It’s slightly sad to think that the teenage gamers of today won’t have a clue who the Bonanza Brothers, Opa Opa and Alex Kidd are. That said, I consider myself to be a Sega buff and I had to Google the names of unlockable characters ‘Zobio and Zobiko’ to find out what game they’re from. Turns out the zombified duo are from The House of the Dead: EX, an arcade game released only last year. If that’s not fan service, then I don’t know what is.

Understand, understand, understand the concept, the concept of….Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing. Like Sonic himself it’s a brightly coloured affair that moves like a greased rocket. Sonic’s tracks have been designed for sheer speed, Samba de Amigo’s bare resemblance to Mario Kart’s Rainbow Road while the Monkey Ball tracks are the toughest due to some harsh 90 and 180 degree corners. The House of the Dead, sorry, Curien Mansion, tracks have zombies aimlessly hobbling around and Billy Hatcher’s assortment provide the as-to-be-expected ice and lava lands. There’s a huge emphasis on power sliding to gain boosts, which is achieved by holding down the left trigger. The same button is also used to perform tricks when in the air.

In the early Mario Kart games the weapons where perfectly balanced. Mario Kart Wii though messed things up with its unavoidable blue shell and blooper ink that smothered the screen. Thankfully there’s nothing inescapable here – the screen can be covered with an obscuring rainbow effect, but only if you’re careless enough drive into a rainbow that somebody has dropped behind. The rest of the weapon assortment includes Sonic’s sneakers as a speed boost, a couple of projectiles (Alex Kidd’s boxing gloves and rockets from Chu Chu Rocket) and a bomb that you can bowl down the track. Do poorly in races and eventually you’ll get a power-up to go ‘All-Star’ and perform an attack unique to each character. Jet Set/Grind Radio’s Beat leaps out of his car and onto his skates and starts spraying other racers with paint; Big the Cat turns into a giant frog and leaps his way to victory. Funnily enough, Eggman always seems to be in last place.

Visceral Games satanic slasher is not based on the seven deadly sins as some misinformed people may lead you to believe, but rather the nine circles of Hell as described by Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century poem the Divine Comedy. As Dante embarks on his quest to free his lover he has to fight his way through Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Wrath, Violence, Fraud, Betrayal and Heresay. I know that the winners of 2001’s Pop Idol weren’t the best group ever, but I don’t think it particularly fair that they’ve ended up in Hell.

If you’ve played any of the God of War games then you’ll feel a sense of familiarity here. The combat system is well thought out and versatile, allowing for air combos and counter attacks while every foe bestows souls when destroyed that can be used to unlock new moves and upgrade existing ones. When finishing off an enemy you can choose to absolve their sins or punish them which will determine whether Dante follows the Holy or the Unholy path.

Following the Holy path will give better magic attacks and stronger defenses while the Unholy path gives more brutal attacks. Dante also comes across historic figures such as Boudicca and Pontius Pilate which too can be punished or absolved for their sins via a button matching mini-game. There aren’t enough souls to go around to follow both the Holy and Unholy paths in one game, which gives incentive for a second play through.

It’s always important to make a good first impression, which is something that Capcom’s Dark Void failed to do. My copy came with a code to unlock a gold jetpack, so before playing the game for the first time I redeemed the code and downloaded the shiny golden bonus. In went the disk, the developer logos appeared followed by a black screen and then…nothing – it wouldn’t load any further. I checked the disk, tried a different game; reloaded Dark Void a few times – it still froze up after the developer logos. After scratching my head a bit I thought I’d try deleting the content I had just downloaded, meaning I wouldn’t be able to get the gold jetpack as the code can only be used once. It turned out this was stopping the game from loading. And then about half an hour into the game the screen froze and it crashed. I know being a games tester isn’t the most glamorous job in the gaming industry, but they could at least do their bloody job properly.

So, my Dark Void experience got off to a bad start. Fortunately it was worth sticking with – the jetpack gives the game a nice twist, the sci-fi plot is interesting and there’s a degree of fun to be had. The third person on foot stages play like Gears of War with a similar cover system while the enemies – slug like larva encased in metal robotic skeletons – are smart enough to flank, leap out of the way of grenades and will retreat if outnumbered. Like Halo there’s a two weapon limit; weapons can be swapped over during levels by finding weapon creates and can also be upgraded. Melee attack animations are pleasingly brutal too, particularly the one where protagonist Will grabs hold of an enemy’s head, twists their body round to give you a full view of the action, sticks gun to their chest and pulls the trigger. Classy.

