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For the second year in a row, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences has honoured Nintendo with an Emmy Award for excellence in engineering creativity.

Ubisoft has spread word that Dark Messiah of Might & Magic: Elements will be out on 8th February.

CMP's 2008 Game Developers Choice Awards announced that it will honour developer Sid Meier with a Lifetime Achievement Award at this year's ceremony.

Microsoft has said it would consider creating a Blu-ray player add-on for Xbox 360, and that it isn't all that bothered by Warner Bros' decision to go with Blu-ray instead of HD-DVD.

"War is an ugly thing," said some guy off the Internet called John Stuart Mill once. He could have been talking about Yggdra Union (which, you may be interested to know, is apparently pronounced ‘yugudora yunion’ according to the spelling on the Japanese box). The best thing about the best turn-based strategy games is that they reduce the messy chaos of the battlefield to a series of uncomplicated elements; a series of building blocks out of which tactical and strategic complexities emerge, simply and without fuss. Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, Disgaea, Civilization, X-COM, Final Fantasy Tactics - they hook you with their accessibility and then reel you in with their intricacy in a really good way.

Microsoft has wooed fans by revealing a completely renovated version of Lode Runner for Live Arcade.

Konami has warned us that no European release for its Bomberman Land games has yet been confirmed.

Codemasters Online Gaming has said it will be showing its existing and top secret wares at a public event in March.

Activision has confirmed to Eurogamer that it is set to release a standalone version of Guitar Hero II for Xbox 360 in the UK so that people who started off with the third game in the series can go back and see what the fuss was about.

Take-Two has made Mafia developer Illusion Softworks one of the family.

Remember the self-referential, idiosyncratic humour and gentle racial stereotyping that used to characterise British games? Kuju has done us proud with BWii. None of Battalion Wars 2's feuding nations is free from its pokey stick of satire, not even our own. 'The Anglo Isles: "This green and pleasant island nation once commanded a mighty empire, but is now relegated to the backwaters of global diplomacy." Battalion Wars 2 begins as Colonel Windsor launches an Anglican attack on Japa - sorry, the Solar Empire, having heard rumours from some mysterious source that their army has been developing a weapon of mass destruction. Sorry, superweapon. Still, it does at least turn out that they do have a pretty powerful satellite weapon hidden away, but they didn't know about it - someone threw it off a cliff several years previously.

Project Gotham 4, Forza Motorsport, SEGA Rally... 2007 was an excellent year for racing games, but how's 2008 looking? Arguably the line-up isn't quite as stellar. A mixed bag, you could say. But the key word is mixed, for there are some diamonds in amongst the dog eggs.

Expectation is such a double edged sword. The cultural obsession with building things up disproportionately (while simultaneously taking our eye off the ball elsewhere) seems to snowball with every passing year - and yet almost every single time a movie/album/game lets us down we still get suckered into the same cycle of buying into the frenzied hype. Then, if things haven't quite worked out, there's this psychological crash as people pick over what went wrong; people divide up into camps - the 'defend it to the hilt' faithful, the 'slag it off anyway' cynics, and the massive silent majority that go and buy it anyway, regardless of what anyone says. Halo 2 fits perfectly into this model.

The Xbox is five years old today, and to celebrate we've compiled a list of the finest exclusive games ever to grace the system. Exclusive you say? Well, exclusive in Microsoft's terms of being 'console exclusive', so we didn't have to chuck out Halo or KOTOR, because they later came out on the beige box. But given that the Xbox was actually a PC in all but name, it's hardly surprising that there was a fairly fluid transition between the formats.

After what feels like a wait of ninety million years, this week finally sees Metroid Prime 3: Corruption reach our Euroshelves. To mark this epoch-making event, and to give me an excuse to dust off some really ace old games, here's a potted history of the critically acclaimed franchise so far. If you've always wondered what the fuss was about, hopefully this will entice you to sample some classics. If you're already in love with Nintendo's resourceful lady bounty hunter and her spherical gifts, maybe this will tickle some happy memories up from the sludgy bottom of your mind.

Looking for Part 2? Click here.

A brief word of warning: Anyone who hasn't played Wind Waker yet (where have you been?) should be aware that there are rather hefty spoilers nestled in the first and last paragraphs. If you don't want the ending ruined for you, you might want to avoid it. And another brief word: Looking for part one? Da-da-Da-DAAAH!

