Dogs in games tend to come in two varieties. There are the adorably cute ones: loveable, enthusiastic pups who like nothing better than to be stroked, bathed or decked out in Mario-themed headwear. And then there are the heroic ones, the loyal companions who'll dig up treasures and bravely tug at the trousers of villains in battle.

So it's refreshing to play a game which reminds you of the universal truth that dogs are actually terrifically stupid. The stars of the show here are Max and Ralph, who've managed to get their tongues knotted together. Meanwhile your omnipotent finger must tap, slide and swipe to keep them out of trouble as they dumbly blunder onwards, wide grins spread across their slobbering jaws.

With standard virtual d-pad controls, the platforming would be a doddle, but developer Mojo Bones has opted for a control scheme to convey the awkwardness of controlling two doltish canines at once. As they gambol along automatically, you'll need to pull back on one of the dogs to catapult the pair over gaps and hazards. Alternatively, you can drag one underneath a platform to collect the bone tokens below, or tap both dogs to drop down from a higher level. Swing a dangling dog in an arc, and you can earn a score bonus for collecting eight or more tokens in a single swipe. There's a pleasing sense of elasticity and weight as you ping them about the place, particularly when you're swinging from tyres or working your way along a patch of sticky mud in a manner oddly akin to negotiating monkey bars.

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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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This year's Ultimate Fighting Championship is off to an excellent start - and a controversial one. UFC 143 delivered one of the most hotly debated fights of recent times.

With current UFC Welterweight Champion Georges St-Pierre still out of action with a knee injury, it was left down to former Strikeforce Champion Nick Diaz and former WEC Champion Carlos Condit to duke it out for the Interim Title. Diaz was the hot favourite to win, coming off an 11-win streak with his world-class boxing. But by playing an outside striking game and evading whenever his back was pressed against the cage, Condit secured a Unanimous Decision that prompted MMA forums across the globe to explode with polarised opinions.

This was a match that, while unworthy of a Fight of the Night accolade, perfectly demonstrated the importance of knowing your opponent's strengths and weaknesses while formulating an effective strategy based on your own skills. It's also something which the UFC Undisputed game series has worked hard to replicate, with a comprehensive fighting system that maintains the MMA mantra of dictating the pace and imposing your will. And in terms of striking a balance between challenge, accessibility and fun, Undisputed 3 is Yuke's most well rounded fighter to date.

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Candy Train looks so much like a PopCap game that it's practically a parody. The title screen is filled with bright colours and shiny, boiled-sweet textures, the sound track is cartoonishly adorable with its busy chuff-chuff-chuffing and its uncommonly cheery rail whistles.

Even the icon you'll see on your iPhone looks like the kind of thing Willy Wonka might hand out to tranquilise problematic visitors before an Oompa Loompa drops them off in a back alley somewhere. It's PopCap Concentrate, PopCap Imax, and that means it's all the weirder when you actually sit down to play Candy Train, and realise it was designed and built by utter bastards.

Tellingly, the game belongs to PopCap's 4th & Battery brand - a label that was formed to release oddities like the brilliantly nasty Unpleasant Horse. Candy Train actually predates its iOS version, however. After its initial debut on the PopCap website back in 2001, it languished, too hard, too punishing for the Bejeweled crowd, until it turned up on the App Store for free in the middle of last year. I've been playing it ever since, and making practically no headway.

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An argument has been raging among the judging panel of the Independent Games Festival. The flashpoint: whether the moody mystery narrative of Dear Esther constitutes a game at all.

What, no high-score table? Where are the guns? Dialogue trees? How do I level up? Surely there's some sort of keycard puzzle? In fact, no. There isn't even a button for interaction. You can't run or jump. You move through the environment - a wind-blasted Hebridean island - simply observing and absorbing. The only puzzle is the obscure, lyrical narrative itself.

Formerly a Half-Life 2 mod by university lecturer Dr Dan Pinchbeck, and now given an extremely fancy refab at the hands of Mirror's Edge artist Rob Briscoe, Dear Esther is a first-person experience and uses many of the narrative tricks familiar to Valve's games, silently building a story through the careful drawing of the world around you.

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The original Motorola Xoom was supposed to be the tablet which unseated Apple's iPad and established a glorious new era of Android-powered slate supremacy. It was running Google's first truly tablet-focused OS - codenamed Honeycomb - and offered blistering dual-core processing power.

Despite the considerable hype, the Xoom ultimately failed to live up to expectation. Compared to the slim and elegant iPad, it appeared chubby and unattractive. Google's software felt unfinished, and a worrying lack of tablet-specific applications - a problem exacerbated by Google's continuing insistence that developers create downloads that are able to function across both phones and large-screen devices - made it a hard sell. Within months, the Xoom was being heavily discounted by retailers, and other Android tablets swept in to steal the limelight.

Motorola is in this game for the long haul, though. Having recently been acquired by Google in a deal worth $12.5 billion, the American telecoms veteran is back in the ring with two new tablet devices: the Xoom 2 and the Xoom 2 Media Edition. Both boast dual-core processors and 1GB of RAM, and sport PowerVR SGX540 graphics processing units. In fact, the two tablets are practically identical, save for one fairly significant detail: the Xoom 2 has a 10.1-inch screen, while the Media Edition has a smaller 8.2-inch display.

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The shorthand for ModNation Racers has always been Mario Kart meets LittleBigPlanet. Well, the Mario Kart bit is certainly true.

Sony's jouncing, knockabout title flings it players around hairpin tracks where they're free to collect weapons (although, in a WipEout-ish twist, they can now convert them into boost), tackle crazy jumps, zip through giant Tiki Skulls and even pick up a tiny, crucial jolt of nitro at the very beginning of a race if they can start their engines at just the right moment. It's borrowed almost all of its best ideas, perhaps, but it's a very entertaining homage.

The whole LittleBigPlanet thing is a bit misleading, though. ModNation is built around user-generated content, but it takes an entirely different approach to that offered by Media Molecule.

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Recently I was chatting to fellow Eurogamer contributor and official Nicest Man In Games Journalism Christian Donlan about the important issues of the day. Opening with a discussion about Friz Freleng and Robert Palmer - like any good conversation should - the topic then turned to in-game buttons on iOS, and how some are much better than others, even though the interaction itself is no different.

We discussed the way you get a real 'feel' from apps when you press their icon; similarly, both of us felt the swiping motion to unlock an iDevice was somehow incredibly satisfying. We talked about a shared dislike of in-game buttons in titles like League of Evil, and then Chris said something that initially sounded really stupid, but turned out to be actually quite brilliant.

"The best single button-press on iOS is probably Canabalt," he said. "And there isn't a button. But it feels like one. And there's no sound. But you sort of hear it in your finger."

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"Daddy!" My daughter is standing in the doorway to my home office, arms crossed, her face bearing the sort of petulant look that only five-year-old girls can pull off. "You're missing all the fun!" Her message duly delivered she gives a haughty turn and runs back to the living room. That'll teach me to check my emails when Happy Action Theater is on.

If that sounds like an almost too perfect moment, the sort of thing an advertising executive would come up with, then imagine my surprise to be confronted with it, unscripted, in real life. Yet there it is. Natural, unrehearsed, honest passion. And this from a girl who has been, at best, ambivalent about gaming despite being raised in a house filled with consoles.

But that was before Happy Action Theater came along, bringing with it gameplay that she instinctively understood. That is to say, no gameplay at all.

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A general problem among fantasy games is they have incredibly crap titles. It's pretty hard to work yourself up to play something called Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer, because it's a formulaic title that suggests the game itself will be similarly uninspired, full of beardy dwarves and willowy nymphs. Ascension has beards, sure - but the game they hide is beautiful.

This is a deck-building card game with hundreds of antecedents, but the one that matters is Dominion. As there, you begin with a deck of 10 bog-standard cards and use them to bag ones from various sections of the board - these cards then enter your discard pile, and crop up in future hands. Your hand is used to build up as much mana and/or power as possible, and these stats are then what can be used to defeat or acquire any of the five cards in the middle of the board.

Building your hand is a tricky business, entirely contingent on what the board shows. Including the expansion 'Return of the Fallen', there are four types of hero cards (Enlightened, Lifebound, Mechana and Void) each of which leans towards a specific playstyle. It's essential to build a deck containing cards that work together, in other words, to enable you to stack abilities and squeeze as much juice as possible out of every turn.

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Balloons are not the most obviously exciting means of video game conveyance - they're not exactly up there with the mine cart or the Warthog for thrill-a-minute returns - and for a while Sir Benfro's Brilliant Balloon seems to fall foul of this, as you stutter gormlessly along beneath a sack of fireflies, snagging on scenery to halt your already ponderous progress. For a generation of smartphone gamers in thrall to running and swooping, floating feels like a backwards step.

Indeed, I more or less gave up on Sir Benfro after 10 minutes of pecking away at my iPhone screen for this very reason, but over the next few days something brought me back. Perhaps it was recollections of the beautiful, pencil-shaded environments that Sir Benfro navigates, which are so warm and teeming with obscure flowers and animals. Or perhaps it was the strings and woodwind that accompany your flight, or the choir of screeching children that cheer as you gather momentum.

Given a second chance at a gentler pace, Benfro made a lot more sense. He floats up when you hold your finger on the screen and descends when you don't, and sustained touches build speed while little pecks arrest it. Once you get used to the behaviour of the controls and the creatures that try to interfere with Benfro's adventuring, you start chaining together majestic arcs that carry you steadily through caves and forests, and you feel a lot more at home with the flow of the game.

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The One Piece universe offers a clutch of potent ingredients for the prospective video game tie-in. For one, the lively Shonen Jump manga chooses the Saturday-morning-cartoon side of swashbuckling pirates for its theme - a celebration of primary-colour braggadocio and easy treasure hunting on desert islands that fits the medium like a glove.

