January 2009: a cracking month in gaming

January is close to over. Soon we can stop worrying ourselves sick over money, faddish diets or brain-numbing tax returns and get back to what makes our souls sing - namely, playing, talking about and getting hyped up about the new videogames and tech on the way in 2009.

Leaving aside the rather exciting fact that EA's sublime Skate 2 has just come out, Microsoft will soon be releasing Halo Wars and Rockstar has Grand Theft Auto on DS due within a matter of weeks, let's cast our eyes back over January to cherry-pick the highlights of the month's gaming news.

The first news that raised a post-Xmas cheer in the TechRadar office was the mere suggestion that spending more time playing games than watching telly was actually good for you. Well, it was if you believed Luis Vuillazon's argument in his 'Game yourself thin - WoW what a body!' article, in which he claimed that "the Azeroth diet is this year's displacement activity".

Next up, playground news. What is there to do for the top three hardware companies once they've dispensed with their Christmas big-hitters? Tear into the competition, of course. Sony kicked off proceedings, pointing out Nintendo's and Microsoft's flaws – or, alternatively, in crazy ex-girlfriend style, asked gamers: "What do they have that I don't have?"

Sony issued a press release at CES 2009 that pointed out the weaknesses of Nintendo's Wii and Microsoft's Xbox 360 in comparison with the (admittedly) feature-rich PlayStation 3. The release achieved little, other than kicking off a predictable slew of fanboy flame-wars on the internet. Which, if little else, kept us mildly amused through yet another afternoon of January doom and drizzle…

Speaking of CES, there wasn't much in the way of interesting game-related news that came out of this year's techstravaganza in Vegas, other than the fact that Nvidia is putting its weight behind developing 'true' 3D gaming, with giants such as Microsoft, Ubisoft and Capcom already offering support for Nvidia's new 3D gaming tech.

In another demo room, Microsoft showed off its answer to LittleBigPlanet and (far more excitingly) Sony pimped some 3D gaming tech demos using WipEout and Gran Turismo, which consumers will see sometime around the year 2015, if the company's current demo-to-shelf averages are anything to go by!

In addition to the dream of 'proper' 3D heading our way, Dolby also promised to improve our audio experience in games – something that TechRadar plans to hear a lot more about from the audio specialists in the very near future. As for the rest of CES? It was all about super-skinny TVs and ultra-expensive portable computers. The usual fare, basically...

Back in Blighty, Rockstar's much-anticipated GTA: Chinatown Wars on DS snagged the first 18-cert for a Nintendo DS game, while we heard that Miyamoto is readying a new in-game cartoon-based tuition-system for the legions of casual noobs buying into Wii. Elsewhere, in a further example of the hand-wringing that seems to infect the culture in January, Greenpeace had yet another pop at Nintendo's overall awareness of the environment.

Sony shot itself in the foot again with yet another PR blunder, claiming that PS3 was still only for 'early adopters' (doh!) so we decided to celebrate the fact that the year had finally (kind of) started proper, with the CES dust having settled, by celebrating our love for co-op gaming, from the teenage arcade wonder that was Gauntlet through to Valve's magnificent Left4Dead.