Two RTS classics that are still worth playing today, even if the greatest enemy of both Warcraft armies still ends up being the humble tree.

It's a musical game that makes you feel like applauding.

For genre fans, the educated, the talented or the time-rich, Makai Kingdom represents a rich and deep pasture with almost limitless ways to play. It's clever, expansive, funny, well made and beautifully translated and, if you are committed enough, could be one of the best videogame investments you'll ever make.

It doesn't, however, fulfill the task of being absurdly entertaining. The failings in the campaign mean that for all its incredible fireworks and visual splendour, its not interesting enough.

Between the multiplayer modes and the Challenge Rooms, there's more than enough innovation to make up for the minor irritations of the retro controls.

It’s as cryptic to begin with as any game ever conceived by Square, and it lures you in with some tremendous combat mechanics and a unique selling point (Disney), but it also tries to piss you off with a vacuous opening zone and the Chipmunks.

Fun, cheeky and irreverent, Death of the Reprobate prances through art history with a wicked twinkle in its eye, and is one of this year's most memorable adventure games.

Two RTS classics that are still worth playing today, even if the greatest enemy of both Warcraft armies still ends up being the humble tree.

What we have here essentially is an exceptionally polished product with a smattering of new additions that, Xbox Live aside, don't make an especially significant leap forward after last year's return to form.

More elegance in the interface, fewer lulls in activity and a better way of gently directing you towards its hidden delights would have carried the score higher, but even with its flaws Viva Piñata is a game that deserves to be played and refreshes your belief that games can be friendly as well as fun.

While none of the games are as polished and well-balanced as Gradius V (surely, prayerfully being held back for a single-shot PSP release) this package is nevertheless essential playing for twitch gamers.

Maybe it's just because we're remembering that the best games aren't the best because they've got the biggest polygon counts, or the most multiple paths through levels, or the largest number of murderable prostitutes - they're the best because they're the most fun to play, and that's what counts.

But overall, it is a very nice experience that exudes a certain Disney charm and - with the exception of minor performance issues - plays almost perfectly on Microsoft consoles.

Bold, raw and effortlessly stylish, Sorry We're Closed uses the building blocks of survival horror to tell a compelling and hard-hitting love story to brilliant effect.

A highly polished, mostly highly enjoyable hackandslash romp with only occasional lapses into tedious gaming by numbers same-old-same-old object hunting and respawning enemy laziness.

HD Remix is a worthy stop-off on the road to Street Fighter IV's console release next February, and a good training ground for anyone who wants to learn or relearn the Street Fighter fundamentals before then.

The novelty of repeated bucket-kicking has dampened a little. And towards the end, the game just starts throwing high-level bastards in your face to see how many you can take. The core formula that defined Infinity Blade and made it so interesting has been tarnished in the move to write an App Store description with some higher numbers than before.

It's not the future of PC gaming, but a glorious slice of the recent past. This may be the last adventure like this you'll ever go on. And there's a certain style and grandeur to anything like that.

There's still some basic things it lacks, most obviously a decent in-game auction house for trading items, and a better teaming system for locating people interested in grouping, but it does keep a count on how long you've been playing and after a long session pops up a "You've been playing for four hours. Take a break".

Taken in isolation, it's easily the best handheld Tennis game.

There are no standout battles - save, perhaps, for the grim final encounter - but the cumulative effect of its fights, puzzles and secrets is memorable.

It won't come as anything new or inspiring to anybody who's tackled a DK title before, but it engages the brain in ways that we enjoy being probed, and for all its age the formula is still as sound as ever.

The only thing that raises CVS2 up and above the likes of "Dead or Alive 3" or even "Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance" is its online element, and I'll only really recommend it until a beat 'em up developed <I>within</I> the last three years makes its mark on Xbox Live.

Gyromancer has longevity, it's fearsomely addictive, and it's more absorbing the more you play it.

Would be an impressive game even if it weren't based on Lord of the Rings. It's a clever and well-constructed strategy title with plenty of innovation of its own, and a genuinely great use of the franchise. Easily the best of the Lord of the Rings games to date.

There's really nothing here that truly deserves great reward. But I had legions of fun. And, for this game at least, that counts for, oooh, pretty much everything.

With the swimming graphics engine in particular being superbly done, I would have liked for more events based around this.

Even at 800 Microsoft points (so, six-quid-eighty), it offers a lot of value compared to some of its fellow test-subjects, and while it does occasionally frustrate or bore, the urge to keep going remains.