Then there's the brash combat, all Super Smash Bros-style starry effects and speed-blurred limbs, perfect for thoughtless button-mash ecstasy. And, of course, the members of the Straw Hat Pirates pack intrigue and humour within their tight-knit, motley social group, a cat's cradle of affections and rivalries from which many an easily-written cut-scene may tumble. Namco Bandai understands the richness of the license, and One Piece Unlimited Cruise SP is no less than the 32nd game in a series that only debuted in 2000.

In truth, it's a repackaging of two previous Nintendo Wii titles - One Piece Unlimited Cruise 1: The Treasure Beneath The Waves and One Piece Unlimited Cruise 2: Awakening of a Hero - with some bits removed and some added. At least, that's what the Japanese players were offered. The European version is a different matter entirely. Reportedly, the need for five different language subs (all voice acting remains in Japanese) took up enough cartridge space to force Namco Bandai to simply drop the entire second Episode from the package, a fact the publisher has kept cheekily quiet ahead of release.

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Editor's note: this is an import review of the Japanese version of Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 on PlayStation Vita. The game is released in Europe and the US at the same time as Vita itself on 22nd February.

It took over a decade for the follow-up to Marvel vs. Capcom 2 to arrive, and twelve months on we find ourselves preparing for a third helping of a dish that's traditionally appealed to those with a sweet tooth. Marvel vs. Capcom 3's extended combos, impossible aerial scrapes and on-screen fireworks have made a perfect counterpoint to the more studied and graceful pugilism of Street Fighter.

There's more to it than that, though - much, much more. The former part of Marvel vs. Capcom's formula brings bold colours plastered across a screen that screams with stylised lettering and motion lines, the fighting infused with comic-book intensity.

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Of all the comic book heroes, it is invariably Superman who ends up with the worst games. There's an inherent problem - how can you build a challenge around a character whose default setting is God mode?

Well, you could make a whole world from blinding fog, as happened with Superman 64, a serious contender for most incompetent game ever made. Or you can forget about it like Superman Returns, and have enemies who can kill him quite easily. Poor as Superman Returns was, however, it had two great ideas - make the flying amazing, and somehow tie Superman's 'health' to the city.

Tiger Games' Superman takes these concepts and soars with them, building a 2D Metropolis that Superman can zoom around and cover in less than a minute, then throwing crisis after crisis at the city rather than the hero. The touch-screen controls are fine, though not quite offering Super Crate Box levels of precision, and one of the two buttons is dedicated entirely to making Superman go faster - whether flying or running.

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Making a new tennis game must be a daunting prospect given that two series have, like Novak Djokovic turning the screw on a flagging opponent, already got every angle covered. On one side of the court there's the zesty arcade brio of Virtua Tennis, with the controlled, sim-like approach of Top Spin on the other. Perhaps unsurprisingly, EA Sports has gone for something in between, but it's another sports game it most resembles.

Grand Slam Tennis might as well be called FIFA Tennis. It's a brand thing, and it's a bland thing, too - all crisp, sterile menus, ESPN swooshes bookending replays, tournament icons swooping in after every point, licensed players and stadia. But FIFA has been benefitting from its maker's iterative approach to sequels for years; formerly raw and unfocused, it's been tweaked and refined over the years into the well-oiled machine it is now. Grand Slam Tennis 2 has but a single predecessor, and that was a Wii game. Essentially, this is a debut all over again.

The first made a bit of a splash on Wii as the first title to support the original, unwieldy MotionPlus dongle, and it played a solid game, with acceptably precise motion controls and a caricatured look that was a perfect fit for its host console. Naturally, the visual style is more realistic here, but that serves only to highlight what's missing.

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Over the past couple of weeks, I've been in an ongoing debate with a colleague who has been arguing that free will either does not exist or, if it does, the only choices we can make are arbitrary. I've been arguing the opposite, but after playing King Arthur 2, I'm starting to agree with him.

What I'd really like to do is feel my squires strap my armour about my body while my hand grasps at the pommel of the sword I won, before staring down at the vast armies I've amassed from the tallest tower of the castle I've constructed and then, finally, turning to meet the eyes of my beloved Melissa, the woman I first met at the royal court in London.

But it turns out that King Arthur 2: The Role-playing Wargame doesn't want me to have more than one army just yet, I'm not allowed to build castles wherever I want to, and a wordless Melissa offers no explanation for why she won't marry me but will, instead, dispassionately embrace any other knight I nudge toward her.

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Batman! Biff! Read this massive legal agreement before playing! Pow! And this one! We know it's a pain, you'll be playing soon. Now your Games for Windows Live ID! Now create a Warner Bros. ID! Checking for downloadable content...

Holy b****cks. Class-based shooter Gotham City Impostors snuck out of Warner's back door earlier this week, which strikes you as unusual for a first-person shooter based on one of the biggest licenses around and made by Monolith, developers of Condemned and FEAR. Something to do with its extraordinarily large amount of in-game purchases, perhaps? Or maybe Gotham City Impostors isn't... you know... any good?

Its matchmaking system certainly isn't. It almost never works quickly or smoothly - instead, be prepared for regular waits of five to 10 minutes, frequent cancellations and dropouts, and many disconnections. This is an exchange two of my teammates had as a new game finally started:

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Given that running games are so prevalent these days, it seems a bit mental that it's taken this long for someone to produce a good one starring a dog. After all, dogs practically invented running. They certainly bang on about it enough, bouncing around the kitchen whenever anyone so much as glances at a wellington boot. But hey, the wait is over thanks to Big Pixel Studios' Off the Leash.

You know the drill by now and this is only a gentle variation. Using tilt controls, you direct a scampering hound up into the screen, swerving to avoid pools, fences and police cars (dogs have been banned, you see - hence all the running away). Or alternatively you swerve towards things - to gather food for levelling up, other dogs for building a merry train of friends, and coins for spending at the in-game shop.

There's a timer on-screen most of the time, ticking down, and you need to hit certain checkpoints before it expires or else you'll run smack bang into a police roadblock. You can better your chances of making it further by levelling up, which increases your speed, and by gathering other dogs to your cause, because as they scamper in your wake they create a wider footprint, which helps in hoovering up collectables. There are also power-ups like a magnet, a chili speed boost and a doggy icon that doubles the number of pooches in your parade.

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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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The rise of mobile devices has refuelled the turn-based strategy genre, and you won't find a better example - at least on Windows Phone 7 - than the slickly designed Armed.

Forgive us for being so shallow, but it's impossible to ignore how good Armed looks nestled in the palm of your hand. Pinching the screen alternatively zooms out the camera to a bird's-eye table top viewpoint, or allows it to delve right in among the rumbling sci-fi tanks and laser-fire-filled action.

You'll be hard-pressed to pick a favourite between the two camera styles. The more panned-out perspective offers the best overview of the battlefield, but you'll still need to scroll across the game's map to keep all of your forces in check. At the same time, you'll be forced to zoom in to properly select and manoeuvre individual troop units, which can become a little fiddly from too great a distance.

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There's a takeout place near my apartment called Nong's Khao Man Gai that serves only one dish comprised of three simple ingredients: rice, chicken, and soybean sauce. By all accounts that should add up to dime-a-dozen mediocrity, yet against all odds, it's garnered worldwide acclaim, having been written up in The Guardian, Time Magazine and the Sydney Morning Herald just to name a few.

Mutant Mudds, the new 3DS eShop offering from Renegade Kid (Dementium: The Ward, Moon) is a lot like Nong's Khao Man Gai. On the surface, there's not much to it. A minimal platformer with an 8-bit aesthetic in which you jump, shoot, and hover would be a tough sell even by late eighties standards, yet it rises above its lack of innovation by getting the fundamentals just right.

After an extremely brief intro portraying an outlandishly dorky-looking boy and his grandma watching an invasion of alien mud (mudd?) creatures on the news, you're booted straight into the first level as the lad goes about ridding the world of these monsters. There's hardly any story or text, and there are no experience points, healing items or power-ups to find. Your only goal is to reach the end of each stage and ideally collect 100 gems along the way.

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An extra pair of limbs is so useful in an FPS, and so much fun, that it's a wonder we haven't seen more games transform you into a multi-tentacled engine of destruction. Instead, we've had to wait five years for this sequel to The Darkness - an unusually long delay in an industry as fond of annual sequels as it is of taking good ideas and running them into the ground.

And having four limbs really does make a difference, opening up combat possibilities that other shooters can't hope to compete with. As demon-infested mobster Jackie Estacado, you not only have two human appendages with which to wield a standard variety of pistols, shotguns and assault rifles, but two piranha-faced tentacles - manifestations of the ancient Darkness that has set up home in Jackie's body.

The one on the left, let's call him Grabby. The context-sensitive left shoulder button sends him snapping out to sink his teeth into any of the objects marked with a glowing core. Hitting the button again throws the object in question. So you can quickly lob scaffold poles and pool cues as deadly spears. Car doors can be ripped off and used as a shield, then thrown as a lethal frisbee. Grabby can also lash out and feast on the hearts of fallen foes, topping up your health in the process.

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Since its inception in 2010, the Humble Bundle series has raised over $10 million, a large portion of which goes to hard-working charities and organisations such as Child's Play and The American Red Cross. It's easy to put this encouraging level of success down to the thoroughly worthwhile nature of the venture, and while we don't doubt for a second that the average gamer has a conscience, it's very likely that the incredibly high standard of product in each bundle has also had some bearing on its popularity.

The Humble Bundle has now reached mobile platforms, with Google's Android playing host to the first instalment. Included in the set is Anomaly: Warzone Earth, described by many as 'reverse tower defence' and boasting some sumptuous 3D visuals. There's also Mobigames' cube-based brain-teaser Edge (yes, that Edge), as well as Edge Extended, an expanded version of the original. The core selection is rounded off by the supremely trippy Osmos, which showcases a delicious ambient soundtrack and inventive use of your phone's capacitive touch-screen.

