the developer's Fukuoka base - supplemented by a further 70 staff working out of Tokyo - there's a lobby that houses over 3,000 DVDs and Blu-rays, the walls lined with a comprehensive collection of sci-fi and anime. Downstairs there are shelves upon shelves thick with manga, the stark strip-lighting and functional furniture giving the large open-plan meeting area the feel of a school reading room that's stacked with forbidden fruit.

It's more than mere decoration or pleasant distraction for CC2, a team that made its name first with the .hack series and then found greater success with Naruto before embarking on a brand new game, Asura's Wrath, in partnership with Capcom. All of these DVDs and all of these mangas are required reading for the team. Every single one of them.

"It's a general rule in our studio that all staff members should know all of the anime and manga that are on the shelves," CC2's president Hiroshi Matsuyama tells us with a smile, before his face hardens a little; "If they don't, and if they're not reading something or watching something, I get mad."

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It all began 15 years ago, with a lofty voice that proclaimed: "Transcending history and the world, a tale of soul and swords eternally retold!" But after the progressively stifled SoulCalibur 4 - a game whose unique selling point was the clashing of katanas and lightsabers in a Star Destroyer docking bay, with its cameos from Darth Vader and Yoda - it seemed like the curtain had finally fallen on the Stage of History. However, nobody told Project Soul director Daishi Odashima, as by taking the series 17 years into the future and retiring certain members of the cast, he finally gives us a SoulCalibur that shows tangible progression since its days on the Dreamcast.

A quick trip to the select screen reveals that Taki, Xianghua and Kilik have been replaced by Natsu, Leixia and Xiba - respectively an apprentice, daughter and successor. This passing of torches is also inherent in their fighting styles, as with bō-staff in hand, Xiba (whose named is pronounced the same as a popular brand of cat food) fights in a way that closely resembles his less goofy predecessor. Although his move set has been subtly tweaked, you can still achieve a ring-out by jamming your pole between your opponent's legs and tossing them over your shoulder.

While Sophitia has passed on her shield duties to her twin children, Patroklos and Pyrrha, the rest of the roster is made up of Calibur classics like the nunchaku-twirling Maki, the axe-swinging Astaroth and the double-cheque-cashing Yoshimitsu. Some of them also look more advanced in years, with Mitsurugi keeping it classy with his Just For Men mane and Lizardman - who now goes by his human name of Aeon Calcos - rocking an angelic set of wings that give his techniques an aerial edge.

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Here's the scene; an orphanage, on a dark and typically stormy night. Blood runs through the corridors, and fresh corpses pile up by the walls. In the nursery, under bright birthday bunting, there's a lullaby of screams as a guard strapped to a wooden chair is slowly tortured.

Meanwhile, a silent killer picks off his prey one-by-one. At one moment in this violent game of hide and seek, a brightly coloured beach ball rolls silently past - at another, with one more victim dispatched, the body's hidden in a nearby ball-pool. It's an orphanage, but with the body count tick-tick-ticking ever upwards it may as well be an orphan factory.

For all the concerns about Hitman: Absolution's grittier, more action-led take on Danish developer IO Interactive's bloodthirsty mascot, it's most definitely retained its line in jet-black humour. "We tried to take it out of Absolution in the beginning," says game director Tore Blystad, a man that, despite being in charge of one of the medium's most notorious killers, can't hold back the widest and most infectious of grins, "we wanted it to be more serious, so this humour had to go. But then it crept back in, so we had to embrace it. It's one of the fundamental pillars of the game."

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Racing studios are, sadly, a diminishing breed, and those that still stand are having to adapt to survive. Following the closure of Bizarre Creations and Black Rock Studios last year, existing developers are finding new paths to explore - Codemasters steering its Dirt brand toward the downloadable route, while Slightly Mad turns to the strange new world of user-generated content for its ambitious and intriguing Project Cars.

There's one studio that's weathered the storm well enough, however, and which, despite the struggles elsewhere in the market, still manages to produce up to three boxed racing games per year. And it does that with a thinly stretched team of 90, spread over three floors of a slightly scruffy studio near the centre of Milan, Italy.

It's this team that put out the functional yet entertaining WRC game and its somewhat underwhelming sequel, and that in the SBK series has produced arguably the best bike game on the market; not a particularly impressive feat when its sole competitor, Capcom's MotoGP games, has seemingly slipped into obscurity, but a noble one nevertheless.

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It has, since its unveiling late in 2009, been hard to muster much in the way of enthusiasm for Binary Domain. Fronted by a stubble-chinned, crop-haired hero who's seemingly more anonymous than the waves of robots he's tasked with gunning down, it's a game that's generic to the point of rendering itself invisible.

If Sega's own Tokyo studio's perverse objective has been to blend in its first foray in to the duck and cover shooter genre crowd in much the same way as Binary Domain's new breed of robots try to hide themselves within its imagined future society, it's proved successful; some have emerged from demos from this year's trade shows with little recollection of what they've just witnessed, an instant amnesia brought on by what seems to be a particularly inoffensive yet uninspiring effort.

It's all the more dispiriting when you consider the heritage behind the studio that's developing Binary Domain - this is the same outfit that has in recent years produced the consistently brilliant Yakuza series, games that are as colourful as they are eccentric and unique, and it's headed up by one gaming's few rockstar developers, Toshihiro Nagoshi. But beneath Binary Domain's innocuous exterior there's something smarter, more cunning and ultimately more beguiling than first looks might lead you to believe. Yes, it's a third person shooter set in a dreary monochrome future, but it's one that's got character, style and a handful of neat tricks to boot.

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The Guinness Book of Records: Gamer's Edition must be having a field day with Star Wars: The Old Republic; most expensive game ever, most vocal recording in a game, longest hype, most embarrassing cosplayer, most Jedi teabagging...

Yet despite the long list of superlatives already attached to it, SWTOR feels like the last of its kind; a game that was started at the end of one era of the MMO, and one that will be released at the beginning of another.

There are uneasy parallels that can be drawn with Star Wars: Galaxies, SWTOR's much-maligned predecessor, here. Galaxies took the (then still mostly-unsullied-curse-you-Phantom-Menace) main Star Wars brand and made a universe out of it, doing a fair job at replicating the feel of the world. It was released at the peak of the paid-for MMO business and did respectably, despite repeated design screw-ups, only being shut down to make room for SWTOR.

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When it comes to keeping secrets, the games industry is about as trustworthy as Julian Assange. Just ask Konami, whose VGAs-closing trailer revealing MGS: Rising as a Platinum Games title leaked online hours before the show.

And yet, defying the odds, news of two-years-in-the-making The Last of Us, created by an 80-strong Naughty Dog team no-one knew existed, was met with that rarest of emotions when it broke cover at the weekend: genuine surprise. But, oh, how close it all came to unravelling as the big day approached.

Two months ago, Neil Druckmann, creative director and writer on the project, left his iPad on a plane. An iPad with the debut trailer for the game stored on it. Frantic calls to the airline ensued, but the device was gone. Naughty Dog waited nervously. And, to its considerable relief, nothing happened.

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Gotham City Impostors is all about obsessive fans. Obsessive fans who, as is so often the case, happen to be both slightly unstable and very heavily armed.

It's a multiplayer-only online shooter set in the Batman universe - but because Batman doesn't actually like to shoot people in his universe, Monolith, the game's developer, has had to get creative. The solution it's come up with is to offer players the choice between two opposing teams of cut-price vigilantes decked out in cheap costumes and weighed down with home-made gadgets and weapons.

Drawing inspiration from the real superheroes and villains, these gangs have called themselves the Bats and the Jokerz, and they spend their weekends blasting each other to pieces. This, in case you haven't noticed, is the set-up for one of the weirdest licensed games you'll have seen in quite a while.

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The Darkness II sees the moody franchise handed a new developer and a new secret weapon. The developer is Digital Extremes, an outfit that takes over from the gloriously under-appreciated Starbreeze Studios, and the secret weapon is colour.

Colour, eh? Cliché that it is to comment on the fact, it's all too often MIA in contemporary shooters. Once it's back, you realise how much you've missed it. Digital Extremes has interpreted The Darkness' funny book origins as an excuse to paint its levels with pools of rich blues, greens, and reds. Look closely and you'll see a touch of cel-shading on top. Look closer still and you'll see traces of Borderlands' lovely cross-hatching, too. It's hard to see the game in motion and not want to try it out. That's colour for you.

In the single-player, the other big ideas include quad-wielding (it was inevitable really) and Nolan North (ditto). All of that's for another day, though, sadly. Today we're only talking about multiplayer.

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The automotive industry in Britain isn't what it once was, but it's learnt to adapt and evolve, finding and filling niches and flourishing in an ever-changing market. For the country's virtual automotive industry it's much the same story; there have been some big casualties (rest in peace, beloved Bizarre) but there are those that continue to thrive, creating the same, well-crafted output that made the industry's name in increasingly novel fashion.

Codemasters struck gold with an Indian investor and the F1 license, while Criterion worked its magic on Need for Speed and looks likely to return to the franchise it breathed some much-needed life into. Elsewhere, South London's Slightly Mad Studios, its own stint on Need for Speed seemingly on hold, has turned its expertise to Project Cars, a crowd-sourced game that's taking more than financial donations from its fledgling community - it's taking their ideas onboard too.

And then there's Newcastle's Eutechnyx, modest veterans of the UK's racing scene with coming up to 14 years experience of crafting driving games. Like Slightly Mad, it's struck out on a different path to many of its competitors, although Eutechnyx is currently a little further along the road.

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By now, you may well have seen the target footage of Rainbow 6 Patriots that Ubisoft released earlier this month, hot on the heels of a hurried announcement. Not much more than a week previously, I'd been sitting in Ubisoft's Montreal game factory watching the very same sequence played live on a PS3 - albeit still presented as a "target" rather than a piece of the finished game. It differed in minor details, but it matched the target video beat for beat.

