Word is spreading about the UK price point for Activision's upcoming rhythm action game DJ Hero and it's not happy reading.

1. All you have to do to get hits is give your story an inflammatory, misleading headline. 2. It is totally useless as a vehicle for actual, useful, informative gaming news. 3. N4G users are more interested in boobies than in games anyway. 4. Fanboy flame wars are not news. 5. For some reason, all these "10 Reasons Why [Whatever] Will Fail" stories are really popular. 6. Xbox is better than PlayStation, PlayStation is better than Xbox and both are really lame. 7. This story is really, really lame. 8. There ...

While hopelessly trawling through Konami press releases in a magazine-related matter, I came across this bit in a piece on the PSN release of Bishi Bashi Special: "Bishi Bashi Special will be the first of several classic Konami PSone titles heading to the PlayStation Store in the coming months. More details will follow." Now, while I don't mean to attack Konami specifically on this, the company hasn't released any other titles on the Europe PSN Store aside from International Track & Field – a classic ...

As Level-5's PS3 exclusive White Knight Chronicles makes a sturdy, if inconsequential effect on the Japanese software charts, I started wondering about what happened to Level-5's PSP tactical RPG, Jeanne D'Arc, in the UK. I picked it up at an import shop, but didn't realise at the time that it never found its way to these shores. This is rather unfortunate. The game generated a positive reception from critics and is visually among the best on the console, but Sony Europe opted out of releasing it in the UK. In all fairness, it would've made little to no difference on the UK charts, but still, on a console that is genuinely starved for decent software, even having on the shelves would do something to boost its reputation.

January is a miserable time for gamers. If we look at the wider picture, the first seven months of the year are generally apathetic in this industry, giving publishers a chance to recover from the Christmas rush and begin to mount an assault on the following holiday season. Some games do crawl out of the woodwork, though, and this month's emblematic post-Christmas release is Pandemic's Lord Of The Rings: Conquest, a Star Wars: Battlefront-style third-person action game that is conceptually an exciting proposition. The Battlefront games ...

#3 The Lynx effect I hate the way many games use their supporting female cast to reassure me that I am desirable to women. Seriously, I may be pretty sad, but I’m not so sad that I need some tart with unrealistically large, unrealistically round boobies strapped into unrealistically impractical clothing telling me that my in-game avatar is a bit of a hunk to keep my self-esteem at some sort of manageable level. What are you trying to imply, you brazen hussy!? It’s even worse when the ...

Having 'larged-up' my weekend via a series of Home conversations and ganders at the new trailers for God Of War III and Uncharted 2, you'd almost think that my time off was worthwhile. But alas, the two-day period was marked by a sad tragedy – one reported on by Gamasutra (via EGM). Yup, Konami is no longer using the MGS theme tune as a reaction to the legal threats posed by one Georgy Sviridov, the composer of a melody that bears a suspicious resemblance to Tappy's original Metal Gear Solid track.

Having been warned off Star Wars: The Force Unleashed by pretty much everyone in the office, it took a little while before I could be bothered to check it out. Even now, it's pretty low on the extensive list of games that I really want to play, but given that I went all the way to LucasArts in San Francisco to get a first hands-on with it, earlier in the year (great cafeteria, by the way), I figured I had to give The Force Unleashed a go. It also helps that I've been watching the prequel trilogy over the past two weeks. Episode I (three stars), Episode II (two stars) and Episode III (four stars) are flawed movies, all, but I thought the combination of watching them and playing the game would work out quite nicely – loads of people claimed that The Force Unleashed was Episode III.5. Slightly lame, but it's the best way of describing it in a review, I suppose. I'm not convinced that The Force Unleashed justifies that title, having played through the first four chapters. Darth Vader is clearly voiced by someone who isn't James Earl Jones, and all of his dialogue is quite clunky – odd, considering that the Secret Apprentice/Proxy stuff is really funny (Juno Eclipse, the game's imperial eye candy, is merely irritating).

#2 Crap swearing I love swearing, really I do. It’s truly and genuinely a passion of mine. I’m not just a games writer because I love games, but because I love words too, and most of my favourite ones are rude. And when you love something like I love foul-mouthery, you really hate to see it being abused. Team Buddies on the PSone boasted a massive excess of totally unnecessary swearing. It was quite funny, though.