As has been the case with the other bundles, buyers are permitted to pay whatever amount they wish for this collection. However, should you decide to pay more than the current average spend, then you unlock the bonus game, the blissfully wonderful physics puzzler World of Goo. 2D Boy's poster child for indie development has already won hearts and minds on WiiWare, iOS and PC; its inclusion here is the icing on an already scrummy cake.

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In the fantasy world of Amalur, everyone believes in fate - in a predestined path that they are bound to tread, with a predestined end. An elven race called the Fae believes so strongly in the immutable power of destiny that they re-enact their songs and stories, over and over.

You, however, are the Fateless One, a unique being with an unwritten destiny that is yours to control. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning begins with your death and subsequent resurrection with no memory - and, according to the seers, no fate. Not only can you be who you want to be (rogue, warrior or sorcerer), you alone in Amalur can change the way things are.

It's a convenient plot device for a role-playing game, of course. But to give creator 38 Studios its due, it's also a pretty elegant metaphor for the promise that makers of Western RPGs love to make. While a Zelda or Final Fantasy is about ensuring the time-honoured legend reaches its foregone conclusion, the American role-playing dream is to hand you a complex world and let you bend it to your will.

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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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With its crisp design-agency visuals, electro sounds and ingratiating, streetwise chatter - it will "punch your brain in the face" and is "rad", apparently - Puzzlejuice is the image of a slick, fashionable iPhone game. Underneath, however, it's just the kind of improvised, cut-and-shut piece of bedroom game-making that has been beaten out of mainstream games, but that the mobile marketplaces excel at.

Developer Colaboratory clearly belongs to the A-Team school of game design. If you can make a serviceable armoured car out of a golf cart and a fridge, why not try making a new game by sticking two existing and completely unrelated concepts together? So Puzzlejuice welds a Boggle-style word game to Tetris in the most blunt manner imaginable, bolts on a few leftover components of Bejeweled, and bursts triumphantly through the suspiciously feeble locked garage door of your mind. The result is as crudely effective as you'd imagine.

It's simple: slot the falling Tetrominos (though smaller three-block pieces do appear on the easier difficulty) together by rotating, dragging and dropping in the time-honoured fashion. However, once you've completed a row it doesn't disappear, but turns into letters. You then have to make words of three letters or longer out of these to clear the screen and earn points.

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Editor's note: Catherine is released in Europe this week. Here we present our review of the North American release of the game, first published in July last year. To the best of our knowledge it's still accurate with respect to the European version.

The main character of Catherine, Vincent Brooks, is the type of guy who you might describe as "aimless." Except in Catherine, as in life, there's no such thing as aimless. If you choose to go nowhere, life will aim you on its own, straight into the choppy waters of the future. Life's kind of a jerk that way.

Yet still Vincent attempts to coast. He's a 32-year-old software designer who has been with his girlfriend, Katherine (with a "K"), for a few years. She's been hinting about marriage lately, asking Vincent when he's going to meet her family. It's around then that he starts having these dreams.

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I'm somewhat of a specialist when it comes to games starring the order Teuthida, an interest that began when IGN reviewed 'Hail to the Chimp' and claimed squids weren't animals (a line subsequently removed without notice). What can I say? You've got to feel sorry for them after that.

Our ink-loving chums are responsible for many fine games. Aside from scene-stealing cameos, there are brilliant shooters like Squid Yes, Not so Octopus (both SYNSOs can be had online, and are highly recommended), the awesome survival horror Night of the Cephalopods, and now it's time for some turn-based strategy with the defiantly plural Squids.

Squids' levels are top-down arenas filled with spiky obstacles, clamshells, fatal drops, anchors, currents and lots of giant enemy crabs. You'll have four squid most of the time, and during your turn twang them across the place like elastic bands. Each squid has a set amount of stamina per go (a full-on twanging uses roughly half of that), and you can of course control how far and fast they're going.

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Despite continuing rumours of a new iPhone with a four-inch screen, Apple has always insisted that 3.5 inches is the optimum size for a mobile display. We're sure that many thousands of hands fondled the very first iPhone prototypes before that magical figure was decided upon, but it's hard to disagree with this stance. Rivals such as Windows Phone and Android offer handsets with more imposing screens, yet it's the Apple standard which has arguably been adopted by the vast majority of mobile developers. For most, 3.5 inches just seems to work.

However, that hasn't stopped Samsung from rolling out what it believes is the device which can not only best the iPhone, but also bridge the yawning gap between mobile phone and tablet. The Galaxy Note boasts a gigantic 5.3-inch Super AMOLED screen, placing it firmly in the no man's land previously occupied by Dell's ill-fated Streak 5. Needless to say, Samsung is hoping that this effort will fare better, and is using the unsubtle sledge-hammer that is the 2012 half-time Super Bowl commercial slot to truly drive home the fact that the Note is the ultimate convergence device; it's a phone, it's a tablet, it's a gaming platform. Rather than being a niche product, Samsung is positioning the Galaxy Note as The Next Big Thing - only on this occasion, the term 'big' could be taken literally as well as figuratively.

You're unlikely to forget the moment the Galaxy Note drops out of its packaging - purely because it's sure to elicit a chuckle. For a phone, it's insanely massive, and when placed alongside the iPhone 4S or even the Samsung Galaxy Nexus (which, let's not forget, has a pretty formidable 4.65-inch display), it looks positively monstrous.

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It's hard to think of a name that divides opinion quite like Jeff Minter's. To some, his creations are beautifully blended homages, crafted by the loving hands of an old master. To others, they're the emperor's new fixation with retro for the sake of it. From either stance, the other side is considered wrong to an apocalyptic degree, and yet perhaps, like many of Minter's games, the answer lies more within a mixture.

Caverns of Minos is Llamasoft's fifth entry in its Minotaur Project, conceived to highlight the simple pleasures of retro gaming while removing all the irritations of the day - unstable sprites, stuttering hardware and the like. This particular release is a tribute to Caverns of Mars from the Atari 8-bit era.

The idea is that players descend into the depths of a cavern to gather a series of items ranging from a pair of pants to biscuits. Once they're reclaimed, the journey is reversed and these items have to be delivered to - what else - a sort of inter-dimensional sheep that hovers at the top of the screen.

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In the debate about the rights and wrongs of DLC, one aspect rarely discussed is how downloadable expansions can enable a developer to build on flawed potential and polish up a rough diamond. Few diamonds came rougher than Dead Island last year, a game groaning with promise but ultimately weighed down by lacklustre presentation and lacking the inspiration to keep its over-20-hour playing time fresh.

As the first narrative add-on for the game, following the XP grind of Bloodbath Arena, Ryder White's campaign should have been a chance for Techland to elevate its surprise hit into something truly special. Sadly, it seems either that the studio really doesn't understand what worked first time around, or that it's gone out of its way to sabotage its own game. Think of any element of Dead Island that you enjoyed, and chances are it's been removed or broken in this DLC.

You liked the co-op, right? Playing with three friends, working together to complete the quests or just teaming up to beat down the zombie horde, was a feature that helped to soothe the sting of the game's clumsier aspects. So, naturally, that's completely disappeared; Ryder White's story is single-player only.

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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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There's nothing new under the sun, but the concept behind Bag It is as old as handheld gaming itself. As Alexey Pajitnov discovered back in 1985, organising shapes so they fit snugly together in a confined space is an absolute hoot, and while the graphics are snazzier and the rules are a bit different, Hidden Variable Studios' iOS and Android puzzler echoes a lot of the addictive qualities of Tetris.

The idea is to arrange groceries in a paper bag so that space is used efficiently and nothing gets crushed. Egg cartons, baguettes, melons, squishy fruit and bottles appear on a shopping conveyor belt at the top of the screen and one by one you must drag them into the bag. Once an item is deposited in the bag it can't be removed, so a lot of your time is spent wiggling and rotating things into position and making space without causing any damage.

Bag It rewards your efforts with up to three stars per stage along with a couple of rosettes for optional secondary achievements, such as keeping all your shopping items upright in the bag or cramming everything into just two bags when you have three available. The number of stars and rosettes you accumulate is key to unlocking additional stages.

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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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Artificial life is a weird business. You fling millions of dollars at a game, craft character models composed of several thousand polygons each, throw in motion-capture, cloth physics, and vocal performances from, y'know, proper Hollywood actors, and all that stands out are the things that aren't quite right. The eyes that are too vacant. The lower lip that just looks weird. The fact that everybody sounds like Nolan North.

Then, you get a game like One-Dot Enemies, whose cast, as the name suggests, are each a single pixel high. They skitter around randomly - no polygons, no motion-capture, no Nolan North - and they're entirely convincing. I'm not sure what they're meant to be exactly, but I know I believe in them all the same. I believe in them, and now all I want to do is squash them.

One-Dot Enemies, an odd little timewaster from Kenji Eno, came out in early 2009 and was the first game - I appreciate that this is weird and stupid - to persuade me that the iPhone might be a decent handheld console. Before then, I hadn't really been that interested in iOS gaming, because iOS gaming seemed to be chasing after traditional genres for which it clearly had no obvious aptitude. There was the occasional acceptable puzzler, but everything else seemed to be a rotten 3D kart racer, or a maze game built around horrible tilt controls. Everywhere you looked there were awful virtual thumbsticks and idiotically complex gesture inputs. After all of that, One-Dot Enemies seemed strangely assured. In fact, it felt uncommonly at home on this weird new platform - and it still does.

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Capturing high definition video typically requires a moderately powerful PC, a bespoke capture card and a hard drive big enough and fast enough to deal with multi-gigabyte files that can account for just a few minutes of footage: fine for the technologically literate with cash to spare, but not so easy for those simply looking for a way to easily and cheaply record some HD action from their games machines. Enter the Avermedia Game Capture HD - an all-in-one "plug and play" device that records video from any current generation console directly onto hard drive or even a USB stick.

