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There is one nice touch in State of Emergency 2. During the introduction to the game, the name of the publisher and then the name of the development studio roll by as neon signs in the generic future-o-city of the game's environment. It's subtle enough that you could almost miss it, and shows that at least during one stage of development, real attention was paid. Sadly, that's the only nice touch in State of Emergency 2. By then we've already seen a prostitute touting her services and heard the first in a long line of tedious expletives thrown about like swearing is going out of fashion.

'No' is actually a longer word than 'Yes'. You know, my biggest fear whenever I'm ploughing my Euro-dollar into new toys from Japan is that my frankly negligible grasp of the local dialect - very much summed up in that first sentence - will leave me floundering somewhere not so far beyond the title screen. In the case of Katamari Damacy however, I had no trouble getting my head round things - mostly because the game's only real concern is getting other people's heads wrapped around me.

Microsoft has made a minor update to the Xbox 360 backwards compatibility list, adding patches to allow three new titles to run on the new console - namely Black, Star Wars Battlefront II, and Winning Eleven 9.

Team Ninja boss Tomonobu Itagaki has revealed that the sequel to Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball will feature a cameraman mode.

Publisher Ubisoft has announced that it has acquired the full set of IP rights relating to the Far Cry franchise, which was created by German studio Crytek, in a move which will allow the firm to continue developing games based on the property.

Enlight's massively-multiplayer online RPG Imagine is getting a Western release in Q1 2007 via German outfit CDV.

The Saturn version of Bomberman might be on its way to Xbox Live Arcade, judging by comments made by Hudson's online marketing manager to US website 1UP.

Long-term devotees of SNK's King of Fighters beat-'em-ups will be interested to learn that SNK Playmore's fiddling with its traditional naming convention - The King of Fighters 2006, announced this week, is actually a sequel to 3D spin-off KoF: Maximum Impact.

Microsoft's Xbox 360 has racked up the best debut ever for a console platform in Australia, with over 30,000 units of the system selling through in the four days following its March 23rd launch.

A little bit later than promised, EA's popped a demo of Battlefield 2: Modern Combat onto Xbox 360 Marketplace.

Ape Escape 3: saccharine platform banality, or the thinly veiled propaganda of media-savvy anarchists with genocidal ambition?

It's not a difficult concept to get your head around. There's a place called Silent Hill. It's a foggy old place with a lake, and no-one lives there anymore. A whole lot of weird nonsense going on. People keep returning there for various deluded reasons and end up encountering similarly deluded, confused and depressed people along the way. To put it mildly the events are inexplicable, yet the stories are intelligently constructed, the puzzles are logical and satisfying, and the combat's scary enough without providing too much of an unnecessary irritation. To date, all the Silent Hill games have been the benchmark for an adventure scene that has long since given way to action at the expense of a more cerebral narrative and puzzle-led experience.

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Second Sight on consoles was very nearly love at first sight. Waking up in a military installation and gradually discovering and making use of your latent psychic powers is a good idea anyway, but being able to dive back into your own memories - playing them out as little vignettes, gradually unravelling the back-story and altering events in the present - is destined to be engrossing and thought-provoking stuff if handled correctly. Which, on PS2, Xbox and GameCube, it generally was. Were it not for Midway's marginally superior Psi-Ops, released at more or less the same time, and Half-Life 2 quickly raising the bar in terms of, well, raising bars and throwing them at people, it would have been even more fondly remembered.

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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.