You find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. (Although David Byrne didn't mention the iPad or the option to PRESS X TO KISS WIFE, you way well ask yourself: how did I get here?) You're a successful banker. A group of men break in and capture you both; you wake up with a bomb strapped to your chest, tasked with taking it to Times Square in New York and committing an atrocity to save the lives of your wife and baby. Ending up stuck in traffic chaos on a rain-lashed Brooklyn Bridge, you're cowering under cover from police fire and following one of the terrorists forward, car by car.

The action then switches to the Rainbow counter-terrorist team, high in the bridge's superstructure. You snipe, taking out an interfering NYPD officer with a shot to the leg. You rappel dramatically, running vertically down the brickwork, firing as you go. You make your way forward through panicked civilians, using a stark virtual-reality tactical overlay (not unlike Batman: Arkham's detective mode) to pick out and close in on the enemy.

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We're a fussy bunch, really. Soon after a game's release and public forums become autopsy slabs, full of should have, would have, could have. It's at this point in a game's life cycle, once the hype has blown away and after the controller's been put down, that everyone becomes a game designer; everyone knows how to make a game better.

Project Cars, Shift developer Slightly Mad Studio's latest project, inverts the process. Here, it's those suggestions, that nitpicking and those moments of fan inspiration that are being harvested for a game that's bravely decided to do much of its growing up in public.

It's all quite simple; sign up to WMD, the somewhat unfortunate acronym chosen for Slightly Mad's World of Mass Development platform, and you're granted access to regularly released builds of the game, which you're then free to pick apart in the official forums. That feedback then gets absorbed by Slightly Mad Studios, a simple loop that means that, when the game is eventually released, it'll be as much a product of the community as it is of the studio.

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After three years of silence, I Am Alive feels as much a statement as a title. The tale behind its development threatens to overshadow the game itself, and it's as packed with enigmas, dead-ends and abandoned ruins as the story that's within.

French outfit Darkworks, creator of Cold Fear, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare and other anonymous classics, were the team originally in charge when the CG trailer first emerged, though there's doubt that the game ever got beyond the concept phase - and whatever the case, when the project limped towards Ubisoft Shanghai some two years later, work was started anew.

The loose post-apocalyptic premise set out by the original trailer remains, though it's now been bent to Ubisoft Shanghai's own ends. Twelve months on from an inexplicable and unexplained catastrophe known only as The Event, the world has collapsed into rubble and dust. Our unnamed hero finds himself at the end of a yearlong trek across the width of the country to his hometown of Haverton, in pursuit of the wife and child he still optimistically believes are alive somewhere in the chaos.

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I must be going soft, or I must be getting old. Perhaps both. Maybe I've become pulpy and aged, like an over-ripe fruit that's due for the bin, because the Dota 2 beta is punishing me.

It may well be that I've spent far too long amongst the warm comforts of its accommodating and enormously successful peer League of Legends, with that game's gentle tutorials, helpful replays and precisely-tuned player matchmaking. Side by side, a game of LoL now seems like a finely-honed fencing match where opponents parry and riposte, while Dota 2 is an unforgiving broadsword duel in which one false move spells disfigurement or even death.

What's more, while opposing LoL players may give knowing winks as they feint and strike, more than a few Dota 2 players practically spit in each other's faces. Like the original Dota, Valve's Source Engine update has no sense of sympathy. That's not what you play it for. Nor is it what you expect from the remake of a game whose beginner's guide is simply titled "Welcome to Dota. You suck." Highlights include a section on "DISGUSTINGLY COMMON NOOB ITEM MISTAKES," you disgusting new person, you.

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Mounted high on the gleaming silver superstructure of one of Dubai's improbable skyscrapers is a vast advertising hoarding filled with a model's pouting lips. In the bottom left corner of the huge banner, someone has used bright red paint to scrawl a single word: Help.

It's disquieting stuff, even when glimpsed from the relative safety of a military helicopter as you pass low over the city, but - listen to that voice - at least you've got good old Nolan North to keep you safe. Or have you? Minutes into Spec Ops: The Line, it's clear that this is a story that cuts a little deeper than the likes of Uncharted, and if that's Nathan Drake we're playing as, it's a Nathan Drake who's recently spent a really long time thinking about all those people he's killed.

It's not Nathan Drake at all, of course. The Line's hero is a Delta Force soldier named Captain Martin Walker, and he and his two squad-mates have touched down in a ravaged near-future Dubai to track down Colonel Konrad, a military officer with a near-perfect track record. He's also been presumed dead for the last six months, caught up in a failed evacuation as freak sandstorms steadily picked the world's strangest city apart. Over the last few days, evidence has started to emerge suggesting that he might still be alive.

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"You haven't strayed into some atrocious Dan Brown paperback," comments the recruiter for the Templars, one of the three secret societies you can join in The Secret World, Funcom's modern-day MMO. Well no, that much is clear - from that self-same gag, if nothing else. Dan Brown was never especially self-aware or prone to post-modern irony.

That said, Brown's airport-novel take on the bookish conspiracies of Umberto Eco is an identifiable part of The Secret World's make-up. It's just one of the many dirty mugs in its overflowing kitchen sink of influences from pop culture and post-Crowley occultism: The X-Files, Cryptonomicon, Hellblazer... Maybe you haven't strayed into The Da Vinci Code, but you have strayed into a playable version of every Neil Gaiman graphic novel you've ever read.

That's The Secret World's secret weapon in the not-so-secret war for the future of MMOs. It's a good hook - and creative director Ragnar Tornquist and his teams in Oslo and Montreal know it, making enthusiastic if not constant use of it to keep the genre tropes feeling a good deal fresher than they do in rival games. It's not this game's only new idea, but it is its best one. Personality goes a long way, and The Secret World has it in spades.

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If you don't like Final Fantasy 13-2, it's your own fault.

For better or worse, the sequel to Square Enix's hard-to-love 2009 effort is a product of democracy. From its opening moments, it's clear that the franchise's core fanbase - or at least its noisier elements - has played a central role in how the game has taken shape.

Did you complain that Final Fantasy 13 was too linear? Square has listened - the corridors have widened out. Thought the first one took an age to get going? Fixed - FF13-2 throws you straight into a wildly OTT boss battle. Were you one of those stamping their feet at the lack of towns to explore and NPCs to chat up? Fear not - 13-2 is busier than Bluewater on Boxing Day. Or perhaps you took to a message board to decry the lack of merchants or Moogles? Rejoice - they're back.

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For the longest time, I knew virtually nothing about the UFC. I'd dabbled with the Ultimate Fighting Championship game on the Dreamcast, and even watched some classic Royce Gracie fights on a borrowed cassette tape, but I was always far more interested in arcade-style fighting games where you could hurl fireballs and juggle opponents ten feet in the air. But after watching an MMA demonstration at an Undisputed event back in 2009, I began to watch and appreciate mixed martial arts as both a technical sport and a freeform style of hand-to-hand combat.

This started with The Ultimate Fighter, an ongoing reality television series that plays out like a cross between Big Brother and Ong-Bak, before moving on to the main UFC events themselves. It's here that I got to see Jon Jones relinquish the Light Heavyweight Champion belt from Mauricio Rua with some savage ground and pound; Cain Velasquez school Brock Lesnar with a round one TKO; and Anderson Silva, after being dominated by the relentless wrestling ability of Chael Sonnen for four rounds straight, lock-in an epic triangle armbar submission to secure his seventh title defence as Middleweight Champion.

It was then, like a music aficionado who can't stop listening to a new band and then takes the plunge to see them on tour, that I finally got the opportunity to see a main event live. This was thanks to an invitation to watch UFC 138 at the Birmingham LG Arena, where I got to see Che Mills earn Knockout of the Night with a thundering knee strike, and Terry Etim achieve his fourth Submission of the Night award with a guillotine choke in the 17th second of the first round.

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After all the talk of Monster Hunter and Demon's Souls, all the footage of giant beasts being tackled in majestic battles, it's quite a surprise to sit through the first couple of hours of Dragon's Dogma and realise what this actually is: an extremely traditional, noticeably Western roleplaying game.

It's set in a wide open fantasy world, which stretches from the sandy shores to mountainous regions, and walking from place to place promises lengthy, tempestuous journeys. The enormous monsters the game has already become known for are conspicuously absent: only one appears during our demo time, and it doesn't stick around for long.

Capcom have never made a secret of Dragon's Dogma's status as an open-world RPG, but it's interesting to see just how close to the standard formula the game sticks. Its universe is Oblivion, it's Two Worlds and it's Risen - it's places you've seen on countless occasions before, pieced together to create something whose only real identity is in how it combines the lot. And of all the quests you'll undertake throughout the game's duration, only a small percentage concern the slaying of gargantuan monsters.

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The secret to enjoying EA's new take on Syndicate might be to put aside all your hopes and dreams and cherished memories regarding the original, and think of it instead as, well, a new Starbreeze game. That's not a perfect solution for everyone, perhaps, but it's also not without its pleasures. Starbreeze is a studio that's constantly poised on the edge of greatness. It brought a sturdiness and a peculiarly grim invention to both Riddick and The Darkness. I think the team can do good things with Syndicate, too.

That's how I felt after dipping into both single- and multiplayer campaigns a few weeks back, anyway. Starbreeze is deeply committed to the concept of clever nastiness - a trait that should ensure it has little trouble bringing the series' near-future landscape with its warring corporate leviathans to life. It's also used to merging nice, heavy gunplay with gadgets and gimmicks: Riddick's melee combat, say, or Jackie Estacado's cackling tentacles.

