If the point is make your mundane life seem exciting by comparison, then I guess it's job done, but hardcore adventurers may find these sections taxing for all the wrong reasons.

For those expecting massive advancements or a radical departure from the original, this will come as a disappointment. A more honest, realistic assessment would be to treat this as a mission pack, and for those who do just want more of the same, you'll come away a satisfied customer.

Even with a spit and polish to the visuals and the usual effortless presentation it can't help but feel tiring after a while.

Thankfully, when you die, which will be quite frequently, the loading times are kept mercifully short and don't add to the frustration like so many other PSP games.

In small doses, it's a game that finds its own old-school groove, and an enjoyable one for the most part. The touch-screen nonsense does it little favours, though, but luckily doesn't completely ruin the fun.

Bad Company 2 remains a superb shooter (if still rather borked by that last patch), but having gorged on it for three months we need something more interesting than second-hand spaghetti bolognese if we're expected to pick up the tab.

The overriding feeling is that Head On belongs on more powerful consoles. Without the added bells and whistles, its core racing mechanics and their shortcomings are bare, obvious, and will struggle in a genre that is stacked to the rafters on PSP.

Those in desperate search of a new platform game after completing New Super Mario Bros. upside down and backwards might get a few hours' respite from this, but otherwise wait until it costs nothing and then buy it for the nephew you gave your old chunky DS when you decide you had to have a Lite, and maybe invest your money in some of the Virtual Console's retro treats instead.

A wide range of systems make Dune: Spice Wars an enjoyable 4X, but the depth of Frank Herbert's world-building is largely lost in translation.

NeverDead feels like gaming's equivalent of Buckaroo Banzai, or Phantom of the Paradise, or any one of those weird B-movies you used to find lurking in the midnight spaces of an old video store and which you often loved for their unlikely concepts or their wilful obscurity more than their actual quality. NeverDead hasn't been given room to get the most out of its strange ideas, but it's still plucky, warm-hearted and genuinely idiosyncratic.

Beneath the hysterical presentation, the frantic battle segments and the skittish storyline, then, Project X Zone is a thin game. The emphasis on fighting game reactions in the battle segments should appeal to genre fans, but these are too simplistic for genuine expression or mastery. Likewise, the tactical elements of positioning and unit movement on the battlefield lack urgency and true significance. The result is a humorous curio, perhaps, but one without the underlying game to adequately serve its stars.

Embark Studios' multiplayer shooter dazzles in the moment, but its AI voices are symptomatic of a broader issue with artistic vision.

A game that has a great little concept, a wonky campaign, AI bots that aren't quite up to the challenge of challenging you and somewhat dodgy netcode. It's incredibly frustrating, because the core concept works, and it works well. It's just all the rest that's falling apart at the seams.

While Infinity is adequate in basic gameplay terms, and will certainly amuse Disney-fixated youngsters for a while, it falls short of the games whose ideas it borrows.

The story may not be the most earth shattering we've heard, the voice acting (though delightfully it's British!) can be a touch jarring on occasion, and it's initially frustrating and rather basic and rough around the edges in some other respects, but nevertheless it grows into something that you can happily sit down and chip away at all evening without getting too worked up.

The camera is crap, the scale is awkward, the story and characters are basic and cringe-worthy, the combat is tedious, the platforming and puzzling is too basic, and I was well bored of it by the time I conquered the final level with the first of the four Teams, which wasn't even that long after I first grabbed it out of the shrink-wrap.

It's a more clued-up committee that's in charge for Razor's Edge, for sure, but for a series that once felt like a singular, twisted and brilliant vision it's still a depressing turn. This is a better game than Ninja Gaiden 3, and one that does commendable things in atoning for Team Ninja's past sins - but sadly it's far from a brilliant one.

No one should really expect it to be cutting edge entertainment, although it does succeed in providing a new spin on long abandoned gaming principles. Despite its overtly simplistic nature, it's still a blisteringly entertaining romp in small doses, providing you take it in the right spirit.

Admittedly better value for money than the rather uninspired "version 2" Dreamcast release, but for a game which has seen as much development as this to suffer from fundamental flaws and dodgy design decisions in so many areas is bizarre.

Respectable platforming and classic Sonic elements are undermined by inconsistent new ideas.

But more importantly, you do get to 'be' the Fantastic 4 and experiment with some really rather excellent superpowers, and the game isn't so bad that a serious fan couldn't overlook its flaws.

Some of it is down to the execution, which is mostly competent but lacks the spark and energy of Neversoft's original work.

The way the game manages to weave simple RPG mechanics on top of the narrative works surprisingly well, even if, ultimately, it all feels like a curious throwback to the days when even the most basic graphics were something of a luxury.

Absolutely enormous, endlessly gorgeous, but maddening (especially in its final moment), The Whispered World is a muddled shame.

Full of anomalies in more ways than one, Stalker 2 is a mess of bugs and jank that nonetheless stays faithful to the open world survival shooter of yesteryear.

It's hard to know how many people are really going to care about the return of Rocket Knight. Climax has done a decent job of giving it a modern sheen, but while it's mildly entertaining and completely inoffensive, it's also forgettable.

As relentlessly daft and shallow as it is, Nail'd is a very hard game to dislike. It's almost tailor-made for a weekend rental, which should give you enough time to rinse the single-player, have a few knockabout online races, and return it before the simplicity and repetition sours the happy memories of your brief time with it.

It's very good at what it does, but it doesn't offer anything new.