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Saints Row 2 producer Greg Donovan reckons that his game will be competitive with Grand Theft Auto IV.

Saints Row 2 contains the same slightly disquieting mix of openworld, urban violence and gang culture as its predecessor. It begins with your character waking up in prison, having been comatose since getting blown up in the last game, lending the game the perfect pretext for a darker, revenge-oriented story as you return to Stillwater to find out how and why you were betrayed. Your character is, according to the game's producer, Greg Donovan, "a very angry young man or woman who needs to rebuild the saints, find out why he was betrayed, and reclaim Stillwater for his own." And it's a game that is, apparently, "a lot darker, a little bit more sinister."

Soulstorm is an "expandalone" in the splendidly bloody science-fiction strategy series, Dawn of War. That basically means that Dawn of War is getting a little pricey if you want to keep playing the same game, but with the extra races. They're not a bad idea if you fancy a dabble: there's no need to have the original game, and there's some new stuff bolted into a proven and familiar game. Nevertheless there's a sense of vacuity. Nothing much is being achieved by this game, and there's really nothing new to focus your attention on.

After several weeks of defending the besieged portcullis of casual gaming with precious little assistance from the parade of lazy mindless tat on Live Arcade, I've finally found a brave knight who can help me slay the dragon of Kneejerk Hardcore Gamers Who Are Scared Of Fun. And he's got a drill.

Quake, as you very probably know, is a phenomenon. It's a strong possibility that every PC gamer in the world has at least heard of this game, if not played it. But the game had very little impact in the console world, with an N64 conversion of the notoriously "brown" Quake being an altogether dull and ineffective port, since Quake was so popular for its deathmatching, rather than its single player depth. However, this conversion of the second in the Quake series has seen a tremendous leap of dedication towards bringing console owners something to shout about and wave in the face of their PC owning counterparts, other than their pointy joypads. Quake 2 on the Nintendo 64 is just as much of a classic here, as it was there, and in some ways, it's far better. What we haven't got is a straight conversion. No... that would be too easy, for I was surprised when loading the game up to find that every single level was new, from the starting episode, to the 4-player tailored deathmatch arenas. This is one incredible port... The reason I mention that it is in some ways better, is that it's simply more accessible to the player, suitable for the absolute beginner to this genre, and to the most hardened FPS addict. From the comprehensive menu systems (including player and name set-ups) to the in game HUD, everything just screams intuitiveness. Of the main gameplay modes, we have straight-up vanilla single player episodes, and then the multiplayer (more on this later). The progression of the single-player game is pretty standard-fare, with each level leading to another contained in a series of units until you reach the end. This would be dubbed dull, but the tasks you must achieve revolve around more than just the "find red key, open red door" formula, leading to the player backtracking across entire levels to solve objectives. This can get rather frustrating after a while, however, as it can be easy to get lost within the huge levels. The atmosphere in the single player episodes is totally gripping, I lost count of the amount of times I was caught unawares and jumped from the edge of my seat, as the droning from the monolithic machinery gave way to the squealing from a parasitic dog creature... at times it can be genuinely scary stuff.

It might only take a second to score a goal, but it's taken eight ponderous years for Jon Hare and co to make a new Sensible Soccer game.

I was sitting in my lounge last Thursday playing Pro Evolution Soccer 6 with a friend, and halfway through our second nil-nil - as Brazil and France bounced off each other's stubborn, powerful defences - a third friend, who had been patiently waiting for something to happen, started to chant quietly under his breath: "Allez! Allez! Allez!"

Approaching the first blockbuster release of the year fully expecting to be mildly irritated by it can't be the best mindset. The spittle-flecked Internet response to the demo even prompted Criterion's Alex Ward to deliver a characteristically uncompromising Christmas message, in which he urged the public to, "Try [Burnout Paradise] for yourself and make up your own mind. Don't let the Internet do it for you."

The Virtual Console may still be filling up with all the speed of a particularly unmotivated terrapin, but the past two weeks have yielded three new games, and two of those are the sort of good solid videogaming fun that make it worthwhile blowing the dust off your Wii Points. And the third is pretty good as well, if you like that sort of thing.

Normally with a retro compilation the first thing you want to do is rant about how rubbish everything is. There's bound to be something wrong with the graphics - they'll be flickering, slowed, stretched, bordered, upside down, whatever - and the menus will be awful, too. The controls will be mapped to the wrong buttons, or the disc will be the wrong colour, and sometimes when you stand on the 50th pixel from the left the collision detection's different to how it was 48 years ago. And of course that's only half the legitimate stuff (and only half legitimate stuff, as you'll note).

Few games have left such a lasting impression on its audience as Another World. Almost entirely the work of one young Frenchman, Eric Chahi, it was a completely different type of videogame in 1991. One that was dark, dangerous and eerie at times. It was a lonely experience, and an exceptionally harsh journey, but an utterly compelling one all the same.

There was a time when gamers with a fetish for horror could enjoy a new blood splattered title every few months. Think back two or three years and we were pretty much spoiled for choice, with two new Silent Hill games in quick succession, three Project Zero games released in just over three years, a fantastic Resident Evil renaissance, and a ton of other interesting titles vying for attention.

Three years ago, Melbourne House did something spectacular and wholly unexpected. It took the perennially abused Transformers licence and conjured an almost-wonderful game for Atari. We described it as "one of the most enjoyable games" of 2004. If you have a PS2, and have some sort of movie-related Transformers itch that you just have to scratch, you should definitely track it down. Not only will you be saving yourself the pain and misery of playing the latest botched attempt, but you'll become the proud owner of one of the most bafflingly overlooked PS2 games ever made.

