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I've made a terrible error of judgment. Oh, it seemed like a cracking wheeze at the time - "Yes, I'll review a Japanese horse racing game!" - but my devil-may-care cavalier attitude has come back like some karmic boomerang and smacked me right in the mush. Having volunteered for the task mostly out of curiosity and false bravado, I now find myself in the cold sober light of day, faced with the job of actually playing and reviewing the damn thing. And, to be quite candid, I'm more than a little scared.

Reviewing Super Monkey Ball Adventure is a bit like buying the director's cut of a favourite film and realising that the director has nothing useful to add. At times - and I realise that I'm not so much throwing stones in my glasshouse here as putting a gravel driveway through a spin cycle and then kicking the door open - you really do appreciate it when something's enjoyed a good edit.

Britain is heading for a serious engineer shortage according to CBI Director-general Richard Lambert. He reckons the reason so few UK students take physics at A-Level then go on to do engineering degrees is the evil combined science GCSE and the lack of inspirational secondary school science teachers. Personally I put it down to the fact that Armadillo Run isn't part of the national curriculum.

THQ's bringing The Sopranos to PS2 and Xbox 360 this Christmas - and you'll be surprised to hear it sounds a bit like a GTA clone.

7 Studios' Xbox 360 take on The Sopranos has been cancelled because there wasn't much difference between it and the PS2 version, publisher THQ said yesterday.

Sopranos creator David Chase says that he doesn't want any cross-pollination between the TV show and the forthcoming videogame adaptation, and that it wasn't his idea in the first place - although it is based on a story idea he came up with ages ago.

Way back when us Western yokels were busy clobbering one another with sticks and scrawling crude pornography on cave walls, the Japanese were busy slaying demons and crooked old men with very dodgy beards. Bless 'em. But although good generally triumphs over evil, there was plenty of evil doing the rounds, and it didn't take much to plunge Japan - not to mention the rest of the world - into perpetual darkness, the likes of which neither sun nor moon could penetrate.

It's well over a year since we were first acquainted with Shenmue 2 on the Dreamcast, the platform on which the mysterious, enigmatic story of young Ryo attempting to avenge the murder of his father was born. Stumbling into fruition as a Japanese and European release with English subtitles, AM2's enormous but fairly flawed RPG was a delicious swansong for our beloved Dreamcasts. With its arrival on Xbox, though, we were hoping for an impressive return to form for Yu Suzuki's intriguing adventure - has it been done justice?

Microsoft and Digital Illusions have continued their rollout of downloadable content for Midtown Madness 3 with the release of three new cars - the Carica (a sports coupe), The Furious (a modified import which might fit in a certain movie) and the LastKraftWagen (an armoured car disguised as a "dumpster").

Remember when the DS was first announced? And none of us could figure out what good, exactly, a second screen on a handheld console was supposed to do? 'I hope it's not just used as a map screen all the time,' went our derisory cry, accompanied by much tutting and shaking of heads, because, well, we couldn't think of anything better ourselves. It seemed so obvious, so pointless.

Rising Star Games has announced that it's bringing Rainbow Islands to PSP.

Sony has launched the PS3 online service, with access to the PlayStation Store where consumers can download the first batch of playable demos.

It's the one you've all been waiting for! Yes! THQ's Xbox 360 version of Cars is now available to demo on Xbox Live Marketplace. Phew.

Apparently there's some new console out in America today but at this point we're more interested in the news of a Rainbow Six Vegas multiplayer demo on Xbox Live.

Nintendo's Wii will launch across the US this weekend, but the console will be without web browsing capabilities and two of its proposed Channels.

Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto has revealed that Nintendo initially intended its next-gen console to go on sale for under US $100 - but certain features pushed up the price.

The manufacturing cost of the 20GB PlayStation 3 is US $805.85 (EUR 629.8), over US $300 more than the retail price, according to research by electronics specialist iSuppli.

The PlayStation 3 has launched across the US, with Sony's CEO Howard Stringer and president Kaz Hirai handing out consoles at the SonyStyle store in Manhattan, New York.

Microsoft is predicting that Gears of War, which goes on sale in Europe today, will accumulate sales of more than one million copies worldwide this Christmas, and become the fastest-selling original game for Xbox 360 in the process.

