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.