As Syndicate's main campaign starts up, dispatched on a clandestine corporate raid, your AI partner fills you in on the backstory and deals out queasy office euphemism like "soft assets" while he casually shoots two receptionists waiting patiently in the lobby you've just crashed into. It gets things off to a wonderfully unpleasant start and ensures you're on your toes straight away.

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You need to forget the name. Which is quite difficult, given that the story of Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City plays on the second and third games in Capcom's long-running series.

This time, you're playing as the bad guys: Umbrella Corp's USS Black Ops team, sent in to destroy any evidence of the company's illegal activities. And that evidence includes anyone who might want the truth to be outed.

Removing the franchise's history from your mind is important, though, because this isn't Resident Evil as we know it. Instead, for all intents and purposes, it's a strange hybrid, a third-person cover-shooter that sees you blasting, kicking and punching your way through hordes of zombies and enemy forces, across a series of dark and dingy story-driven levels, as part of a team of four.

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Brian Provinciano loves games. No strange thing for a developer, but his is a more dedicated passion than most. Before we meet outside a Starbucks on a damp Nottingham afternoon, he's just been to the local Game, picking up copies of both Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Their covers differ oh-so-slightly from those sold in his home town of Vancouver, and they're to be added to his collection, another couple of scalps for this committed completist.

It's not just GTA ephemera that Brian collects, though. He's also compiling another compendium, an assortment of memories, inspirations and cherished moments thrown together in a digital scrapbook.

"My original dream was that I wanted to see a version of Grand Theft Auto running on NES hardware," Provinciano, animated by his enthusiasm, says. "That was what excited me." An eccentric hobby, what was then known as Grand Theftendo was worked on in the downtime from Provinciano's day-job working as a programmer at Backbone Entertainment.

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As far as a lot of video games are concerned, snowboarding might as well be a made-up sport, really. You know, like Quidditch, or Welters. Or Badminton.

That arcadey downhill racer you play on the living room flatscreen has lofted itself so far from reality by this point that it can now be a little crushing to encounter the genuine thing on TV. Where are the particle effects, the afterglow, and the combo numbers? Why can't Shaun White really thrust himself so high into the sky with each jump that he comes back to earth having wrapped his face around important elements of the Hubble Space Telescope? I suspect a big part of the reason that people were so upset about the new SSX's first reveal trailer wasn't so much because the Deadly Descent angle looked terrible, but because it seemed kind of, well, realistic. Who wants that?

Happily, having played a few of the Deadly Descents last week, it turns out that they're not realistic at all. They're over-the-top, and almost cartoonishly inventive. There are particle effects, afterglow, and combo numbers. You know, like classic SSX. Or Badminton.

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Mass Effect 3 is all about long-term plans finally coming to fruition. After two games of steadily inching ever closer to their target, the Reapers have finally found Earth, and while the single-player campaign will dart about orchestrating the beginning, middle, and end of a planet-wide conflict that's been thousands of years in the making, elsewhere on the start menu, other promises are being fulfilled too.

That's because Mass Effect 3 is finally taking the plunge with multiplayer - a bold move for BioWare, which hasn't tangled with anything other than a solo campaign since, what, Neverwinter Nights? After an hour with the game last week, though, the delivery looks a little less bold. This is definitely entertaining stuff, but it's also pretty standard co-op fare.

With the single-player eating up man hours over at BioWare Edmonton, and the Austin studio toiling to piece an entire galaxy of Star Wars treats together for the Christmas launch of The Old Republic, Mass Effect multiplayer's being handled in the main by the freshly-minted BioWare Montreal, a team that's been up and running for about a year. The end result appears to be a series of four-player co-op missions where you form an elite squad with your friends and fight for control of territory throughout the stars.

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You can hardly say that World of Warcraft is fighting for survival. Blizzard's online world approaches its seventh birthday in the same position of total dominance over subscription gaming that it's held since the servers were turned on.

But with every year that passes, the pressures on it increase - from big-ticket rivals like Star Wars: The Old Republic, the busy gaggle of free-to-play games, and from untamed community hits like League of Legends and Minecraft which seem to be able to summon tens of millions of players out of nowhere.

Nevertheless, WOW's greatest enemy by far is itself. Or, perhaps, it's its age. It's been a long time, now - for all of us.

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The history of gnomes in games is, like gnomes themselves, short and pathetic. Gordon Freeman's got fired into space, then reappeared as Gnome Chompski in Left 4 Dead. Bully's idle fisher gnomes got smashed to dust so Jimmy could wear a gnome suit. WoW's gnomes are basically wannabe hobbits. And Risen? Risen turned our beloved garden ornaments into grotesque fat pig-goblin-thieves which you slaughtered by the hundred.

So, oddly, some of the developer's concern in RPG Risen II has been about gnomic rights. The sequence we saw, when it didn't feature 20 foot high mystical monsters or someone stealing a galleon, focused on the gnomes, their language and their fundamental aboriginal humanity - they're not monsters, they're not stupid, they've just been brought up in a primitive, alternative culture.

Not that the first game's massacre leaves you grinding your gnashers with guilt in this game. They're still not totally sympathetic individuals, though their thievery is now justified; apparently, each gnome is hunting for the object that will guarantee them access to the afterlife, essentially a fetish (in the old sense). Though, of course, this newfound character complexity isn't restricted just to gnomes. Your hero is a tortured soul too, poor thing.

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Maybe it's because the 25th anniversary concert is only a week away, but the first thing I notice is the music. The swooning classical score is augmented by real orchestration and the effect is as epic and stirring as it proved in Super Mario Galaxy.

For a series light on narrative relative to the scale of its adventures, Nintendo has learned to engage players' emotions by other means: most potently through a shamelessly sweet blend of nostalgia and novelty.

As longterm fans well know, the more things change in Zelda, the more they stay the same. And far from signifying a failure of imagination, the series' consoling familiarity provides a brilliantly successful blueprint that Nintendo endlessly toys with to deliver that "surprise" Miyamoto always cites as his creative goal.

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I'm lost. It's not something I'm proud of, but I have no idea where I need to be going. I'm on the attacking force in a Squad Rush multiplayer game of Battlefield 3 and I'm running around like a headless chicken, trying to work out where those target markers are pointing.

Things started so well, too. We advanced efficiently along a mountain pass, dealt with some sneaky snipers who'd taken cover in the long grass at the top of a rise, and we'd driven the defending team back from the first two objective markers with ruthless efficiency. We were unbeatable. We were badasses.

But now I'm scampering about like a drunken puppy, trying to find some tunnel or doorway that will allow me into the guts of this enemy base. The objective markers are below me, so unless the game is horribly glitched, there must be a way in. One of my brothers in arms sprints past me and hurls himself off the helipad, clearly driven to suicide in the hopes that a respawn would put him back on track and make the way forward clear.

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There are dragons! Unlimited dragons, purportedly, and I probably should have chased one of them down in my three hours with Skyrim. Instead, I got distracted by crafting swords. This may not have been ideal journalistic practice, but it does speak to what Skyrim really is, as opposed to what all those dramatic trailers present it as.

Fighting dragons is an element of Skyrim, but Skyrim is not really a game about fighting dragons. For all the pomp and splendour of the marketing, this is very much an Elder Scrolls game, and as such is set on evolving and expanding the various roleplaying systems that Bethesda's fantasy adventures have set up over the last couple of decades. This means, on my part at least, obsessively scouring the game's vast and mountainous world for items to scavenge, equip, sell or upgrade. Some strange part of my brain responds far better to this sort of activity than to engaging in to-the-death combat with creatures the size of schoolbuses.

So most of my 180 minutes playing Skyrim from the start (with the introductory, storyline-setting quest neatly excised) was spent crafting and cooking. Underground, overground, scavenging free. A few simple recipes were achievable from the off, but soon I ran into the Dilemma of Dilemmas - to focus my level-up points into becoming more of a powerhouse mage, or into being able to build bigger and better items.

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You can't move for twin-stick shooters or Diablo clones on Xbox Live Arcade, but a twin-stick shooter/dungeon crawler with MMO sensibilities? Now there's something to get excited about.

It's also something to get confused and a little bewildered about, at least at first. You can't really fault first timers Starfire Studios for their ambition, though; its game Fusion: Genesis is a striking blend of disparate parts that, surprisingly, hangs together brilliantly well. It's a game that's as unique as its title is bland - and while the studio behind it might be new, it helps that the talent behind it is a little more experienced.

Step forward Phil Dunne and Chris Tilston who, alongside two other colleagues, decided to leave behind their previous employers Rare and move to the nimbler, riskier yet more creatively fulfilling world of Xbox Live Arcade.

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There's long been a link between Assassin's Creed and Metal Gear Solid, and it goes deeper than the furtive glances exchanged in various throwaway references to each other over the past few years. It goes deeper, too, than the murky tangle of their respective plot lines, interminable to all but the most dedicated scholars of the game's own brands of high-minded nonsense.

Game characters live and die in the blink of an eye, but rarely do we ever see them grow old. Yet Metal Gear Solid introduced an older, more forlorn Solid Snake in Guns of the Patriots, and now it's Assassin's Creed turn to grey at the temples as it bring us an older, more mature lead in Ezio Auditore.

There's a weariness to Ezio, a cool wisdom sitting alongside a humanity that's sadly far from commonplace in the medium. "I think Ezio is one of the most influential characters in the gaming industry," creative lead Alexandre Amacio says in what's only a slight overstatement, "and he is because he's a real character. He's not a static fake sort of character. He's had a beginning - and you've seen him being born - and you've lived through his entire narrative curve. Having him be older reinforces that, and makes him all that more real and all that more powerful."