10th October finally saw the release of The Orange Box on Steam. What follows is a review of the product as a whole. For individual reviews of the component games, click on the following links.

Thanks to failing eyesight (thanks, Suicide Girls) and this newfangled obsession with making everything look gritty, online FPS games are harder for me than ever. Half the time I can't pick people out from the environment until it's too late. Even in Counter-Strike, which is clearer than most, I often get popped in the head by a distant Colt and then have to cycle the chase-cameras to work out who killed me and from where.

The portal gun is the most exciting thing to happen to FPS games since the gravity gun, and it's no surprise to discover that Valve is agonising over whether to give it to Gordon Freeman. Its function is simple: bridging gaps. But, in doing so, it alters the way in which you approach an FPS environment so radically that it's hard to think past it. Give it to Gordon, and Half-Life will never be the same. Better to keep it in the family, but away from the action. That's what Portal does, and the results are interesting.

Koei's Dynasty Warriors games just don't sell very well outside of Japan. The solution is obvious: take all the hallmarks of the Warriors series, and apply them to European history. Hence Bladestorm.

Another visitor. Stay awhile... stay forever! No, not Eurogamer's mission goal (although they're perfectly free to "borrow" it) but instead the taunting speech of a lunatic scientist, a simple yet perfect introduction to one of the Commodore 64's most enigmatic classics.

Are you ready to rock? Again? With more peripherals? Of course you are. But is it as good as it obviously should be?

If I'd spent anything like the amount of time with an actual guitar as I have with Guitar Hero, I'd probably be playing to packed-out stadiums by now. I'd be the next Hendrix, only female, right-handed and with slightly less excellent hair. There are people who might consider spending about six hours a week playing a pretend guitar laughable, but you understand me, dear readers. You understand how important it is that Neversoft gets Guitar Hero III right, especially after the (Harmonix-designed, I should point out) damp squib that was Rocks the 80s.

As much as the Hitman series has grown into one of the most interesting shooters around, IO Interactive is smart enough to know when Agent 47 needs to stroke his bar-coded bald bonce and take a few years off. We've been here before, of course. A year after Silent Assassin hit, the Danish developer released the sorely under-rated Freedom Fighters - a game, lest we forget, that Tom reckoned had "the best team-mate AI ever".

Sensible Soccer completely redefined football games when it first burst onto the Commodore Amiga scene back in 1992. Jon Hare, Chris Yates and co. took the top-down viewpoint of Kick-Off, zoomed the viewpoint out a touch and came up with a fast, flowing and intuitive take on footy that was instantly playable, yet full of hidden depths. Its eventual evolution into Sensible World of Soccer took that depth even further via a succession of tweaks to the gameplay and a hugely absorbing management element. It was a heady combination, and by the 96/97 version, Sensible had refined it to a point where it was pretty much as good as it could get.

This is not Space Giraffe.

April is amazing and brilliant not only because you can push people down the stairs as a joke, but also because it's the month before May, which is nearly summer. We didn't play any jokes this year; we thought about swapping around usernames in the forum for a while, or replacing words like Microsoft with other words like Sony when you wrote things, but we got confused and forgot to do either. And then fell down the stairs.

It's almost three years since the last Devil May Cry, with its self-consciously angsty Emo shapes. Despite its awful music and dialogue, we were happy to dish out 8/10 for what was one of the best hackandslash fighting systems around. It wasn't a big step up, but it didn't need to be. It just needed better balance, and to make us forget about the awful second instalment. Refining the 2001 original into something truly fleshed out and compelling, it did the job.

With former publisher Acclaim long since bust and memories of Turok: Evolution as few as they ever were favourable, Touchstone Games' 2008 Turok gets the benefit of a fresh start, even if Propaganda Games' narrative rebuild is anything but: space marines shot down on a hostile planet, anyone? As Joseph Turok, a Native American black-ops knife specialist new to his unit, you're tasked with hunting down Roland Kane, of whose Wolf Pack unit you were once part.

In which a burly, gruff black man with a machine gun and a muscly, gruff white man with a sniper rifle run around the world shooting foreigners in the name of justice. Or freedom or revenge or something else entirely; it's hard to tell and impossible to care. Yes, it's another game with the word Ops in the title, so expect lots of guns and grenades, tanks and helicopters, oil barrels to blow up and boxes to hide behind.

A few campaigns into Army of Two, and mercenaries Tyson Rios and Elliot Salem are lugging their risible body armour, pimped hand-cannons and mismatched names towards their next encounter with a bunch of insurgents who look like a street gang, in an army base that looks like a skate park, in an Iraq that looks like the outskirts of Denver. Rios (bald, scarred, The Serious One) is being Basil Exposition, wondering aloud to Salem (tousled, tattooed, The Impetuous One) whether a mole might be betraying them to the enemy.

This interactive adaptation of the movie of the books is one of those games that starts off better than you expect, and then slowly droops to being exactly what you expect. At one point, near the start, I was wondering if I might have to dollop out an 8/10 for a game based on a kids movie. By the end the score had whittled down to...well, you'll see.

Sumo Digital has made quite a lot of games since its formation in 2003, but our favourites are the two OutRun games and Virtua Tennis 3; love letters for SEGA fans, penned on SEGA's behalf. Superstars Tennis, by contrast, is dinner, dancing, cocktails and fellatio. It's absolutely stuffed with SEGA characters lovingly recreated in 720p high-definition, full of tennis courts built in honour of games like Super Monkey Ball, House of the Dead, Golden Axe and Space Channel 5, with unlockable Achievements for 360 inspired by their names. SEGA Rally is a 40-shot rally, After Burner is a 100mph serve, OutRun is covering 6 miles on foot.