Bit.Trip's carefully poised fusion of old-school difficulty and retro-futuristic aesthetics won't be to everyone's taste, but anyone with an interest in distilled arcade design owes it to themselves to at least have a go.

Just like the Wii U game, The Chase Begins has big ambitions - but it suffers for being crammed into a smaller footprint. Compared to its partner, it's undeniably compromised. Taken on its own merits, however, there's still enough charm and fun to be found in this smaller toybox to make it a worthy second best choice.

Artful and warmly considered (even the menu options are caught up in it - the "Options" menu is the "Engine Room", and the "Quit" button reads "Abandon Ship"), it's a well-formed idea that will almost certainly grow as it builds up a head of Steam.

If you played through Tales of Xillia, this is an interesting but rather lumpy postscript to that adventure. If you've never played a Tales game, this isn't the one to start with.

A lack of depth doesn't stop Chime from quietly turning its own genre on its head either. Zoë Mode's game shows what can happen when you give up destruction in favour of creation, and exchange tension for a kind of dreamy calm.

With a rewarding upgrade structure and lightweight strategic elements allowing Game Distillery to distance itself from its obvious influences, Aqua develops a personality of its own which, while not exactly breaking much new ground, shapes the shooter landscape in an appealing manner.

Pirates is a game of lots of little pieces that combine to form a patchy but largely coherent slice of pirate life. Could it stand to be a little more in-depth, a little less piecemeal in the way it hands out tasks? Certainly. But if you just want a solidly entertaining pirate game that you can dip in and out of, safe in the knowledge that there are hours of gameplay ahead with no paywalls, this is definitely worth downloading.

Warp is a pleasant enough diversion, but with patchwork design that remixes gameplay ideas and stylistic elements from sources as diverse as Splosion Man, Metal Gear Solid and Portal, it never gels into anything particularly memorable.

It's a bland taste to a cultured palette. But it's fun, too, and self-aware.

Top Spin 2 is a fine tennis title and a game you'll have a lot of fun with off or online, but one that does little to justify its price tag, and is little more than a high def update of the original.

This is a flashy and technically sound beat-'em-up and its drawbacks are largely overshadowed by what is the strongest interpretation of the Dragon Ball Z anime in years.

Sure, it's probably the most morally bankrupt game we've ever come across, but if you delight in extreme violence, language that would make Tarantino blush and a more forgiving take on the GTA theme then you've come to the right game.

The likelihood, then, is that people who played DKC Returns will find Tropical Freeze a little uninspiring. It's a superior game - it looks nicer, it's easier to control on the GamePad than it was on the Wiimote, and there's slightly more to do - but like a lot of Nintendo's recent sequels, that doesn't feel like quite enough.

It's a delightful nod to early eighties platforming, but one held back by an ill-suited input method.

The meagre number of maps means repetition soon kicks in, but the gorgeous visuals, frenetic carnage and demanding teamwork make for the tightest Horde variant since Mass Effect 3's. A surprisingly good time for all.

PES 2010's team management options are a warning sign that the Japanese developer still has some tricks up its sleeve, and people for whom the transition to another football game is simply too much to countenance will buy and enjoy this, and discover it still plays a good, grass-roots game. For everyone else though, up is still down, because FIFA wins again.

It's a solid, enjoyable shooter, but one that ultimately fails to leverage its strange control decisions into a truly unique experience. It should be different yet, for all its bold ideas about movement, it ends up feeling strangely generic over the long haul.

What you're buying into is a fantastic celebration of a timeless classic, and one that does something genuinely interesting with the gameplay to make it relevant now. The problem is, basically, is that it's been put in totally the wrong price bracket for what is an impulse buy. A curiosity.

GRAW lets you down just when you start to believe in it, and the net result is that although it's still very good, it's simply not as polished or amazing as it should have been.

Crucially, however, the game itself remains almost completely unchanged, the creative inertia all the more noticeable given the radical overhaul the series enjoyed over the course of its 2008 and 2009 incarnations.

Project Zero 2's gameplay is pretty basic throughout and showing its age in areas - although the graphical makeover, bar some dodgy textures, is very good. But with the lights off, it's as spine-tinglingly scary as any game I've played, with some truly haunting moments and gasp-inducing set-pieces delivered as it reaches its disquieting climax.

There's much work to be done before LucasArts can boast it has created the ultimate Star Wars FPS. Sure, it's the best one yet, but with some often laughable AI and creaking tech underpinning it, the flaws are there for all to see.

Snapping out of your glazed-eye reverie to find you've added a few points to the high-score table. Well Gunpey-R's sort of like that. Not quite as good. But it's almost as good, and that's a pretty significant achievement after all.

The single player campaign is, if anything, too long, and focuses more on continuous combat than actual role-playing. The lack of any support for parties in the single player mode is also disappointing, and makes the game far less involving than it should be.

A superb game with a truly deep story. Couple this with a rather good looking graphics engine, some great dialogue, detailed environments, and an all round attention to detail, and you have a great game. Unfortunately though, thanks to the nature of the adventure system and the pauses while loading scenes, the game can become tedious at times.

Yes, just to add an even greater degree of random nonsense, you can shake the device to jog the coin a little, and therefore give you a chance to influence its direction. Once you start employing this tactic, of course, you can't bloody well stop, and so spend most of the game spasming like a drunk with an involuntary tic.

More often than not though, Eden succeeds, and once you get to grips with creating Molotov cocktails, shooting bottles in mid-air, and using aerosol cans as makeshift flamethrowers, it hardly seems to matter that shooting itself is so ineffective.

It seems churlish to completely dismiss Scarface's many amusements just because of control issues, especially as they can be accommodated with patience and practice. For the bulk of its playing time Scarface remains an indecently entertaining bad taste romp and, for those who don't have access to a PS2 or Xbox, it's still worth having.