Some people celebrate their 50th birthday with a cake, and perhaps a party attended by relatives they're really not that keen on. If you're a producer of games, though, your celebration takes the form of what ...

The person who votes for 24 as their game of the year needs to straddle two camps. Firstly, they need to be fans of the series, its fast plot trickery and the occasional, sizeable plot holes ...

Why is poker called poker? A quick Google (it's now officially in the dictionary as a verb, surely?) will throw up the theory that it derives from the German word "pochen", meaning to bluff. We subscribe ...

While in no way a precursor to the drab argument over which format is best to play games on, there is one particularly strong factor in the PC's favour. In spite of the varying problems you ...

Here's the thing. On the day that We Love Katamari was released, IT Reviews did an experiment. We went around four or five high profile video game high street retailers to look for the game. It's ...

'God' games are all the rage these days, encouraging you to design your own town, hospital, house or theme park. But not many of these are designed for the younger end of the market. Zoo Tycoon ...

More literal-minded readers out there will be pleased to know that this puzzle software from GSP doesn't actually involve sitting and playing Kakuro infinitely, into the gaping black stretches of perpetuity. That would be unthinkable. A ...

If you sing a song loudly enough, the whole world will stop to listen. Equally, if you sing a song badly enough, you'll become infamous on the X Factor DVD extras. Let's face it, the X ...

The current trend for shovelling old games en masse onto a disc shows little sign of slowing, with a Yuletide release roster that throws up classic packs from the likes of Capcom, Midway, Sega and Namco, ...

Game franchises based on movies have had at best a chequered past, and games built around TV series have hardly faired better. So when news came of a spin-off from the famous American medical drama that ...

Tying in with the currently-in-administration Retro Gamer magazine, GSP has launched a selection of classic game compilations at a tenner apiece. Each of the packs has at least four games on it for your money, and ...

The past few years have been rife with innovation as far as games controllers are concerned. We've had microphones you sing into, mats you dance on, maracas you shake, and a web-cam you perform in front ...

The thing with a good fad is that there's no shortage of people trying to ride it. At Easter there wasn't a single Sudoku product on the shelves, to our knowledge. Now there are three of ...

It was inevitable, once computer games became big business, that some developers would see if they could find a way to introduce sex into the gameplay, to make a few quick bucks. But the history of ...

Be honest. How many games have you played recently that have left you with a big cheesy grin on your face? And let's be honest again. How often has a Star Wars game managed to eclipse ...

According (obviously) to a friend of ours, the average cost of a top-shelf magazine is around the £4 mark. A second-hand copy of the original Sims game will cost you around a tenner. And, arguably, that ...

In theory, Puzzle Buff, Crossword Buff and Wordsearch Buff should be what budget software is all about. Each costs a tenner, each has 1,501 puzzles to work through, and each has a special selection for younger ...

If you thought you knew all about Scrabble, think again. Scrabble 2005 takes the classic word game and adds features which, for this fan anyway, make it rather special. Before you can start to play ...

In the olden days, we spoke Latin. In the really olden days, grunts sufficed. Nowadays, we've regressed back towards the latter in our obsession with the text message, or rather, txt msg. Hence Trivial Pursuit becomes ...

One of the biggest surprise hits ever on the PlayStation 2 has been the EyeToy. An ingenious marriage of a web-cam and a series of little party games, it's made Sony some serious cash and sent ...