Think of a videogame you still love today, five or ten years after you first fell for it. Tell me what makes it special and you'll probably speak of how, at the time, the graphics transported your younger mind to new, exotic, unimagined places; of how its music perfectly soundtracked your leisure time leaving an indelible melodic stain on your mind; of how its perfectly balanced gameplay broke the separation between man and machine as your character and your thoughts acted as one; of muscle memory that will only be lost at the grave.

Mario is over twenty five years old. Simply in terms of longevity in a constantly evolving industry, that's quite an achievement. Really, how many other characters from the dawn of gaming are still remembered, let alone starring in major AAA new releases? Is the world holding its breath for a new Pitfall Harry game? No sir, it is not. Unless you're cheeky and count Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. Hmm.

Science has given us much. The internal combustion engine, penicillin, Furbies - all represent terrific advancements for humanity. Yet science has a darker side. In sinister underground laboratories, filled with bubbling test tubes, weird electric nodes and other pieces of highly stereotypical equipment, gangs of rogue geneticists are churning out crime after crime against nature. No piece of DNA goes unwarped, no embryo is uncorrupted. The horrific result? Countless perverted offspring of a misguided attempt to play god. The shameful cost of progress.

The future will be a scary place. Well, no, that's not quite accurate - it'll be a scary place for a bit, then a rather quiet place. As we'll all be dead. Probably eradicated by one of several enticing options: total thermonuclear war (fried), wacky climactic changes (fried and drowned) or a fatal galactic event like asteroids smashing into Earth / the Sun exploding / aliens popping by on a madcap conquering spree (fried, drowned, exploded and then zapped into teeny-tiny gobs of flesh).

With the XBLA version of Sensible Soccer just around the corner, it's time to take a short break from compulsive finger-crossing and cease those dubious offerings to dearly-beloved dark deities.

To conclude our 12 Games of Christmas feature run, we look back in time at the games that have embraced Christmas as a gameplay or graphical theme. Let's, in Christmas Carol fashion, take you back to Christmas Past.

Merry Christmas dear retro readers! As it's that time of year when the turkey is getting fat, or has even met its maker by now, presents surround the Christmas tree and chestnuts are getting burnt to a crisp on an open fire, we thought it would be a nice gesture to give all you retro loving readers a gift - a Christmas cracker.

Computers can be incredibly dull. Dan who puts the screenshots up has never convinced his to go paragliding, and mine won't even come to karaoke. Fortunately there is a solution: rip them apart and enclose them in a spectacular new PC case! Good thing, then, that we have teamed up with our friends at Midway to provide one of you lucky lot with the Unreal Tournament III-themed Bit-Tech PC case. Imagine reaching under the table to turn something like that on. It's enough to make your knees tremble. If they need help, you can also excite your joints with a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty Champion Series sound card to go with the case, and a copy of Unreal Tournament III to play.

What better way to start a review of a movie quiz game than with a movie quiz? There are plenty of better ways actually but we've forgotten them and there's nothing on Wikipedia. So here goes: which movie ends with the line, 'Welcome to Hollywood! What's your dream? Everyone who comes to Hollywood's got a dream...' (We'll give you till the end of the review to answer.)

Back in July I reviewed The Sims Pet Stories, and got a little bit excited at the idea of the Sims engine being used to create different gaming experiences and fresh interactive narratives. At first glance, it seems like The Sims 2 Castaway (not to be confused with the confusingly titled The Sims Castaway Stories) might be another step along that road since it really doesn't play like a Sims game at all. At least, not to start with.

What with all the blathering about how the Wii has broadened the gaming demographic, it's easy to forget there's another console out there which also appeals to kids, families and people who wouldn't normally play games. In fact, there are 100 million of them out there. Even Nintendo can't boast figures like that just yet.

Well, now we feel a little guilty. Firstly, we'd begun to think that Sony's gorgeous slab of PSP might not have been the future of handheld consoles after all. I mean, I'm still playing Lumines, Everybody's Golf and ahem, Midway Arcade Treasures, but ports of old PSone games and watered down multiformat titles just haven't done it for me. And then along comes Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror, which you'd be forgiven for thinking might be a combination of the two, a watered down home console offering based on old PSone titles. But no, this is all built specifically for the PSP and it's good. Bloody hell, this is rather good indeed.

Eurogamer is very happy to announce that we can't find any more bugs in the fancy new website front-end we've been working on, so we're going home.