Let's get one thing straight right from the off: Game Capture HD's pitch is all about convenience rather than pristine quality video. It's an entirely different beast to the Blackmagic Intensity Pro we recommended in our pre-Christmas gameplay capture feature. For a start, it only supports analogue component connections: it's the only way to capture footage from all three current generation consoles, because of the HDCP encryption on the PS3's HDMI output and the fact that the Wii doesn't actually have HDMI at all.

The device itself weighs 335g and measures a miniscule 164mm x 124mm x 57mm, packaged with a universal component cable that works with all the major consoles. Game Capture HD runs off a 12v, 1.5A power supply.

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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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How big is your brain? Testing your mental prowess is nothing new in gaming, given that legions of Nintendo DS owners have already consulted a pixellated Professor Kawashima to calculate their cranial capacity, but in an era of global leaderboards and Achievements, even on handheld devices, the ability to simply do something is now only part of the fun.

That's where Quiz Climber Rivals comes in, posing up to 50 general-knowledge questions with machine-gun fire rapidity. It's your job to pick the correct answer from a choice of four. Get the question right and your character, a blue squirrel thing, bounds up a branch on the Quiz Climber Rivals tree. Get a question wrong and it's game over. Players are bound to a 15-second time limit and the questions get harder the higher you climb. It's a test of quick-thinking and reflexes - there's certainly no time to search Google or (if you are somewhere no one can see you) ask Siri.

The four possible answers often begin as humorous riffs on a theme. For example, when asked the name of a famous Christmas bird, you'll be asked to decide between Riddler, Batman, Joker and Robin for the answer. But things get tougher fast, and topics cover everything from science and sport to popular culture.

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Editor's note: Metal Gear Solid HD Collection is released in Europe this week. Here we present our review of the North American release of the game, first published in November last year. To the best of our knowledge it's still accurate with respect to the European version.

Metal Gear Solid's Snakes may resemble Escape From New York's hero right down to their names and eventual eye patch; however, their penchant for ideological musing about the nature of war reminds me more of another mulleted eighties action hero, Dalton, the bouncer with a philosophy PHD from Road House. And much like that 1989 cult classic, in Metal Gear Solid, it's never clear when the creators are in on the joke.

More esoteric and cerebral than the pro-war action movies from which they draw so heavily, Metal Gear Solid games are equal parts melodrama, political thriller, science-fiction, whimsical meta-humour and surreal theatrics. They're as much war games as Twin Peaks is a police procedural.

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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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Where do all those twin-stick shooters go? What fate awaits each but a tiny niche of players and, eventually, oblivion? So it is, you feel, with Solomon's Boneyard - and what a tragedy. Though recent iOS titles offer more precise controls and shinier visuals, I've yet to play one that tops this for sheer craft and a brilliant twist to the usual.

There's a reason behind its portmanteau design, one that mixes RPG elements into an endless survival shooter - Solomon's Boneyard is a spinoff. Back in April 2010, the game Solomon's Keep was released on iOS - a top-down RPG with many of the exact mechanics found in Solomon's Boneyard, which was released later that year. Boneyard junks the RPG trappings but retains the ingeniously worked-out levelling system at its core, then builds the waves around this.

There are initially four characters and one map in Solomon's Boneyard, though you can unlock more of both - just one strand of the game is collecting gold on each playthrough, and saving up for perks and unlocks. Mobile games have been getting brilliant at this recently, with Jetpack Joyride perhaps the best example, and Solomon's Boneyard is a less refined but no less compulsive taskmaster. And on that note, it's currently free - there are two possible in-app purchases, but they're hidden away and neither is crucial.

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"Yeah, so I heard that in NeverDead, you can rip your own head off and use it to roll through ventilation shafts. I heard you can attach your head to your severed limbs and just wobble around on the floor kneecapping demons with your twin pistols. I heard you can pluck your right arm off and then throw it, still clutching an Uzi, into the mouth of a giant boss, so that he'll swallow it and you can then shoot him from the inside and the outside at the same time."

Princess, you heard right. You can do all of that stuff in NeverDead, because NeverDead is kind of amazing. And it's lucky that NeverDead is kind of amazing, because - quite a lot of the time, at least - NeverDead also isn't actually very good.

Konami's latest is the fruit of a weird collaboration between Metal Gear Acid director and long-time MGS stalwart Shinta Nojiri and Rebellion, a venerable studio based right here in plucky old England. Together, they've come up with a game about Bryce Boltzmann, a grouchy Tom Waits-alike who wanders the streets of New York hunting demons with a sexy lady named Arcadia.

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Even without the perplexing addition of Stars Wars characters, the last SoulCalibur felt like a game that had run out of creative steam. All the swashbuckling pirates and disgruntled golems played much the same as they had on the Dreamcast, and although Project Soul added the Soul Crush system to make blocking more risky - as well as a customisation mode that let you adjust appearance and attributes - it was akin to owning the same sports car for 10 years straight. It still had the capacity to excite, but familiarity had dulled some of that early intensity.

It seemed that SoulCalibur would join the same ranks as Killer Instinct and The Last Blade: fighting game series that once went toe-to-toe with the best of the best, but were destined to fade away. This tragedy, however, has not come to pass. Although Namco took a misguided step with the epically bad SoulCalibur: Legends, the weapon-wielding warriors have returned in SoulCalibur 5 - And this time, the performance upgrades offer much more mileage.

Set 17 years after the last game, this chapter of the Stage of History is populated by 27 characters, including familiar faces like the dauntingly breasted Ivy and the whimsically sadistic Tira - neither of whom has aged a day - in addition to three descendant characters who inherit the bō-staff, ninja garb and Chinese sword of Kilik, Taki and Xianghua. Although the protégés conduct themselves in a strikingly similar fashion to their forbearers, they each pack enough new tricks to give veteran players something fresh to experiment with.

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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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Tricks of the Reviewer's Trade #116: Start the review with an out-of-context description of a seemingly bizarre but ultimately representative gameplay moment, highlighting the absurdity of the game's premise and/or presentation.

Example: My towering condominium is leaning at an alarming angle. There are three bombs ticking away at various points along its height, and my anxiety is not helped by the fact that Boat Head, a giant radioactive crab, and Reginald Starfire, a giant blue unicorn who used to front a boy band but now works for a self-esteem telephone hotline, are standing to either side of my building, demanding to be fed. If I don't feed them in time, or feed them the wrong thing, they'll have a massive strop and my condo structure will be toppled in the ensuing tantrum. Game over.

Luckily, I feed Boat Head a diamond which makes everyone fall asleep, then shovel some blue condos into Reginald's mouth which causes three yellow condo floors to fall together and form a bronze power-up, which I then feed to Reginald causing the tower to straighten up. Disaster averted, I calmly pocket several million points and continue to build.

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Doodle God has been around for a while but, as a discerning gamer who refuses to follow the common herd, there's a good chance you've flicked past it while browsing the App Store or Android Market. After all, only desperate shovelware knock-offs use the ubiquitous "Doodle" prefix to ensnare the undiscriminating, right?

Wrong, at least in this case. Doodle God is actually that rarest of things, a game that refuses to fit into any single genre and so has instead created its own. Despite the title, it's not really a god game, although you will be creating more things than you ever did in Civilization. And it's not really a puzzle game, even though there are times when it will have you scratching your head for days. It's... well, let me explain.

The game starts with just four tiles: earth, air, fire and water. It's up to you to start combining things to see what happens. So, for example, you put earth and water together and - in a quick burst of hallelujah - you've created the concept of "swamp". Combine air and fire, and you create "energy". Now combine energy and swamp, and marvel at the fact that you have called forth life itself.

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Final Fantasy 13 reflected the character of its heroine, Lightning: an elite, standoffish soldier who would let nothing come between her and her mission. The game presented a journey so focused and linear that its first 25 hours could be mapped out as an unbroken corridor. And Lightning's purity of focus saw Square Enix discard many Final Fantasy tropes so she could pursue her goals without distraction.

The series may reinvent itself with each new entry, but the games have always been tied together by common motifs: crystals, summons, Chocobos, airships, Yoshitaka Amano's Klimt-esque concept art, and that tinkling harp arpeggio. In Final Fantasy 13, both towns and exploration were discarded as extraneous trappings, unnecessary to Lightning's mission or - as it was referred to in the game's terminology - her Focus. Rarely has a game been so focused as to discard so much of its own heritage.

Serah, Lightning's younger sister and heroine of Final Fantasy 13-2 - a rare sequel to a mainline Final Fantasy title - is a primary school teacher in a seaside village. She has none of the steel composure of her elder sibling, none of that dogged determination that makes Lightning such a difficult character to empathise with. And the game world reflects this from the first moment.

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How do you feed a dragon? From as far away as possible, says publisher Miniclip. Ideally from the other side of your iPhone screen, via a catapult and some trampolines, skimming through a waterfall and past a couple of black holes.

You'll find all of these items in Feed That Dragon, a cheerful medieval iOS puzzler starring a young knight called McDuff, who has been tasked with keeping the king's pet dragon fully fed.

Levels are filled with obstructions to block or alter the trajectory of your catapulted cakes and donuts, slowly adding to the game's difficulty while at the same time happily keeping you hidden - presumably so your scaly ward can't trace the more appetising smell of your delicious human flesh.

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The unfortunate decline of backwards compatibility on the current generation consoles has been mitigated somewhat by the rise of the HD remaster - the chance to revisit select gaming classics from years gone by, revitalised by the embarrassment of raw power on tap from the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. High definition resolutions, enhanced artwork, improved audio, smoother frame-rates, stereoscopic 3D support... a good HD conversion sees the original game being handled with respect in its transition to more powerful hardware, accepting that sometimes a 720p facelift alone isn't enough, and that without care and attention, can actually diminish the impact of titles designed for the low-res CRT era.