Why would they call the very prettiest thing to have appeared in games for over five hundred years, "Nail The Trick Mode"? It should be called, "Glistening Dew On A Spring Morning Mode", or "Kari Off Of Mythbusters Mode". Not Nail The Trick. The idiots.

This being a family publication, we can't really address the dark, deeply unhygienic things most of you would like to do with Sarah Michelle Gellar, but suffice to say for some of you, her absence from this game - both in voice and in spirit - will be enough to put you off your stake. But whether or not you like the show and whether or not you lust after the carefully constructed 25-year-old, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is very nearly one of the best Xbox exclusive titles we've seen.

Enclave, recently the subject of our loving attention, will be appearing on PC, PlayStation 2 and GameCube later this year according to the CEO of Swedish developer Starbreeze. However, one of the developer's crowning achievements with the Xbox version of the game was injecting distinctive, high definition visuals into proceedings, and whether they will be able to emulate them effectively on the lesser hardware of the PlayStation 2 and GameCube remains to be seen. The PC should be able to cope, but GeForce 3-level kit will doubtless be the order of the day. Related Feature - Enclave review (Xbox)

Enclave is one of the toughest games we've conquered in 2002, up there with Rogue Leader and 'getting your siblings to shut up' at family gatherings. And the prospect of having to slog through the whole thing for the second and third time on GameCube and then PlayStation 2 is a bit much for us.

Swedish company Starbreeze have announced a new project, an online first person shooter called Enclave which is due for release next year. The first screenshots and some background information are up on their website now.

A planned Metal Arms sequel has been rejected by Vivendi-Universal, despite the critical praise lavished on the Ratchet & Clank-esque original, released to little commercial success during the Christmas maelstrom late last year.

How annoying must it be to work tirelessly on a game for several years only to find that it gets released to virtually zero fanfare at a time of year when literally dozens of big name (EA) games are piled high on the shelves, elbowing everything else off regardless of quality? Very annoying, we'd imagine, for the developers at least. Christmas 2003's case in point no.75, Swingin' Ape's charmingly frantic klepto-blastathon Metal Arms - yet another game you won't play this year because of the screamingly annoying practice of failing to realise that the market can't cope with 300 simultaneous new releases.

Vivendi have announced a new robotic shooter for Xbox and GameCube called Metal Arms: Glitch in the System, developed by relative unknowns Swingin' Ape. The game sees Glitch taking on enemies across 30 levels, while solving puzzles, driving, and somehow taking control of enemy robots. The storyline apparently has a humorous slant, having been penned by a team of cartoon and television writers. The game is planned for release in the fourth quarter.

Riffing somewhat from current events, Freedom Fighters sees an irked young patriot defending his country against an invading superpower through a campaign of guerrilla warfare. Perhaps disappointingly, developer Io Interactive doesn't explore the underlying irony of the premise - that Russia has invaded America to "liberate" Americans from their corrupt capitalist rulers - to any significant degree, preferring instead to frame the player's actions with comedic news broadcasts, predictable NPC dialogue and stirring Russian music.

Third-person action - it's synonymous with "bleh". If there's one thing this generation of consoles will be remembered for it's foisting endless desperately unoriginal concepts on the poor old third-person action game, which these days basks like a pruning octogenarian in the glare of RTS and FPS style wheel reinvention. Hitman creator IO Interactive is attempting to work against these unwanted staples of the genre with its latest project, Freedom Fighters. It's third-person, it's mostly team-based and it's dripping with mindless gun-based slaughter. So far, so 'me too'. Except� it's good!

As with so many games, people and situations, Grabbed By The Ghoulies reminds us of an episode of The Simpsons. It's the one that starts off at "Bi-Mon Sci-Fi Con", with Mark Hammill knocking cardboard cutouts over with a plastic lightsabre and a Star Wars take on Guys and Dolls ("Luke be a Jedi toniiiiight!"). Anyway, the specific bit we're on about is when the camera pans to a totally abandoned booth with two guys sat behind a table waiting to sign autographs. These men are Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. But nobody cares, much to the exasperation of a suited PR man who exclaims, "Folks! Folks! These men have actually been in outer space!", his voice rising an octave with each syllable, at which point a nearby huddle glances in his direction and makes a collective "meh" noise.