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Some game reviews are very difficult to write. This is one of them.

Interesting conversation. In the pub the other day (side note: for those questioning my continual pub references recently, I am actually spending a lot more time in the pub; it's not just the product of some editorial mandate to be blokish in print), a friend of mine who reads the site quite a lot asked me why I have such a problem with concept art. I'm "always taking shots at it", apparently. I suppose I am. What I said to him was simple: I like concept art; I just don't see it as a satisfactory reward for tirelessly chipping away at a game. If you like a game and you're good at it, it should be clever enough to reward you with things that accentuate and augment the things you love about it. To me, that's good reward structure. Spending an hour taking on the same task over and over in exchange for a scrawled version of the main character, which looks blurry on your TV anyway, doesn't seem as worthwhile. Half-Life 2 got this right - continually evolving, toying with your expectations, turning evil things on their head (or putting them on a virtual leash), and climaxing in a symphonious spectacle of mechanical rediscovery and oblique storytelling. Mercury also gets it right.

WipEout Pure does a lot of capitalising.

Historically, the football isn't meant to wind up in your hands. Unless of course you're Tiago defending a forty-yard cross-field pass at Anfield. The same is true of handheld football games. There just aren't very many good ones. A quick straw poll of the footy fans here couldn't even come up with one convincing candidate. My old flatmate Rich used to have a soft spot for a couple of Game Boy football games, but I honestly can't remember what they were, so they clearly weren't that good.

The price of Platinum PS2 games is set to be slashed, Sony Computer Entertainment UK confirmed today.

Rumours of a third instalment of Ground Control have been flatly denied by series developer Massive Entertainment, who instead revealed some new info on its next game.

Last month, if you recall, we reported that the Sonic Gems Collection for PS2 and Gamecube will include the Streets of Rage games as well as a healthy line-up of classic Sonic titles.

Yes, it's time for another episode of My Console's Better Than Yours, this week starring no less than three top gaming bigwigs - Sony's Kaz Hirai, Microsoft's J Allard and Nintendo's Reggie Fils-Aime.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has admitted that the Nintendo Revolution console may arrive on the market after Sony's PS3 - but said that it will not "fall behind by too much."

Not content with winning horse races, owning restaurants and hawking pizzas, superstar jockey Frankie Dettori has now decided to expand his empire into the world of gaming.

Greedily ripping the cellophane from my copy of Metal Gear Acid on the train, I was distressed to learn that the clip holding the UMD had worn out, and I wound up catapulting the poor disc halfway across a busy Tube carriage. At which point the beautifully illustrated manual nearly fell into a pile of sick. Both items escaped unblemished through a mixture of resilience (UMDs are deceptively tough) and my own forethought (I had my knees together under the potential flight-path of the tumbling manual). But it was a sign of things to come.

Following the recent acquisition of development studio Creative Assembly, SEGA has announced that it's also secured the rights to publish the Rome: Total War - Barbarian Invasion expansion pack, previously down as an Activision title. You can see some screenshots here.

Rockstar has confirmed to Eurogamer that the supposed screenshot of the next-gen instalment in the Grand Theft Auto series is indeed "a hoax."

An article on techy website Anandtech - which has since mysteriously disappeared - claims that there's no point arguing about the relative merits of the PS3 and Xbox 360, since neither will be as good as next-gen PCs.

Pin on your pilot wings, put on your oxygen mask and look up the highway to the danger zone on AA Autoroute - US publisher Mastiff is producing a new Top Gun game for the Nintendo DS. Screenshots are here, and there's a trailer on Eurofiles.

Those of you who like What's New but wish I was dead will be pleased to learn that I'm off next week, so the column will be left in the capable hands of whoever still has hands left next Friday.

The hard drive for the PlayStation 3 will not be bundled with the machine, but will instead be sold as an add-on unit, according to press reports in Japan which seem to confirm earlier hints dropped by SCE boss Ken Kutaragi.