There's a depth of enjoyment to Final Fantasy IV Advance - even pathos - that few other games can match.

If nothing else, it's entirely fitting that a game that's always been brilliantly brainless is now genuinely brain-dead as well. Oh, and I finally got that bloody Mario-themed Achievement. SCORE.

Considering Summit Strike is only pitched as a budget-priced expansion pack to last year's 'full-blown' version, Ubisoft has done an exceptional job of providing nigh-on top draw entertainment with literally no compromises.

Rugby 06 finally offers the full range of Premiership, Celtic and Southern Hemisphere club teams, not to mention exhibition sides such as the Barbarians and New Zealand Maoris. That's, like, three times as many sides as "Rugby 2005."

With well-considered new features, glorious artwork and fantastic music, it demonstrates Funcom's design and art teams firing on all cylinders, building on the work done by the technical team in bringing the game up to scratch over the past two years.

The Outer Worlds 2 is for better and worse still fluffy gaming comfort food, but it is significantly improved and better than its predecessor in almost every way.

It is a majestic tribute to cinema, a movie game in the literal sense, and your enjoyment will be in precise step with your appreciation of that objective - and whether or not you believe it to be Drake's great deception, or Drake's great delight.

Thanks to Criterion's otherworldly technical ability to pull off graphical effects that wouldn't look out of place on next gen machines and some truly inspired set-pieces, BLACK is the most progressive and exciting shooter to emerge on the console platforms for years.

With its bite-sized premise, hugely compelling one-more-go appeal and negligible loading times, Everybody's Golf is without question one of our favourite PSP titles.

The reason this game and its predecessors perch atop their genre is they make every sweet passing move, crisply negotiated corner and shaved second feel like a podium finish.

Although at times little more than a culmination of spy films and stereotypes over the last forty years, No One Lives Forever is an adventure and a half for the single player, and well worth investigating if you’re sick of world-threatening plots and Quake-engine oddities.

With 200 of the blessed things to face (of which 140 are evil user-created levels), public transport delays will be positively welcome.

A terrific Breath of the Wild follow-up with some brilliant new systems, amazing views and more dungeon-type spaces, plus a slightly deadening emphasis on gathering resources.

The Random Encounter makes for a short game, but an extremely enjoyable one, the two-hour campaign providing you with plenty of hectic victories and glorious defeats. It also leaves you with an Endless Mode, some lovely pixelated memories, and that warm feeling that only comes from seeing something very new built from ideas that are very, very old.

Sometimes it pays to do things differently, even if you risk driving your audience slightly insane in the process.

The puppies are astonishingly realistic, and very easy to become attached to. This in itself makes for an incentive to keep on playing the game day after day, but there's also the fact that there are so many funky items (oh, how we long for the pirate hat) and different breeds (oh, how we long for the Shetland sheepdog) to collect.

In its desperation to infuse this setting with "maturity" - be it of the sober, political kind, or the game's painfully clumsy gore and sex - BioWare has forgotten the key ingredient of any fantasy: the fantastical. Without it, you're still left with a competent, often compelling, impressively detailed and immense RPG, but it's one that casts no spell.

If you've somehow lost your inner child, you might find it skulking impishly in the confines of Casey's Contraptions. Even the price is from your youth.

There's no sense of urgency or pressure to break the mood. It's a game that invites you to wallow in its languid depths, wriggle your toes, stretch your brain a little and take in the view.

Assassin's Creed Rogue may well have begun life as a hedged bet - a PS3 and Xbox 360 game knocked together in case the next-gen consoles hadn't taken off by now - but despite its slightly awkward role as b-side to Assassin's Creed Unity, the result is a welcome follow-up to Black Flag.

It's a straightforward sequel with a few more bells and whistles than before, and it lowers the bar of entry somewhat compared to the GameCube original.

Acclaimed point-and-click studio Wadjet Eye's gently paced, time-travelling genre-hopper blends elegant puzzling and intricate, affecting storytelling to beautiful effect.

If Pirates seems less ambitious than the last two Lego titles, lacking the cohesiveness of Potter's Hogwarts hub or the epic scale of Clone Wars', um, wars, then it makes up for it with an overall confidence borne from TT Games' experience with the licence.

Capcom has crafted a love letter to its own past, and its own fans, that is both effective and generous in satisfying its peculiar niche audience.

