DJ Hero 2′s realigned focus on two turntables and a microphone was actually designed to be more than fodder for games journalists everywhere, who will now make coy references to Beck’s “Where It’s At” at every possibly opportunity from now until launch. Look, I just did it. Still, it’s the one thing FreeStyleGames is determined to get across for the (first) sequel: DJ Hero 2 has two turntables and a microphone.

The cynics will probably point out how, actually, DJ Hero 1 had support for two turntables and a microphone. But the microphone’s now been made a proper part of the game, with its own scrolling lyrics indicator and scoring system, instead of something you can sing into if you fancy it. You might as well have just used a hairbrush last year.

It’s easy to imagine nipping round your mate Dave’s place and belting out Jon Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer in Guitar Hero: World Tour. It’s harder to imagine performing karaoke in a custom DJ Hero mix with pauses, rewinds and the lyrics you know being cut into another track. I can picture FreeStyleGames looking enviously across the room at the Activision staff parties, their jealousy of Guitar Hero’s naturalistic co-operative experience uncontainable. Note: Jon Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer has not been officially announced as part of the DJ Hero 2 tracklist, nor will it ever be. Probably.

But with the vocal experience featuring plenty of spoken word lyrics, and with a game having a scoring system based on beat and rhythm alongside pitch, actually being the person on the microphone looks set to be a whole different kind of experience than it is with Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Crooners need not apply, presumably, and those with a musical bone in their body will be delighted to see a game that’s about sticking to the beat instead of missing all the high notes on Don’t Stop Believin’.

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Like any self-respecting band of aging rockers, Guitar Hero’s having a moment of realisation after trying to stay current for the past few years. The adoring fans don’t want a modern tune – they want the old band back together. Who ever thought it was a good idea to put the Kaiser Chiefs in last year’s iteration? Guitar Hero is supposed to be about the gargantuan power of thrashing your tiny plastic guitar as an ode to the might spirit of rock.

So now Neversoft is taking the series in the opposite direction of the super-slick Guitar Hero 5, which was comfortably on par with Harmonix when it came to the Rock Band mould if you ask me. Then again, I’m the kind of person who last rolled out my Rock Band band (Goretopsy) to do a marathon Journey session. That’s clearly not what Neversoft is after: now we’re riffing off Guitar Hero 1, with an even more accentuated sense of nostalgia regarding the rock classics.

Of course, ‘rock classics’ is a bit of a subjective term and, with so many iconic tunes already rinsed and repeated throughout the series, Neversoft is left dishing out a setlist you probably wouldn’t include in your Desert Island Discs. Twisted Sister – We’re Not Gonna Take It was the opening track of choice in a recent presentation – need I say more? – and with Gene Simmons providing the game’s narration you could be forgiven for thinking it’s come over a little bit too glam for the most hardcore guitar heroes.

That’s until Black Sabbath – Children of the Grave blasts out of the speakers and cranks it up to 11. Just listening to it makes me want to grow my hair down to my knees and permanently dress in black. Rock. The full tracklist promises over 90 songs, and currently confirmed are tracks from the Buzzcocks, Rammstein, ZZ Top (a live version of Sharp Dressed Man – which should bring back memories of anyone who remember Guitar Hero from back in 2005), Slayer and Queen. Yes, it’s Bohemian Rhapsody. Goretopsy will knock that one out of the park.

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If Alpha Protocol’s dialog system is to be believed, all super spies work by uncomfortably modelling their lives around DVD boxsets they’ve picked up with leftover Christmas money. Michael Thorton is our super spy of the moment, living the jet-set life of international espionage and wooing ladies with (in my case at least) a massive hobo beard, but every few minutes a dialog pops-up and poses Alpha Protocol’s all-important question: do you want to be suave like Bond, professional like Bourne or aggressive like Bauer?

The logic is sound, and on paper Alpha Protocol reads like a rather tip-top action RPG; Mass Effect with spies instead of space. But all is not well in the world of video walls, plush hotel rooms and shady back-rooms, with the game having some of the limpest and counter-intuitive opening levels from any RPG in the last few years. It doesn’t hesitate to kit you out with an arsenal potent enough to make a gun fanatic swoon, provided they’re fond of a bog-standard weapon selection, but the problem comes from when you want to use those guns to actually shoot someone. Until you’ve funnelled hours of time and money into levelling up your skills you’ll have better luck taking out your enemies by jumping up and shouting “bang”.

Because of this, the game is radically different at the ten-hour mark than when you’re two hours in. You can actually fire in a straight line by this point, provided you’ve not spent your points on levelling up the shotgun or SMG abilities which have been added as comedy joke options. Despite the awkward teething problems, and the initially overpowered enemies, by the time you’ve sunk some time into your character sheet each subsequent trip to the levelling up screen becomes a guilty pleasure, and unlocking the bounteous wealth of fancy bits and bobs becomes a bit of a guilty pleasure that nicely spurs you onwards.

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Skateboarding is as much about chilling out and soaking up the communal atmosphere as it is trying to make a plank of wood defy gravity: the nature of the sport is social. EA is focusing on bringing that skater ethos to the series by emphasising online modes and adding a suite of team-based features into Skate 3. But its singleplayer mode is an altogether more corporate beast.

The aim is to guide your foundling Skate company to unimaginable riches by peddling a million of your own-brand boards in the new skating holy grail of Port Carverton. To do this, you and a posse adopt a slightly unorthodox -but impressively hands-on- campaign of wooing potential customers by pulling tricks on every pipe, rail and ramp you come across.

