Videogames often enjoy high-speeding along the temporal tightrope, conjuring its own make-believe predictions of how the next few thousand years or so in Earth history could pan out. So, laid out right here in the present is the future of the world according to videogames. Hold on tight, because we're doing the time warp from 2009 to 7268 ...

What's in a name? Everything. Products live and die by their catchy or unique titles, and children, oh man are they in for a tough life if they're hastily named Richard Long or Nancy Weiner. Obviously the same goes for game consoles, which go through several stages of mock ups and codenames before they ever earn the right to sit next to Big Mouth Billy Bass on a Wal-Mart shelf.

Some of these you may know, others you may not. ...

Video game characters are increasingly becoming the poster children for gym membership. With most of gaming’s heroes and heroines being chiseled, pert and with cheek bones you could grate cheese on, there seems to be less and less room for the more gelatinous gentleman in the industry. ...

Pardon our geekboners, but holy f**k Mega Man 9! Instead of dragging our boyhood hero through any more tired Star Forces or Battle Networks, those understanding folks at Capcom are giving us the Mega Man game we’ve always wanted.

What took ya so long? And more importantly, why haven’t other games turned to their pixilated roots when MM9 is making it look so damned easy? Tecmo Bowl is about to rise ...

"There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt."- Audre Lorde, a poet who wasn't the first person to have this idea

The idea that there are no new ideas isn't a new idea at all. In fact, it's a pretty old one and its veracity can be seen in the games industry too. ...

We were watching the Beijing Olympics at the weekend and got to nattering about how there's hardly any excitement around event-based sporting games anymore. Predictably the conversation took a rose-tinted turn towards the nostalgic and we all traded happy tales of masochistic joystick waggling and multi-load cassettes. No doubt other gamers with a memory for the shit old days will do the same. Here's five games that we reckon will fondle the memories of most old-schoolers at some point during the Olympics ...

One week ago we kicked off our Soulcalibur IV character creation contest, and boy oh boy did you guys deliver. ...

The biggest announcement at this year's E3 - that Final Fantasy XIII is going multiplatform - is about more than just a game being available to a wider audience. It's also a clear sign that the topography of the videogame industry has changed a little. ...

Did you know that no one in space can hear you scream? What about the sound of gurgling as you slowly bleed out after being impaled by a multi-limbed tentacle monster? ...

Today marks the start of the 2008 Olympic games. And in order to spur on our Olympic heroes, while at the same time trying to fool our brains into thinking that we’re actually doing some exercise, we’ve tried and tested eight different ways of playing Beijing 2008. Some of which will be familiar, others definitely won’t be. But are any of them better than the good old jumper trick? ...