Saints Row 4 may lack refinement - nothing thwarts a superhero quite so frequently as an overhanging roof or your homies standing in a doorway - but it compensates with sheer exuberance. It's a heartfelt love letter to the superhero genre and to a medium that makes such madness possible.

But however much positive energy we lavish on FIFA all the areas that EA beats Konami on - bar online - are simply gloss. In a straight tussle between the games, we just don't enjoy playing FIFA as much as we do "PES3," and, for most of you, that's what matters.

Karaoke and guitar specialists certainly won't want to throw out their SingStars and Guitar Heroes, but with the peripheral set-up now established and regular infusions of downloadable content, the future's bright for Rock Band - and the present's pretty rocking too.

The problem with all these things which have been coded to create historical semi-realism is that it creates a limit of the tech-tree they can climb.

I've been utterly hypnotised by Harvest Moon: Magical Melody from the moment I laid my hands on it, even watching my girlfriend play it for hours on end (her time spent playing probably a tenfold increase on mine) and I still don't feel that we've even begun to scratch the surface.

I've never read any of the Moomin books, but last year or maybe the year before I did read a memoir by Jansson about a period of her life in which she settled on a little island, Klovharun. It was "a rock in the middle of nowhere", no running water or electricity and any shelter had to be constructed. The book presents a dream landscape, but it's one of those dreams in which you have so much to do. Sorting wood and fuel and things to eat and drink: Jansson loves all this, but she doesn't hide any of it or try to frame it as something that was easy. I see that same resilience, that same fortitude, when Snufkin calmly dismantles a park and pushes back the forces of order and regulation.

What could easily have been a mid-season lull feels instead like a peak. If Telltale can maintain this standard for the rest of the season, it could yet top The Walking Dead's first run in terms of quality - if not novelty.

For a while, it's intensely good fun, but every man has his breaking point. At some stage, mania sets in, and fending off the determined alien hordes requires a desire to replay levels that only a gurning leatherface should tackle. You should know which side you're on by now.

Identifying clues is now a more intuitive process. While before you might mistakenly think an adjoining picture was part of the same hint, the game now highlights the clue in question so that there's no ambiguity.

It's not just half a dozen great diversions and a few more besides; it's sweet fan service that celebrates Nintendo's catalogue with more heart and less calculation than we've seen of late. Better yet, it reclaims the used and abused mini-game compilation from the hollow hinterlands of the casual cash-in, lovingly restores it and puts it back where it belongs - amid the hustle, the buzz, the urgent appeal of the arcade.

As a follow-up to one of the most innovative and accomplished 2D fighters in recent years, Continuum Shift is a worthy successor which refines the BlazBlue formula.

EiB feels grittier - closer to its fascinating yet fearful inspiration - than any other military shooter out there. Much of that feel comes from the credible mission design and AI already mentioned but a significant portion stems from fundamentals like the way the weapons look, sound and perform.

With 24 levels to work through, and a entire Winter Assault campaign thrown in as an added bonus, Crap Of Defense boasts untold hours of palpitating fun for its paltry asking price.

Metro 2033 is far busier and far more accomplished than I expected it to be, and it's also one of the best-looking games - at least in a few very special scenes - on the Xbox 360.

This slick new Civilization may be more reduction than Revolution, but it's easily one of the most distinctive games on 360 and PS3. I can't see myself playing much more of the single-player, but I genuinely cannot wait to war over landmass with a few like-minded chums.

While online may be an opportunity missed, overall TrackMania DS delivers, and whether you're a fan of the series or a total novice, the slick, compulsive fight to gather all the game's golds will have you plugging away until you've exhausted its content. What's more, it's that rarest of things: a DS game with amazing graphics.

That's Trackmania's secret. It's deeply satisfying, while at the same time being more frustrating than you could possibly imagine. It's a contradiction until you've played it.

It's certainly true that apart from the graphical polish, this is essentially the same in terms of core gameplay, albeit structured slightly differently. But with new courses, new cars and the freedom to create your own content, it's hard to imagine too many DS-owning race fans being put off by such a piffling complaint though.

Who cares if it's no longer free? Slap your money down and feel the warm glow of supporting Raptisoft's sterling efforts.

Section 8 is capable of scintillating multiplayer drama, and it is impeccably solid throughout. I've had some maginficent tooth-and-nail matches, which is all I can really ask for. For all the offbeat design decisions and mechanistic foibles, I've been enjoying the hell out of it.

