In what's likely to be the last Face-Off of 2009, Digital Foundry does a little housekeeping, sifting through the teetering piles of code dotted around the office, picking out the most intriguing games we've yet to cover, and combining those with the definitive word on one of the year's biggest releases - BioWare's Dragon Age: Origins. As is the norm, the feature is crammed with the media that matters. One of our TrueHD workstations is pretty much full to the brim with lossless digital dumps of the HDMI ports of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, giving us access to the very best 24-bit RGB comparison shots and untouchable video assets, presented to you in pristine h264 video, manually encoded on a per-game basis for ultimate quality.

Onto the all-important line-up, then. Just the five releases covered this time, but all of them with an interesting story to tell, plus some bonus PC action included too. 29th November 2009. Fresh from headlining the Cavern Club on Tuesday night, the Eurogamer Super Group was back on stage this morning with Essex songstress Pixie Lott, to kick off a Guinness World Record attempt marking the launch of Guitar Hero 5. The event, overseen by an official Guinness adjudicator, began at 11am in HMV's flagship store at 150 Oxford Street, London, with France, Italy, Spain, Holland and Sweden running sessions simultaneously to find the territory which can produce the greatest number of players over the next 24 hours using the game's 'jump in, jump out' Party Play mode.

Clearly Lott had been made aware of Eurogamer's god-given talent at making fools of ourselves, so she bottled it on the singing, electing instead to wield the plastic axe while EG wailed its way through Blur's 'Song 2', half-blinded by incessantly flashing paparazzi lights - none of which, amazingly, was aimed at us. 11th September 2009. My favourite moment in Guitar Hero: World Tour - just ahead of the evening I finally conquered Joe Satriani with unholy backwards-run fretboard skills that I have never been able to summon again - was when Jimi Hendrix suddenly appeared on stage and tapped my painstakingly created avatar on the shoulder after an exemplary performance of The Wind Cries Mary. Naturally, she freaked out, jumped up and down a bit and ran backwards off the stage.

Joe Satriani has been a worldwide guitar hero since his 1987 breakthrough album, Surfing with the Alien. Sample rate(s): 96kHz/24bit; Artist: Joe Satriani.

Five years ago, I could not have imagined a digital Jimi Hendrix appearing in a rhythm-action videogame. For me, the endorsement of real-life artists (even ones who aren't dead, like Paul, Ringo, Slash and Matt Bellamy) cements Guitar Hero and Rock Band as a legitimate way of enjoying music in the eyes of the wider world, as well as in my own. Guitar Hero 5's celebrity appearances aren't quite as thrilling - Kurt Cobain, Bellamy and Johnny Cash are fine and all, but they're not Hendrix - but in every other respect the game takes significant steps forward.

It would be easy at this point for Neversoft to release glorified song packs ad infinitum, but instead the developer is continuing to show respect to Guitar Hero followers by broadening and polishing the series without overcomplicating or changing it. 11th September 2009. Neversoft has revealed how the regular guitar controller has evolved for the launch of Guitar Hero 5 this September. The new guitar is the same shape and looks superficially similar, apart from a red and white colour scheme, but there are underlying changes to the slider bar's touch pad and the strum bar, according to the developer's Brian Bright. The touch pad is now digital, Bright told IGN, 'reducing the chance for error and latency', and also features 'slight reliefs' so you can feel your finger positions better, and brighter colour-coding for visual confirmation. In-game, the 'purple rope' between slider notes has also gone.

15th July 2009. Another year, another sequel, but no matter how smoothly the hit factory churns them out, it's not hard to suspect there could be a problem with Guitar Hero 5. Not with the track listing, of course: Activision's signed as judicious a line-up as it ever has, with a mix of family favourites and chic esoterica. And not with the note-tracking either - by now, Neversoft's nearly every bit as sharp as Harmonix at transferring squealing arpeggios and thumping power chords into tight neon chunks of scrolling light. 2nd June 2009. Activision has announced the 84 bands to appear in Guitar Hero 5 this September. The more surprising entries include Public Enemy, Blur, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, T.