Probably the best example in recent times of HD remastering "done right" is Just Add Water's conversion of the vintage 2005 Xbox exclusive, Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath. A beloved classic from a well-regarded developer that shut-up shop somewhat prematurely, the PS3 game sees all aspects of the original classic restored and upgraded, based in no small part on the original assets, designs and concept work created by Oddworld Inhabitants themselves so long ago.

In this special Digital Foundry interview, we talk with Just Add Water CEO Stewart Gilray and technical director Steven Caslin. We chart the origins of the deal to bring back the Oddworld games, the team's approach to the HD remastering process, the assets they had available to work with in reconstructing Stranger's Wrath, and the PS3-specific technical enhancements made to the game - many of which are scheduled to be rolled back into the existing PC game in a forthcoming patch. And we also find out the trials and tribulations JAW has endured in trying to get what was originally an Xbox exclusive published on the 360...

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Ever since savvy manufacturers realised that gamers were prepared to pay top dollar for pieces of near-useless plastic that claim to improve their gaming experience, there's been a flood of largely pointless peripherals for home consoles. Right now, countless Wii Remote tennis racket attachments sit gathering dust in cupboards the world over, waiting forlornly for that dreaded day when they are unceremoniously recycled as landfill.

Traditionally speaking, these regrettable money-wasting exercises are largely confined to domestic hardware. Attempts to augment the functionality of portable consoles have proven largely unsuccessful in the past (remember the D-pad cross attachment that came with the Neo Geo Pocket Color port of Pac-Man? Didn't think so). The problem is that handheld platforms are all about convenience and mobility - nobody wants to strap extraneous chunks of plastic to their console if they can really help it, as additional bulk defeats the object of the device; these machines are supposed to be pocket-sized and effortlessly transportable.

Which is no doubt why the revelation that the Nintendo 3DS would be getting a secondary analogue slider pad via a bulky and downright ugly accessory caused hoots of derision from some sectors of the industry and rampant face-palming from others. Many hoped that it would prove to be an elaborate hoax, but the 3DS Circle Pad Pro is very much a reality - and we've put this controversial product through its paces to prove it.

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There are mobile games that make the journey from Android to iOS (or vice versa), and then there are games that jump from AAA console title to handheld spin-off. Those first, purely mobile titles grow their stature by catching a little bit of fire, awarding the developer just enough interest and finance to give their next big thing a shot at a wider audience.

We're going to do our best to highlight those gems that we love which never make that transition - but Triple Town is a little bit different. In this case, both Android and iOS owners owe something to a little known social networking site called Facebook (as well as Amazon's Kindle) where the game launched last year. The objective is to build as fancy a town as you can by combining groups of three or more identical objects into upgradable structures.

Here's how it works. Collections of grass make bushes, which make trees, which in turn can be combined to create houses (themselves upgradeable), while angry little bears that occasionally appear as the next placeable object will wander around the map, getting in the way of everything and making you cross. In order to be stopped they must be fenced in, a process which turns them into gravestones which can then be converted up into cathedrals.

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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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I've found a new way to terrify myself. It's not by counting the grey hairs in my beard, nor is it by examining my receding hairline, checking my bank balance or reading up on whatever tropical disease is in vogue. It's by surrendering myself to WipEout 2048, and more specifically, to Zone mode on the track Sol.

It's the drop halfway around this sky-bound track that does the trick; a blind crest that gives way to nothing, the track pulled from beneath you and leaving you suspended for a handful of panicked seconds. It's made more urgent by Zone's airbrushed psychedelics, and more urgent still by the steadily escalating speed of the ship at your fingertips.

This is WipEout at its best, and it's preserved, in part, for the series' Vita debut. WipEout's been much more than a futuristic racing series since its inception - it's been one that's screamed that the future is, in fact, now. It started with the PlayStation debut, a game that did more than just usher in the 3D age - it lent gaming an edgy credibility that helped pave the path to success for Sony's then fledgling interactive empire.

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Breeze is a tilt-sensitive game where you control a gust of wind and blow a virtual flower around a bright sunlit world. It's also nothing like thatgamecompany's Flower.

While Breeze's leafy-green setting may superficially sound like it shares Flower's roots, a completely different breed of game lies beneath. An unassuming puzzler by trade, Breeze's brilliance lies in its simplicity.

Players must guide their flower around a maze-like obstacle course towards the goal. On the way, you'll need to pick up enough sunshine orbs to unlock your exit. And that's the game in a nutshell.

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"You once again prepare to enter... the world of survival horror." Those were the days. Lately, Resident Evil hasn't had much of either.

Where Resi 4 performed the impossible, spinning the grotesque and the Die Hard without dropping either, Resi 5 just gave up and trod on meekly behind, the imagination of its alpha versions eventually beaten out of a lukewarm final product. Resi 6's solution seems to be all things for all men: Leon for horror; Chris for guns; the mercenary for melee. In the meantime, what can the 3DS-exclusive Resident Evil: Revelations offer?

More than you'd think, but less than you'd hope. Revelations does 3DS proud in the ways that matter. It's a bona fide Resident Evil with lengthy single-player, excellent online, magnificent locations and some stunning 3D visuals. But it's not all jam. Revelations is a move back towards the horror side of the series and to this end makes big changes to the recent formula, most notably with its combat system.

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I was furious with Quarrel when it launched on the iOS devices (livid, really), and not just because Christian had pipped me to the post in reviewing the game. What really got my goat was the near-inexplicable lack of multiplayer for such an obviously suitable competitive game. "Oooh, can we play a game together?" my other half asked, in a rare fit of gaming. "NO!" was my bemused and exasperated reply.

That didn't stop the game being something rather special - and fully deserving of Christian's lavish praise - but it was a frustrating oversight. All hail the arrival of Quarrel on Xbox Live Arcade then, bringing the much-desired online multiplayer to one of mobile gaming's brightest gems, as well as the core of the game - which remains exactly the same as the one we've loved and obsessed over on our phones and tablets. [So much so that it was one of our Games of 2011 - Ed.]

Two to four players, possessing an equal number of tiles and soldiers each, move around the play area choosing either to take on an opponent in a word-making match, shuffle troops around, or end their turn and receive one reinforcement for each occupied tile. For every soldier you take into battle, you get to use an extra letter from the eight-letter anagram presented to both players in a time-limited Scrabble tussle.

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What a splendid bunch we gamers are when it comes to our furrier, more fragile friends in the animal kingdom. Lemmings? Not a lot going for them in the way of looks or career prospects to be honest, so might as well toy with their natural inclinations for the betterment of our entertainment. Not even the humble slab of super meat is safe from the excesses of our imaginations, and the less said about hedgehogs the better.

Next to step up to the dinner plate is Run Roo Run from 5th Cell, developer of Scribblenauts as well as last year's iOS release Scribblenauts Remix (and if you haven't sampled the delights of that particular game yet, consider it your second App of today).

Roo's on a transcontinental rescue mission across Australia, which on your iOS devices means a journey that starts with a single tap, one that sets off an unstoppable chain of events across each of the game's single-screen levels as he moves from the left-hand starting line to the finishing line at the other end.

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Cleanliness is next to godliness, so the saying goes. And yet, while I wouldn't deny the deep sense of spiritual well-being instilled by a freshly bleached toilet pan, I can't claim to feel very zen after playing Dustforce, a time-attack platformer which takes tidying as its theme.

In fact, I very nearly bit through one of my knuckles while unleashing a gargle of vowel sounds at such a high volume that my neighbour came round to check I was OK. But Dustforce doesn't care about "OK". It only wants "flawless". It wants, in the game's own dark lexicon, the vaunted "S/S" rating.

Dustforce's levels make two demands: firstly that you must clear each environment of the muck which encrusts its floors, walls and ceilings, and secondly that you must do so with finesse. The former is the easy part - the first and lesser S of S/S. Your character, an unusually nimble janitor (a ninjanitor, perhaps?), need only scoot over the dead leaves or dust trails to dissipate them, deploying quick and heavy attacks to dislodge more stubborn clumps and deal with the occasional enemies - creatures corrupted and controlled by the accumulated filth.

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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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In a world where £200 consoles are often packaged up without a bundled video cable, and chunks of games that we used to get for free are now sold to us separately, it's rather gratifying to load up one of your favourite mobile releases and discover that the developers have bolted 32 more levels onto it for free.

Like a lot of freemium add-ons, Whale Trail's Challenge Pack invites you to spend a token amount of money (£1.49) to unlock all its levels, but persistent players who have spent a few months plugging away at the main game should be able to earn them without handing over anything more than the 69p we paid for the game in the first place.

The original Whale Trail was another one-button phenomenon. We took control of a flying whale (obviously), tapped the screen to propel it upwards and released our grip to let it descend. The idea was to dodge through networks of dark clouds and collect a magical rainbow stream of bubbles that fuelled your flight, and the goal was to set high scores by going as far as possible. Like Tiny Wings, Canabalt and plenty of others before it, we chased that goal with every unlikely pound of flying mammalian blubber we could muster.

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With a tentacle arm, a prosthetic hook hand, an eye patch and a Nightmare Before Christmas rictus grin, Scarygirl lives up to the somewhat unkind name her parents burdened her with. But it's a Gruffalo kind of scary, the sort of character a 14-year-old girl with pink hair and thick mascara who hates her dad might cuddle up to in bed, if it were sold as a plushie. And it's this kooky appeal that makes for a perfect video game lead.

The creation of 34-year-old Australian illustrator Nathan Jurevicius, Scarygirl is best known for her appearances in psychedelic, reinterpreted tales of folklore, stories through which she attempts to find her identity while under the watchful eye of her octopus guardian, Blister. This spin-off platform game sticks closely to the mythology of the world, sending the titular heroine off on an adventure over forests, up mountains and through ice caverns to find out who or what is behind her haunting dreams.

