I'm going to be lazy today, and simply suggest that you watch the half hour documentary linked below. Filmed in 1984, this incredible time capsule from the dawn of the videogame industry is probably about as close to a version of Spinal Tap as we gamers are likely to get.

Charting the rise and fall of Liverpudlian company Imagine software, from Champagne and Ferrari fuelled eighties excess to their eventual spectacular collapse, this is a masterpiece of schadenfreude, reaching its unintentionally hillarious zenith when a hapless saleswoman attempts to sell a game that she hasn't even seen - and doesn't even exist, except in the minds of the programmers - to a suspicious distributor.

Enjoy...

Even though I'm a complete and utter videogame nerd, I somehow managed to avoid Super Mario World for nearly sixteen years - the Super Nintendo is one of the few consoles that I've never owned, so consequently I've never played what is probably Mario's best outing. Now, thanks to Wii's marvelous Virtual Console, I can finally play all those Super Nintendo games I read about in Computer and Video Games as a youth, including of course, Super Mario World.

Despite its age, SMW still stands as a virtuoso lesson in sprite-based gameplay and pixel perfect level design. Now that the world's most famous italian plumber has migrated to a polygonal 3d world, playing SMW reminds me just how different the two game types are. As much as everyone loved the groundbreaking Mario 64 back in 1996, I almost felt sad to see the more simplistic run-and-jump formula go.

Don't get me wrong - I fully intend to buy the latest game in the series, Super Mario Galaxy, and I'm sure I'll enjoy it – but it's just not the same as the simplistic elegance of Super Mario Bros. and its 2D sequels.

Without a doubt, Super Mario World is as much of a joy to play in 2008 as I'm sure it was back in 1992; the game's pacing is meticulous, with nearly a hundred short levels that challenge but rarely frustrate. It's possibly one of the finest examples of 'pick up and play' gaming - anyone with thumbs can play and enjoy it, but later levels take considerable practise to complete.

It may have taken me 16 years to get round to playing the fourth Mario game, but it was certainly worth the wait.

Shot in 1964, The Last Man on Earth was the earliest screen adaptation of Richard Matheson's source novel, I Am Legend. Starring the legendary acting genius Vincent Price (who easily ranks as one of my all-time favourite actors), it's essential viewing for fans of the genre.

Robert Morgan (Price) is - apparently - the sole survivor of a terrible virus that has consumed the world's population and turned the afflicted into nocturnal zombie-vampires. Morgan spends his days hunting the creatures and his nights hiding from them - a prisoner in his own home, with nothing but alcohol and home movies for company.

This sounds incredibly similar to this year's Will Smith blockbuster, but plot points aside, it's a very different picture. For one thing, Last Man's budget is painfully low: Price's house isn't the iron-clad fortress of I Am Legend, and the creatures aren't the screaming ultra-athletic wall-scalers of the new film either – they gather at Morgan's front door and thump at it languidly, constantly calling his name like drunken noisy neighbours.

Morgan's real enemy is his own sanity - 'I can't afford the luxury of anger. Anger can make me vulnerable. It can destoy my reason and reason's the only advantage I have over them,' he says near the film's opening. He spends most of the film battling loneliness and depression. Tortured by the loss of his family, he spends his nights drinking and gloomily fashioning wooden stakes on a lathe.

Had Last Man had the luxury of a larger budget, it would easily have been a superior film to the 2008 I Am Legend – in some ways, it still is; the script is often brilliant, and while it lacks the occasionally remarkable visuals of the new movie, the final act is far more resonant and downbeat. For all their lack of menace, Last Man's pre-Night of the Living Dead zombie-vampires are no less convincing than Legend's singularly unconvincing CG efforts, and are all the more impressive when one considers that this film comes several years before Romero's seminal masterpiece.

Despite its flaws, a worthwhile film – and despite its relative obscurity it's easy to get hold of. You can buy it from Amazon here or if you're an impatient skinflint like me, you can download it free (and legally) from archive.org here.

