PSP Features

Gamers are a fickle and impatient bunch. After spending our childhoods at the altar of a twitchy, flashy, interactive dream box, we tend to act a bit ADD. The best games, however, can cut through this clutter right from the start. They dazzle us with cinematic spectacle or immerse us with unexpected realism. They overwhelm our eyes and ears with technological power or capture our minds with extraordinary storytelling. Within those first few minutes of play, they demand our attention.

At the end of every year we get a new year – one that is numerically superior to its predecessor and brimming with new stuff to buy. But how do you know what to buy if all the shiny “best of” awards are given at the end of the year? You could spend your precious 365.24 days reading game reviews, but what are they compared to shiny metallic awards?

So Eidos plans to make Lara Croft more "family-friendly". Turns out despite the huge brand name and near universal critical acclaim, Tomb Raider Underworld just didn't sell as well as they had predicted, so it's time to tap that lucrative family market.

But Eidos don't need to spend thousands on a marketing consultant - we've done all the hard work for them and drawn up new versions of Lara. Indeed, one for every member of the family.

What do Gears of War 2, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Halo 3, Dead Space and Prey all have in common? Well, they were all innovative, highly praised and sold well at a time when - ok, let's drop the pretense. You’re here about the ass.

There are many examples of game level archetypes that designers go back to again and again. How many Sewers, Ice Worlds or Warehouse Maps have you experienced in your gaming life?

Now that President Obama has taken office, we’re about to see whether he can act on all those campaign promises he’s been touting for the last year or so. We have a good feeling about Barack, although Presidents have been known to lead the public astray.

Skate 2 drops into disc trays everywhere this week, and its feeling the love from critics everywhere. But even if EA’s latest board game can topple Metacritic’s servers with terabytes of 9s and 10s, its still got to feel like a partial victory. You see, the road to King of Sk8 is paved with broken decks, shattered expectations, and no less than five unnecessary Tony Hawk titles.

Whether you're new to the site, a regular or one of those people that comes through from Google and then scarpers again, there's a very good chance you've missed some of our features over the past year. Features that took time, effort, love and loads of trying to use the lasso tool in Photoshop. This makes us sad.

So in the spirit of blatant re-promotion of archived content here we present a load of words and pictures you might of

By now you’re probably aware of all the top-tier games coming out in the first three months of 2009, but isn’t there a little part of you that wants to know what the devs are working on next? We sure as hell do, and have already made up our minds about what should be unveiled before the year is out – most of them games we already suspect are on their way but have so far remained hidden.

One is a pure, bubbly and pretty-as-pink princess who rarely reveals even the skin of her ankle. The other is a sassy, sexy and no-nonsense computer program who has spent her entire existence in the nude. Within the tightly linked and extraordinarily small world of videogame voice acting, however, these two women are the exact same person.

There are two editorial gold mines in the videogame-list business. The first is box art, because laughing at other people’s hard work gone awry is fantastically easy. Right behind those myriad articles about game packaging are lists devoted to poking fun at their very names – and we’re not afraid to go back to the well for another bit of fun.