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Last month I packed my rucksack with the usual assortment of travelling essentials and made my second pilgrimage to the Eurogamer Expo. And while travelling from the UK's most southerly county isn't exactly cheap or hassle-free, the level of gaming opulence on offer made it worth the while.

But as I walked through the glass doors at the Earls Court Exhibition Centre on the Saturday morning, dressed in a makeshift Terry Bogard costume, it was obvious - to me as much as everyone else - that I was destined to spend most of the day with the quartet of new fighting games. And although it took me almost half an hour to find the fabled "Tournament Area", partly because of on-route distractions, and partly because it was hidden behind a wall of Alienware PCs, the eventual discovery was nothing short of burning knuckle brilliance.

As the only fighting game at the Expo that wasn't a direct sequel or update, I approached Street Fighter X Tekken with all the rabid anticipation of a hungry wolf. And suffice to say, I wasn't disappointed. The select screen presents a tough decision - but seeing as it was winner stays on, and I didn't want to visit the back of the queue any time soon, I picked Sagat as a safe pair of lunchbox sized hands with Kuma as a goodwill gesture. My opponent countered with Ryu and Ken.

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So, Mario to the rescue? After a rather awkward first six months, the game that should have been there from day one arrives on 3DS next month, with the Kart variety following closely behind.

If you're in any doubt as to the importance of these titles to a fledgling Nintendo console, consider the following: by the end of last year, New Super Mario Bros. DS had shifted 26.2 million copies and Mario Kart DS an equally dizzying 20.7 million.

On Wii, it's a similar story, with Mario Kart notching up 26.5m sales and New Super Mario Bros. Wii a mere21m. These games aren't just popular, they're also brilliant. And, frankly, there hasn't been a lot of that on 3DS so far.

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Guild Wars 2 was a major draw at this year's Eurogamer Expo, and yesterday we named it as our Editors' Game of the Show. Below, John Bedford tries out player-versus-player and discusses it with lead content designer Colin Johanson; on page 3, Robert Purchese interviews Johanson about dungeons, the endgame and Guild Wars 2's distinctive dynamic events.

The PVP zone of Guild Wars 2 on display at this year's Expo was the Battle of Kyhlo. It's a war game that sees players competing against an opposing team to secure three capture points on a devastated rural map: the Mansion, Windmill and Clocktower. As each team races to secure the 500 points necessary for victory, players can make use of a trebuchet - itself destructible - to destroy buildings and expose the capture areas, dealing extraordinary damage to those taking control of the map.

The capture-point mechanic is a staple of MMO battlegrounds and will feature in every one of Guild Wars 2's PVP maps. Johanson explains that variety will stem from the dynamic components of each match rather than the game rules. "That map had the trebuchet and the destructible environment. That was the secondary mechanic for that one. One of the other maps we're talking about has a giant dragon that flies over the map, breathing fire all over the place, doing damage. They'll all be capture point maps, but with different things that make each of them memorable."

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A cherry-red dragon swoops low in a green-topped canyon, its wings skimming against still blue waters as formations of flying insects attack, all disposed of with a sweeping lock-on. Despite the familiarities, this isn't Panzer Dragoon - but the download-only Project Draco flies as close as is possible to Sega's much-loved on-rails series.

Take one look at Project Draco producer Yukio Futatsugi's CV and it's obvious where that particular influence has crept in from. When working at Sega's Team Andromeda in the Saturn era, Futasagi created Panzer Dragoon, helping oversee its sequel and the cherished but all-too-rare RPG spin-off Panzer Dragoon Saga.

But Project Draco's resemblance to Panzer Dragoon isn't born from one man's obsession with flying reptiles or a sign of a designer falling back on past success - it is, its creator claims, born from the possibilities and limitations thrown up when designing a shooting game that's exclusively for Kinect. "We tried to make a 3D shooter with Kinect, and following the logical steps of that we ended up with an on-rails shooter," admits Futasagi, a cheery, talkative man who's surprisingly forthcoming about the genesis of this game for his upstart outfit Grounding.

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Given the number of delightful oddities that came out of Japan when the DS first launched, it's been rather sad to see such a conservative first wave of 3DS software. With that in mind, not to mention the relative paucity of announcements at E3 a few months back, this year's Tokyo Games Show was an important week for the handheld. Would developers finally step up with some serious support for the system, or would the industry place all its chips on Vita?

Nintendo's potentially game-changing announcement last week that it had somehow wrestled Monster Hunter 4 away from Sony and onto 3DS firmly put paid to those fears, but the healthy number of interesting titles playable on the show floor was further proof that the 3DS is finally starting to pick up some steam.

While the Vita stand unsurprisingly hogged much of the spotlight, with enormous queues to check out Sony's new system in its first Japanese public appearance, the biggest buzz undoubtedly surrounded a 3DS game. We headed over to the Monster Hunter Tri G booth about an hour after the doors opened only to be told all tickets for a 10 minute slot on one of the 20 or so 3DS units had already gone for the day.

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Nintendo may have done its best to spoil Sony's party by announcing that Monster Hunter would be coming to the 3DS, but the air of celebration continues around the Vita. 31 games for the handheld made an appearance at the Tokyo Game Show, and - Monster Hunter aside - it was the biggest pull of the event.

With no firm word of a release date outside of Japan and no region locking for the console's software, there is of course a huge temptation to import Sony's Vita when it comes out in the East on 17th December. 26 games launching alongside the handheld ensure that, unlike this year's 3DS launch, there will be a wealth of options when it comes to picking up games.

Sony's first-party games provide the obvious highlights - and Uncharted: Golden Abyss is as close to an essential purchase as there is for the Vita, both a technical marvel that's perfect for showcasing the console's power as well as an extension of one of this generation's best-loved series.

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Dark Souls is the work of a creator willing to press responsibility into the player's hands: someone who understands that with freedom comes agency, and that the very best video games are the ones that treat us as adults even as they allow us to believe in their worlds like children.

Even so, it's tough not to see Hidetaka Miyazaki as kind of a prick.

Predecessor Demon's Souls, 2009's sleeper hit, quickly garnered a reputation for being one of the very toughest video games. And with this pseudo-sequel, director-producer-game-designer-tea-boy Miyazaki has only stoked the fires of infamy, claiming with some braggadocio in interviews that he wants Dark Souls to be harder still.

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As far as rumours go, the first whispers that Nintendo was planning on somehow stapling an extra circle pad to the side of the 3DS was at the wackier end of the tittle-tattle spectrum, and you can be sure Eurogamer thought long and hard before reporting on it.

An alleged insider's claim that Nintendo was subjecting its fledgling hardware to a brutal bout of cosmetic surgery just six months after launch seemed like a case of Chinese whispers at best or, at worst, some audacious trolling from 01.net, the French site that broke the story.

But less than a month later, here we are, standing in the Tokyo Game Show's Makuhari Messe, clutching the unwieldy beast in our hands. Believe us, it's very, very real.

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I squat down and my fingers instinctively spread, ready to receive a ball. No, I've not accidentally copy-and-pasted the first line of my latest letter to Penthouse Forum. This is the moment that the genius of Kinect Sports: Season 2 really comes into focus.

The ball, of course, isn't there. I'm playing American Football, one of the six new events in this sequel, and even though I know the sensor doesn't care whether or not I get into character, I find myself doing it anyway. It's impossible not to. I squat, call the play to my team and get ready to throw to the wide receivers. My hands make the ball shape all by themselves. Why? Because I'm playing American Football. It's what you do.

This happens time and again as I traipse around Rare's Twycross headquarters, trying out all the events, and it shows how the parameters of good game design have been expanded by the rise of motion gaming. Bad motion controls are perhaps the most off-putting mistake a game can make. Get it right, however, and the human brain automatically steps in to fill in the real-world blanks until you'd swear you can actually feel the pigskin in your hand. That's immersion.

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Grasshopper Manufacture's games have always had abstract, manic personalities. Lollipop Chainsaw is no exception, though this time there's something a little different about it.

The story of 18-year-old zombie hunter and cheerleader Juliet Starling massacring hordes of the undead in a sunny suburban high school seems uncharacteristically tame by studio head Suda 51's esoteric standards. Both cheerleaders and zombies feel overly familiar; Grasshopper's always excelled at showing us things we've never seen before, and white trash stereotypes thrown together with zombies is a mix that's close to being worn out.

Happily, any concerns that a Western influence has turned Suda's vision into a generic cash-in are quelled as soon as the action starts. Lollipop Chainsaw is a lot like the John Hughes movies it's riffing on, with judgmental first impressions of this scantily clad blonde dissipating like the social cliques of The Breakfast Club.

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The pressure's got to be high for Portal lead designer Kim Swift. After creating one of the most influential games of the generation, Swift decided to leave the company that put Gordon Freeman on the map and pursue her own venture at indie studio Airtight Games.

Quantum Conundrum, Swift's first title since GLaDOS' debut, may not be a million miles away from Portal with its focus on first person physics-based puzzling. But it contains the unique brainteasers and adorable humor that made her last game such a rousing success (what? You thought I was going to call it a triumph?).

You play as a boy sent to stay at your uncle's manor for the weekend while your parents get some R & R. Given your uncle's shock of grey hair, white lab coat, and moniker - the delightfully improbable Professor Quadwrangle - it should come as no surprise that he's a mad scientist.

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I'm playing Batman: Arkham City on a cinema screen. It's just me, in the middle row of the Warner Bros. private screening room in London, with Dax Ginn, Rocksteady's effervescent Aussie marketing man. I've had worse afternoons, it has to be said.

It's a fitting venue for a game with such lofty cinematic aspirations, and a striking reminder of just how far the artistry and technology of the medium have come - no longer is it simply in revenues that the small screen rivals its big entertainment brother.

