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Leather-tongued, lead-headed, dizzy and worryingly positioned with my head in a pile of dirty socks, I awoke this morning surrounded by empty bottles and overstocked rubbish bins with three thoughts buzzing through my head. 1) SingStar Popworld is a major return to form for Sony's competitive karaoke series. 2) Given the amount of alcohol required to truly enjoy it, it's arguably the only PS2 game with a subscription fee worth paying. 3) Doo-wah-diddy-diddy-dum-diddy-doo!

Whatever clever wordplay was intended, subtitling your game with the brutally over-used phrase "killer app" is bound to have gamers the world over sharpening their critical knives. No amount of clever wordplay from them or us can disguise the fact that underneath TRON 2.0's cultish appeal, it's little more than a slightly above average first-person shooter that has some good ideas, a unique visual style that suits the premise perfectly but some teeth grinding design flaws that quickly serve to undermine your will to continue playing it.

Shame on you for passing up on the opportunity to play one of the games of the year. In with a bullet at No.33 in the UK charts, gone the next week. When such anomalies occur you feel like packing it all in and strapping a megaphone on your face and annoying Christmas shoppers in a Scouse accent with talk of football and Jesus. Remember: don't be a sinner, be a winner! Buy this game and set yourself free.

Mario changed my life. There. I've admitted it at last. The transition from a fanatical comic reading pre-teen youth hung up on Dennis The Menace and Bananaman to hopelessly addicted Crash-reading computer gaming aficionado was all but assured from the moment Donkey Kong took its arcade bow. And yet, 22 years after our first encounter with the tubby moustachioed plumber Nintendo is still capable of flushing out cynicism, eradicating boredom and making us believe in the possibilities of gaming again.

This is so obviously a game.

There's a reason people don't use pens to steer cars. Try to guess what it is.

Stop us if you've heard this one before. In a fantasy world made up largely of quaint little villages full of people who don't object to being dragged from their farms and forced to mine gold or hack down the local forests all day long, the Men and the Elves have an alliance which holds back the beast hordes - ogres, trolls, that sort of thing. The two forces rush headlong into an almighty barney, but it turns out that the real enemy is set to emerge from the shadows, with an evil force from beyond the stars seeking to take over the world, albeit somewhat handicapped by the peculiar refusal to build anything on ground that isn't covered in purple muck - presumably because it would clash terribly with the curtains, or something.

"A shooter in its purest form" says the press blurb about People Can Fly's relentless and maniacal attempt at elbowing its way onto the FPS scene. But unlike a lot of the fluff that PRs like to spin hysterically around their products, this quote is right on the money. It's a form of purity you're going to either admire because you're one of those stoic 'change is bad' types who never wanted FPSs to morph into some kind of poor-man's sci-fi storytelling vehicle in the first place, or look at it quizzically in the manner of someone who can't quite work out why someone would make something so unapologetically retrograde by design. Didn't we say goodbye to crazy AI-free 'everyone's running at me' shooters ten years ago?

"Project Rub could be for the DS what Tetris was to the Game Boy."

Above the newspaper article was a photograph of a large cat. Leaping into the air, its eyes were fixed on a baby wren, the poor bird desperately trying to escape its claws. The ferocity of the cat was plainly evident. Its gaze was the merciless gaze of a hunter. The helpless wren didn't stand a chance. Even though the photograph had frozen the bird in a moment of escape, you knew what was really coming next ... *swish*, *squawk*, *gulp*, *burp*.

The chances are you've seen The Incredibles. Even if you haven't, the cloying hype surrounding the Pixar animation has been unavoidable this Christmas, so there's no point in telling you of a plot involving a superhero family and the regaining of its powers. You know this already. It's everywhere. Incredible.

It was about this time when a concept solidified in my mind which I've never quite shook.

"How many times do I have to kill you, dammit!"

Please remember: as you read this, Cybertron is under threat.