Activision releasing a version of DJ Hero on Nintendo DS is inevitable. What isn’t inevitable though is whether they’ll bundle it with a peripheral like the DS version of Guitar Hero before it. It’s no big deal if it doesn’t happen – Deep Silver’s DJ Star proves that something like this can work just fine without any hunk of plastic hanging out of the DS’s cartridge slot.

Any game of the this ilk is going to live or die by its music selection, so it’s fortunate that the developers have had wide enough wallets to be able to include a large selection of licensed music including stuff from Calvin Harris, Eric Prydz, Bob Sinclair and Pharrell Williams. The sound quality is surprisingly good, although the DS’s speakers aren’t really designed for heavy bass lines.

At the start only a few tracks are available, with the rest becoming unlocked as your custom-made character starts their clichéd career path of going from a bedroom based disk jockey to a superstar DJ. There’s also a simple to use music creation tool to make your own music with. It reminds me of something I used to play around with on a Sony Ericsson mobile phone about five years ago – just drag and drop beats and away you go.

Konami are brave souls for picking up the publishing duties for this one. See, Silent Hill is considered to be the pinnacle of survival horror, so any dark and dank third-person adventure game in which the main character uses a flashlight usually gets compared to it. Why release something that is bound to be considered inferior to a product that already exists? Probably because the SAW series is absurdly popular.

The premise is pleasingly simple – Detective Tapp wakes up in an abandoned mental asylum with a key sewn into his chest. This key happens to be for the exit, and so everybody else that has been brought into the asylum to play Jigsaw’s twisted game is after Tapp. From start to finish Jigsaw sets various tasks and puzzles while the asylum itself is rigged with traps. It’s not a particularly scary game, just a bit grim at times. Like having to put your hand in a toilet bowl full of used syringes and grab a key before the pain becomes too much.

As soon as the second level Tapp has a shotgun collar put around his neck – come into contact with anybody else wearing one and it’ll detonate. Enemies usually go down with three or four punches so they’re not exactly anything to fear. In some sections guns are available but fortunately they don’t turn the game into a mindless shooter as ammo is limited to what’s inside the gun when you find it. You can also set up your own traps by using shotgun shells, paint thinner and other objects. A definite highpoint is the battle against Pig Head, who is too strong to take down with melee weapons, instead requiring some clever trap placement to kill.

I am a simple man. Give me a decent circuit, a good sense of speed, a believable enough simulation of a Formula 1 car, and a grand prix weekend’s complement of practice sessions, and I’m happy. F1 2009 does just that, so in terms of their first game with the license, it’s job done for Codemasters.

There’s a genre seriously lacking in the Xbox 360’s software catalogue and that’s naked alligator mud wresting. I’m joking of course – it’s topless glamour model stairlift racing. But seriously, it’s the simulation genre, with the little-known A Train HX and Civilization Revolution being the best of a small bunch. We can now add Tropico 3 – the first console version in a series of previously PC-only sims – to that list too. I think publishers Kalypso should have dropped the ‘3’ at the end though – it might alienate people, which would be a bad thing considering this is jolly good stuff.

Instead of seeing “Press Any Button to Play” on the title screen you’re presented with the words “Press Any Button to Rule” which sums up the idea behind Tropico 3 perfectly. This is your chance to become an El Presidente of a chain of “banana republic” islands and it’s your choice as to how you rule them. You can be a tyrant, forcing your people to live in shacks and work in farms and then sit back and reap in the cash or turn the island into a tourist resort with hotels, sandy beaches and tacky gift shops. There are different factions to keep happy and also the chance to form relations with the US and the USSR. Doing so opens up more options, like being able to let the Russians test nuclear missiles on your shores in return for a hefty cash injection into your Swiss bank account.

Hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of gamers have put a lot of blind faith into Infinite Ward, being happy to place down money on pre-orders going solely on some hype-packed previews. Just imagine how funny it would have been if Infinite Ward had spend the last two years making twiddling their thumbs before churning out something akin to the trashy Army Men games. Activision would probably end up with countless people outside their offices carrying burning Guitar Hero guitars and lobbing DJ Hero decks covered in poo through their window. Hilarous.

