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Do they know it's Christmas time at all? So sang Paul Young in 1984. And Lisa Stansfield in 1989. And a Bedingfield in the 2004 version, which featured Dizzee Rascal's marvellous rapping ("Spare a thought this yuletide for the deprived. If the table was turned, would you survive?").

Despite his protestations in an encouraging "Notes" section that rails against "games-are-art-theory-wankery", I have a feeling that Riff: Everyday Shooter author Jonathan Mak will struggle to escape veneration by the aesthetes of my profession - what with having cited Kenta Cho, Kanta Matsuhisa and Tetsuya Mizuguchi as direct influences, and having then turned in an album of musical shoot-'em-up levels that derive their mechanics from the principle that "even the simplest thing can be the most beautiful thing". Whether or not you get lost in the elegance and subtle meticulousness of his compositions, though (and we will be doing that presently, by the way), you'll still be pleased with what's on offer here: eight distinctive examples of the two-stick shooter that start off well and only get better the more you play them.

Bizarre Creations believes the divided reaction to The Club has been because some have misunderstood its concept.

Much as we'd sometimes like to convince ourselves otherwise, we spend our days writing a silly website about videogames. Among our nearest neighbours in Brighton is Relentless Software, best known for the Buzz! series of games for PlayStation 2, and soon PlayStation 3. What they generally do is make silly quiz games about popular culture.

It is the late 1990s, and the world is head over heels in love with the bold new world of interactive entertainment opened up by Sony's chunky grey biscuit, the new-fangled "PlayStation". Most notably, everyone is frothing at the parts about a Japanese game called Metal Gear Solid, a sequel to some obscure MSX game, in which you don't just run around shooting people, you sneak around. And then shoot people. Or break their neck. You can even hide under cardboard boxes! It is the best game ever and everyone loves it.

According to those splendid websites that go around counting all the review scores, WipEout Pure is the second best game on the PSP. Ever. That's not bad for the seventh game in a clubby racing series that's definitely had its uppers and downers. Lucky number eight, due out for Christmas, remembers to drink lots of water and has a jolly old time too.

That the PSP should receive heavily embellished ports of two of the greatest strategy RPGs ever made within weeks of one another is, at once, cause for wild celebration and cause for mild irritation. Celebration because both Final Fantasy Tactics and Disgaea are astounding achievements of intelligent design, assured form and delightful function; annoyance because the proximity of their second comings will force free time-impoverished players to choose one over the other when, in all honesty, both are fiercely individual games and both make for essential playing.

Aside from minor tweakings to the motherboard and abortive anti-piracy updates, Sony's PSP hardware has thus far remained pretty much unchanged since its debut in December 2004. However, the recent release of the PSP Slim and Lite - or PSP-2000 to give it its technical name - is Sony's latest, and perhaps last throw of the dice as it seeks to catch up on the runaway success of Nintendo's DS portable.

I write with my left hand. Not that I ever write, really, apart from scrawling names on padded envelopes containing Christmas presents that I was too busy or drunk to send. It's one of the poetically enjoyable things about The Future; writing is only necessary when I let things slip into The Past. Anyway, writing with my left hand singled me out for abuse from craggy old Mrs. Alexander when I was 10, so I hardly miss it, or being called "Smudgie", but it wasn't until I picked up the DS version of Geometry Wars: Galaxies that the shame and humiliation of my genetic predisposition toward being a wrongbrain redoubled its attack on my aspirations. Basically, I cannot play this game with the stylus because my remaining right hand is not programmed to operate a spaceship's directional movement.

PopCap co-founder John Vechey has said Peggle is heading to DS, resulting in random outbursts of love.

Towards the end of February, San Francisco hosts the Game Developers Conference, where you can spend the morning listening to someone talk about visual storytelling and the afternoon watching people argue about font rendering. Around the same time, we also get to visit the Independent Games Festival, where the best indie devs in the world gather to show off. And yet we don't celebrate them half as much. So we thought we'd put that right, with a few hands-on previews of the best the IGF has to offer. First up, an exclusive look at 2D Boy's World of Goo. Take it away, Kieron.

We've done Audiosurf and World of Goo, two of the Seumas McNally Grand Finalists at the Independent Games Festival next month, and now we come to our early favourite, Crayon Physics Deluxe. Drawing is best.

There is a horrible, horrible section near the start of Universe at War where you suspect that perhaps developers Petroglyph don't have their collective tongue firmly wedged in cheek. Just for a few minutes, it seems entirely plausible that the team has created a game script plastered in a heavy layer of over-familiar clichés and sci-fi homages - and that it means every single word of it, without a hint of irony on the landscape.

No More Heroes is a game about slicing people up with a laser sword until you're the best assassin in town. Sounds straightforward; 2007 tapped a rich vein for single-minded murder-'em-ups with Crackdown and Assassin's Creed among the better examples, and 2008 is welcome to carry on splashing the same blood on our faces. Except No More Heroes does what those games do back to front: where the journey was once the worthier part, gently parting crowds in beautiful, sun-baked Jerusalem with a knife at the ready or kicking people off rooftops in Pacific City's skyscraper playground, No More Heroes' Santa Destroy is a dull, dusty strip of under-populated inactivity where the showdowns are the actual pay-off.

