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How did you spend November 1998? I spent it having conversations like this.

Whatever the ins and outs are of Tomb Raider: Anniversary's protracted passage to the Xbox 360 [where's my house, Eidos?], there's plenty to celebrate about this tardy conversion. First up, Eidos has been smart enough to release the game at mid-price, with most UK retailers pricing it at just GBP 24.99 for the boxed version. Interestingly, owners of last year's Tomb Raider Legend also have the option of downloading the game in four separate 'episodes', each priced at 600 points. The latter option, in particular, offers superb value for the kind of gamers who never get beyond the first few levels - but forcing Eidos to restrict sales of the downloadable version to owners of Legend seems like another of those illogical Xbox Live rules that ought to be shot in the head. Like a bear.

Air combat games are contradictory beasts. They offer the most freedom of movement of any game genre, and yet are constrained by the emptiness of their aerial arenas into gameplay that can quickly become monotonous if you're not passionately excited by military technology. Fly to waypoint, shoot down enemies, rinse, repeat.

Imagine a modern day videogame in the mind of someone who has never played one. Imagine no longer, as Saints Row The Third is arguably that game; an overwhelming orgy of preposterous violence that would send a Daily Mail reader into paroxysms of indignant rage if they could ever grasp a sliver of what was happening.

If you want to talk about Saints Row 2 (right place to be, innit), you've got two different approaches open to you. You could talk, in technical terms and a tone reminiscent of a slightly disappointed maths teacher, about how the graphics aren't terribly impressive. It's got a huge city for you to explore, but compared with the deftly filtered visual richness of something like Grand Theft Auto IV (a comparison that's going to be hauled out a lot, I'm afraid), it looks dated.

The theme of underground resistance has always run through the Red Faction series, but it's never been so overtly political as it is in this third instalment - the first to ditch the traditional linear FPS format for a free-roaming third-person openworld adventure. "The liberators soon became an occupying force," declares our hero, Alec Mason.

It's been ten years since developer Volition first debuted its environment-trashing GeoMod technology in the original Red Faction. Over that period the series has fidgeted uncomfortably from first-person shooter to openworld adventure and now, with Armageddon, to third-person shooter.

Wine in a box, eBay, shower radios, Worcester sauce crisps. We can all think of at least one thing we wish we'd thought up first. Puzzle Quest is another one. Take the puzzle mechanic of Bejeweled and make it the basis of a turn-based RPG. Genius.

Remember the first time you ever rode a rollercoaster? The intoxicating, freefall terror of plummeting downwards into infinite doom; the feeling that you're surely going to die as your stomach flies past your ears. That's Pure's stock in trade.

Prince of Persia hasn't always spun a good yarn, but it's often overcome that with exotic locations and even more exotic acrobatics, and for the first few hours the new-look Prince threatens to do likewise. Having stumbled upon a Princess in peril while out hunting for his wayward donkey, the Americanised Prince falls into a divine battle between the forces of good and evil, and proceeds to wisecrack and Brendan-Fraser his way through an occasionally delicate story of restoring life to a corrupted fantasy world of epic palaces and Skies-of-Arcadian technology.

If you make a mistake, rewind and try again. That's been the implicit motto of the Prince of Persia series since 2003, but now it seems that life is imitating art as the ambivalently received 2008 reboot is unceremoniously ignored in favour of this "interquel", squeezed in between The Sands of Time and its angsty 2004 follow-up, Warrior Within, in the official canon.

There's a term currently bandied around in gaming discussion with wilful abandon. "Living city". It's something of a misnomer. If anything, the term is used to describe the most static of towns, where NPCs amble around with no fixed agenda, perhaps occasional unscripted scuffles of no consequence are used as set decoration. These cities aren't living. The reality is, the city only ever lives when you start changing it.

Even when a game is as gleefully stupid as possible, developers are sometimes smart enough to leave room for the player to make it even more so. It's almost inspiring. Case in point: Ninja Blade. The game opens with a unit of ninjas, one of which is you, being dropped from a transport plane into a city that's been infected by Alpha Worms from Space. Or something. None of the ninjas have parachutes. On the way down - slashing enemy flying things who have the misfortune to be passing by - you proceed to land by crashing through the side of a skyscraper and slow the impact by doing a forward roll. That's as sane as it gets. By the end of the level, you've kicked an enormous demolition ball into the boss' equally enormous tendril-covered face.

Ah, time to roll out one of my "meanwhile in capitalist Russia" anecdotes... A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to be out in Moscow visiting a developers' fair. While I was there I met up with one of the 1C Company bosses, and we had a chat about the apocalyptic theme that runs through Russian and Ukrainian gaming.

With production values to rival most full-price platform games, The Maw is certainly an eye-catching addition to the Xbox Live Arcade line-up. It's also an entertaining one, even if the amusement is rather short-lived.

The remarkable thing about Mafia II is not that it's bad, but that it masks its awfulness so well. The game opens with striking visuals: the backdrop of Empire Bay (Mafia's stand-in for New York City) is packed with World War II-era details, and the characters are authentic-looking, with a veneer of humanity. The nicely curated oldies soundtrack promises to immerse us in the culture and spirit of the period. Mafia II has the production values that players interpret as signs of quality. What comes next is cognitive dissonance.

