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Episode 3 of The Eurogamer TV Show is now live and if you have as little of a social life as us, there's nearly half-an-hour of exclusive hot-off-the-editing suite video content to help fill that suicidal Friday night void.

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When we were compiling our recent Bluffer's Guide to GameCube Cult Classics, Viewtiful Joe was a shoo-in from the word go - a posterchild for great games that failed to capture your cash at retail. So you could say we were mildly surprised when it turned out Capcom was not only developing a sequel (wisely, this time, for both GameCube and PlayStation 2), but also had a port of the original in mind for fans of Darth's Toaster. Still, we're not complaining - if ever a game deserved another stab at the big time, it was Viewtiful Joe, and the addition of Dante from Devil May Cry as a playable character was a clever way of catching the attention of the PS2 faithful. We only hope it works.

- Pom PomSystem Requirements -   Pentium III 400 or equivalent   64Mb RAM   OpenGL graphics card

Hired Team Trial was first released in Germany last year, and has allegedly shifted a million copies since then. Quite how they achieved this feat we're not entirely sure, as this is quite possibly the worst first person shooter we have seen since .. well, I can't remember ever seeing anything quite this bad to be honest.

First thing's first - Starfighter has had quite a billing, and it lives up to it. Based on a storyline that runs parallel to The Phantom Menace, it draws on the adventures of three new characters, pilots Rhys Dallows, Vana Sage and Nym. Thanks to the freedom afforded to the development team at Lucasarts, Starfighter proves itself as one of the most satisfying console titles ever to come out of the company's doors. Borrowing elements of previous titles like X-Wing / TIE Fighter and gelling them together with The Phantom Menace assets has allowed Lucasarts to craft quite an adventure. The most important part of Starfighter though is its controls. Complex, yet responsive, they take only a few short missions to really get to grips with. Everything on the Dual Shock 2 controller has a function, making the craft highly manoeuvrable, whatever the situation. The classic cyclic targeting system is handled by the triangle button, allowing you to pick ships up all over the clock, while the square button allows you to target whatever appears nearest the centre of your screen. The addition of a zoom mode is invaluable, allowing you to focus in closely on far-off vessels. Why this wasn't in games like Freespace 2 is beyond us - it totally eliminates the tedium of firing randomly at pixels in the distance. Until someone can offer us a better way of doing this, we say all power to Lucasarts.

After three years of ceaseless hype, Black & White has finally been released. If you've been living under a rock somewhere in Outer Mongolia you might not be aware that this is the latest effort from Peter Molyneux, marking his return to the god game genre that he helped to create with the classic Populous.

Starfighter was one of the PS2's early success stories, and it also stands out as one of the only positive things to come out of the Episode I movie, apart from double-ended lightsabers. With Episode II debuting next month, the inevitable sequel Jedi Starfighter has now been released, consisting largely of the same gameplay dynamic that made the first game so rewarding, coupled with improved visuals, plot, voice acting, cut scenes, and the added benefit of Force powers. The bizarrely tentacled space pirate Nym returns with his ship the Havoc, and this time is joined by Adi Gallia, the Jedi Master at the controls of the prototype Jedi Starfighter, whose orders come directly from Mace Windu, one of Episode II's chief protagonists. After demoing the Jedi Starfighter in a comfortable set of training levels, Adi turns her attention to the Trade Federation's activities in the Karthak system and meets up with Nym and his companions, whose trust she earns in a couple of early missions, dogfighting both in space and on the surface of one of the planets. Before long they're fighting the Trade Federation and the threat of Count Dooku's underling Cavik Toth, the game's lead bad guy. His plan to use banned Hex weapons against civilisation must be put to a stop, and your daring duo set out to do so over the course of fifteen increasingly difficult levels, showcasing an impressive array of units, many of them lifted from the two Star Wars prequels. The Jedi Starfighter and the Havoc enjoy an equal share of the levels, with the former's agility and Force-endowed pilot useful for ship-to-ship combat, whilst the latter is more suited to blowing big things up with an array of missiles.

Way of the Samurai is one of those games which plants you in a position and lets you pick your own relatively short path to the end sequence. Set over the course of three days in an area called Rokkotsu Pass, the player is cast as a ronin, a wandering samurai without a master on a quest for adventure and, well, profit.

There was a time, not so long ago, when EA simply ruled the football roost - at least in sales terms. But after years of chipping away quietly, Konami finally broke through commercially with last year's ecstatically well received Pro Evolution Soccer. For the first time EA found its lynchpin brand outsold, outsmarted, and out of favour - and all this despite huge marketing support, slick presentation, high profile endorsements and all the official stadia, player faces et al.

Hockey games are traditionally less popular in Europe than the US, in the same way that football games are traditionally less popular over there than here. It's a fair cop. And just as the Yanks like the odd bit of footy now and then, we enjoy a dabble with the old puck and pads now and again, and EA and Midway are currently fighting over who gets to entertain us.

Tiger Woods is one of the world's richest sportsmen, despite throwing hissy fits and singularly failing to win anything whenever I've seen him on the TV, and one of the reasons he doesn't always have to rely on his golf is that EA Sports continue to pay for his visage to front their PGA Tour line. With Tiger Woods 2003, EA hopes to strengthen his position, but this Christmas there's a new challenger on the circuit. Ace Golf aims to make its mark through the use of charmingly cute visuals and simple controls - but can Telenet's upstart leave Tiger's suave presentation in the rough? Or is EA's resolve stronger than a cement bunker? All will be revealed.