But in designing the city around online team play, EA has rendered their new playground devoid of the same spirit that proved so delightful in former games. The big-budget introductory sequence returns as an immediate jaw-dropper, but once the sheen of the nicely represented, chilled-out-to-the-max real-life skaters starts to wane, you realise part of Skate 2′s soul died in transition. Instead of being shooed away by groups of incensed pedestrians and security guards, you’re landing tricks into adoring crowds of fans reaching for their wallets. In former games the series promoted some off-kilter message about freeing New San Vanelona from corruption, now it constantly praises even the most low-key of accomplishments with an unrelenting celebration of gratuitous moneymaking.

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Call of Duty: Black Ops takes us back through time or, more specifically, to one particular stretch: the Cold War. It’s another case of history being told through the eyes of videogame designers, with military vignettes being picked out and displayed on account of their raw violence. Real life soldiers don’t have checkpoints, but let’s not worry about that.

From the get-go, Black Ops looks to be doing what Call of Duty does best – bombastic scenes told with explosive relish, scripted down to the very last tree trunk. The two levels on show at Activision’s pre-E3 press conference confirm the series’ age-old mantra of if it can explode, it will explode. And things certainly do explode.

The first level, WMD, takes us to the snow-kissed peaks of soviet Russia, with an elite black ops squadron (wait – that’s the name of the game!) named Kilo One tasked with infiltrating a dodgy weapons lab. Seeing as this is Call of Duty, ‘infiltrate’ loosely translates to ‘roughly shoot everyone in the face, jab them with pointy blades and toss them off mountains’. Who’s not down with that?

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Our Editor-in-Chief, Dan, has tucked himself away in a little building and left me out in the open capturing the point. Tick. I see ten, fifteen, twenty enemies marching in our direction, but more than half of them are felled by Dan before they get close enough for me to pick off with my AK47SU. Tick tick. I don’t mind that he’s getting all the kills, as I proved my worth a few minutes ago when I blew up a battleship. Tick tick tick.

The enemies are relentless. The satisfying ding that accompanies each kill in Bad Company 2 is continually echoing as scores of the dead begin to pile up. A tank rolls down the hill and I’m torn between my desire to run away and my need to stay on the capture point. Tick tick tick tick. The blast from my RPG-7 connects and the thing explodes. We cheer. The point is captured. Engineer was a fine choice.

This is Onslaught, and at the beginning it doesn’t feel quite right. These are familiar sights – Valparaiso, Atacama Desert, Isla Inocentes and Nelson Bay – but they’re dotted with an altogether different enemy and the change to the beat is eerie, as if you’ve stepped into a different dimension where Valpariso is occupied by gangs of harmless puppets with a duff shot instead of Medics who like to hide in the low ground at the fishing port.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2’s multiplayer component is so outstanding it makes the single-player seem like an unnecessary distraction, so I’m not immediately convinced that we need some premium DLC where human players get to fight computer-controlled allies. Still, it can’t be any worse than flogging some palette swaps for 400 points.

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Like the developers of EA’s Medal of Honor reboot, I’ve seen The Hurt Locker – clearly a major source of inspiration for the game – and it’s a pretty grim portrayal of the politically perilous situation over in the Middle East at the moment. So, who wants to grab an M4 and shoot some terrorists right in the face?

“We’re Rangers. This is what we do,” enthuses a marine to his family over the phone, presumably directly referring to the act of shooting terrorists in the face but said to assuage his family’s fears over him being riddled with bullets or blown up by a roadside bomb. He doesn’t bother to remind the family about regenerating health and generous checkpoints.

The action takes place in the north of Afghanistan, we’re told, so we’re left to assume that the narrator is either safe in the south or simply lying to his family. In my mind, his son is waving an American flag for the duration of the conversation, although the imagery being displayed on-screen is decidedly less patriotic: an American Chinook is being destroyed by rocket fire. Crumbs. Is the child now without a father? Medal of Honor is trying very hard to make us empathise with these characters on a human level.

You do not empathise with these characters on a human level. You can’t, because as soon as the action starts they’re little more than a regular gung-ho military superhero type who blasts away scores of enemies without a care in the world. I am told this is not what it is like to be an actual marine – just like the developers, most of my military knowledge comes from old war movies and the odd documentary on the History Channel when I’ve lost the remote control – so no matter how hard EA strives for authenticity, it will forever be out of the game’s reach. Might as well toss in a few snowmobiles and explode a nuke in space, eh?

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Isaac Clarke was a mute as he reduced alien foes to limbless chunks of blood and mush within the twisty corridor confines of the USG Ishimura in the original Dead Space. In the sequel, though, he’s not afraid to flap his gums. You’d think it would be the opposite, but it’s just more proof (if proof were needed) that Isaac has a stronger constitution than most.

After cracking hundreds in half, he’s also seen fit to grow his own spine. He’s not the errand boy anymore – this, according to developer Visceral Games, was the biggest flaw of the original – and is now taking charge of sorting out the latest undead invasion pickle.

It looks, sounds and feels almost the same as the original. But the familiarity should not breed contempt; Dead Space after all was a splendid action-cum-horror game that was the greatest tragedy in 2008’s flood of underappreciated titles, and the core of the game requires very little tweaking to competently put competing titles to shame.

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Street Fighter is always guaranteed to provoke a response. From the legions who will return the game in a week because of their disgust at repeated online batterings to those who will invest in an arcade stick costing hundreds of pounds and countless hours of their life, Capcom’s iconic fighter is a dense, complicated arena of rules, moves, tics and ultra combo finishers.

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Square Enix don’t just build games – they fashion entire worlds. Since the series took the leap from obsessive import fodder to mainstream success with 1997′s Final Fantasy VII, there’s been an ever greater focus on regenerating their recognisably familiar story tropes into unknown worlds and new battle systems, rounded off with a ever-changing cast of characters that have proven themselves diverse enough to pad out the occasional misguided attempt at a fighting spin-off.

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