And it's also a chance to get a proper feel for the game from the perspective not just of its protagonist, but his playable counterpoint, Catwoman.

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Borderlands was a game about shooting stuff. Sure, it gave us interesting weapons to shoot and varied targets to fire upon, but that was the long and short of it. Borderlands 2 is still about shooting, but there's much more to it than that. Its gorgeous world, creative set pieces, and ludicrous humor aim to flesh out the blueprint set out by its predecessor.

The demo begins with our character, the new Gunzerker class, on a wintry plain. The pale blue landscape obscured by howling winds and flakes of snow is more reminiscent of Okami's water coloured wonderland than Borderland's brown wasteland. "Imagine that, new colours," jokes Gearbox's Steve Gibson, running the demo. There's a story about trying to rescue your friend in this mission, but it's not important. The priority is on survival.

While the cold doesn't seem to have any tangible effect on you, danger quickly presents itself as abominable creatures called Bullymongs pop out of the icework. All arms, fur and claws, they hop around like overgrown frogs picking up anything they can get their hands on to throw at you, including stalactites, cars, people, and quite innocently, snowballs. Bear in mind that this is still early in the game before threats escalate from elementary school hijinks to astronomical assaults.

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Iterating on the most successful multiplayer video game in the world today would be hard enough in solitude. But doing so in the centre of an online amphitheatre with 20 million voices screaming conflicting views of what to change and what to leave well alone must be nothing short of paralysing.

For every player you appease by, for example, reducing the damage value for the shotgun by 5 per cent, you outrage another. Competitive multiplayer shooters are cat cradle's of design choices. Tiny tweaks echo and amplify through the game, often with unanticipated repercussions. Change one and you change them all, risking losing what made you popular in the first place.

"Trying to manage tens of millions of voices is extremely challenging," admits Modern Warfare 3's producer, Mark Rubin speaking at the COD XP fan event in Los Angeles this week.

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Blanchimont is a small, unassuming and often unsung stretch of tarmac tucked away in Belgium's Ardennes forest. As part of the make-up of the Spa-Francorchamps circuit, it's Eau Rouge, the famed uphill kink that dares drivers to take it flat, and Pouhoun, a violently fast double-apex left hander, that take the plaudits. Blanchimont, on the other hand, is a mere footnote, a simple bend on the back straight that barely registers in most other driving games.

But in F1 2011 it's got bite; the kind of bite that'll leave big teeth marks in the rear of the car as it spits you out into the concrete wall that's there to catch anyone dumb enough to underestimate the turn.

Coming so soon off the back of F1 2010, Codemasters' inaugural HD take on the licence it snapped up from Sony in 2008, it's something of a revelation. Last year's game was competent and assured - and it did enough to ensure it was the best take on the sport since Geoff Crammond's heyday - but it was also a little lightweight in its handling.

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It started with a nuke.

Except, if you ask me, that's a popular misconception. The nuclear weapon that goes off in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare may have been the smoking gun that drove us toward things like Modern Warfare 2's infamous terrorist siege in a Russian airport, but the shock and awe at the heart of Infinity Ward's single-player campaigns began longer ago than that. Perhaps it was in September 1942, during Call of Duty 2's Russian campaign, when your commander told you there weren't enough weapons to go around and you should wait for the man next to you to die, then use his.

So it shouldn't be surprising that while other action threequels struggle to manage expectations set by simply Making Everything Bigger last time around, Modern Warfare 3's campaign still knows how to make an impact.

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One of the nicest things that happened last year was that Joe Danger was really successful. Built by four guys in a room in Guildford after they quit their studio jobs to make something they would want to play, it was a cartoon stunt bike game inspired by Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and Sonic the Hedgehog, and beneath its breezy, cheerful exterior thumped the heart of a wonderful high-scores game. We gave it an 8/10 and said, "If you like collecting things, going fast, beating times, posting scores... If you like video games, basically, you ought to like this."

Joe Danger: The Movie, which may yet end up on multiple formats (the original was a PSN exclusive largely because Sony was the friendliest option for developer Hello Games), finds tubby stuntman Joe on the set of a new film.

"The idea is that Joe's making a film," Hello MD Sean Murray tells Eurogamer. "It's one big film that you're making, and you're recording scenes from it. You record them out of sequence, but when you see them played back they start to make sense, and you start to see things that give away what's going on in the overall movie."

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Two months out from release and we still haven't been told anything substantial about the story behind Battlefield 3's campaign, and judging by what executive producer Patrick Bach has to say when we visit DICE to check on the game's progress at the end of August, it may well be kept under wraps most of the way to launch. However, we do have a good sense of what not to expect.

Asked about storytelling by a Rock, Paper, Shotgun competition winner, Bach rules out letting you do anything being too controversial.

"In a game where it's more authentic, when you have a gun in your hand and a child in front of you, what would happen?" he asks rhetorically. "Well, the player would probably shoot that child. We would be the ones to be blamed [for the player's actions]. We have to build our experiences so we don't put the player in experiences where they can do bad things."

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It can be difficult to get into a multiplayer shooter that's been out for even a week. Other players will know the layout of the maps, have a keener understanding of the weapons, and a better feel for the controls. Now imagine getting into a game that's been played obsessively for over a decade and it can feel next to impossible. 

Such is the case with Counter-Strike, Minh "Gooseman" Le and Jess Cliffe's competitive multiplayer mod from 1999. In the time since its inception we've had Halo and Call of Duty come and go and come back again, the word "pwned" has entered the pop-culture vernacular, and dual analogue sticks have become the norm for console games, allowing the FPS genre to thrive in a space previously dominated by Goldeneye. A lot has changed, so coming into Counter-Strike now can feel like an exercise in futility.

This hasn't stopped Valve from renovating its aging warhorse in a way accessible to today's market that may not be familiar with the legendary shooter. Their upcoming iteration, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, seeks to maintain the series' hardcore sensibilities, while opening it up for new players.

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At first, you might say that The Witness is set on an island. Then, it slowly starts to dawn on you that the game is the island: breezy, threatless and yet strangely mysterious. With its pebbles, trees, and little tufts of grass, it's both realistic and quietly abstract, in the manner of a Japanese garden. It's playful and sombre. It's intricate and wordless. It is, in short, the new game from Jonathan Blow, the creator of Braid.

Blow's island is dotted with hundreds of little computer screens, each one containing a single-panel maze puzzle. This is where most of the game's challenges initially seem to reside, isolated from the rest of the environment, well sign-posted and very approachable.

Each puzzle tasks you with finding a path through the maze to a certain point. Early puzzles see you tracing straight lines or, at most, taking a few 90 degree turns. They're simple, and they're meant to be: they slowly, wordlessly, teach you the rules of the game, and they do basic things like opening nearby locked doors, allowing you to explore more of the island - and, in turn, to try out more puzzles.

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In the words of an ancient meme, I love horses. What's more, after three years of working freelance in a home office dungeon, I've developed a flutter fixation. I have a Paddy Power account (other holes to pour your money into are available) that seeps small change to every ebb and flow of John McCririck.

Tecmo Koei knows this. It's seen deep into my lonely Ladbrokes heart, and now they think that they can push me one step nearer to the abyss. First off, they think they can get me to drag my coffee table into the kitchen to make enough space to get Kinect running. Secondly, they think they can turn me into this man…

Champion Jockey, you see, is the latest rendition of the G1 Jockey series - albeit newly monikered and repackaged to give it a degree of extra sway in the UK and Irish horseracing heartlands. You can play it whatever your motion control poison (Kinect, Move or Wii) although traditionalists can of course moodily finger their pads if they'd rather stay sofa-bound. The motion controls certainly make you look like a gargantuan tit - specifically, some sort of failed equestrian children's entertainer - but let it not be said that they don't slot neatly into the game.

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The set-up to Rise of Nightmares is pretty straightforward stuff. Josh is a drunk and a bit of an idiot. He's going on a marriage-saving trip through Eastern Europe when the train he's on is hijacked by scary weirdoes and his wife ends up kidnapped by an evil scientist who lives in a nasty castle and likes to do very strange experiments on people.

The pitch for Rise of Nightmares is a little more complicated. This is a free-movement first-person Kinect game for the survival horror audience: a title that is effectively going to test whether the Fruit Ninja and Dance Central crowd want to bash in shambling corpses and barrel through a campaign filled with grim horror and sickly amusing torture. It raises some interesting questions. Is Kinect up to it? And, beyond that, is the audience up for it?

The second question will only be answered on release. As for the first, though, it's looking tentatively positive. Sega's AM1 team, which is making the game, has implemented a back-to-basics control scheme with some clever asides - and while there's a bit of a learning curve, after a few minutes with Rise of Nightmares you'll pretty much get the hang of it.

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"Being honest, I don't know how DOTA got as big as it did, given how hard it is to sit down and play it with your friends," says Erik Johnson, the man charged by Valve boss Gabe Newell with the task of heading up the Dota 2 project.

Erik is absolutely right. Defense of the Ancients, the Warcraft 3 mod maintained and developed by the reclusive IceFrog, is virtually impenetrable. (You can bone up on the basics and history in our Story of DOTA.) Millions, possibly tens of millions play it, but for some it remains an incomprehensible curiosity: a game they're aware of, but not playing.

Valve hopes to change all that.

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Max Schaefer's tasted success, and he's got the scars to prove it. The CEO of Runic Games, a man with an engagingly gentle demeanour, placed a bet with his colleagues that the studio's first game wouldn't break a million units. If it did, he'd get a tattoo - and so too would the rest of his team.

Ask most people and they'd happily take that bet on. Torchlight was a humble action RPG from a fledgling studio, yet its loot-happy mechanics scratched an itch that's been nagging at players for years since Diablo 2's release in 2000.

