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My name is Isobel. On Saturday I went to the zoo with my Daddy and Liam who is my brother. I don't think Daddy really wanted to go but he smiled a lot when he was there.

Microsoft has announced the "Xbox Live Arcade Challenge", set to run between 17th and 30th December, which will see players competing in Lumines Live! and Small Arms for big-screen televisions, Xbox hardware and other prizes.

You've probably scrolled down to the bottom of the page to see what score I've given it already, haven't you? Thought so. And if you haven't, you'll probably buy Sim City 4 regardless of what I've given it anyway. That's why Sim City is an important franchise. I'm sure you all realise this, and Maxis would have been fools to ruin it now. You'll be relieved to hear that they haven't.

Who would've thought there was still this much mileage in the 2D scrolling beat 'em up? Honestly. Anybody with more than five or six years of gaming pedigree will immediately recognise the model: little man walks from left to right kicking and punching other little men, occasionally battling a larger man and growing in strength and ability along the way. Apart from a few high platforms and a double-jump ability, on the surface this could be Final Fight. But while others are still unashamedly churning out that sort of game (Konami's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles remake project springs to mind), it's taken beat 'em up masters Capcom to truly reinvigorate the scrolling beat 'em up, with simple, addictive gameplay, a combo system of untold depth and some of the most gorgeous cel-shaded visuals ever entrenched on a disc. But more on those later.

Although Activision will tell you that Tony Hawk's Underground (or THUG) is more than just the fifth Tony Hawk title in as many years, these days Neversoft's extreme sports skating franchise operates on much the same terms as any other sports game - you get a new version every 12 months and it'll probably have enough gimmicks and marketing devices on top of last year's feature list to hook you in. THUG is no different, offering more customisation options, more game modes, more online options and more tricks whilst relying on the same core technology and gameplay and arguably moving further sideways than it does forwards. Then again, that's kind of how skateboards work...

Though Maxis' post-release support for Sim City 4 was initially poor (the promised multiplayer facility took months to appear), the game was eventually patched with bug fixes, performance improvements and features that would have been nice out of the box. But is Rush Hour, potentially the first in a line of SC4 expansions, enough of a game out of the box, a glorified patch, or just an excuse for EA to print some more shiny DVD covers and banknotes?

Order yours now from Simply Games.

The first boss level in The Incredibles: Rise of the Underminer can be completed at the first attempt in under sixty seconds.

More than 35 years after Scooby and the gang first appeared on our screens, it seems that kids can't get enough of the doggy detective and his chums. And now they're back in yet another platforming adventure that, although formulaic, is sure to keep younger Scooby fans entertained this Christmas.

The Bratz, for those who don't know, are a group of teenage cartoon characters who are into fashion, hair, make-up and bad music. In fact, they're just like real life teenage girls, except they aren't also into Peach Thunderbird and happyslapping, and they have heads so freakishly enormous it's impossible to believe that all their mothers didn't die in childbirth.

It's not easy to see the attraction of SpongeBob SquarePants as far as we're concerned. His jaundiced complexion and freakish giant goggle-eyed head are just too weird and frightening, and not in a good way. And besides, when we were kids cartoons were based around cool things, like robots that could turn into trucks, cat people with magic swords and mysterious cities of gold. Who cares about a talking sponge?

You've got to feel sorry for the creators of the Petz series - all those years spent producing endless pet sims, only for Nintendo to go and nick the idea, do it a whole lot better and make a million billion pounds in the process.

How do you review a game which isn't a game and isn't even trying to get away with pretending to be a game? Electoplankton is an oddity; a collection of little applets - for want of a better word - that allow you to create little pieces of music. And it divides opinion - polarizes it, in some cases. With the game due out over here next month on April 21st, we secured the services of regular contributor Mathew Kumar, an avid gamer, and talented young musician Jake Yapp to take a look, and hopefully give you an idea of how you'll feel about it.

You can read what we made of the single-player campaign elsewhere on the site.

SEGA is working on at least two next-generation console games based on the Alien series of films, the publisher announced today.

Australian research suggests that left-handers might be a bit better at games than their right-handed counterparts.

A group of German politicians have drawn up a new piece of legislation which would strengthen the country's already tough rules on violence in videogames - and could see some titles banned outright.

Sony's American PlayStation 3 Store this week welcomes the addition of Lemmings and Go! Sudoku to its (slowly) growing repertoire.

Just how did those monkeys get trapped inside those balls anyway? How do they eat/sleep/go to the toilet? Aren't they annoyed at their captors for holding them hostage for the past five years? How is it they've suddenly developed the ability to jump? Why do I get to review the duff Monkey Ball? Questions questions.