One of the unsung strengths of the Lego games is that their reductive approach to plotting allows them to skip or gloss over the weaker elements of their inspiration. In the case of Pirates of the Caribbean, that's several hours' worth of storytelling bloat - and at times, TT Games punctures it perfectly.

LEGO Harry Potter is enormous, which is no mean feat given that the title character is two centimetres tall. And plastic.

I always used to wish that some enterprising developer would take the openworld template of Grand Theft Auto and apply it to Batman. Not just any Batman, but specifically the wonderful 1960s TV Batman, with his outrageous rogue's gallery of villains, slapstick humour and an appropriately titled gadget for every occasion. Roaming a virtual Gotham, you'd foil plots by villains both famous and infamous by land, sea and air. Heck, you could even get Adam West and Burt Ward to reprise their roles in voiceover.

Squeezing an entire new Tomb Raider game into a downloadable nugget - admittedly, a rather chunky one, at just over 2GB - has necessarily involved some downsizing. Guardian of Light's opening cinematic is a series of stills with none of the acrobatic action-heroine antics or sharp delivery that we've come to expect from Crystal Dynamics' take on Lara Croft. Before you take your first steps into Guardian of Light's first temple, you wonder whether Tomb Raider without the pizazz can possibly be the same.

I'm both the best and the worst guy to be reviewing this. The best because last year's strategy/role-playing curio King's Bounty: The Legend was comfortably my game of the year, and one I bent the ear of anyone unlucky enough to be in the same room as me about. The worst because, well, that. I know the thing inside out. Armored Princess is a standalone expansion for it, and as such it's pretty much the same game. If I'd come to it without already knowing how good King's Bounty is, I'd have been grabbing people in the street, staring at them with wild eyes, shaking them by the shoulders and shouting, "Princess! Armored Princess! Omi god it's amazing it's a proper PC game you have to play it you have to play it whoops I just had a trouser malfunction."

I can't help wondering what the atmosphere in the IO Interactive office was like when EA announced details of Army of Two: The 40th Day. Both sequels were revealed within a few months of each other last year, and the similarities are startling.

Rico Rodriguez stands, head in the clouds, 1200 feet above sea level. The Southeast Asian island of Panau shimmers far below, a colourful patchwork quilt of diverse terrain, all couched within a Sonic-blue ocean upon whose surface ten thousand pricks of sunlight wink lazy. There's no time to fully take in this National Geographic photo spread of a vista, however. In twenty seconds a helicopter gunship will tear bullet holes through the cirrus wisp and silence - a problem when your feet are planted on two giant zeppelins' worth of compressed gas.

"Press X to jump in mass grave". I've been confronted with some bizarre button prompts in my time, but Homefront earns itself a special biscuit for this strangely calm exhortation to dive in amongst my slaughtered neighbours.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov and Ray Parker Jr. have more in common than you might think. True, one is a Nobel prize-winning Soviet physiologist and psychologist, while the other is an African-American singer-songwriter whose albums include Sex and the Single Man. One is best known for authoring Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex; the other produced Sweat (Till You Get Wet). Pavlov has never been openly accused of nicking ideas off Huey Lewis, and Ray Parker Jr. has never had a ballerina or a pudding named after him.

Shell and BP made a collective 33.7 billion dollars in profit last year, but while the oil companies are laughing right now (and raping, and pillaging, etc), the future according to Frontlines: Fuel of War is not one they will enjoy. By then, the scarcity of oil reserves will result in an East-West divide that can only be solved by hard men with big guns. Cue yet another near-future first-person shooter on the Xbox 360.

If F.E.A.R. 3 has one lesson to learn, it's that horror is at its best when we care about the people involved. This is the difference between rooting for Sarah in The Descent versus cheering for Freddy as he slaughters Midwestern teenagers before making a bad pun about it in the later Nightmare on Elm Street sequels.

Elixir seems to be edging closer to its masterpiece. The idea behind Evil Genius is simple enough - taking the reigns of a burgeoning evil empire, carving an elaborate secret island base out of the side of a mountain and populating it with all manner of minions and specialists, and then researching and carrying out various crimes around the globe, building up your notoriety rating whilst evading the attentions of the forces of justice. But while Elixir does a much better job of translating its good ideas into a good game than it did with Republic, and manages to instil the game with a consistent sense of humour, it's still guilty of undercooking a number of key elements, and the result is a game that, whilst enjoyable, once again fails to capitalise completely on its promise.

Games are full of excuses, whether they're telling you that a terrorist strike has closed off half the city you're exploring or that swimming is a bad idea when you have electricity coursing through your veins. As excuses go though, Driver: San Francisco throws up one of the more outrageous.

I'd love to be able to start this review by telling you about the time in Mission 4 I was held hostage by a talking codpiece, or the bit in Mission 7 where I fought undead tapeworms inside the gut of a flatulent troll princess. Sadly, I can't. Nothing anywhere near that anecdote-worthy happened to me. Though Disciples III is mechanically very similar to the fabulous King's Bounty, it doesn't have any of that game's wit, energy or quirkiness.