The history of video games is littered with great but flawed projects. Perhaps no time embodied this fact more than the recent turn of the century. Between 1998 and 2003, new technology and a lot of good ideas got lost in hardware limitations and bad engineering decisions. The finest example of this exciting but troubled time is an action RPG called Gothic.

Developed over a ridiculously long period of time by a German company called Piranha Bytes, Gothic sought to completely reinvent role playing games as we know them. To that effect, it pretty much did. Aside from a few glaring technical issues, the game is one of the most immersive, impressive products in the industry. Players take one of those typical nameless heroes on a series of quests in a gigantic, fully-explorable world.

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Wanted came out in 2008 and featured plenty of slick gun action as James McAvoy became a professional assassin and learned to bend bullets in the air in an impossible manner. Game tie-ins now seem inevitable and so Wanted: Weapons of Fate on the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC was to be expected. It is a third-person shooter with plenty of gun play and a focus on using cover and bending bullets.

Movie tie-ins are always pretty bad, they tend to get rushed out the door to coincide with the film release and good games development is something you just can’t rush. They have obviously taken a bit more time over this title than they do with some but the short development cycle is still painfully obvious. For a start the game is only around five hours long in total and there is only a single player mode, no multiplayer option.

It looks attractive with some decent animation, modelling, visual effects and environments but there is nothing that really blows you away.

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Perhaps the greatest miscalculation of the video games industry has been its unwillingness to completely embrace new demographics. For example, the business existed for more than twenty years before developers seriously considered trying to appeal to any potential female players. Even then, the best they could do is drop a woman into a Goldeneye clone as the protagonist. The fact is, for those who aren't interested in blowing stuff up or kicking the crap out of some person or some thing, video games don't have much to offer. Yet some of the most well-received, innovative games in history have been the ones to eschew these concepts.

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Mount & Blade is an indie release which may have escaped your attention. If you’ve ever fancied playing a game as a knight with decent third-person swordplay, archery and even jousting on horseback then this is most definitely for you.

The game was developed in a different way from your average release with developers TaleWorlds, originally a Turkish husband and wife team, starting development and offering an early version of the game as a cheap download. The first fans were able to get the subsequent updates for free and via a lively forum community they helped to shape the final product. This model allowed TaleWorlds to develop a great game free of the demands of a publisher and the end result may be rough around the edges in some respects but it is a wonderfully creative and immersive game.

Mount & Blade is a mixture of genres and you play in third-person as a character of your own creation.

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Ceville is a new point and click adventure for the PC from German developer Realmforge. It is gently humorous, rendered in colourful 3D and features some puzzle game-play which is typical of the genre. But wait a minute aren’t point and click adventures dead?

You play as the tyrannical ruler Ceville and you have just been deposed by an unruly mob of rebels. Your first task is to escape the confines of your own castle which you do by clicking on the environment and chatting to characters until you find the solution which allows you to progress to the next screen.

The game is set in a world called Faeryanis. Although the people have managed to remove you from the throne they’ve gone and let another even more evil character fill the void. Your task is to take revenge on Basilius and bring peace to your kingdom. This is achieved with the help of several other characters and you’ll switch control between them as the game unfolds.

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Sometimes I wonder whether or not ambition is a good quality for game developers to have. While it's apparent that innovation keeps the gaming industry from going stale, there's a big difference between actually being innovative and just really wanting to be innovative. In the worst cases a developer can start to sound like a blowhard, promising things that will never actually come to fruition. Take Peter Molineux, founder of Lionhead Studios and perennial promiser of the sky. He began as one of the true pioneers of video game design with imaginative titles like Populus and Magic Carpet. But by the time his much-maligned god-game Black & White came out, no one actually expected his games to be everything he'd cracked them up to be.

Molineux isn't alone in talking up games that don't deliver. The nature of video game design lends itself to overreaching.

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I don't really enjoy MMORPGs. I've played and observed a lot of the big ones and even a few small freeware creations that don't have much of an audience outside of Korea. Still, I find their sudden ubiquity to be fascinating. Even if I don't get a kick out of them myself, I have a sort of academic love affair with MMOs because the path of their evolution is like a museum of gaming innovations. I enjoy deconstructing this recently pervasive machine to see where it got all of its parts. That's why it's kind of a shame that today's entry in Hall of Classics always seems to find itself low down on every list of top RPGs.

Tales of Phantasia is something of a labor of love that went through the usual grinding-by-gears of any delicate project put through the corporate system.

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The New York Times has a surprisingly long (six pages) article on artists in Second Life. The requisite time is spent explaining Second Life to presumably clueless New York Times readers ("Avatars communicate with one another through typed instant messages or through computer-enabled voice chat"). The article follows real life artist Jeffrey Lipsky, who quit his day job to sell art in Second Life using his avatar, Filthy Fluno.

Some potentially disturbing conclusions can be unpacked from the fact that Lipsky, who is "a short, white Jewish man" chose to appear in Second Life as a "short, snaggletoothed black avatar" with an enormous afro. The author of the article brushes against this topic, but - perhaps sensibly - quickly veers away.

Lipsky has two art galleries, one in real life and one in Second Life. He uses his Second Life space to promote his real life art, which has become a profitable venture.

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The long awaited Street Fighter IV has finally hit the shops and is now available for PS3 and Xbox 360, sadly the PC version has been delayed until the summer. So is it all we hoped it would be? Does it recreate the beat ‘em up genre and give it a much needed next generation twist or innovation? The short answer is no but despite feeling disappointingly familiar there are a few new twists on the tried and tested formula and there is no denying this is a highly polished and enjoyable game.

It feels a bit like Capcom were frightened to alter the formula too much because the series has a massive fan base. Things have changed little since Street Fighter II was released but each new iteration has been lapped up by loyal fans.

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Every now and then, a game that didn't get much attention in its time deserves to be re-examined. Perhaps no era in gaming has more of these overlooked classics than the beginning of the 32-bit console market. The Sony Playstation hit the North American region in the latter half of 1995 amid the stormiest competition in the history of the gaming industry. The market was flooded with new consoles and each one was, especially compared to the 16-bit machines that had dominated the scene, very impressive. In that first year, a lot of games got lost in the tumult. One of those games was an isometric shooter from Konami of America called Project Overkill.

PO is, to be curt, little more than a Crusader clone. It took a slightly less nuanced approach to the same "shoot guards, fight robots, get keycards" variety of gameplay. Players take four heavily-armed mercenaries through a series of increasingly brutal levels on fetch quests and assassination missions.

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