As a full-priced offering, though, the goal posts have moved, and it's hard not to feel a little short changed by the short-lived single player campaign and how similar the whole thing feels. In many ways, GRAW 2 is the classic quick-fire sequel - short on new ideas, but big on polishing what we know and love. But these days, isn't that what people want?

It's interesting. By the end of the adventure, Oxenfree 2 has tied up a lot of mysteries. It had for me, anyway, and with a web-like game such as this there's always reason to go back in, make different choices, and see what else is waiting in there to be solved. But there's this other feeling to everything too, just as there was in the first game.

Short but powerfully unsettling, Threshold takes aim at the strange and horrifying helplessness of being a small cog in a giant corporate machine, and nails its execution brilliantly.

The cheap bordered 50Hz conversion is a touch disappointing but when the rest of the game is so damn great and taking into account the fact that you'll get change out of fifteen notes for this little beauty, it seems harsh to keelhaul XI over cut corners like this.

A flawed masterpiece. A game brimming with variety and a freshness lacking from most of the factory farmed franchise exercises that pass through our offices with crushing regularity.

What Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga delivers in spades is an interesting, atmospheric RPG experience with an enjoyable battle system, fabulous music and an excellent visual style that set it well apart from RPG cliches of recent years.

Despite the wealth of options and the addition of infinite continues – which will no doubt lead some to complain that it can be completed in 20 minutes – Guwange makes few concessions to a modern audience, and as such, Cave has almost certainly restricted its game to a niche crowd. But that's an observation, not a criticism.

Given time, though, and Pocket Academy gets under your skin just like the other Kairosoft efforts, largely thanks to the attachment to your pupils, the satisfaction from their eventual progress, and the burgeoning relationships with other pupils. It's enough to bring a tear to your eye.

It almost feels awkward to play something this understated, but once you get over that you realise that all you need to have fun is a few squares of track snapped together creatively - and that you don't need in-game radio stations, real-time reflections or modern cityscapes to make your case.

So get it. Get it because it's ferociously satisfying, well designed and well executed. Get it because it easily reaches far greater heights than a mere tech show-off. In fact, it's so much fun I didn't even feel the need to mention Unreal Engine 3 once. Except there. Damn.

Sand Land proves once again that Akira Toriyama and video games are a perfect match.

Despite the fairly humdrum single player campaign, Tides of War is well worth engaging in for the Live experience alone. PC gamers, however, can save their cash.

One of the most compelling horror adventure games ever, and must rank as one of the best games on the Xbox.

The best Civ expansion ever? Yeah, why not?

Feels like a complete package from the start; the three gameplay areas - solo, co-op and multiplayer - all feeling like parts of a cohesive whole, driven by a clear and honed declaration of intent.

A frighteningly moreish game that represents ludicrous value for money, and is highly recommended to anyone taken to competitive twin-stick shooters.

As magnificent an example of the add-on pack as Rome is, it doesn't redefine the game completely in order to make it an absolute essential buy for anyone who was interested in the mother-game. It's an imaginative more-of-the-same, but still – at its core – a more of the same.

Rogue Trader nails the 40k setting and provides an appropriately massive narrative filled with meaty tactical combat, though some bugs and poor performance hold it back.

The lack of any new multiplayer options is a bit disappointing, but it's priced as an expansion pack and there's certainly enough here to keep any fan of Medieval engaged for quite a large number of hours.

A less openly provocative game than its predecessor, and one that will capture less attention, but while it may be damned for subtlety it is every bit as deceptive, and perhaps that's the greater of the series' illusions regardless of what else a BioShock sequel might have become.

Compact and playful and ingenious in the lightest, and least overbearing of ways, Arranger is just lovely.

The wonderful narrative, great cast, enjoyable battle system and stunningly beautiful music and artwork are all compelling reasons to explore Chopin's deathbed dream. However, we can't escape the feeling that this isn't so much an eternal sonata, as an unfinished symphony.

Crack a handful of languages and then wield them in this mesmering adventure game.

In Ikaruga there is no refuge, and there's honesty to this black and white approach that demands respect. But will that respect will turn to adoration? Well, that very much depends on how hard you'll work to make your own memories herein.

Blades of Fire manages to feel original, lovable, and born of genuine passion, despite the near overwhelming number of problems that could have extinguished it.

To quote my good friend the Air Daschund: what a rush. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a real delight, a game that revels in both its genre and its own heritage, delivering some wonderful combat and exploration. All that and the odd secret door. Sold.