What's that you say? You read THE FACE, and hence you're not 13 anymore? You have an independent disposable income, and can buy your videogames any time you like, not just two weeks in December? Go tell that to the games business, then , because it still thinks you're in short trousers and junior shellsuits. After the marketing frenzy of Christmas, when you couldn't move for new blockbuster titles, the flow of new games has dried up overnight, not even to a trickle but to something more resembling the condensation of breath on a mirror.

It'd be understandable if this was just a hangover from earlier, console- dominated times - when games were mostly sold as toys, aimed at 10 to 14 year-olds - that the games business hadn't quite recovered from now that its target demographic is 10 years older, but the phenomenon affects the PC market just as badly. The entire official PC game release schedule for February (covering around 120 different companies) showed just nine original new games due to come out (and even then we're really stretching the definition of "original", with most of the nine being fairly minor updates of existing titles), and the PC audience has always been made up of affluent, grown-up types. (N64 and PS owners, incidentally, could choose from just two new games each in February.)

So why does this happen? Well, ask the games business and they'll tell you that no-one buys games in February (or, indeed, pretty much any other time that isn't December), pointing to the ski-jump sales curve from Christmas to November. But then, it's hardly surprising that more games are sold in December if there are 20 times as many of them out there to buy, is it?

The situation this leaves us in is that the games chart is effectively moribund from Christmas to Easter. As we write, Electronic Arts' fine FIFA 98 is still sitting proudly up at the sharp end of the table, where it's been since early December, and it's likely to monopolise the position all the way to June, when it'll probably be replaced, but only by the official World Cup Finals version of itself. And as any record company that survived the Love Is All Around Wars of 1995 will tell you, a moribund chart is bad news for everyone. There would be a great joke to be made at this point if Wet Wet Wet, rather than Black Grape, had released an album called Stupid, Stupid, Stupid, but life isn't that good.

DEAD OR ALIVE

(Saturn, Sega, £40)

1997 was a pretty quiet year for beat-'em-ups, but a whole truckload are waiting in the wings for '98, and first out of the traps is the Saturn version of Tecmo's arcade hit. Little separates it from all the identical-looking 3D beat'em-ups that have preceded it (on the beleaguered Sega machine in particular), but Dead Or Alive's does have one unique selling point in the shape of the deeply disturbing "breast inertia" menu option that causes the fronts of the female characters to flob up and down like two comedy balloons full of half-set jelly. Oh dear.

CRUISIN' USA

(N64, Nintendo, £40)

The N64's taken a lot of flak so far for failing to play host to a decent racing game in its first year of existence, so it's extra-specially weird to see Nintendo plough their faith into Cruisin' USA, a game that was universally panned when it appeared (on import only) with the very first batch of Japanese and US consoles right back in 1996. This month sees the game's official UK release, and while it's not quite as bad a game as everyone thinks (veteran design guru Eugene Jarvis tries to do some interesting things with it, including shifting the focus of racing games back to getting past the other cars, rather than the modern obsession with simply trying to stay on the track), it's certainly not going to do anything to bolster driving fans' confidence in the N64. Whither Rave Racer, anyway?

COOL BOARDERS 2

(Playstation, Sony, £35)

With snowboarding games still big news in the arcades, the search goes on for a decent home version. The point, though, (that the success of the coin-ops is due in overwhelmingly large part to the fact that you have to stand on a real board and fling your body around excitingly) is generally whooshed part in a cloud of powder and bemusement, and thus both this and the Saturn's Steep Slope Sliders capture the snowboarding experience in much the same way that ten pints of low-alcohol lager captures the experience of a big night out on the town - which is to say, all of the tiresome effort and unpleasant after-effects, and none of the devil-may-care thrills. Although, at least with Cool Boarders 2, you don't have to go to the toilet quite as much.

LULA - THE SEXY EMPIRE

(PC, Take 2, £35)