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Let's not beat about the bush and get straight to the obvious: Simpsons Skateboarding is diabolical. It doesn't take a genius to work out that licenses like this are hacked together in fifteen minutes by marketing 'geniuses' just before they all knock off to some seedy club for the evening. As a fan of the Simpsons for as long as I can remember, it irritates me that some fabulous characters have to be put through the mill like this - just leave it alone.

Making crazy money is not something many of us in the games business are ever likely to do, but as a lunatic cabbie in a videogame we've been pretty prolific. Some three years ago the original burst into the arcades, and its Dreamcast port was one of the must have titles for the console in the early part of its life, delivering an instantly playable twist on the tired driving genre. It was a breath of fresh air, and at the time was one of the first arcade to console ports that was functionally identical to the coin-op.

Giant transforming robots armed to the teeth with ludicrously overpowered weapons are generally the sole preserve of the Japanese, making Battle Engine Aquila into something of an oddity - a slick and stylish shoot 'em up featuring a mech that transforms from ground-based walker mode into a flying jet at the drop of a hat, but developed not in some bustling suburb of Tokyo, but in our very own damp English town of Guildford.

For all mighty EA's dominance, it has never managed to successfully come up with a cutesy icon to compete with the Sonics, Marios and Crash Bandicoots of the console world. So it should come as no surprise to see a new 'franchise' appear that attempts to carve itself a slice of this lucrative worldwide market.

TDK has stalled its Mercedes-Benz inspired racer before it's even out of the pits, announcing earlier this week (on Christmas Eve no less) that World Racing will now appear on February 28.

If the Dreamcast had an abundance of anything, it was fighting games and a crowd of hardcore devotees willing to lap them up. Arguably one of the finest fighters released on the platform was Marvel vs. Capcom 2, and some two years later Capcom have seen fit to resurrect the classic to a new and far wider audience on the PlayStation 2.

Sports Interactive MD Miles Jacobson has delivered his festive address to the SIGames.com faithful, revealing that the second issue of ChampMan magazine will be released on February 14th with a cover-mounted CM4 demo. Furthermore, Miles tentatively highlights February 28th as the game's UK release date. Regional releases in Germany, France, Holland, Spain and South East Asia should only take a few days to catch up.

Nintendo may have botched up Christmas in Europe, but the Japanese will certainly be smiling at news that they can expect Metroid Prime in February, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and Wario World in spring, F-Zero GC in May and 1080 GC in time for the snow.

Intel's sponsorship of a games tournament at London's Science Museum last Saturday ended in farce and frustration for participants and spectators alike.

Rockstar North's all-conquering Grand Theft Auto: Vice City has returned to the top of the All Formats chart to claim the coveted Christmas No.1 slot, knocking Sony's challenger to No.2, after just one week at the top.

Ah, another belated review copy from Vivendi, but rather like those contemptuous cinema ads from the mid-90s, this time... it's laudable. Indeed, far from a hot potato that nobody wanted, NOLF2 was more like a Kylie calendar to the Eurogamer office, and there were some pretty ugly scenes when it came to choosing the reviewer. Fortunately, as a master of ugly scenes I triumphed over adversity, and now I've triumphed over NOLF2, and, I'm delighted to tell you, it's a bloody good game.

Xenosaga Episode 1: Der Wille Zur Macht will be released in the US on February 25th, 2003, says Namco. We have no idea when/if it will ever appear in the UK or Europe, but a US translation is certainly enough to keep us happy. And we're betting that the true RPG nuts among you won't find the NTSC barrier too painful to cross.

The Sims - simultaneously one of the most popular and most hated games of all time - has seen its first ever console port completed. Developer Edge or Reality has been working hard to complete the transition - which is very faithful, we can tell you, based on our few minutes with the game so far - ahead of its end-of-January release date. And we've recently learnt that rather like Nintendo's Animal Crossing, players can plug their memory cards into other people's PS2s and take their Sims around for tea and furniture inspection. Of course it all seems a lot more fun when everyone has animal heads, but we'll let that slide.

Sony Online Entertainment (basically the publisher Sony set up to handle Verant) has revealed that the universally anticipated [ho ho - Ed] MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided, will be released on April 15, 2003. We can't tell you if that applies to Europe as well as the US, where the announcement was made, but our inkling is no. And it being Christmas people aren't keen to tell us one way or another.

An unexpected treat was the arrival of a review copy of Ape Escape 2 this afternoon, and with precious few decent games left in our barrel o' junk, this went straight to the top of the pile, and five top banana levels later, we thought it was our duty to let you know what this latest load of monkey business was all about.