"There were so many risks with what we did, because we were making a single-player RPG, which was poison," says Schaefer. "You don't do that, and we were releasing it primarily on digital distribution and at 20 dollars, so we had no idea if we would sell 50,000."

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Castle Crashers was all about teaming up with your mates to bash goons and rescue princesses, but there was one little twist. After defeating a boss, your team had to turn on each other and fight to the death, the last man standing rewarded with a kiss from the girl. Friends turn to enemies and, when the next level starts, back to friends again. If anything encapsulates Battleblock Theatre, the new game from Castle Crashers developer The Behemoth, it's that moment - turning to your mate with an innocent smile and planting a sword right between the eyes.

Known as Game #3 for most of its development, Battleblock Theatre has been around in various forms for a while; some will remember trailers touting a 2010 release. Though it's usually shown with two players, the lovely arcade cabinets The Behemoth are touring it in are now set up for four, and the developers have dropped hints there may be even more supported in the final version.

The setup: you're on an island ruled by mental cats, who have thousands of prisoners they send into deathtraps for amusement - the Battleblock Theatre. Levels begin with grainy intro cards, and the aesthetic carries over into the level furniture, where often bits and bobs like bushes are cardboard cutouts. More than anything else, as a Behemoth game, this looks the part: the developer has a distinctive style that just can't be copied, a mix of bong-eyed cats and cheery cartoon sadism that's instantly familiar.

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Who knew a dodgy haircut could provoke such an outcry? We now know Capcom itself insisted on Dante's extreme makeover, expecting a reaction. Nevertheless, his newly recruited hairdresser seems shocked by the ferocity of it.

"Responding to the haters," Ninja Theory co-founder Tameem Antoniades begins, working himself up to a statement of intent via a wounded chuckle: "We've got our plan and we're not changing it. It's a cohesive world that makes sense when you get your hands on it."

The knee-jerk outrage of change-fearing loyalists was premature, in other words. It's not that Ninja Theory doesn't care what fans think. Quite the opposite, actually, and we'll get to that shortly. But judging a largely unseen game on the haircut of its protagonist is, well, possibly not the best barometer.

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Steel Battalion was more famed for its controller than it was for its detailed, if dry, take on mech combat. Its 40-button, three-part centrepiece came in at three times the size of the Xbox console itself; its heft and intricacy pushed the price of the game beyond the reach of many, ensuring its status as a coveted curio and the stuff of legend.

Those who've been lucky enough to sit behind this loving tangle of hardware speak wistfully of the complex boot-up procedure that had you flicking multiple switches before you could even get moving, or the eject button that cruelly wiped your save file when pressed. (A button that was, originally, to be sheltered by a glass case that had to be shattered in order to get to it - Capcom, in a rare bout of level-headedness when designing this game, ultimately decided against it.)

The controller was the heart of the experience, so it's strange that for this sequel it's been completely ripped out and replaced with something that's just as novel - but hardly as stirring.

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Expansions for The Sims have become so regular and so familiar that they've rather appropriately become part of the gaming furniture. Rarely do they make headlines or arouse much interest beyond the (enormous) niche audience that is Sims addicts. So when the invitation arrives from EA for a special press day for The Sims 3 Pets, it's hard not to do a double take. Really? A whole press event? For pets?

The first thing we learn is that Sims 3 Pets is really two related, yet different products sheltering under a common banner. For PC players, it's an expansion in the traditional sense. For console players, it's a complete standalone game in its own right. Each has its own unique and exclusive wrinkles, and together they do add up to a substantial addition to the Sims canon, worthy of a moment in the spotlight.

There have been pet expansions for the previous two Sims games, but this time the pets are more than mobile accessories. These are fully customisable animal Sims, as much a member of the family as your human creations. Console players get to create cats and dogs, while the PC also adds horses to the mix. Not only do you get to pick their breed, from a list of over 100 for each pet type, but you can then tweak and customise their appearance to your heart's content.

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Once, we dreamed of worlds where we could be anyone, do anything. That day may yet come, but in 2011 the grand fantasy of a sandbox MMO is one that is served only by boutique or elder games which determinedly reward the eternal ardour of their existing fans but struggle to add that surface level of gloss and accessibility necessary to draw a gigantic crowd.

There is a reason that World of Warcraft is so successful. There is a reason that BioWare has made large elements of Star Wars: The Old Republic look and play a certain way. There is, similarly, a reason your first reaction to screenshots of WildStar, the major new MMO from NCsoft's Californian studio Carbine, will not be without familiarity. It wants people to come to it, and it seemingly knows some of the ways to make this happen.

Once they're there, though: then it wants to give them something else. It wants to let them play how they want to play - to be a bold middleground between that promise of true freedom and the more treadmill-like reality of traditional MMOs.

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Last year, Milestone's World Rally Championship ended a long hiatus from video games for one of motorsport's top-tier series. It wasn't the only one, of course - but while Codemasters' F1 2010 came with all the swagger and polish that's befitting of the world's noisiest circus, then WRC was perhaps a reflection of rallying's more diminutive following.

The worlds of Sébastien Loeb and Sebastian Vettel, though revolving around four wheels, couldn't be more different. Glamour and mud don't necessarily go hand in hand, and while champagne is the tipple of choice in the Grand Prix paddock club, when the WRC came to the UK last year and wanted to put on a show, it did so in a damp Cardiff car park where a thermos of tea was the only sensible choice of refreshment.

It's fitting, then, that last year's WRC game wasn't the glitziest. A bare-bones driving experience, it nailed the essentials of flinging a car through thick forests well enough, though it was lacking elsewhere. It's not unfair to say that, at times, WRC was as pretty as mud.

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A pre-presentation video isn't usually the most exciting part of a game preview, but after that achingly brief teaser from E3 that offered only a sun-blushed glance at the new Trials, all eyes were on the big-screen.

After a dizzying blast through landscapes of giant stone hands, canyon dashes, lunges through exploding buildings, and death-defying leaps through lumber-mill saw blades, there was no shortage of grins around the table.

Trials HD's greatest achievement and refinement over previous editions was in placing complete and utter control in the hands of the player. Prior to travelling to see RedLynx in Finland, I spent several evenings focusing more on the handling of the vehicles, rather than any serious attempt to compete on individual tracks. I wanted to commit the subtle nuances of the game to absolute muscle-memory so that when I got my hands on the new game, I would instantly feel any gremlins in the machine.

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Driver: San Francisco is a game that has its chief character in a coma for much of its duration, his consciousness flitting across The City by the Bay as he shifts from car to car. If it's a little disingenuous to draw a parallel and suggest that Driver has been a series on life support these past few years, it's definitely been drifting out in the ether for some time; by the time Driver: San Francisco is released, it'll be nearly five years since the brand was last seen on a home console.

That's a long time for a series that was once at the cutting edge of driving games, a place that its developer Reflections sees as its rightful home. The Newcastle studio's PlayStation launch title Destruction Derby was a brilliant Ballardian funfair ride, and with Driver's release in 1998 it introduced a then-novel cinematic sensibility to its cars and open world.

A couple of years later Reflections could proudly boast that it beat Rockstar to the punch in delivering an open-world 3D game in which you could leave your car and walk around the city, being the first to offer the kind of digital tourism that became so prevalent in the decade that followed. But famously, the empire would soon all come tumbling down.

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Music games are as nebulous and diverse as music itself, as we've very recently explored. Still, it's no surprise that when Q-Games turned its hand to the genre the results would be stranger yet - for if there's one thing that's defined the studio's PixelJunk series, it's a willingness to be different.

"I personally always feel uncomfortable if the game feels too familiar," says Dylan Cuthbert, Q-Games' founder and president whose long and illustrious career has taken him from Edgware to his current base in Kyoto, "but at the same time I like to have a small amount of familiarity in there." 

And so the PixelJunk games have always used the most simple of concepts as a springboard, be that the tower defence template at the core of Monsters or the 2D shmup mechanics that the forthcoming Sidescroller is built around. From there, though, ideas are spun out and explored, accompanied by often breathtaking visuals provided by an impressive roster of collaborators.

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At the peak of his popularity, Tintin's creator George Remi was in control of an organisation that must have looked a little like a video game company. When writing the Calculus Affair, for example, there were photographers despatched to Switzerland for reference material, as well as background artists, letterers, and Remi himself who would draw the characters. Now Tintin is in the hands of an actual video game company. No wonder he looks so at home in his new surroundings.

Ubisoft's been crafting a Tintin game to accompany the forthcoming film, and, as is often the case with these things, I'd been expecting the worst: a cartoon masterpiece reduced to a limply reconfigured FPS where you run around Marlinspike Hall, stealth-choking Nestor, collecting a trail of floating croissants and taking cover behind 2CVs. (I know Tintin's not French, incidentally, but I couldn't think of any Belgian cars.) Put those fears aside. What Ubisoft's actually done is much more interesting. It's taken Tintin, and turned him into Donkey Kong.

I certainly wasn't expecting that - yet it works surprisingly well. The game's 3D art is set on a 2D plane - if you've got a really expensive TV, by the bye, that art will be in actual pop-out 3D too - and you control Tintin as he jumps around from platform to platform in a series of teetering split-level environments, finishing off baddies and collecting trinkets.

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A few years back, when DICE was sitting down and putting together its plans for domination of the first-person shooter genre - plans that may well come to fruition later this year - it peered into the future and asked: what's the one feature that all first-person shooter games will have?

The answer, it was surmised, was destructibility. Walls would come tumbling down, cover would crumble and bullets would tear into the scenery with realistic conviction. Both Bad Company games took that challenge on, but disappointingly, very few others followed this path.

With the Red Faction series now officially marked down in history as a noble failure, it's just Bodycount that's left to probe that particular vision of the future - and it does so with gusto. Things fall apart in this game, and they do so with style. Playing through one of its levels is like being given the keys to the sweet shop then wreaking havoc with a heavy mallet.

