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It's not often that we're moved to review PS2 ports, but when they're as overlooked as this game is we'll happily make an exception. Since Project Zero's initial release back in September last year, we've had to listen to Rob banging on about how good it is, and the rest of us here at Eurogamer towers had a nagging feeling that his 9/10 score may have been a little generous. But the problem was that we and the rest of the UK gaming public simply couldn't find the game in high street stores, with original publisher Wanadoo seemingly lacking the marketing muscle to make people sit up and take notice – a quick scan of the UK chart data revealed it sold a whopping… 12,000 copies. But with Microsoft belatedly picking up the rights to publish the Xbox version (it's been out in the States for six months), we finally got the chance to find out what all the fuss was about.

Picture the scene. You're playing a platform game - it doesn't matter which one - and you've been stuck on the same chunk of the same level for the best part of fifteen minutes. You know exactly what you need to do, but you keep fouling it up and having to start again. Your eyes are narrowed and your blood is simmering as you stab the Retry button for the fifth time in as many minutes. All of a sudden though, you're in the zone! Pixels are connecting precisely, the timing is perfect, your path is almost clear, and then, just as you gather enough momentum and leap victoriously towards the final platform, a scuttling rodent of an adversary wanders into your character's knees, and you stumble sideways into a bottomless pit. Continue? Quit? Or throw your pad across the room and scream blue murder at the cushions and the coffee table?

"Hup! Careful... careful... no... NO! Phew. Hrng. Hup... careful... argh! Again." - Me, playing Prince of Persia on the Amiga in 1994.

In terms of third-person games, Prince of Persia is like first class air travel. You pay quite a lot for the privilege of eight hours' comfort at high altitudes, you have a merry old time sampling all the little luxuries and extravagances kept out of your reach in the rough and ready confines of economy, and although by the end of the journey you're still fairly content to depart the plane, remonstrating with yourself that it was a very expensive way to fly, given the choice it's a touch of class you'd certainly never be without. In other words, if the inconsistencies of titles like Spider-Man: The Movie, Legacy Of Kain and Tomb Raider left you with the gaming equivalent of deep vein thrombosis, Prince of Persia is like a gentle massage set to the peeling tones of a 72-virgin orchestra. It's spectacular and soothing to play.

No console launch line-up would be complete without some form of platform game, and the Xbox's arrival in Europe is no exception. Enter Oddworld : Munch's Oddysee, a 3D sequel to side-scrolling platformers Abe's Oddysee and Abe's Exxodus. For those of you not familiar with the series, Munch's Oddysee includes a handy option to show you the story so far, told through cutscenes from the previous games. The short version is that the evil Glukkons (environment-destroying industrialists) and Vykkers (mad scientists with a penchant for experimenting on live animals) have been defeated in their scheme to turn the incredibly ugly but apparently quite tasty Mudokon into canned meat by Abe, who is now living as a hero amongst his people. The game proper begins in the oceans of Oddworld though, introducing a new (and equally unattractive) character called Munch - a one-footed bug-eyed amphibian whose fellow Gabbits have been hunted to extinction for their lungs (used for transplants) and eggs (sold as Gabbiar). Unfortunately Munch isn't incredibly bright, and having walked into a trap he starts the game strapped to a chair in a Vykkers lab with a tracking device bolted to his head. The good news is that he can use this bizarre cranial implant to activate machinery and give off electric shocks. Before long he's loose in the lab with a bunch of furry little animals called Fuzzles, which look incredibly cute .. until they bare their teeth and try to bite someone's leg off in a furball frenzy.

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When Namco started trawling out arcade compilations over ten years ago, the idea was hugely compelling. For starters, MAME was still in its infancy, and most of us hadn't come into contact with the real cabinets since the mid 80s. The mere possibility of playing our childhood favourites was an intoxicating one, and Namco did a fine job of drip-feeding them over six volumes, six games at a time. They were pretty expensive for what they were, but the concept of emulation was still a novel one. The idea of being able to play the real Ms Pac Man and Galaga at home was something we'd dreamed about since before the Spectrum, so you could say there was pent up demand.

Old games never die - they just wind up on the permanent life support machine that is the retro gaming collection. Most publishers with a lengthy heritage have peddled them over the years, but normally with limited success thanks to their tight-fisted policy of cobbling together full price packages featuring only two genuine classics and four has-beens (take a bow Namco, Midway, Konami!).

The PSP is truly a thing of beauty. Just holding it in your hands with the power off is entertaining enough on its own. Turn the unit on and gawp at that screen and everyone in the vicinity is compelled to stare at it, lost in the moment. It's like the future has arrived in your hands and someone forgot to announce the fact. And then you play some of the games and suddenly you're snapped back to the reality of the situation: horrendous loading times, sluggish frame rates, ill-considered conversions. This wonderful machine deserves a better fate than this.

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Frontline is an excellent first person shooter, easily aspiring to the calibre of its forebear on the PC and perhaps even surpassing it. Unfortunately, many sections of the press seem to have let this fact pass them by since the game appeared on Xbox and Cube, lambasting the port it for its gritty but ostensibly PS2-level visuals and ignoring its alluring new multiplayer mode. Rest assured, we continue to enjoy Frontline and won't be swayed by the prospect of 'cheating on Halo' unless the experience has soured significantly since June. In other words, we've gotten our rifles out, but we've yet to fix bayonets.