Sony Computer Entertainment America has admitted that day one shipment targets for PlayStation 3 were not met - but says all manufacturing problems have now been resolved.

Ubisoft has shed some more light on Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, revealing that the squad-based shooter sequel is in development for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC and PlayStation Portable.

Electronic Arts is working on another expansion pack for the PC version of The Sims 2. "Seasons" will introduce all forms of weather, and lots of new contextual items and activities for your little virtual people.

Releasing a game based on the original Jaws move license in the year 2006 is not so much missing the boat as turning up at the harbour thirty-one years after it's been shut down and replaced by a coastal airport, but let's not scoff at Jaws Unleashed. Not yet, anyway. This is Appaloosa, after all, and they made Ecco the Dolphin, and that was pretty good. A Jaws game could be brilliant with today's technology - think of all the blood they could put in! It could be a glorious, destructive orgy of violence, all smashing ships to bits and tearing tiny people limb from limb and hunting down and eating everything else in the sea whilst that spine-tingling theme tune provides a fitting background to your rampant devastation of Amity Island.

Well lookee here. EA's designers have got busy with the right analog stick again, and served up a blinding control method for NHL 07. It's simple, it's obvious. The right stick is your hockey stick. Tap up to shoot, jab left and right to deke, and pull back before slamming forward for a blazing slapshot. Later, you'll discover more intricacies, such as rolling the stick in one direction and back a little to flick one off the wrist. Obviously, all of this sounds like wanking euphemisms. Ignore that, the Skill Stick - as EA is branding it - is very satisfying.

It's hard to imagine just what it is exactly that comics have to do in order to become culturally esteemed. Despite a Pulitzer Prize for Art Spiegleman's Maus, the story of his father's survival of Auschwitz that brims with tears and sad importance; despite the consistently back-breaking and astonishing prose of Alan Moore's twenty years of output From Hell to Watchmen; despite the tender, broken honesty of Steven Seagal's wrestle with Superman in It's a Bird, or the sub cultural incisiveness of our own Kieron Gillen's Phonogram (we have to be nice about that one else, if the opening chapters are anything to go by, he'd rape us with magic) they're still ranked lower than blue cheese on the leaderboard of humanity's creative output. Being several places higher than videogames probably isn't much comfort.

You've got to run to stand still in the fast-moving world of football management. The same can be said for the virtual 'soccer' universe, where Football Manager has been setting the pace for years. The latest FM for PC (and Xbox 360) upped the series' canter once again with a locker room bursting with 100 gameplay additions...

I hate Christmas. Not the Christmas bit of it, you understand, but the weeks preceding it, during which I'm more than ever "the one who knows about games". "Help me," a long lost friend quivers down the phone. "I have to spend three days at my mum's house and I need something to dull the pain." Have you tried Lumines? "Have I tried what? Valium?" Close enough. "Help help help," says another in an email. "I'll have to talk to my step-dad while the others watch the telly. He's the dullest man alive." Sounds like you need Phoenix Wright! There's lots of suspicious murders in it though. "Good. I could use a few tips."

Empire At War might not have stunned us with its mild innovation and even milder Star Wars battles, but it was nevertheless an engaging and time-gobbling RTS-with-tactical-campaign-map-management-stuff. For the rabid few, however, it was a godsend: a Star Wars RTS that wasn't rubbish. Imagine that!

Looking at the rows of gleaming medals pinned to the chest of Company of Heroes by the world's game critics, you'd think it won WW2 (the RTS) single-handedly. It didn't. Not quite, anyway. Most of CoH's most striking features first surfaced in a Russian strategy game released over two years ago. Soldiers: Heroes of World War II was the very first real-time tactics title to combine spectacular physics, great graphics, and a good-sized dollop of WW2 realism. Only a lack of polish and presentational panache kept its gong tally low.

Even after years being forced to be professionally impartial, there are always going to be some games that you approach with a prejudice. In the interests of providing adequate background to this review, then, I feel compelled to admit that I've never liked Rayman. I don't hate the games, you understand - just the character, the world he inhabits, the weird little deformed things he usually has to rescue and, most of all, his silly early-90's fringe. Raving Rabbids also seems to represent everything that is a bit dodgy about the whole Wii concept - it is a sequence of mini-games, nothing more and nothing less, all based around controller movement. Whenever I played it at various preview stages, its wacky humour came across as trying a bit too hard and the mini-games themselves all seemed to involve the same three repetitive actions. I wasn't expecting to take to this at all on a professional level, let alone find any personal fondness for it.