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"Choice and consequence" may be the action-adventure cliché du jour, but being able to define your own combat style through a suite of overlapping toys is definitely up there too. Pretty much ever since BioShock invited us to paralyse splicers with electricity and then whack 'em with a wrench, everyone's been at it.

Typically though, with great power comes great limitation, and in order to keep worlds like Rapture from descending into anarchy mechanically as well as narratively, designers have become jailors, building environments around you like gilded cages that lock you away from too much imagination.

So it's pretty interesting to sit down and watch Arkane Studios' Harvey Smith and Raf Colantonio play around with the tools you get in Dishonored, their first-person stealth game about an assassin with magical powers, because they insist they've taken the opposite approach.

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It's more than just the concrete that comes tumbling down in Ridge Racer Unbounded. In this, Finnish developer Bugbear's first game in coming up to five years, the very definition of a series that's been about overstated drifts and nitrous trails is smashed to pieces too. In the rubble that's left at the end of a race, it's hard to pick out where exactly Namco's racing staple has got to.

Gone are the high-gloss world, LED trails and eccentric handling of the Ridge Racers of old; in their place is a punchy, physical and playful game with a very literal impact. It's about driving through things rather than fishtailing around them, and it couldn't feel further removed from what's gone before.

There's been no shortage of disquiet since Unbounded's unveiling, and in a way the naysayers are right: as a Ridge Racer game in the traditional sense, this feels like a failure.

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You would imagine that getting to play The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for the first time is an enormous pleasure, but let me tell you a secret: it is not.

It probably will be for you, of course, because you will get to take your time playing with the character creator, running your fingers through the long grass and listening to water rushing downriver before you even have to think about following one of those tempting icons that keeps flashing up on your compass.

It wasn't unusual for people playing Oblivion to log well over 100 hours, and if you want to get the most out of Bethesda Game Studios' unique RPGs, you need that sort of time to do so. These are games where you create your own stories through exploration as much as you rely on the script, and you can't do that in a weekend or even a month of Sundays.

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Ahead of my visit to Blizzard's Californian base for a preview of the Diablo III beta, I was told that there was going to be a major announcement. The developer's press office seemed unusually anxious about how it would be received.

Only one thing makes games companies this nervous about messaging: asking players for more money. But when Rob Pardo, Blizzard's vice president of game design, announced Diablo III's real money auction house, all I could do was laugh to myself at the sheer audacity of the move.

Although trading game items for real-world cash is almost as old as online gaming itself, the practice carries a stigma - of cheating, scamming, spam, and the dodgy ethics and inhumane working practices of black-market 'gold farmers'. Diablo III's auction house will be the first major authorised real money trading market in games. As such, it's both historic and controversial.

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For many games or sports, one playing field is quite enough. A rugby, football or hockey pitch need never change, while the ageless simplicity of the chessboard belies the complexity of the many matches that have been fought across it.

To alter any of these gaming arenas would, depending upon your point of view, be either an act of sacrilege or an act of revolution. And anyway, they have never been the point of the game, never the focus. They exist only as a platform upon which the strategies, tactics and even personalities of their players can be pitted against one another in endless combinations.

Once upon a time this was the case for League of Legends, a game that only ever needed one map, and a map whose origins can be traced back to the aging Warcraft 3 mod Defense of the Ancients (DotA).

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You've got to feel sorry for new IP: we bleat for it all the time, then Capcom whips the covers off its first-ever open world game, a titan-slaying adventure of breathtaking scope. And then people say "Monster Hunter meets Demon's Souls, innit."

The comparisons aren't without basis: many games - Monster Hunter, Oblivion, Demon's Souls, and Shadow of the Colossus - are influences here. But Dragon's Dogma is no patchwork, and casting it as a simple blend of what's gone before doesn't illuminate a game that plays differently from any of them.

On offer in this latest hands-on is a dungeon section from near the game's beginning, and a Griffin boss fight, each played with a different class - the warrior for the former (sword and shield) and the strider for the latter (bow and daggers). You play a character called Arisen – urgh – trying to hunt down the dragon who's bound to his heart: this eponymous sod gives Arisen instructions throughout the game, hence the title, but at this point you're just chasing it down.

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Once upon a time, before EA Sports hired the Top Men who masterminded FIFA's revival in the late 2000s, our football-gaming lives were all about Pro Evolution Soccer, and the arrival of each new instalment was the equivalent of what cracking the seal on the tomb of Tutankhamen would have been to archaeologists - except we got to do it annually. Twice annually, if we had chipped PS2s and imported versions of Japanese sister-series Winning Eleven, which of course we did.

Thanks in part to the Konami development team's remoteness and the huge language barrier, new instalments - even of PES, which was made pretty much exclusively for the series' large European audience - often arrived with only ambiguous fanfare, and it was left to gamers to decipher the hieroglyphic subtleties encoded beneath the sands of physics tweaks and improved visuals.

Since FIFA has been top dog, all that has changed. New instalments of EA's series are preceded by detailed descriptions of every new feature, usually badged up by buzz-phrases like "Personality Plus".

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"It was a struggle". That's Damien Kieken, the multiplayer game director for Assassin's Creed, on the prospect of incorporating competitive game modes into a series designed around single player stealth, freedom of movement and one hit kills.

The announcement of multiplayer in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood certainly raised skeptical eyebrows, but the end result won many over with its shrewd understanding of how best to transfer the series' strengths to an online arena. Even so, Damien admits that the multiplayer aspect was "quite complex and hard to get into".

"We saw that when players get it, it was OK, but when you begin you have a lot of things to learn", he accepts. "That's why we're bringing in the Deathmatch mode."

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Rage begins in outer space. There's a meteor floating slowly towards the Earth at thousands of miles per second, it's going to smash everything to pieces and everyone's going to die. You get to watch it scattering dust in Saturn's rings and glancing off the moon as it travels inexorably towards us – and the start of another post-apocalyptic first-person shooter.

For me though, Rage began exactly four years ago. On 2nd August 2007 I was sitting in the audience at QuakeCon when id Software announced the identity of its next proper game after Doom 3. It was going to be a first-person shooter but it was also going to have driving bits, and it was called Rage.

Back then the developer's fans – myself included – were broadly excited, but also privately concerned that this new racer-shooter hybrid might not be a proper id game. Proper id games are about fidelity in control, extreme violence, and ingeniously designed levels packed with fierce monsters. First and foremost they are proudly corridor-driven first-person shooters.

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Diablo III has hardly been under wraps since its Paris unveiling three years ago. It's been playable at BlizzCons and other events, and Blizzard's currently open mood has allowed press and punters to follow its development in some detail.

But last week was the first time the studio has invited press to its Orange County campus for a full briefing on the game - from first principles to latest developments, including a hands-on preview of the coming public beta. Despite the game's familiarity, we emerged from a 100-minute presentation and Q&A with our heads spinning - from the accumulated mountain of detail on this apparently simple and visceral game, from its quite dizzying quality, but also from the boldness of the thinking behind it.

The big shock is an officially sanctioned real money auction house - an in-game eBay - where players will be able to sell loot to each other in their local currency. This development is so daring, complex and potentially controversial, we'll discuss it separately in a full article soon. There'll be a separate but functionally identical auction house where players can trade using game gold.

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Certain gamers understand ennui. An example would be fighting game fans, particularly those who love Capcom, in these months following Marvel Vs Capcom 3 and Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition. The first was a gorgeous, sparkly nothing, and the second was the point of diminishing returns for the peerless SFIV. So when the Street Fighter X Tekken logo comes up, it almost takes a heave to put your hands on the fightstick. Come on: another one?

The fight starts and, like a flaming Dragon Punch to the chin, Street Fighter X Tekken hits with amazing force: forget about faffing around with Spider-Man. It looks like SFIV, and in many cases characters are using moves from SFIV, but this has moved very far from SFIV – and it doesn't merely feel different, but fresh. Street Fighter X Tekken is faster, much more combo-oriented, incredible looking and - most importantly of all - a fighter that brawls just as well as it dances.

Each fight is between teams of two characters - and when one of the characters is KO'd, the round is over. Switching is done by pressing both medium attack buttons, but this 'normal' tag is slow and leaves the exiting and entering character vulnerable for a split second. Much safer and quicker is a tag out while your opponent's prone body is flying through the air. For such a purpose, there are launchers.

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Seattle, the town that brought us diverse cultural artifacts ranging from Kurt Cobain to Frasier has another movement to add to its repertoire: independent games development. To celebrate this phenomenon, Jake Kazdal, founder of Haunted Temple Studios (creators of Eurogamer Expo favourite Skulls of the Shogun) invited a bunch of local game developers to strut their stuff in the first Seattle Indies Expo.

The rationale for why Seattle has such a thriving indie scene is disappointingly devoid of mystery. "Seattle's got so many ex-Bungie, ex-Valve, ex-Nintendo, ex-Microsoft, ex-whatever," Kazdal notes. When asked why so many of them leave their cushy jobs to go indie, the answer's just as simple. "A lot of them are getting laid off," Kazdal bluntly replies.

Rather than dwell on this, Kazdal remains optimistic. "There's finally valid distribution for this stuff," he adds. "With iPhone you don't need a publisher. People can just take a chance. Steam has been great for that stuff and that's in Seattle too. With Xbox Live Arcade, Xbox Live Indie Games, and PlayStation Network this is a mainstream thing now. It's not mainstream in the sense that it's going to topple Modern Warfare 3, but its big enough that people can say, 'f*** big games. I want to go do my own thing.'"