Massive Development's follow-up to the visually alluring AquaNox is continuing to take shape in Germany, with various aspects of the single player game already tucked into place. This week, publisher JoWooD revealed that the game will feature 30 main missions, with a shoal of bonuses to fish for.

Back in June, Sega Japan announced plans to relaunch a brace of classic Yu Suzuki games on one GBA cart, and the world went "ooh!" However, since then we've heard nothing of the games' fate in the West. Oh-ho, until now.

In line with Midway's policy of reviving its arcade glories, the rotting, blood stained cash cow corpse of Mortal Kombat has been exhumed one more time. Its recent attempts with Spy Hunter and Defender lent weight to the argument that some things are best left as you remember them, so will Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance be the chance to realise the series' 3D potential, or another ham fisted bodge at reviving a once glorious franchise?

GameSpot reports that the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs Media Art Festival has honoured Sega/UGA's Rez for its representation of modern art in a videogame. Previous games to receive recognition from the Agency include Sega's Seaman and Phantasy Star Online and Nintendo's Pikmin.

CDV has finally released an English demo version of Rebelmind's new action RPG, Grom, a WW2-period game giving players control of up to five characters, including Colonel Grom himself, on a journey into the heart of Tibet.

Sim City 4 has officially 'gone gold', according to a press release issued in the US of A. EA's Maxis team has been beavering away like an assortment of extremely proactive beavers in order to have it ready, although the game has obviously missed the chance to appear in 2002, and will be released on January 17th. Until then, we suggest you bone up on the city by checking out our hordes of screenshots and our first impressions of the game.

While Europe slept, a demo of Terminal Reality's human-vampire hybrid BloodRayne appeared to occupy another 168MB of the world's disk space. BloodRayne - the name of the game's heroine - is a supernatural hybrid of human female and vampire who has been bred to eliminate global threats. Speaking of global threats, BloodRayne is up against a group of - who else? - proto-Nazis, who plan to terrorise the world by unleashing horrific creatures. It all sounds jolly silly, but the game has received a reasonable amount of critical acclaim in the US where it has just been released. A European debut is scheduled for early 2003. Now might be the time to get you fangs ready and try it on for size.

Last week may have been boring, but at least I got to write about The Getaway - a game so compelling that I finished it last night in-between doing actual work. Unfortunately for Disney Golf (PS2), Knockout Kings 2003 (Cube) and Scrabble 2003 Edition (PC) though, it's getting late in the year and we're really in a cigars and brandy kind of place - in other words, there's no room for a Mickey Mouse sports tie-in, a second-rate Rocky or a board game digitisation. They're fit for nowt but firewood.

Earlier this month, KCET shipped the latest release in the long running Winning Eleven series, dubbed "Final Evolution" - albeit about as final as "Final Fantasy". Although this won't mean much to those who graze exclusively in the fields of PAL, anybody with a passing interest in footy and a dodgy bit of silicon lodged in their PS2 will certainly know what we're talking about.

Infogrames has sold German firm Boll Kino the worldwide rights to develop Alone in the Dark for the big screen, as well as video, DVD, television, cable and pay-per-view rights for the film. Infogrames retains virtually no rights at all.

We're not quite sure how it happened, but the embargo on posting the PC demo of Splinter Cell has apparently been lifted while we slept, meaning that somebody broke the rules and we all get the 101MB demo earlier than 5PM today as a result. Some websites appear to have fallen off the face of the web due to demand, too...

We were all expecting it, but Take-Two has finally confirmed that Vice City will be coming to the PC next year, but the fate of Duke Nukem Forever remains as vague as ever - but it is coming to consoles.

With the PS2 V-Rally 3 still fresh in many gamers' minds, Infogrames plans to expand the series next April by launching an "expanded" and "improved" Xbox version. Certainly something I'm getting used to writing.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Capcom has all but made its bed with Nintendo, having supported them so vigorously with the Resident Evil series and last month's announcement of five exclusive new titles. The Japanese publisher/developer has even been linked with the ominous 'Megaton' announcement - with rumours suggesting that Nintendo could purchase the creator of such franchises as Street Fighter, Resident Evil and Mega Man. Not that we believe that for a second.

The slippery so and sos. No sooner had EA bagged the rights to the movie, Vivendi Universal Games thought it'd be a really good idea to get the rights to the books, and so gamers are faced with having to choose from two titles based on the phenomenally popular J.R.R Tolkien story.