Expectedly perhaps, the art and animation are the strongest aspects of the game. Scarygirl herself exudes character, with vibrant animations as she leaps, dives and helicopter-spins her way through the undergrowth. Levels are designed in the style of Klonoa, with winding '2.5D' pathways that curve into and out of the screen while parallax background layers add depth off into the misty distance. The game's 21 stages are divided into seven worlds, none of which stand out from the usual platform game tropes, but all of which have their own charm and interest.

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You know, much as we all love them, touch-screens are probably beginning to hold up the evolution of our species.

"Huh," you're thinking. "What do you mean by that? Are you referring to the way we've become enslaved to tools that impede our understanding and control of art and the written word by reducing our interaction with them to sliding pictures under glass? Or are you, perhaps, suggesting that by restricting our self-expression to a crude suite of gestures, taps, pinches and awkward attempts at typing, generations to come may find their natural dexterity retarded by the hereditary misconceptions our new behaviour is beginning to program into our genes?"

Sure thing! But really I meant we're too addicted to 'running' games to get off the couch.

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One of the worst side effects of the supposed battle between "hardcore" and "casual" is the need to make everything drab and serious. If a game isn't full of angst, gritted teeth, knotted muscle and grim-faced violence then it simply isn't a game. Nowhere is this more obvious than in horror gaming, as adolescent gore and po-faced melodrama have become the main signifiers of the genre.

Remember when it was possible to be spooky and fun? PaRappa the Rapper creator Masaya Matsuura obviously does. Haunt, his Kinect-exclusive ghost-'em-up developed with help from the UK's Zoe Mode, is wonderfully silly and deliciously camp. It's also sort of scary, but not in the blood-soaked manner we've come to expect.

This is horror as you experienced it as a kid. It's a theme-park haunted house, full of cheesy "boo" moments that make you jump even as you're rolling your eyes. It's Vincent Price in a cape, not Jason Voorhees with a machete. It's Halloween (the holiday) not Halloween (the movie). It's about that enjoyable chill up the spine followed by a giggle at how daft it all is.

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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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There are two schools of thought where car games are concerned. You either task players with carefully driving around things, or you actively encourage them to crash into them. Smash Cops sounds like it should be the latter, but is actually the former, and the discrepancy between the two dims the appeal of what should be a brilliant experience.

A top-down police chase romp, it's the first iOS title from Hutch Games - an indie start-up founded by veterans of games such as Burnout and Fable - and their A-list polish shows through. This is particularly true of the controls, which use a simple yet intuitive two-finger system to offer immediate and satisfying mastery of the road.

You place one finger directly behind your police car to start it moving. Moving this finger left steers the car right and vice versa. A second tap anywhere on screen deploys a quick rechargeable turbo boost, which can be used to ram suspects or to catch up to them.

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Hero Academy - the new iOS game from the ex-Ensemble team at Robot Entertainment - is a nice piece of game design, but a truly great piece of spot-welding. As a turn-based fantasy battler, it's easy to play yet tricky to play well, it just about survives the implementation of micro-transactions, and it's delivered with a decent bobble-headed art style.

What makes it a little bit more special, though, is the fact that all of this is then stuck behind a front-end that comes straight out of Words With Friends. You search for pals to battle with or select a random match-up, you make a move against your opponent, and then you sit back and wait for them to make theirs. You can message players in-game if you particularly like them (or if you particularly loathe them, I guess), and while you're waiting for a rival to take their turn, you can start a new match with someone else, safe in the knowledge that the familiar scroll-down interface will keep track of everything.

The game itself is pleasantly simple, a multiplayer-only affair in which two teams face each other across a tiled pitch. The object of each battle is to destroy your enemy's crystal(s) before they destroy yours, and you take turns to play: dropping units onto the field, moving them around, attacking or throwing in items. Each turn allows you to make five moves, and that's always long enough to put a plan in motion - bring a new guy in, buff him and get him moving towards the front lines, say - but never long enough to ensure that you haven't left yourself exposed somewhere else.

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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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Crush3D is a refreshed version of Zoe Mode's Crush, a smart, innovative platform-puzzler for the PSP which involved switching gameplay between 2D and 3D to progress - and immediately you can see why a 3DS version now exists.

You navigate the game's abstract levels as Danny, a psychologically troubled teenager dressed in an Arthur Dent-style dressing gown. Each course comes from his own subconscious, his mind trapped inside a mad scientist's machine.

Collecting your marbles (the not-so-subtly-named spherical items dotted around each level) will unlock an exit, but it's then a matter of getting there. Danny's a feeble little blighter, only able to jump a foot in the air and fond of perishing after too steep a fall. His limits are fairly realistic, in other words, but for a video game he is rather gratingly underpowered.

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In October of last year, Sony announced that it would be buying out mobile partner Ericsson's stake in the joint venture founded by the two companies way back in 2001. Sony Ericsson - a major force in the world of mobile telecommunications - would become plain old Sony.

While the world waits for the first Sony-branded handsets of 2012, it's worth noting that the firm has already started to strike out on its own in other sectors. Last year, around the same time that the Sony's buy-out of Ericsson was broadcast to the world, the Japanese manufacturer was already working on two Android-based tablet devices.

Predictably, these products have tiresomely been labelled 'iPad beaters' by some sectors of the technology press, but from a purely gaming perspective it's the inclusion of the much-hyped PlayStation Suite that catches the eye. So how good are these products and does the PlayStation connection actually offer up any kind of valuable gameplay experience?

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Much like the original, Choplifter HD is at its absolute best when everything's going wrong. Play it too competently during the early levels, and it's a bit like running a taxi company - albeit a taxi company that sends its cars out with machine guns strapped to the bonnet. You leave your base, shoot a few guys, keep an eye on the fuel, pick a few other guys up and then make it back home with a nice soft landing. That'll be eight pounds, cheers. Sorry about all the roundabouts.

Play it badly, though, and it's kind of amazing. Forget your fuel, spend your missiles profligately and whirl through the skies, roguishly sliding into one cloud of flak after another. Squash the people you're meant to save, allow a few zombies to climb on board to mess your co-pilot up and then, warning buzzers buzzing, take plenty of machine gun fire from the locals as you arrive back at the base running, as they say, on fumes.

It's exhilarating to live on the edge of disaster, and it can feel pretty cinematic, too. If nothing else, modern film-making has educated us all on the precise kind of alarm sound you hear coming from a helicopter when it's in trouble: Choplifter HD delivers this sort of thing brilliantly.

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Hello and welcome to the libel minefield that is the Eurogamer review of Michael Jackson: The Experience, the touch-control version of last year's console game of the same name. I'm your host and reviewer John Bedford, to my right is the desiccated - yet commercially vibrant - corpse of Mr Michael Jackson. Say hello Michael: "BLEURGHYAGHALAL."

Thank you Michael.

We're here today to talk about the recently released iPad-exclusive edition. Upfront, the rather grim news is that the £2.99 basic app provides only a meagre collection of four songs: Beat It, Smooth Criminal, Speed Demon and Blood on the Dance Floor. Additional songs such as Billie Jean and Black or White are available at a somewhat optimistic £1.49, while outfits can be upgraded for the price of an average standalone app (£0.69).

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Just like hurricanes, horror games seem to go well with girl's names. First Catherine, and now Amy. Just names, nothing else, but simply by knowing there's a sinister context, these otherwise ordinary words take on a malevolent air. Yet it only works with girls names. Could you imagine getting chills down your spine from a horror game called Mike or Roger?

Sadly, that's about it as far as interesting things to say about Amy goes, as this shambolic collection of outmoded ideas and clumsy execution would have been sub-par if released in 1998. Put it up alongside even the shaggiest second-stringer in 2012 and it's hard to find anything positive at all.

The plot gets things off to a bad start, compiled as it is from a jumble of survival horror clichés. We open with Lana, our heroine, as she escorts the Amy of the title on a train. Through leaden exposition we learn that Amy is both traumatised and mute, and she's been sprung from a dubious research facility. It's not hard to see where this one's going.

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Terry Cavanagh's VVVVVV is a game in love with being a game. The sci-fi tale of six space-dwelling scientists (whose names all begin with the letter V) getting displaced in another dimension is silly, but the bare-bones premise is fitting for the 8-bit retro aesthetic. This nostalgic presentation allows Cavanagh to look at common conventions with a deadpan sense of wide-eyed wonder.

When it's discovered that walking to one end of the screen causes you to emerge out the other side it's explained as "inter-dimensional interference". The first time a scientist sees a checkpoint he suggests it be brought back to the ship to be analysed. Where Atari games like Asteroids and Centipede seemed embarrassed by their stories, Cavanagh builds one to complement the medium's preposterous designs. These analytic musings and low-fi visuals brings to mind classic sci-fi yarns like The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, from an era when computers were the size of apartments and even the most basic video games were the stuff of dreams.

VVVVVV is sharper and more modern than its inspirations, sidestepping the archaic trappings of actual games from the eighties. The design vaguely resembles Metroid, but where Samus' debut presented players with an open world to explore, it was really only somewhat open, with a series of barriers blocking off much of its real estate until the proper piece of equipment was found.

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The first two Katamari games, produced by future playground designer Keita Takahashi, were memorable for inventing a new style of play while railing against rampant consumerism. Players rolled a sticky ball across carpets and pavements gathering up the flotsam and jetsam of everyday existence, and the ball would grow in size until it could roll up the carpets and pavements themselves - and then cars, houses, fields and eventually countries. They were funny, beautiful and intelligent games with gorgeous soundtracks, and we loved them dearly.

Once it became clear the joke was lost on his employers, however, Takahashi buggered off to do something else, and without him Namco Bandai proceeded to make so many sequels and to produce so much merchandise that the metaphor eventually consumed itself. So much so, in fact, that if Takahashi were to come back and make a new Katamari game today, it would probably have to include a level where you do nothing but roll up new Katamari games.