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With the engine off, you could almost mistake TrackMania for a normal racing game. The car model is glossy and nicely detailed, and the tarmac of the road looks suitably rugged - despite the faint suspicion that the course has something strange planned as it heads towards the horizon. Then you put your foot down and your car comes to life. By the time you hit that first jump - the one that sends you zooming into the sky with almost nothing to hold you back - the TrackMania difference is clear.

One of the differences, anyway. TrackMania is about building as much as it is about racing. This is hair-trigger stuff: punchy Matchbox motors running over the most bizarre corkscrewing Scalextric tracks you can think to construct. It feels like it’s been part of the PC racing scene forever, and yet the latest game is the first true sequel.

And it’s a sequel in which returning players will immediately feel right at home. Driving on those narrow, intricate courses, nestled behind either a keyboard set-up or a control pad, your race will take you over huge jumps, through brain-jangling loop-de-loops, and up precarious wall-runs. Sure, TrackMania 2 will include damage modelling for the first time, but it’s kept things purely cosmetic. Nothing has been allowed to meddle with the fierce arcade predictability you need for these twitchiest of racing tracks - even if a little internal meddling has already given the cars a touch more weight as they lurch and drift around corners.

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Rayman Origins doesn’t take an old school approach to game design merely because it’s a 2D sidescroller based around an aging Ubisoft mascot. It’s old school because it’s hard. Not Demon’s Souls hard, perhaps, but it would still rather send you to your doom than provide you with a glowing breadcrumb trail or one of those last-minute rewind getaways beloved of The Prince of Persia. You’ll die in Rayman Origins, and you’ll die quite a lot. You’ll get over all that, though, because the game is so precise, and because it’s so joyfully intricate.

Leaving the Rabbids behind him, Rayman’s back on pure platforming territory, assisted by drop-in co-op buddies in a hand-drawn adventure that’s delivered via Ubisoft’s new UbiArt framework. That’s a suite of tools that apparently lets the publisher’s designers put games together without half the fuss that’s normally associated with that sort of thing, and what the publisher’s designers – Ubisoft Montpelier, in fact – have put together on this occasion is a grinning cavalcade of dribbling freaks.

Rayman Origins’ art is beautiful, but its subject matter is very rarely beauty itself. Instead, this is a world built of gorse bush thorns and slack-jawed bullies. It's a place where horrible gummy monsters lurk in the bottom of gooey pits, and where plants come with glittering fangs and huge, bulbous noses. It looks like European political cartooning at its meanest – which is saying something – and when it moves, when it bounces and oozes and squelches before the unblinking gaze of your HD television, it recalls the boils and gristles and Band-Aid love of early Ren & Stimpy.

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How much do you know about marine biology? Now, I'm not talking about that creepy subset of real-world science where you learn how clams can get depressed or how sea urchins mate (the answer is "carefully"). I'm talking about Space Marine biology. Because whether or not you're excited about Relic's upcoming 3rd person action game could probably come down to how clued up you are.

Thanks to extensive genetic augmentation, each Space Marine is 7'6'' tall and weighs 700lbs before you put the armour on. They have a third lung and a second heart that's capable of pumping steroids or adrenaline into the first. They're implanted with something called Larraman's Organ, a high-tech liver that allows them to survive by eating dirt. Their salivary glands allow them to spit poison or chew through iron bars. And when they choose to sweat, they secrete a waxy substance that can protect them from extreme temperatures or even a vacuum.

They are superheroes hand-designed to protect humanity. They're also quite literally heavy metal fascists. Many Space Marines feel the need to protect "mortals" gets in the way of their job of eliminating the enemies of the Imperium.

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Last year, we got two Bond games, one from Bizarre Creations and one from Eurocom, because there was no movie on the way. This year, there is a movie on the way - it's called James Bond and the Very Sinister Ox, apparently, and it co-stars Christopher Lambert as a deranged cross-country cyclist who wants to eat the moon - but there is no Bizarre Creations anymore. Luckily, we still have Eurocom, or England would be a pretty depressing place around about now.

GoldenEye 007 is one of the best shooters on the Wii - fast-paced, well-tuned to pad or motion controls, and reasonably pretty to boot - and we're about to see if that praise is less faint than it sounds. Eurocom didn't have a lot of competition on Nintendo's machine, but now the game's coming to the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 after a bit of a tidy-up and a few new modes, we're going to find out how it really stacks up.

I suspect it will still be a lot of fun, and witnessing an early build suggests it's not going to look too out of place on HD consoles either. This isn't a case of simply taking the original game and stuffing it onto more powerful machines with the edges of the graphics made a little sharper. Eurocom's apparently constructed a new engine, that's right, “from the ground up” for this one, and has delved into the code, replacing the textures, rebuilding the geometry, throwing in new animations, lighting, and particle effects, and even switching out the old AI. The levels are the same in basic structure - a look at the Archangelsk Dam infiltration suggests Eurocom's doing a beat-for-beat reworking of the Wii game's campaign - but they look a lot nicer now. Rocks are rockier, rain is rainier, and Daniel Craig looks a little clammier, as if he should be at home with a Beechams rather than titting around in complex breaking the necks of a series of Russian gentlemen.

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"This time you're playing Death, another of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. You may remember in the first game that War was gone for a century for accidentally bringing about the apocalypse. In this game you have to restore mankind in order to rescue your brother.

"Darksiders 2 takes place in the Abyssal Plane. At this time in the game, we need an audience with the Lord of Bones. He's kind of an air-traffic director for souls."

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Before he became a game designer full-time, Simon Oliver made interactive exhibits for museums. I think a little of that kind of thing may have rubbed off on Okabu. I'm not trying to taint his latest project by suggesting it's anything like a piece of educational software, but it has a sweet-natured environmental message and a rigorous logic to its challenges. Whatever your age, it wants to make you think. You play as a cloud, you'll spend a lot of time wondering how water's going to interact with other elements, and the whole thing, with its neat little fields, its puzzles about harvests and its creeping threat of industrialisation, comes across like an agrarian Super Mario World. Put that on the back of the box.

There won't be a box of course. Okabu is the first straight-up console title from Oliver's tiny HandCircus outfit - the micro-studio that made its name with the Rolando platformers for iOS - and it's appearing on PSN later this year. Like his previous offerings, Okabu's colourful and cheery, and it's been built by a handful of people (just five this time): a fact that makes its sprawling levels, its ingenious, race-tuned mini-games, and its playful, detail-rich hub worlds quietly astonishing.

As with Rolando, the visuals are being handled by the illustrator Mikko Walamies, but there's no danger that anyone's going to mistake Okabu for LocoRoco. Instead, this is a game where the comfortable chunkiness of the art complements a varied design and some inventive mechanics.

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Remember that bit in The Iron Man where the Iron Man chucks himself off a cliff? Maybe he falls, actually – I haven't read it in a while. Anyway, the Iron Man topples off this cliff – because he's sad, because he's a metaphor for the Cold War, or because life is so lonely and pointless that toppling off cliffs is the only smart thing to do – and when he hits the ground he smashes into hundreds of pieces.

Then, the pieces start gathering themselves back together. An eyeball connects to a hand, the hand scurries over to a leg, to a torso, another leg, an arm. It's tragic and moving and all a little bit melancholy. That's what I thought about when I first saw NeverDead. NeverDead is that scene, writ large, and played for laughs.

I'd heard about NeverDead a few months back, but had gotten it into my head that it was some kind of zombie survival game. That's, um, not correct. In fact, now that I've spent a bit of time with a preview build, I can tell you that NeverDead's nothing like that whatsoever. Instead, what it is like is a slapstick shooter in which you can tear your own body apart for fun and profit. You can hop around on one foot, filling enemies with hot lead. You can wield a brutal butterfly blade even if you're down to your last arm. You can bounce your disembodied skull around like a basketball with some teeth wedged into it. Let's get this out of the way right now: I'm going to pre-order this game.

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When faced with a new fantasy world it's easy to hide behind your hand and do a Muttley-giggle. The sprawling Plains of Erathell? The enchanted forests of Dalentarth? Hah! Give it up and go home LARP-boy! You won't catch me employed by the Warsworn to empty the Brigahall Caverns of the Niskaru taint! That's for losers! I'll probably just kill a few more dragons in Skyrim instead…

Opening gambits with high fantasy games in unfamiliar worlds are always a little strained. Even Reckoning's play area, the Faelands, sounds like a term that Richard Littlejohn would use as a put-down. No matter how daft those names might strike you as at first though, and no matter how earnest the game is, it's the fifty or so hours you plough into them that'll make them your reality. What sounds like an odd collection of syllables today will trip off the tongue as easily as Cyrodiil or Azeroth tomorrow.

Well, hopefully they will. Reckoning was first shown off at this year's GDC alongside a fanfare of the nerd royalty involved: Ken 'Morrowind' Rolston, Todd 'Spawn' McFarlane and RA 'Shelves devoted to me in Waterstones' Salvatore all have a hand in the project, while their underlings have been hired from some of the greatest Western RPG houses around. A shame, then, that the showing itself lacked its own voice – Oblivion-esque character creation met a stat-fuelled version of God of War's 'bish-bosh' combat, while a more open version of Fable's Albion nuzzled up to the gold-exclamation marked quests of World of Warcraft.

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The chief unique selling point of Defiance was announced long before the title or any other details about this massively multiplayer action game were.

A joint project between ambitious online gaming startup Trion - which recently scored a hit with its first game Rift - and the Syfy TV channel, the game would offer a science-fiction universe in two live media simultaneously. Events in the TV show would influence those in the game, and vice versa.

As it turned out, there was an even more audacious claim and unlikely link-up for Trion to make when it came to finally unveil Defiance. At E3 last month, the game was demoed to press and industry live on two consoles, a PlayStation 3 - and an Xbox 360.

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