They were afraid of me... they were afraid of me... they were afraid of me!

Now this has got me rather excited. Way back in the early nineties, the corner shop near my school got a Streetfighter II arcade cabinet. The result was complete and utter chaos - the second the lunch bell rang, a swarm of school boys (myself included) would rush to the shop to play it. Queues would stretch out of the shop door and several yards back up the hill as we waited patiently for our turn. None of us had seen a fighting game of such depth before; for once, it wasn't a simple case of pounding buttons - there were special moves to memorize, and each character had radically different skills to master.

For me, the fighting game genre reached its zenith with SFII, and the countless sequels and 'homages' that followed - from King of Fighters to Tekken to Dead or Alive - never quite captured my imagination in the same way. There was an almost magical balance to the gameplay that Capcom themselves never quite recaptured.

But something tells me - though I could be wrong - that they may just have learned from their past mistakes, because Streetfighter IV looks brilliant. The Okami-esque trailer is a little misleading - there won't be paint spattered everywhere, for one thing. A read of an article in Edge magazine reveals that the game will in fact look a little more like this:

While it's obvious from the early screenshots that Ryu and Ken are the only characters finished to a presentable level, it's still fair to say that Streetfighter IV will look marvelous. I'm also assured that all the iconic characters - E-Honda, Chun-Li and Dhalsim for example - will be returning. If they look as good as Ryu and Ken, I can't wait to see them.

Capcom are remaining tight lipped as to which consoles it's being developed for - though I'm guessing that it won't be the Nintendo Wii from the quality of the graphics.

So it looks good - but how will it play? The good news is that SFIV will be '2.5d' rather than 3D, and the developers have suggested that SFIV will be very close to SFII in terms of gameplay - just what I wanted to hear.

As you've probably already guessed, the games pictured above are all (at the time of writing) Japanese-only. While we poor europe-dwellers have to make do with approximately six games (only two of which - Zelda and Mario Galaxy - could sensibly be described as essential), the lucky residents of Nippon seem to be enjoying a veritable cornucopia of titles - some of which look rather brilliant.

I'm particularly intrigued by the superbly titled SD Gundam: Scad Hammers. As far as I can tell, you get to swing the wii remote about and smash robots up with big mace-type things. I'd love to play this, but I'll wager that it, and many of the other games above, will never be released outside its country of origin. There have been numerous SD Gundam games for almost every console you can think of and none of them have ever ventured beyond Japan's shores.

This has been a pet frustration of mine since the distant days of the Sega Megadrive - even then, some stunning games were Japan only, including one of my favourite platformers for the system, Magical Flying Hat Turbo Adventure. Obviously, Sega Europe didn't think us westerners would 'get' it, and so it had a horrible visual make-over and was eventually released here with the rather less interesting title Decapattack.

Of course, I may be getting ahead of myself - it may be that Nintendo will eventually get round to sharing the wealth with the rest of us Gaikokujins, but somehow I doubt it...

Will Smith usually makes the kind of big-budget, wisecracking comedy action fare I hate, so I didn't have particularly high hopes for I Am Legend – I went to the cinema fully expecting the same bad jokes and blatant product placement that all but ruined the could-have-been-great I, Robot.

Thankfully, Big Willy Style keeps his more irritating acting tics in check for I Am Legend, and while the product placement is still in evidence (Apple iPods and iMacs are seemingly ubiquitous), it's nowhere near as distracting or galling as I, Robot's appalling shoe commercial.

Set in a post-apocalyptic New York (99% of the world's population has been wiped out by a virus created by Emma Thompson, of all people), the film opens with some quite stunning shots of sole survivor Robert Neville (Smith) driving through the deserted city. These early scenes are excellent, and Smith's performance as a lonely, desperate man is (for him at least) understated and touching. The score is similarly low-key: the soundtrack is occasionally silent, lending an eery, desolate quality to certain moments.