Artistically the series has pretty much snookered itself. Still, that's never stopped the games industry before, and so here we are with Touch My Katamari for PlayStation Vita.

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

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

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

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"The heart wants what the heart wants." -Woody Allen

Love works in mysterious ways. Where logic and hormones duke it out like a scorpion fighting a tarantula, the heart comes in like a jeep, dominating through sheer force and willpower. Alan Hazelden's chilling tale of obsession and romance is an uneasy marriage between a traditional puzzle game and prose. While I wouldn't say these two disparate genres don't click at all, I'd wager that if they had a Facebook page they'd forgo being "in a relationship" for the more tenuous "it's complicated".

Each of the game's 36 levels begins with a line of text telling the story of a couple who discover a robot. Suffice it to say, things get dicey. Their tale is reflected by a series of puzzles wherein you turn cogs clockwise to rotate hearts surrounding them until they're all right-side up. Though adequate, they're not the most rewarding brainteasers. Unless you're a savant who can predict more than seven or so moves ahead, chances are you'll just muck about until you're fortuitous enough to come close to a solution. Deciphering those last few moves can be satisfying, but, like a Rubik's cube, the number of steps required for success can be overwhelming.

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By day, WayForward is just a mild-mannered developer for hire. It wears sensible spectacles and smart shoes, it slicks its hair back with odourless pomade, and it spends its working hours creating surprisingly decent licensed games. Often they're significantly better than decent, actually, as with last year's elegant and pulpy BloodRayne: Betrayal and 2009's A Boy and his Blob.

By night, however, after heading for a secret cave hidden beneath a dusty mansion, or stepping inside a phone booth and spinning around dead fast, WayForward is transformed into a smart indie studio, heroically splicing genres and crafting its own retro-tinged gems like the WiiWare survival-horror puzzler Lit and the evergreen bellydance-'em-up Shantae.

The Mighty Blank Blank series, as those in the know like to call it, has recently earned a place amongst the team's more interesting work. Last year's Mighty Milky Way sent you swimming through the galaxy one planetoid slingshot at a time, while, before that, Mighty Flip Champs offered up a multi-dimensional platformer in which you couldn't jump. Take that to the bank.

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Balance can be a tricky mistress to satisfy. Take All Zombies Must Die, for example. Its core components - a twin-stick shooter with zombies - are so overused that the combination inspires more fatigue than excitement. Clearly, something has to be done to the formula to make it stand out. But add too much, too little or simply the wrong sort of thing, and whatever base pleasures still remain in the twitching top-down zombie shooter corpse can be lost.

Unfortunately, with All Zombies Must Die, developer Doublesix has fallen prey to the last two pitfalls. It's not only added too much clutter to the genre's fragile framework, it's added the sort of clutter that actively detracts from the game's enjoyment.

The scenario is obvious enough. There's a zombie outbreak, and a quartet of survivors must live to tell the tale. There's a wise-cracking dude, his exasperated ex-girlfriend, a nerdy scientist and, apropos of nothing, a bulb-headed alien called Lux.

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The debate continues to rage boringly across the internet as to whether the PlayStation Vita's Japanese release has been a disaster. Some commentators have urged patience rather than wholesale condemnation of a faltering strategy. Others, including plenty of hot-tempered Nintendo 3DS owners, have declared the whole launch a massive botch. (Perhaps their argument is that it takes one to know one.)

But while you wouldn't want to bet on the success of a new handheld in these fearsomely competitive days of App Stores, tablets and Slide Circle Pad Pros, you can always bet your house that a new console from Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft will definitely mean at least one thing: a mini-game compilation. For PlayStation Vita, Sony looked to UK-based Bigbig, an offshoot of Evolution Studios, and the result is a game called Little Deviants. As these things go, it's perfectly agreeable.

As you might imagine, Little Deviants is as much about showcasing the myriad different functions of the multi-talented Vita as it is about keeping you entertained. Most of the mini-games use the touch-screen, plenty make use of the built-in gyroscope, and the splendidly named rear touch function is a regular participant. At one stage you're even invited to sing - or at least make noises at a few different pitches.

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Where do you draw the line between indie and mainstream gaming? Is it purely a financial distinction, with one being produced for peanuts and the other benefiting from healthy sacks of cash, or is it an ideology, with independence not only from corporate interests but from conventional design?

These are the questions that buzzed around my head while playing Afterfall: Insanity, a game produced over several years by Intoxicate Studios, a group of Polish coding enthusiasts who coordinated their efforts over internet forums. They've created something that looks incredibly impressive, with Unreal 3 powered visuals and a throbbing orchestral soundtrack. They've also created something so generic that you can't help wondering if it was worth the effort.

It's a third-person survival-horror shooter, set in a post-apocalyptic dystopia where humanity has survived a cataclysmic war by retreating to underground bunkers. Topside, the world now belongs to mutants and monsters. Below, people live in sterile comfort, ruled by totalitarian leaders and subject to the madness of Confinement Syndrome. It's Fallout crossed with Dead Space, basically, and while it does a serviceable job of calling to mind its inspirations, it offers none of its own.

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QUBE means 'Quick Understanding of Block Extrusion'. Doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, does it? But QUBE is more elegant than its name suggests, a slow-paced and methodical first-person puzzler that only suffers from an obvious comparison - one that, unfortunately, it forces on the player again and again.

The aesthetic design of QUBE is far too inspired by Portal. The game doesn't share a great deal of its mechanics or ideas, but the influence is absolutely overbearing, to the extent this almost plays like a pitch document. The problem is not that Toxic Games wants to be hired by Valve - that is a noble and understandable aim, and by the way Gabe Newell if you're reading I'm available - but that QUBE's is visually a poor imitation of Portal, and so your frame of reference for its decent FPS puzzling is the best FPS puzzler ever. Every moment feels intruded upon (Gabe, call me!), and the comparison does QUBE's own mechanics no favours. (GABE!)

You wake in a lab, a silent protagonist wearing high-tech gloves. The floors and walls of its small rooms are composed from large grey and white tiles, the interactive elements are colour-coded, and the larger structure funnels you through increasingly complex arrangements of blocks and jumps. Puzzles are built around coloured bricks that react in different ways to a wave of your glove: red ones pull out in a straight line, yellows are in groups of three that pop out to different lengths depending on where they're hit, blues act like springs, and purples spin sections of the walls.

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So farewell then, Flatout. An at times great crash-em-up that began six years ago on PC, this third entry was only announced the other week - and smashes the franchise into a brick wall. If this has been in development for more than a year, I'll drink engine fluid.

Flatout 3 is developed by Team 6, which was also behind the Wii's uncontrollably bad Flatout, and picks things up from there. Veterans of Bugbear's Flatout 2 and Ultimate Carnage will recall tight handling at high speeds, sophisticated damage modelling and bouncy but tight physics - and those things remain a memory.

The first of many unwelcome surprises is using a 360 controller. Remember that mission in Grand Theft Auto 4 where you had to drive while a passenger was trying to wrench the steering wheel away? Play with a pad and you will - the car jerks left and right randomly, like an iron filing surrounded by weak magnets, jamming itself into the scenery again and again.

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It's hard to believe that Super Crate Box came out on Macs and PCs as recently as 2010. It feels like I've been playing it forever. That's not because I'm any good at it, mind. It's more likely because I'm intimately aware of all the ways I'm not any good at it. I know I lurk too much on the safer mid-level platforms of the Moon Temple stage and then get overwhelmed, for example. I know I'm scared of weapons like the disc gun and the laser rifle, so I've never really mastered their quirks. I know I flip out completely whenever the little floating skull guys turn up and that I often fall in the flaming pit at the bottom of the screen entirely by accident.

There's another reason it's hard to believe Vlambeer's fast-paced blaster is only two years old, though, and that's because Super Crate Box, while oozing with indie credibility, feels like a classic arcade game from the Eugene Jarvis era. It's got a great line in tight, replayable maps, it's got dribbling horrors to populate them with, and it's got some adorable, savagely differentiated weaponry to keep you alive.

Like Robotron or Defender, Super Crate Box is a brisk tutorial in how less really can be more when it comes to design. You could list its handful of ideas on the back of a rail ticket, and yet they provide enough structure to build a game that you can then pretty much play until the end of time.

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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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These days there are so many handheld devices available that allow you to play games on the move - small and large, cheap and expensive, buttons and touch - that it's a challenge to stand out from the crowd. Where do you put your focus? Judging by a fortnight with PlayStation Vita, even Sony's hardware designers couldn't make their minds up about that, because the initial impression is that they threw everything at the wall and everything stuck. The result is a handheld that can do pretty much anything. The good news for hardcore gamers is that in amongst all of that functionality are a few things that could - if the software follows - make this the best gaming portable ever.

PlayStation Vita isn't going to infest the world like iPad did two years ago, but it faces the same scepticism - that Sony is answering a question no one's asked. Apple's tablet quickly rose to that challenge by seeping into the gaps between other devices to become the best at things we forgot we wanted, and gamers may discover that Vita pulls a similar trick. Now you can sit on a train playing a new Uncharted adventure and it looks almost as good as the one at home, and crucially it feels the same.

"We need that second analogue stick - something that even Nintendo has belatedly acknowledged with its revisions to the 3DS - and it's here at last."

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You'd probably prefer it if I didn't mention World of Warcraft in this review. Seven years on and it's getting boring, I have to agree. But that's tough for both of us, because Star Wars: The Old Republic wouldn't exist without Blizzard's online world, and it's impossible to discuss without referring to it. There are two elephants in this room.

The Old Republic is largely made in WOW's image, and it's the latest and probably the last attempt by a cowed and frustrated industry to unseat it. Never has a game stopped an entire genre in its tracks like WOW has with massively multiplayer online gaming.

