Games

The past couple of years has seen a growing trend for remastering older games for the current generation of consoles. Which is great news for those of us wanting revisit a classic with the added benefit of snazzy new hi-def graphics. This month it’s the turn of Hideo Kojima’s legendary stealth-action series to get a spot of hi-def spit and polish.

Bethesda’s latest open-world role-playing game doesn’t try to redefine the genre. Indeed, the story it tells packs in pretty much every fantasy cliché you can think of (including your own character, who just happens to be the return of a line of mystical warriors long thought vanished from the realm, blah, blah, blah...). But what ...Skyrim does so well is refine the genre and deliver an awesome gaming experience.

Dystopian, Blade Runner-esque futures are ten-a-penny in videogames. So it's hard not to feel a little jaded when yet another title turns up promising to take you into a perpetually overcast near-future version of our world, populated by sinister big-business types and shadowy conspiracies. But it's worth remembering that the original Deus Ex set the benchmark for the action-role-playing-game genre when it hit the PC at the turn of the Millennium. And, remarkably, this third entry in the series manages to match, if not top that lofty achievement.

Taking its inspiration from Jewish religious work the Book of Enoch, this unusual videogame charts the adventures of Noah's great-grandfather Enoch on a Heaven-sent quest to save the world from seven fallen angels.

The high-speed thrills provided by motor sports have been a popular subject for videogame designers since the birth of the industry, with games like Namco's Pole Position and Micromega's 3D Death Chase showcasing what could be achieved on even the most basic hardware. The technological grunt of today's consoles ensures that driving games are more exciting and realistic than ever before, and they don't come much better than Codemasters' DiRT3.

Away from the multiplayer arena, fans of first-person shooters have had a pretty tough time of it recently. The short-lived campaign modes served up by high profile releases like Call of Duty: Black Ops and Homefront have failed to live up to expectations and felt more like developers going through the motions rather than pushing the genre in either exciting or interesting new directions. Thanks heavens then for games developer Crytek, which has delivered the shot-in-the-arm this withering genre so desperately needed with its latest offering Crysis 2.

It's been a little over 25 years ago since writer-director John Milius first unleashed his action flick Red Dawn on filmgoers, telling the tale of a band of small-town teenagers fighting back against Soviet forces who had invaded the country.