Evidently something rather momentous happened in 1996, because despite starring a Ribena-suited flying jester of indiscernible gender orientation on a console struggling by that stage to hold the majority's attention, NiGHTS into Dreams won enough people over that its rebirth on a Nintendo console over a decade later wasn't just greeted with interest but outright jubilation. Even you lot got excited - one reader revealing he'd actually bought the original twice, and another threatening to boycott the medium entirely if SEGA cocked it up. Well, Journey of Dreams certainly isn't a cock-up, and while it's still a bit 1996 in places where it really shouldn't be, it's much too likeable to be cast aside completely.

You might find it surprising that Nintendo went out and found a competition-standard chess program to build its budget-price Touch Generations chess game on. I didn't. What I found surprising was that it built the game around the loop chess engine, which came a pathetic third in the 2007 Amsterdam ICGA Tournament. What's wrong, Nintendo? Rybka's UCI chess engine a bit too expensive for you? I thought you played to win these days?

You might be inclined to take one glance at PixelJunk Monsters and mutter something glib about it looking like it belongs in 1992 and move onto something altogether more alluring. Funnily enough, it also plays a bit like some forgotten 16-bit gem from the same era, based around the simple concept of defending a forest's timid population from a variety of encroaching nasties. Think of it as Space Invaders meets Dune 2.

Unreal Tournament III? The other ones were on the PC, Mr PS3 Consumer. Of course you know that (I've always liked you), but some won't. That's the point; it was huge on PC, and Epic and Sony know that PS3's spangly new online network and ferocious hardware is ideal for establishing it properly away from its usual digs. So if you are new, the premise is this: a multiplayer-focused first-person shooter that takes established concepts like deathmatch, team deathmatch, duels and capture the flag, aims to do them very well, and moulds them into tweaked alternatives to establish variety.

We've waited far, far too long for an Xbox Live Arcade game in which you must shoot a robot dinosaur repeatedly in the face with a neon pink laser beam until its eyes fall out.

Every now and then, someone pops out of the woodwork to complain that the games industry isn't innovative any more. This is clearly nonsense. Certainly, publishers might have an ongoing love affair with barely distinguishable sequels and a herd mentality that makes sheep look strong-willed, but consider this - year after year, the industry invents new and previously unheard-of ways to make you part with your cash. If that's not innovation, what is?

THQ has sat us down and cleared up what sort of things you will be doing in new Wii title Band Mashups.

Snap the Rez design apart, lay the pieces out on the table and you've little more than a wireframe Panzer Dragoon. Sure, it's been named by Underworld, custom soundtracked by Adam Freeland, graphic designed in a lab by Tron nanobots and rolled out into the look-games-can-be-intellectual battleground plastered with Wassily Kandinsky posters. But behind the frippery sits Space Harrier chewing acid at a science-fiction fancy dress party. There's no way to escape the fact that your character moves along a fixed path at a fixed speed, clicking on pop-up targets for points. At its heart, Rez is a good old-fashioned shooting gallery arcade game, albeit one stationed at a Butlins in Alpha Centuri.

Released to a muted fanfare on Wii and PSP almost three months ago in the US, Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 is the filler release you're expecting. The apathy surrounding it is hardly surprising. After more than ten different MOH titles since the back end of '99, we all know the drill: shoot clueless Nazis, wander around linear levels, blow stuff up, meet objectives, repeat until dead/bored.

Electronic Arts' promising survival horror game Dead Space was being shown off in a suitably creepy basement in London this week - and we couldn't help but notice that hero Isaac Clarke is sporting an ability that he's definitely picked up from Gordon Freeman's playbook.

Despite the hit-and-miss onslaught of retro offerings available from the online arcades, SNK has decided to aim at its re-release of Art of Fighting at the impoverished PlayStation 2 owner - a move that's immediately endearing, as it's great to see the old Sony warhorse being put to a task it can perform with success and dignity (foot-rest doesn't count).

SEGA wants Japanese people to learn our language from zombies in English of the Dead.

EA has said that downloadable additions to Burnout Paradise will be a mixture of free and paid-for content. However, those who do not buy the updates will still be able to see the new stuff in-game.

Nitrobike starts off well by being called Nitrobike. We like silly names, and Nitrobike certainly is one. Good controls, too. You hold the Wiimote with the buttons facing upwards and rotate it like a steering wheel. Turning is responsive, and the bike handling is intuitive enough that you quickly understand its limitations; when you need to throttle back, and the effect that the d-pad nitro boost has on cornering. Re-orientating the bike and performing tricks in the air are simple actions, the latter adding extra chunks to your boost meter so that you can rev for longer without exploding, with one chunk lost again whenever you're unseated.

Virtua Fighter 5 may not have set the charts on fire over here, but it's still big business in Japan and particularly Japanese arcades - so much so that SEGA has issued Version D with special pirate levels. Obviously.

3D Realms has tried to bury suggestions that Duke Nukem Forever will be out this year on PS3 and 360 as well as PC.