Cast details have been announced for the big screen adaptation of Gas Powered Games' PC hack-and-slasher Dungeon Siege, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Valve's marketing chief Doug Lombardi has taken time out to grant a full interview to fan site HalfLife2.net, discussing Half-Life 2 as well as snippets on the forthcoming Aftermath add-on pack, Day Of Defeat Source and the freebie High Dynamic Range (HDR) tech demo level Lost Coast.

Several major Japanese game developers including Sonic creator Yuji Naka are designing downloadable mission content for PSP title Tenchu: Shinobi Taizen, according to reports stemming from Japanese games mag Famitsu.

Rockstar has spoken out on the first PSP Grand Theft Auto title, GTA: Liberty Stories, claiming the title will be a complete removal from the traditional handheld oeuvre.

Konami has seized upon Brazil's fabulously entertaining demolition of Argentina in Wednesday's Confederations Cup Final by releasing three new screenshots of Brazil playing Argentina in Pro Evolution Soccer 5.

It's certainly hard to fault the DS's early software line-up for its endearing originality, but the harsh question we always have to ask each and every one is would you really want to shell out full price for it? Games like Pac-Pix fall perfectly into this troublesome category, for as much as games like this delight us with their freshness, originality and immediacy, if someone from Namco came around shaking a Pac-Man hat at us asking us for a contribution, we'd probably pat our pockets, avoid eye contact and whistle nervously.

Learning to swim was hard. This young reviewer still fondly recalls being encouraged to practice for hours until he could make it from one side of the children's pool to the other without touching the bottom - trying to copy other people's movements, slowing the arms to move water rather than slap it, and eventually managing to do it motivated not only by the potential fun but also by the £25 worth of promised Transformers toy waiting in the toy shop up the road. With that in the bag, there was backstroke, front crawl, butterfly and eventually diving and other entertaining offshoots to master, like swimming underwater, and of course using goggles to stare at older girls in bikinis.

There's a joke that runs throughout Mario & Luigi. It crops up whenever the head-bopping brothers encounter anybody new.

Yesterday we heard Quantic Dream CEO and founder David Cage discussing his goals for Fahrenheit and the difficulty in convincing publishers to take an interest in his unusual idea. Continuing our chat today, Cage reflects on the importance of choice and how to include it, his inspirations on the big screen and in the world of gaming, and how he came to wind up as a character in his own game.

In ways, we're amazed that Bomberman has never become a victim of this politically correct era. In an age when whipping out a camcorder in many parts of London can earn you a lecture from a police officer on the dangers of terrorism, when wearing the wrong kind of shoe on a transatlantic flight makes you into a prime suspect for the security forces and when a miscalculated pun could probably see you on the front page of the Daily Mail so fast it'd make your head spin, it's astonishing that the violent pyromaniacal urges of the aptly but terribly inappropriately named Bomberman still pass muster.

In the me-too, sequel, licensed fodder-obsessed era that we're currently stuck in, a game as ambitiously forward-looking as Fahrenheit is like a breath of cool fresh air. Abandoning the current trends and pursuing ideas that have long since been foolishly discarded by others, Quantic Dream's latest labour of love could well be the first narrative-driven title in years to reawaken the public's long dormant thirst for adventuring.

It's been a huge delight to re-run through the old Super Mario classics on the Game Boy Color, the GBA and, more recently, on the DS. But at the same time, there's only so long you want to wallow in nostalgia before you get to play something new, and Nintendo has finally taken the hint with this brand new DS-only offering. New Super Mario Bros. takes everything we loved about this celebrated platforming series and buffs it up, with an impressive 2D reworking that sticks to the old gameplay principles while throwing in a few new moves and graphical tricks to prove that the days of side-scrolling platforms are far from numbered.

We're in an underground military base of some sort, home to nasty experiments. We're holding a big gun, and we're running around with our fellow elite special forces types trying to shoot our way out of it. We're on familiar ground.