Final Fantasy, despite 'defecting' to the 360 with its thirteenth instalment, is still one of the jewels in the PlayStation brand's crown. People will inevitably look back on VII, VIII, IX and X as the renaissance period of Square Enix's long-running RPG series (in terms of sales, at least). During the period that these games were released, the JRPG sub-genre was opened up for the world to see – if Final Fantasy VII had never sold 9 million copies worldwide, you can be sure that series like Shin Megami Tensei, Dragon Quest and Eternal Sonata would never have been given a fighting chance on European shores. Still, even though Final Fantasy X was only released here in 2002, the series has since expanded in a very different direction. No longer is a main instalment this sacred, once-in-a-long-time event. When Final Fantasy X-2 became the first linear sequel in the series, it's as if the leash was taken off; developers within Square Enix started experimenting with different gameplay styles, characters and scenarios.

“The vast majority of games still appeal to a very un-adult audience. The technology is rapidly maturing, but the industry is still rated “E” for Everyone. Let me know when Microsoft comes out with Mortgage Hunter: Freedom To Refinance, then we can talk about adult sophistication.” Derek Thompson, Business Week Over recent years it’s become commonplace, fashionable even, for those working in and around the videogames industry to talk about games maturing and being held in the same regard as movies – perhaps even being considered art. Most agree that it is in the interests of the games industry to be taken seriously and viewed as responsible and mature. As someone that works on the fringes of the games industry myself, it’s in my interest to see videogames treated with respect by society as a whole. And as an adult, it’s in my interest to play games that deal with mature themes in a mature way. The optimist in me hopes and believes games are growing up, and that this industry doesn’t deserve to get sidelined and derided by the mainstream again and again. But every so often something happens that makes me embarrassed to be an adult whose job it sometimes is to defend and promote this industry. Such a thing just happened – it’s called Call Of Duty: World At War.

I've just started playing the highly-acclaimed Fallout 3 and, as one of the sensible people that actively decried the bloated Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the first two hours of the experience. That was, of course, before I arrived in the horribly designed town of Megaton, and was assigned a bunch of Oblivion-esque tasks, like fetching stuff and murdering characters who were miles away in the game world. I stopped short of giving up on ...

  Over the weekend, I watched some proper shit UK TV. Come Dine With Me on More4, the X Factor results show (not through choice, though) and ITV1's Coronation Street omnibus were all eating my time on Saturday and Sunday; when Okami gets a little too pretentious and irritating, it's pleasing to watch television that's almost aware of how bad it is. Call it reverse colonic irrigation for the mind. These three TV shows all had one thing in common: Nintendo. Each of these programs were plastered ...

# 1 The 'Inverted' Y-Axis Forget religion, forget gender, forget race, forget sex, violence and foul language – few things cause more controversy in videogaming than the Y-Axis (or ‘Look Control’ as it’s sometimes, perhaps more accurately, known). It’s an especially big problem for games journalists during hands-on game demos where the pad is being passed around a group, with insults and accusations being hurled between the opposed Y-Axis camps. Now, it doesn’t offend me that some people’s perception of the orientation between controller and screen is different to mine, but it ...

Yes, the publisher has responded to criticisms of the original game, but that still doesn't mean I'm anywhere near excited about Eden Studios and Atari's Alone In The Dark: Inferno. The fact that the press release boasts about “red-hot content” and “sizzling gaming enhancements” actually fills me with dread. At one point, I was kind of excited about Alone In The Dark, but then I played the demo on the 360. The clumsy camera, annoying inventory and horrible cut-scenes immediately diminished my interest; while I'm ...

When review code doesn't arrive for a game more than three weeks before release, it's usually a bad sign. While Sega has had numerous opportunities to demo Golden Axe: Beast Rider to us over the past year or so, it has chosen not to, which suggests that the company doesn't take a lot of pride in this 're-imagining' of the classic Mega Drive/Genesis franchise. Yesterday, though, just over a week before release, I received a promotional copy of the boxed product. Since I'm charitable ...