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I've been trying to persuade PEGI to add a new warning icon to their ratings system for the past ten years. If a box came emblazoned with an anorak symbol, the potential buyer would know that "A pre-existing interest in the theme is essential for the enjoyment of this product".

The dumbing down of society continues unabated. We live in a world where irredeemable pap like The Black Eyed Peas' The Time (Dirty Bit) tops the charts, where Peaches Geldof not only has a career but is paid to appear on telly and, like, talk about stuff, and stuff.

If by a man's work shall ye know him, Tomonobu Itagaki is a smashed Xbox 360 control pad. In fact, he's a special kind of smashed Xbox 360 control pad. He's the kind that was desecrated in a frenzied tantrum of bile and frustration, its destruction soundtracked by a stream of vitriolic swearwords so extreme any senior citizens within earshot would spontaneously combust.

Few people I know have anything nice to say about Kane & Lynch. No one I've personally talked to about it has had anything particularly noteworthy to say - most of the time general chatter among gamers isn't exactly on par with Shakespeare - but the gist is that the series is bland, full of clichéd characters and generic cover-based gameplay.

There are three distinct types of people who sit at the high tables of the console business - those who started out in engineering, those who started out in sales and management, and those who started out in development and design. You can, if you want to apply broad brushstrokes to the whole market, divide up the three platform holders according to those definitions.

It's not easy for critics to come back to something they liked, or hated, and deal with the division their copy failed to anticipate. But that shouldn't stop us facing up to and exploring differences of opinion. We've tried before, of course, with the infamous BioShock: A Defence, but that wasn't quite the right approach (even if we did enjoy ourselves), so we've come up with something we think is better. In this, the first of our Retrospective pieces on major games of the past 12 months, Oli Welsh and Alec Meer use the hindsight afforded to them by the five months since Halo 3's release and consider the arguments on both sides of the divide. You can read our original Halo 3 review first, if you like, to put it all in context.

When Fallout 3 was announced, the widespread joy at the resurrection of a beloved and largely forgotten series by a developer of as much established talent as Bethesda was huge. But it was matched by an equally fierce backlash from one of the most notoriously fanatical, difficult-to-please fanbases in the gaming world. Most Fallout fans were adamant that the series ought to be left alone, that the limited technology that the games were built upon was an integral part of what Fallout was, and that any attempt to modernise the series could only result in the bastardisation of one of the most fondly-remembered game universes in the history of the medium.

Tomb Raider is back on track. Following 2003's berated and broken Angel of Darkness, which saw Eidos relieve Core Design of its duties and ship Ms. Croft over to Crystal Dynamics, the series has made a solid return to form. Tomb Raider Legend was a promising if cautious reinvention, while Anniversary was a glorious update of the original game. This week sees the release of Underworld, the ninth game in the series.

Thank goodness, yes it is. There's a horrible tension when you return to a game that's entered legend. What if it was hype? What if things have moved on so far that it creaks and you feel silly trying to play it? Worst of all, what if you've been desperately hoping for an oft-suggested sequel, getting excited at the prospect of its existence, and then you discover the original wasn't what you remembered? Thank goodness, Beyond Good & Evil is still every bit as wonderful.

Holy #*%$! I've just seen the Japanese intro for Street Fighter IV and it looks absolutely killer. Screw objectivity, I'm going to say right now that from my impressions of the Street Fighter IV arcade game and from what I've played so far of the console release, Street IV could very well be the greatest fighting game ever made. With Eurogamer's review going live tomorrow (Monday 16th February), I'm taking a look back at the different Street Fighter games in their many different arcade transitions. Hold onto your sticks people.

Released in 1996, the original Resident Evil not only shifted PlayStations, but cemented the survival horror genre in gaming history. The game's original intro FMV uses real-life actors and features a scene where STARS Alpha member Joseph Frost is graphically ripped apart by Cerberus. Capcom had the intro toned down for the game's western release, warranting a 15 classification by the BBFC, although the PC port by Westwood a year later retained the intro with an 18 certificate. Either sets the tone.

I went back to Dark Forces with two things in mind. First, to see if it could still give me vertigo. And second, to find the map of Max's head. This was intended purely as a nostalgia trip, a brief look at an antiquated shooter that I'd once loved. What I'd forgotten was that it's really, really good.

If it's Sunday then it must be time for another Eurogamer writer to bury you nose-deep in their barren adolescence, pointing at a retro game and braying about it with bleary eyes for a few pages. This week your hangover has been interrupted by a paean to Duke Nukem 3D, my love for which has recently been rejuvenated by the remarkably slick Good Old Games service and formerly its co-op enabled appearance on Xbox Live.

This article is a tribute to the phone box repairmen and women of Lost Heaven. The work they put in behind the scenes, without credit, is only outshone by my dedication toward driving into them.

This Sunday's opinionated retro rant is about Black, the Criterion-built shooter that graced the last generation of consoles towards the end of their shelf life. During the following, somewhat feverish discussion of its impact, or tragic lack of impact, at no point shall we mention that a game released in 2006 cannot be considered retro.