With the Star Wars and BioWare brands attached and an unimaginable amount of effort and money expended on its making - this Herculean project would make James Cameron or Cecil B De Mille blanch - The Old Republic has been given every chance of success. It has the timing right too, arriving just as WOW players' ennui has finally begun to outweigh Blizzard's genius for reinvention, and the old warhorse's subscriber numbers have started to fall. Could we really have a contender here?

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Thanks to quirks of the calendar and the narrowing technological gap between the devices in our pockets and those lingering under our TVs, the latest instalment of the Uncharted action-adventure series arrives barely two months after we reviewed the last one, Drake's Deception, and doesn't look all that different. Even by the Call of Duty-regurgitating, never-knowingly-not-a-sequel standards of the modern video games industry, that's an impressive rate of iteration.

The difference, of course, is that Uncharted: Golden Abyss is one of the first games to be released for PlayStation Vita, and while the timing is perhaps unfortunate - even when Vita reaches Europe in late February, Drake's Deception will be barely four months old - you can understand the choice of talisman. If anybody is going to convince sceptical gamers that Sony's new handheld can deliver premium-quality gaming on the go, then surely it is Nathan Drake.

With original developer Naughty Dog sticking to the PS3 for the time being, Drake's latest fate is thrust into the hands of Sony's Bend Studio, and the team best known for the Syphon Filter games proves a fastidious steward, carefully ticking all the right boxes over the game's six-to-eight hour lifespan. There's a reluctant love interest, double crosses, fossils and relics galore, and an ancient city of gold to be found by jumping, shooting and dangling through jungles and ruins across South America.

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Poor Kirby. Mass Attack has the dubious honour of being Nintendo's last DS effort as the developer ditches the format for platforms new. Released without fanfare at a busy time a couple of months ago, this DS swansong slipped by almost unnoticed - by our reviews department, anyway.

But, in 2011's last days, it's time to set that right and salute a fitting send-off for the great handheld. Because those who do pick up one final game for the ageing device will find a showcase for some of Nintendo's best uses of the DS touch screen.

European gamers have never really taken to Kirby, yet 2011 could have been his year. Mass Attack is one of three games released in the past 12 months to star the pink puffball, alongside Wii adventures Epic Yarn and Return to Dreamland. Nintendo even saw fit to give Kirby his own anime channel on the Wii this summer. And while Return to Dreamland was a step back to the series' enemy-swallowing staples, Epic Yarn offered an imaginative take.

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Sega is a shadow of its former self. Its star developers are scattered to the four winds while treasured series hang cracked and dry from so much tireless, often unsympathetic milking. The company is perhaps the greatest casualty in the collapse of the arcade scene, once the fertile breeding ground for its most daring ideas and brightest designers.

Nevertheless, Sega still has one jewel to its name: its fans. Sega's devotees are loyal and tenacious - and many are also talented and industrious. Nowhere is this fact more evident than in this remake of Sonic CD, a lavish, widescreen production that puts almost every other Japanese publisher who is remaking yesteryear's classics, from Treasure to Nintendo, to shame with its generosity. It was, in large part, made by a fan.

In 2009, after a number of somewhat disappointing iOS ports of classic Sega titles, the publisher put out a call to fans asking which game the community might like to see re-released next. Australian coder Christian Whitehead responded not with a wish list but rather with a YouTube video showing a proof-of-concept port of the classic Mega CD title Sonic CD, created with his own Retro Engine Development Kit.

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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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Nintendo's been on a roll lately with the new entries in its beloved Mario, Zelda, and Mario Kart franchises. Yet even the most dyed-in-the-wool fan will admit concern that the company keeps drawing from the same well. So it should come as a surprise that Nintendo's best first-party original title in years is premiering as a budget release on the 3DS' fledgling eShop.

Pullblox, or Pushmo as it's known in North America, is a puzzle-platformer by Intelligent Systems (WarioWare, Advance Wars, Paper Mario) about rescuing children trapped inside collapsible play structures. While this sounds ridiculously painful, Pullblox doesn't dwell on this silly premise and instead uses it as a simple explanation for why your gnomish red avatar Mallo has to solve a series of spatial challenges.

Scaling these vertical playpens is easier said than done. Each structure is comprised of a series of peculiarly shaped blocks that can be pulled out to three positions along the Z-axis. Blocks can also be grabbed from the side and slid forward, provided there's enough room for Mallo to shuffle his feet. It's a bit like Catherine, without all the sex or frustration. Or sexual frustration.

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It's a definite improvement. Duke Nukem Forever's latest batch of DLC feels like an attempt to replace the game's original campaign with something a little less wobbly, and it just about manages that. The storyline is a touch wittier: Duke's fighting an army made from clones of himself before jetting off into space to really stick it to the alien menace again. The pacing doesn't seem quite so haphazard and the grim lady grot has been confined, more or less, to an eleventh-hour visit to a brothel - a sequence that feels more like a contractual obligation than anything the developers actually thought was a good idea.

As campaigns go, this four-hour episode, with its own beginning, middle and end, is better than the main event in every way imaginable. Sadly, it's still not particularly good.

The problem is pretty simple: The Doctor Who Cloned Me can improve on the detailing all it wants, but it can't escape the fact that it has to build on the original game's rotten framework. That means the same arsenal of weightless, ineffectual weaponry wedged into the same two slots, the same boxy art assets, and the same lengthy loading times between levels. The locations may zip past a lot faster and the references may be a little more current - Portal gets a nod this time, instead of Team America - but it's still a bit of a slog as you move from one cramped interior to another, stopping now and then for a limp forklift puzzle or a painful bit of first-person platforming.

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Trine was a great co-op adventure that too many people worked their way through alone. Multiplayer was only available locally, and Frozenbyte's rather earnest class-based platformer could initially seem a little too complicated to appeal to the drop-in, drop-out couch crowd.

Trine 2 doesn't change very much about the basics of the design, but it does take its new campaign online for up to three players. It's easy to jump into, extremely stable (on the PC/Mac version anyway, which is all I've tested) and it's a crucial addition to the game. Suddenly you can blast through this chaotic fantasy universe with friends and strangers alike: improvising, collaborating and fighting over who gets to be the wizard.

Elsewhere, it's pretty much the game it once was, with Frozenbyte's vivid 3D art used to craft a new selection of intricate side-scrolling 2D levels laden with puzzles and combat. The first game's cast has returned, meaning you play while cycling between a brawling knight, a nimble grapple-hook-wielding thief and a wizard who can levitate objects and conjure a series of blocks and planks. They've each got a range of simple new powers to choose between as you level up, too, with skill points adding fire or ice to the thief's arrows, say, or allowing the wizard to chuck enemies around.

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"Have they pulled it off?" That was the question spitting incredulously from our lips back in 2001 when Grand Theft Auto made its leap from top-down 2D distraction to fully 3D, open-world game-changer. In a moment of cultural symmetry that probably means something or other, "have they pulled it off?" is also the question that greets GTA3 in 2011, as it celebrates its 10th birthday by debuting on mobile platforms that don't even have buttons.

It's a blue-plaque moment as far as technological change is concerned, and even though games like Infinity Blade should have convinced us that these pocket-sized devices can offer more than Snake and Minefield, the arrival of Grand Theft Auto on the iPhone is momentous enough to warrant a contemplative pause.

Given the ubiquity of so many of its ideas, it's easy to forget just what a paradigm shift Rockstar's opus represented. There had been open-world games before, of course, and Driver had already offered free-roaming car chase thrills only a few years earlier. What GTA did, in its leap to three fully fleshed-out dimensions, was expand the canvas. It wasn't just the freedom of movement, but the sense of place. The radio stations. The characters. The sly sense of humour. To be told we were at liberty to go nuts in Liberty City was a pivotal moment in the evolution of game design.

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Few video game titles are as misleading as English Country Tune. It's not a music game, doesn't contain anything even remotely close to a country song (English or otherwise), nor is there any narrative to provide context. Instead, the first commercial release by prolific indie powerhouse Stephen "Increpare" Lavelle is a fiendishly difficult spatial puzzler that switches up its mechanics at a dizzying rate, making it nearly a dozen puzzle games in one.

Initially, you control a flat panel flipping over tiles in an effort to push spheres called "larva" into incubators. Trouble is, their gravitational pull is relative to the angle at which you knock them. Positioning larva in the right place with the correct trajectory is easier said than done and the challenge ramps up significantly by the second set of levels.

Once you've gotten the hang of that, it's on to new objectives, pushing cubes called "whales" off the edge of the map. Whales cannot be moved directly and instead emit beams of light from their six surfaces, which must be pushed to move their source. Next up are "garden" stages, where your goal is to plant cubes of grass upon soil by covering every tile without retracing your steps. Before long you'll be doing all of these in 3D, then asked to combine multiple mechanics in the same stage.

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Having defined the stereoscopic 3D experience for PC gamers, NVIDIA reckons its proprietary 3D Vision is ripe for improvement, rolling out a new range of hardware backed by some of the leading lights in PC display technology. Meanwhile, software support for the platform goes from strength to strength with some of the best games of the year - including Skyrim and Batman: Arkham City - offering up strong 3D support.

The first thing you'll notice with the new 3D Vision 2 package is that the configuration of the active shutter glasses has changed significantly. While they look bulkier, they feel lighter and are thus easier to wear for longer periods of time. The additional bulk is down to two major elements - firstly, NVIDIA says that the lenses themselves are 20 per cent larger, and secondly, more plastic is deployed to shield light from leaking in. In truth, this brings NVIDIA's specs more closely into line with what we've seen from some 3DTV makers in the design of their own glasses, and it's clearly a step-up from the original goggles.

Indeed, there's a very strong argument that 3D Vision 2 represents a genuine technological leap over and above current LCD 3D displays. These new additions to the technology are significant: dubbed "Lightboost", 3D Vision 2 monitors are reckoned to be twice as bright as previous displays, meaning that the dullness typically associated with stereoscopic playback using active shutter glasses is largely eliminated.

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