The truth though is this: Modern Warfare 2 is genuinely worthy of the hype. It’s brilliant, and the brilliant thing about it is that it’s constantly brilliant – from start to end there isn’t a single dull moment. Levels are a lot bigger than before but no less detailed – the attention to detail is scarily realistic, not just on the environments but also on the character models and weapons. Enemies no longer respawn and are more intelligent – they even jump across roofs to get a clearer shot – and the animation is also close to faultless. Even the sound is worthy of praise, with your allies shouting out enemy locations and passing comment on any skilled shots with a sniper rifle.

Gimmicks over gameplay – that’s what someone has probably said at some point about a Wii game. I’ve just checked with Google, and they have indeed.

DTL:TNC – an abbreviation I shan’t use again – doesn’t employ a Wii-related gimmick though. Well done, you might think. Not so: for Drawn to Life does employ a gimmick, it’s just a Nintendo DS gimmick. But in a Wii game. Which works as well as you’d imagine.

The first Drawn to Life was a DS title, and used the stylus as a drawing implement. Here it’s the flappy, imprecise Wii remote instead. With that you’re supposed to draw your character, and many other objects which fill the half-hearted platform game which passes as the title’s substance.

Blood and guts. Include too much in a game and it can end up looking tacky, like in the early Mortal Kombat games when you performed a fatality and an absurd half a dozen rib cages burst out of your opponent. Fairytale Fights manages to get the amount of gore just right – there’s plenty of it, yet it doesn’t look out of place. This is a little bizarre considering that the cartoon styling may fool some into initially thinking that this is a kid’s game. It couldn’t be further from the truth – the fairytales told here are deeply twisted, with Hansel and Gretel being conjoined twins and the Pied Piper luring women into his house instead of rats.

With infinite lives, drop-in-drop-out co-op play and similar camera angles, Fairytale Fights has clearly been influenced by the Lego games. First impressions are favourable enough – the graphics are bright and breezy with some detailed backdrops while cutting enemies in half – complete with an extreme close up on the side of the screen – is mildly entertaining. The potions are quite fun to use too – throw a pot of acid at an enemy and their skin peals off their bones in a distributing manner, just like scene at the end of Gremlins where Spike falls into the water fountain. The boss battles are creative and sometimes require some thought, but here’s the problem – the levels leading up to them are long and tedious, with little variation in enemies and hardly any set-pieces.

So there I was, about to have a rummage around a tomb when the quartet of giant moths that I’d been running away from finally managed to catch up with me. Suddenly I heard a voice. “Don’t worry, I’ll help you!” yelled a nearby farmhand. I knew that his attempts to kill the moths would be futile so I sat back and watched him get stung and clawed to death. And then I went and raided his corpse and stole his weapon, before vanishing into the tomb to carry on my pilfering spree.

It’s during the unscripted events like this which Risen really shines, which is slightly ironic given how dull and washed-out the visuals are. I can’t vouch for the PC version but on Xbox 360 it looks like a fuzzy old PlayStation 2 game at times. If you’re expecting blistering combat then you’ll also be disappointed. The politest thing I can say about the combat system is that it’s simplistic, being merely a case of standing in front of an enemy and bashing the A button. A lock-on function would have been a massive help as if you aren’t standing exactly in front of a foe then your blows won’t register, and if an enemy sidesteps it takes ages to swing the camera around which leaves you open to attack.

You do get the impression though that developers Piranha Bites simply wanted to create an interesting, living and coherent island that’ll take weeks to explore. And if that really was their aim, then they’ve succeeded – the island is genuinely exciting to travel around, with caves, crypts, and abandoned buildings to discover and countless people needing your help.

In the world of videogames timing is crucial. Not just attacking an opponent at the right time to cause maximum damage but also where releasing games is concerned. SouthPeak managed to get this out of the door barely two weeks before Halo 3: ODST – the sequel to the most played games on the Xbox 360. Had it come after, I doubt it would have even managed to get into the top 40 chart at all.

The plot and setting is your typical sci-fi affair involving two factions waging war on distant planets. What this really boils down to is two teams of up to sixteen players competing to reach a score of 1000. How you contribute to a victory though up to you. A kill is only worth 5 points whereas capturing bases and destroying gun turrets will earn you twice as much. The real big earners are gained from completing the missions that randomly commence such as escorting convoys, killing (or protecting) VIPs and the like.