Nearly three years after its UK release, I'm still trying to get my head around Pathologic, an obscure genre mashup from weirdest Russia. Every time you think you've grasped it, every time you figure out what's at the heart of the game, it slips away or blurs with another idea. What is this thing I've come to love so dearly?

It's the difficulty levels. That's what I love most about Thief. Looking Glass's genre-exploding first-person sneaker epic is an incredible work for many reasons, but I think it's best summarised by the difficulty levels.

EDF! EDF! EDF! There is one central thing you need to know about Earth Defence Force: it is not what people have come to believe they want from a videogame. Graphically it's last-generation, the animations are like watching stop-motion puppetry, the voicework sounds like extras from Baywatch reading the script of an Ed Wood movie, and the monsters appear to be based upon stock photography of insects.

"Let's just say you have to be very sensible! Very pragmatic. It isn't magic, although perhaps we'd like to say it is."

In development terms, 3D Realms may be the house that Duke Nukem built (and then laboriously took apart brick by brick) but another, less popular, game gave it an extension and built a pond in the garden. That game was Shadow Warrior and, much as the Dukester was in his day, it was designed to ensnare the male teenage mindset at its every level. Naked anime babes! Swords that cut zombie ninjas in half! Casual racism!

In 1995, a curious alignment of some of the best things in the world occurred. Sat in a circle, hooded staff members of developers Perfect 10 must have chanted various nerd-pleasing names in an ominous fashion: "Monty Python", "LucasArts", "Blackadder", "the Doctor Who that owned the antique car" and (finally and most loudly) "Terry Pratchett". If they had a bit more foresight they'd have added "the gay uncle out of Gavin and Stacey" to one of the verses too.

I love the sunshine, and I've rather a taste for garlic, so I've decided I'm probably not a vampire. It's taken a while to be sure, though. The world of Bloodlines is so arresting, so marvellously cohesive, that it's difficult not to be entirely taken in. Despite the ageing visuals, the places and people of this gritty, gothic Los Angeles are frighteningly real.

How soon we forget. All LucasArts has to do is waltz through door with a smile on its face, a Monkey Island revamp and a decent Star Wars MMO under its arm, and the keys to a digital distribution service jangling in its pocket, and all of a sudden the past five years are forgotten. For years, absolutely nothing - and then suddenly she's back on the doorstep with a cheeky wink and a quip about selling me some fine leather jackets. Out of nowhere, we're rolling around in hay together and daring to dream of a new Day of the Tentacle, and more. As if the life that I wasted lying horizontal on the sofa and staring at the wallpaper hadn't been frittered away.

I like to take my time. I'm not in any rush. I don't need to be hurried along, pushed from behind, or told time's running out. Let me wander at my own pace, I'll get there in the end. Adventure games let me do that. They're in no hurry. They've a story to tell, and they'll tell it to me in my own good time.

It's hard to believe that Super Stardust HD recently celebrated its second birthday. Play the game today and it's still one of the most technically adept, brilliantly conceived and ultra-addictive shooting games available on the current generation of consoles. Where Xbox 360 has its Geometry Wars, PlayStation 3 has Stardust. Both superb, both essential.

"I remember the day I picked up the newspaper after the War on Terror got underway, and saw the Global Defence Initiative labelled in the news," says Louis Castle, co-founder of Westwood Studios, the developer that created Command & Conquer. He laughs, leaning back on his chair in the EA LA meeting room where a handful of series vets have converged to look back over the landmark RTS series. "That was in 2003. So, it only took the real world eight years to get there."

There tend to be two angles taken on a retro piece. Either someone goes back to a game they love and explains why they love it, or they go back to a well-known game and point out how it was actually quite flawed. I intend to take a slightly different approach to this reflection on Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers. This is a piece about how it was actually quite flawed, and why I love it.

Amidst the dusty annals of video gaming, there are games only mentioned in hushed tones. There are games that are traded in back-alleys, games where the few extant copies are guarded by hooded, pale-faced men who worship the old gods Mintah, Ammygah and Com O'door. Games where only one person has ever played it, and he whispers its plot endlessly from his isolated, padded rooms in Bedlam...

(A warning: Spoilers tend to go with the territory in retrospectives, but I'm going to reveal Stranger's Wrath's greatest twist early on in what follows. If you're planning on playing through this game for the pleasure of watching the plot unfold - and this is one of the few games where that wouldn't be an entirely self-destructive objective - you might want to do that before reading any more.)

Powersliding, while a glorious, evocative word for petrolheads, proved an irritatingly elusive dynamic for driving game developers of the 1970s, eighties and very early nineties. Indeed, it was only the remarkable acceleration the genre benefited from as a result of videogaming's transition to 3D (coupled with the renewed processing power of enhanced hardware) that finally enabled the recreation of drifting a box of polygons sideways through a corner in a manner that felt satisfyingly convincing. Up to then, even the most fervent member of the Sprite Generation knew deep down that adding smoke and screeching effects à la OutRun just didn't cut it. If you're going to give the illusion of powersliding, you need to do it in three dimensions. Namco's absurdly popular Ridge Racer was an early front-runner in this regard and soon found a rapidly growing number of efforts from other publishers in its slipstream.