It’s one hell of a contest we have lined up for you tonight folks. In the Blue corner we have Sherlock Holmes, the legendary detective with an ego matched only by the level of his analytical intellect. In the Red (and lots of it) corner; Jack the Ripper, the mysterious perpetrator of one of the most gruesome unsolved killing sprees in history. Quite a match up I’m sure you’ll agree, and I was fairly excited to be given the opportunity to see these two heavyweights slug it out on either side of the law, constantly trying to stay one step ahead of the other. With Frogware’s release of Sherlock Holmes versus Jack the Ripper on Xbox 360 and PC that opportunity was presented to the masses, so I grabbed it with both hands, eager to start my investigation into the gruesome Whitechapel murders. I began my investigation hoping to uncover a gem of a game that allowed detailed investigation and quests that really got the brain juices flowing, but was quietly cautious of the possibility that this clash of the titans could be more on the level of Freddy versus Jason, Victorian style. So does a bit of digging into the murders yield positive results? Read on to find out if this mystery is better left unsolved.

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Ray is back once again, providing you with the latest news digest of the gaming world every week. This spread will cover all the major formats; Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii, DS, PSP, iPhone, PC and more. We explore the big news, the major announcements and even some that sneak under the radar. So sit back, enjoy and prepare to fill your head with the biggest stories of the week.

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As many of you know by now, I’m always keen to champion the Xbox Live Indie Games scene. Admittedly you have to wade through some real crap but it’s finding that hidden gem for 80 Microsoft points that makes it all the more worthwhile for me.

Over the last twelve months there have been a few welcome improvements such as Avatar support, an entirely new name, and new pricing structures, so I was very interested to read Major Nelson’s Top 20 XBL Indie games for 2009. Thanks to the official XNA forums, many of the developers also went on to list the sales data for their games over the year, and GamerBytes were able to work out the bigger picture. This lead to headlines such as “Xbox Live Indie games earn six figures” which is fantastic, but under closer inspection it’s not as black and white as the headlines would have us believe.

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Australia’s largest developer, Krome Studios are bringing a new concept called “Game Room” to Xbox Live, as news slowly starts being drip fed through to the media. The service will allow users to create their very own retro arcade and is coming our way in spring; in fact it doesn’t look too dissimilar to the PlayStation Home-style arcade.

The idea is that users will create their very own virtual arcade and invite their friends over to play, meet, chat and maybe even compare bragging rights. Upon launch we are told to expect thirty old-school games, and the added bonus of all the titles enjoying voice chat and online leaderboards which will link both Xbox 360 and PC users.

Microsoft said:“The new Game Room on Xbox Live, will be the place to relive the glory days of arcade games, with over 1000 games being released throughout the next three years”. Upon seeing early footage it does look good and there is something quite cool about you and your friend’s avatars wandering around the arcade you have just built but is there a catch?

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Daniel Maher, AKA MrPointyHead, is responsible for overseeing the publication of content across the Xbox LIVE homepage in Europe, i.e. Spotlight, Game, Video, Music Marketplace and, of course, Inside Xbox..

Most Xbox 360 owners will be used to seeing him alongside SuperKaylo on SentUAMessage on the Xbox dashboard with their amusing videos, so are delighted to grab him for an interview with This Is My Joystick.

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It’s not very often that one single game can grab my attention enough to make me play solidly online for longer than a few months, but while others chose between two Call of Duty’s and Halo to battle on over the past few years, I was suffering (and still am) what I dubbed COD-fatigue. Thankfully I found solace in Battlefield: Bad Company; a shooter that I’ve gone back to time and time again over the last year and beyond. It’s a game that I felt was greatly underrated by a lot of console users; however after a disappointing XBLA and PSN excursion in between, I have been looking at the sequel with a hint of cautious optimism. The online-only demo for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has just been released and I was able to get a good look at how the game might measure up to what has come before. After selecting Quick Match from the menu and selecting my class from one of four from Assault, Engineer, Recon and Medic, I jumped into the Port Valdez… Literally, I was parachuted in…

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Welcome to the newest This Is My Joystick feature, where we’ll be providing you with the latest news digest of the gaming world every week. This spread will cover all the major formats; Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii, DS, PSP, iPhone, PC and more. We explore the big news, the major announcements and even some that sneak under the radar. So sit back, enjoy and prepare to fill your head with the biggest stories today.

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I think it’s fair to say that everyone was fairly dissapointed with the conclusion to Fallout 3, at least from a gameplay perspective. After hours upon hours of slow motion deaths, seemingly endless exploring and a hundreds of lines of dialogue, the ending suddenly cuts to black with little  more than a whimper. Fallout 3 was over, case closed. Until the inevitable release of DLC of course, which we know now consists of five separate expansions that will take you all over the Capital Wasteland and beyond. I was delighted to be granted the opportunity to extend my experience of Fallout 3, but let’s face it, I would have been able to get an entirely new title for the same cost of the whole set, so they had damn well be up to the standard set by the main game itself. After painstakingly sifting through the content that each piece of DLC provides (I know, tough gig eh?) I’ve come to some tough conclusions about the quality of each expansion, so read on to find out which ones deserve to be part of the Fallout universe, and the missions that should have died at the same time as Fallout 3 did. If you haven’t already, check out our full Fallout 3 review.

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Vigil Games’ ‘Darksiders’ isn’t a game that I’d been following all that closely until very recently, writing it off as another of those hack ‘n’ slash games that tend to bore me so. However, after many of the previews on the interwebs claimed that early builds of the game bore more than a passing resemblance to the renowned creation of Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka; The Legend of Zelda; that all changed. Being a huge Zelda fan, and with this new knowledge in mind, Darksiders instantly became a title I just had to check out. In many cases this level of ‘industrial bootlegging’ can work against a title (although it has worked for some), but by borrowing elements from other titles and thanks to the brilliant execution, Vigil might just have a bit of a surprise hit on their hands.

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I first heard about Alan Wake way back in 2005 and was initially quite excited about the release of psychological action thriller from Remedy, renowned developers of the successful Max Payne series.

The premise of the game, in which you play an eponymous best-selling suspense author suffering from writer’s block, who escapes to a small town only to experience the mysterious disappearance of his fiancée. Sounds quite intriguing doesn’t it? However the project has been delayed so often that I take their Spring 2010 release date with a pinch of salt.

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