For the first third of the film, I Am Legend barely puts a foot wrong: we watch Smith as he wanders the city by day and locks himself away at night in his fortress-laboratory, his refuge from the infected, vampire-like night stalkers that dwell outside. A few concise, well directed flashbacks give us further insight into Smith's tortured past, showing his doomed attempts to evacuate his family from the disease stricken city.

It's when Smith finally stumbles across a 'hive' of night stalkers that the movie begins to falter. The antagonists are revealed (in an otherwise tense scene) to be a horde of identical, bald CGi humanoids that bite and head butt, Keith Flint style. While the film isn't completely ruined by their presence, it's difficult to imagine why the creatures couldn't have been made with good old-fashioned prosthetics - it worked for Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later and countless other films. As it is, we're left with a bunch of monsters that looked like they've wandered in from a Resident Evil game.

For a mainstream Hollywood movie, there are some interesting ideas in here: it's implied in certain scenes that the night stalkers aren't quite the mindless cannibals Neville thinks they are, and the film as a whole is subtle, thought provoking, and not the mindless blast-fest that I was expecting. After six months of gaudy, noisily upbeat films such as Transformers and Diehard 4.0, it's refreshing to watch a movie that's brave enough to be this bleak and gloomy.

I Am Legend is sadly marred by the unconvincing CG antagonists and a denouement that is too neat and abrupt to satisfy – after a slow and assured buildup, the final act is over and dealt with in twenty minutes. Without these flaws, the film could perhaps have been a classic piece of apocalyptic cinema.

I've barely played a FPS since the heady days of Goldeneye (for an in-depth rant about the genre, why not have a look at my article on Den of Geek?), but after a friend's recommendation I decided to give Far Cry a go (the fact that it can now be picked up for a measly fiver also helped).

Graphically, Far Cry's still a bit of looker, despite being nearly four years old; the depiction of a sun-soaked paradise, replete with parrots, tropical fish and loads of blue sea is so crisp and colourful I almost expected Judith Chalmers to appear. Sadly, she didn't - but a horde of stereotypical army hardmen did, all yelling eighties movie oaths such as 'you want a piece of me?!' and 'your ass is grass', etc.

It was at this precise moment that I remembered the big reason why I stopped buying first person shooters - I'm absolutely useless at them.

As soon as the first crack of gunfire zips over my head, my co-ordination goes out of the window. I return fire pathetically, the bullets missing their targets by miles and hitting some innocent crates instead.

My ammo spent without murdering a single enemy, I initiate Operation Leg It, which, for a brief period, works remarkably well; I run down the beach, hurl myself into the sea like a coward and swim off for the nearest island. I follow my on-screen compass to a waiting jeep, which I steal with my trusty F key. Sadly, my driving skills are as apalling as my shooting prowess, and I find myself driving round in circles, bouncing off trees while being shot at by a gathering throng of shouty bad guys.

But then, just when all seems lost, I finally get the vehicle pointing in the right direction (i.e. away from the bad guys) and I set off down a path at top speed. For a moment I think I'm on a roll - I'm running over villains and sending them flying over my windscreen - but then I hit a tree and my conveyance lies smoking and knackered. To make matters worse, two jeeps full of soldiers appear on the horizon, and an enemy gunboat heads in from my right.

Suddenly, I seize the moment and unleash my inner Rambo. I shoot through the windshield of the nearest jeep, killing the driver. I leap into the vehicle, and using the machine-gun mounted atop, I shower my foes with round after round of hot lead. Horrifyingly, every shot misses its target.

In desperation, I fling myself into the sea and swim for all I'm worth, bullets hitting the water all around me. I follow my compass and swim in the direction of a huge, shadowy vessel, and disappear through a hole in its hull.

Despite my utter incompetence and lack of skill, I've made it past the first stage.

I am exhausted. I am elated. First person shooters, why did we ever part?