At times like this, we wish reviews were read out by 'Mr Movie Voice'. You know the one. The same one that accompanies every film trailer ever, and the occasional Carlsberg advert. House of the Dead 3 relies on such Marlboro man dramatics to accompany its supposedly scary "festival of gore", and as such it would probably make our review slightly more compelling as a result. At the very least, it would be a heck of a sight easier if we could just read this out to you, after the RSI-inducing fest of button-bashing that HOTD3 inevitably becomes. Typing. Ouch.

Depending on whom you talk to, I am a musician. That is, to my mum and dad, I am a musician. To my friends, I am someone who sits on a stage pounding seven shades out of my long-suffering drum kit, or rolling about on the floor tearing at a guitar with my bleeding fists as waves of white noise make the audience's faces melt. I'm sure they love it really. I am, however, not very good at making music with computers - the very sight of Cubase sends me into a cold sweat. So when the opportunity came along to construct something close to listenable with my PS2, I jumped at the chance. Well... okay, Tom pushed me at the chance.

Year after year we hear the familiar cry from friends and colleagues that Konami's Pro Evolution is king, yet Johnny Punter still shells out for FIFA regardless. After a few consecutive years of Konami breathing down EA's neck, last year EA simply turned up the heat, made the best FIFA ever and tripled its marketing spend. Result? Over double the sales and a game that to this day still sits proudly in the top 10.

There's a curious primal comfort to be gained from making a fool of yourself in front of other people, so it hardly came as a great surprise when the EyeToy became this year's innovative success story, selling hundreds of thousands of units all summer long when most other publishers had shut up shop. The chance to leap about in front of your own TV and see the results of your apery was a masterstroke by Sony, for the fact that it dragged in thousands of previously unwilling 'casual' gamers into joining in this evil pursuit we call videogames.

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Crash and Spyro games have been cash cows on whatever platform they've been issued on. Their original creators Naughty Dog and Insomniac moved onto franchises new a long time ago now (so much so that both are now onto their third incarnations already), but the likes of Traveller's Tales and Vicarious Visions have kept the brands alive by giving the masses what they want. To the discerning platform kleptomaniac, though, they've drifted off and contracted sequelitis to an extent, and most of those who really want some serious platform kicks tend to mutter something along the lines of "they're for kids", and they're not far off the mark.

Sony's announced that its next Formula One game is due out in June WAIT COME BACK! There's something interesting about this one! Studio Liverpool's making the PS2 and PSP versions, and apparently you can compete cross-platform. In other words, if you've got a PS2 version you can play online against someone who has the PSP one. That wasn't to say that Formula One games are boring, by the way. Don't cry.

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10:30pm. A simple test.

Bands love doing this. They release a few good albums, do a couple of tours, hit the studio again and crank out some nonsense, then return to form with a self-titled EP. Ridge Racer's a bit like that. Indeed, if the people who made Ridge Racers 1-4 did go on tour, that probably explains why RR5 and R: Racing were so ARGH; they probably whipped their heads round so fast demonstrating the cornering routines that they spun clean off and had to be surgically re-attached. Game development is much harder when you've accidentally decapitated yourself.

It's finally here - the pet sim that has taken the US and Japan by storm and sold a whole load of DS units to a whole load of people. We previewed the Japanese game back in June, but now we've had the chance to try out the English language version and find out just what all those text screens actually mean. And here's what else we've learned...

Must... resist... dating anecdotes.

We love The X Factor. We love Sharon, we love Simon, we love Louis, we even love Kate Thornton, with her strange outfits and her inability to begin a single sentence without leaning her head to one side like she's had a stroke. And we love the contestants - especially, at the moment, Andy the binman and Nicholas the new Craig David. We do wish the Conway Sisters would stop looking like they've all just found a dog egg in their shoes though.

EA's said that it chose From Russia With Love for its next Bond film adaptation partly because it was Sean Connery's favourite film, and partly because it had all the elements that the devs wanted. Talking to us a while ago, producer Kate Latchford highlighted "the locations, the women, the fun scenes, the enemies". Those things probably were part of the thinking, and indeed the game adopts a similar light-hearted approach to the film, has women, has the locations, has the enemies - but I suspect the choice also had plenty to do with the film's suitability for third-person gunnery, stealth and driving around. The things that worked in EA's last not-awful Bond game, Everything or Nothing. What with the gypsy camp shootout, Constantine's canal, the road trip to Station T., the sniping, the assassination attempts - From Russia With Love obviously maps rather better to the EoN template than, say, Dr. No.

It should have been a blockbuster.

Time to say hello once again to Shrek, Fiona, DON-KAYYY and all the gang in a new offering from Activision. Unlike previous Shrek games, this one's all about combat, plain and simple - in short, it's a beat-em-up for kids.

Here's a truism about games: very little is ever as good as you remember. I really believe that. In fact, I believe it so much, I'm going to make you sit there while I brutally shatter several of my own dreams just to prove a point. Let's see. I regularly describe Super Mario Kart as one of my all-time favourite games. I will now play it.

Dracula's interior designer.