Writer Annie Dillard suggested - and I paraphrase - that a writer should never leave the price-tags. This means you shouldn't let the reader know the effort which it took you to create a piece of writing. If it took you four years of research to cobble together a paragraph, you shouldn't leave anything that implies it was anything other than a few sentences glued together with word-plastics. Specifically, anything you created which purely exists to justify the research should be snipped by the holy hands of editing.

"How did you feel being denied these... Hungry, Hungry Hippos?"

Reviews traditionally start with either a joke or an anecdote. Ideally both. Here it is: When typing "Demon Stone" I find myself actually writing "Demon Stoned" by accident in some Freudian hellish dope-head accident.

Although it's hardly worth boasting about now, the Atari 2600 was the second console this reviewer ever owned, remarkable not for the quality of the games but for the fact that those games cost almost as much as full priced games are priced at now, a quarter of a century down the line. We had it tough back then, I tell you. Being something of an arcade addict even in my pre-teen years, the prospect of playing Space Invaders, Dig Dug and Ms. Pac-Man on a home system was just too much to resist, even at their horrendous rip-off price tags. But when you're eight and don't know any better, you'd see those gloriously attractive sleeve designs and melt. And then get home and stare with wide-eyed disbelief at how little the graphics resemble the arcade and feel somewhat cheated.

1. Train. "Yes, oh I do apologise, I was just trying to keep a plumber's brother on a string out of the mouth of a crocodile when I accidentally elbowed you viciously in the ribs. I am so embarrassed. Please, let me help you up. Is that your colostomy bag? Oh dear."

There are a number of schools of thought on retro gaming. It's probably important, in the context of this review, that I pin my colours to the mast here - most old games are rubbish. Or to be precise, they've aged badly and become rubbish, just like your favourite shirt from five years ago, which now sees service washing the car on Sunday afternoon.

The most telling thing about Shadow of Rome was Tom's off-the-cuff reaction when he walked in and looked at the screen while I was busy hacking my way through one of its many gladiatorial sections. "That's so Capcom!" he guffawed, before dashing out of the room armed with two ludicrously impractical Tetris-shaped controllers (but that's another story).

This review was originally published on 21st October 2004 and based on the US version of Phantom Brave. The PAL version of the game sadly does not feature a 60Hz switch, although the impact on this sort of game is minimal so it's only worth mentioning in passing and doesn't affect our final conclusions. As a bonus for European gamers, every copy of the game ships with a free soundtrack CD - which was available in the US only if you pre-ordered - which is nice!

Cute fact about Pharaohs; some, apparently, ceremonially ejaculated into the Nile to secure the requisite inundation of the Nile to replenish the farm-lands. Ruler of an empire, cheerfully knocking one off the wrist while an anxious crowd waits and an uncaring Nile sits there. Don't see any developer building that into a game.

It's a Real-Time Strategy Game.

There are simulations, and then there's GTR. Simbin's lovingly crafted game observes such painstaking attention to detail that even an electron microscope would struggle to do it justice. It'd give the average Need For Speed Underground fan a nosebleed from 100 paces; and that's just in Arcade mode.

You walk into every review with expectations. Basic critic's prejudice. With something like Playboy: The Mansion, this Sims-esque Hugh-Hefner-'em-up, you walk into the review buried alive in the things. Can't approach the work cleanly, which says something about humans but a lot more about the game.

Retro compilations have almost become a retro concept in themselves at this point. Don't believe me? It's ten long years since I bought the exciting-sounding Williams Arcade Classics compilation (before I'd even acquired a PlayStation, it's that long ago) and began the long, drawn out process of dismantling my bespectacled rose-tinted view of how good old games were.

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment has confirmed reports in the Hollywood press that Dirty Harry is to become a videogame, and surprised a few people by revealing that it will be a next-generation console project developed with star Clint Eastwood's blessing and likeness.

Leading publisher Electronic Arts has revealed details of its early line-up for next generation consoles, with thirteen titles currently scheduled to launch on Xbox 2 in late 2005 and early 2006.

Large publishers such as Electronic Arts are "trying to scare people" with their quoted figures for next-generation game development, Epic Games vice president Mark Rein has accused in an exclusive interview with GamesIndustry.biz.