When Medal Of Honor : Allied Assault was launched with a party at the Imperial War Museum in London back in February, most of the attendant journalists were slouched over a PC running the game, or camping the bar. I was too busy playing the single level demo of Frontline which was running on a debug PS2 hidden around the back of a V2 rocket to bother with such petty distractions.

It's usually pretty pointless looking at the same game across multiple formats; most of the time it's a uniform experience no matter which platform you're reviewing the game on - but not so with the PS2 version of Max Payne 2. If games came with cigarette-style health warnings on them, Rockstar's latest would state boldly: SLOW LOADING TIMES IMPAIR YOUR ENJOYMENT.

The more complex, involving and time consuming videogames get, the more something as fresh and immediate as Max Payne 2 stands out. A game you can just pick up, play, enjoy, complete and play whenever you fancy something a little less cerebral. Think of it as the gaming equivalent of a brain dead action movie, and I don't mean that in a disparaging way; it's just delivers the kind of shitfaced grin experience that most developers shy away from in this era of 50 hour epics.

Some people insist that you make your own luck in this life. If that's the case then poor Max Payne is a supreme architect of ill fortune; a man so down that you wonder why he even bothers getting up in the morning. Welcome back, Mr grim, we've missed your constipated grimace.

For all the emotional hand-wringing over Manhunt's gratuitous violence and total absence of morals, it's actually quite a simple game - and not one with a great deal of longevity either.

The leafy avenues and posh boutiques of Windsor are a far cry from the grimy streets of 1930s America, but lurking in an unassuming office block hidden behind the shopfronts and narrow cobbled alleyways is the UK front for Take 2 Interactive. When our man on the inside suggested we drop by to check out the latest build of Mafia, it was an offer we couldn't refuse...

One of the many computer games companies to emerge from the former Soviet Bloc in recent years is Illusion, who scored the Czech Republic's first big international hit with their World War II tactical combat game "Hidden & Dangerous".

If ever there were ever a reason to ban porting PC games to consoles, Mafia is the textbook example. Having already suffered the indignity of a less than impressive PS2 port, we held out one final hope that Illusion Softworks would use the extra power and similar architecture of the Xbox to produce the definitive version of this oft-misunderstood game. Instead what we've ended up with is a six month-late conversion that to all intents and purposes is functionally and technically identical to the scarily compromised PS2 version that disappointed us so mercilessly earlier this year.

I have a confession to make - I'm a gangster movie fanatic. Anything from Hollywood classics like Goodfellas and Donnie Brasco to oriental films like Sonatine and the Young & Dangerous series finds a special place in my heart (and my DVD collection). On the face of it then, Mafia should be the perfect game for me, melding an excellent prohibition era storyline with third person action, a wide range of driveable vehicles and a whole city for players to explore. Unfortunately, while it's a great concept, the implementation is lousy.

Like everything else Illusion Softworks is responsible for, Mafia is a flawed classic. For many, the ever-present niggles and frustrations are too much to bear, and they'll shout from the rooftops about how much they despise it. You never have to look too deeply to recognise the fundamental design issues that conspire to ruin its chances of being remembered as a masterpiece. So how is it that an equally vocal band of loyal supporters rank this mission-based driving epic amongst their favourite ever games? Is it the grand cinematic atmosphere, or are they just blind in their praise and more forgiving than a priest?

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Games often affect us in strange ways. Tetris changed the way we organised things in our car boots, Gotham left us veering dangerously close to parked cars for fear of losing Kudos, and, today, Full Spectrum Warrior has us throwing ourselves up against the corners of walls, and judging everybody we meet based on how much cover they have [I still got a headshot -Ed]. It's just as well we don't buy into the whole gang culture thing that's quite prevalent down our way, or we might be writing this review from a hospital.

Order yours now from Simply Games.

Order yours now from Simply Games.

It's hard to figure out what's more hellish. Being trapped indoors on a hot, sticky, humid London summer day at 32 degrees C, fighting off your body's desire to dissolve into a pool of salty ooze, or being trapped on a base on Mars in the future, fighting off an endless respawning succession of Satan's minions. The fact that we had to do both at the same time in order to get a review out on time simply made the experience all the more authentic. In our spare time, we sin for fun, so hell seems like our natural home; it's like playing tourist to your future.

Mario Kart has always been the king of kart racers. Having played the DS version via Wi-Fi Connect the other day, and now Crash Tag Team Racing, we can confirm that this is not something which is about to change.

We've come a long way in the eight months or so since we last played Conflict: Desert Storm on the PS2. We've seen a few more tactical action titles come our way - some succeeding admirably, and others flopping pathetically. Conflict always sort of sat somewhere between the two, but hopefully the long-coming GameCube port can resurrect our faith.

It's tricky to pinpoint exactly what makes a good tactical action shooter. Is it the tension as you guide your troops into hostile environments, completely outnumbered with the odds against them? Is it the ability to command like a professional and think on your feet instead of watching the action from afar? Or is it the sheer excitement of sweeping through the most closely guarded enemy installations without making a sound? In an ideal world, a good title has an excellent command of all of these and then some - how about Conflict: Desert Storm?