For only 200 points, you get a good few hours of beautiful entertainment, and an Endless mode to pick through once you're done. More of this kind of thing, and Nintendo's best kept secrets won't stay that way for long.

Completists will certainly enjoy the three Templars' Lairs bundled alongside The Bonfire of the Vanities, but being forced to buy the accompanying memory sequence to access them leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

It's the Amy Winehouse of videogames: rambling and incoherent, a bit of a mess and not much to look at, but with a unique and distinctive voice that's very hard to ignore.

This is, above all else, a supremely confident game: confident in its charm, in its challenges, and in its unique identity. If you thought Braid gave puzzle-platformers a soul, this one is all about personality.

Whether you play this via DLC or as part of the forthcoming Gold Edition of Resident Evil 5, it's an essential episode.

Scrappy where it needed to be polished, clumsy where it needed to be nimble, the game wears its iconic characters as a shield, happy to serve up scripted shocks but offering nothing that might actually surprise.

It's bursting with happiness. And so am I when I play it.

Maybe it's the classic, solid city-building gameplay. Maybe it's the unique style and sense of humour. Maybe it's the fact that, despite all the niggles, the game is still so absorbing you can spend hours on it without realising just how much time you've wasted.

It extends the series in intelligent and welcome ways.

With two-player co-op and versus modes adding a welcome dose of multiplayer fun to the package, Art of Balance is nothing short of essential.

Innovative, unique and utterly charming in its self-contained universe, it comes highly recommended to open-minded 360 owners.

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.

Dante's Inferno is worth considering if you're a diehard hack-and-slasher fan who loves blood, gore, fire, brimstone, layered but simplistic combat systems and tits. This is more than one big lava level and it's not a terrible game. It's just not an original one, and it's arrived a little too late.

The original Super Monkey Ball wasn't designed with a balance board in mind, any more than monkeys are meant to wear waistcoats, and the end result is just as odd and incongruous. It might well be time to stop grinding that organ.

But despite sounding infuriatingly complicated, Link 'n' Launch very quickly gets under your skin. The only problem is it's a bit lightweight. With just 10 missions and 100 pretty simple puzzles to barrel through, you're soon left wanting more.

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.

Only the slight sensation of datedness prevents this from scoring higher, and no doubt once the mods start flowing the value for money will get even better. But there's plenty here to keep the faithful feeling extremely optimistic about the prospect of a proper sequel. And there's still nothing out there quite like STALKER.

Despite all of these complaints, those hordes of starship captains are quite happy. They may not have many different things to do, and the missions and UI may be rather buggy, but there does seem to be enough content to sustain them - at least until the endgame - and even at its worst that content is knockabout fun with more instant appeal, and more suitability for casual, short-session, low-commitment play than most MMOs.

Despite their relative strength, the disparate halves of White Knight Chronicles fail to gel in meaningful ways.

It's a shooter without eloquence or crunch, an MMO without content or personality, and as an experimental combination of the two it's missing ambition.

By any objective measurement, this a poor attempt at adding a new sequence to an excellent game which already boasted a generous amount of content. Had it added more explorational elements, or another secret location to discover, it would have been worth the effort - but to simply stitch together forgettable melee encounters and chases with new cut-scenes is some distance from being enough.

Perhaps BioWare's greatest success in Mass Effect 2 has been taking a complex RPG and making it effortless to understand, play and enjoy on a constant basis, because it has done this in a manner that should prove utterly essential to veterans and newcomers alike, and more than enough to suggest Mass Effect 3 will be the most important game in BioWare's history.

The game's concessions to traditional game design make No More Heroes 2 a more palatable, satisfying experience. But in doing so, you feel Suda 51 and his team have moved away from Grasshopper's boisterous 'Punk's Not Dead' slogan.

To say it's a good stopgap for Super Street Fighter IV would be an injustice, as it's a fighter that stands out on its own merit. Those who look beyond the tinted visors will discover not just an excellent Wii game but an all kinds of awesome 2D fighter.

The irony then, is that the game which can accommodate the greatest numbers of players in the history of the medium will be best enjoyed by a dedicated few. For those players, at least, numbers really aren't everything.

The sad truth is that there are better looking, better designed twin-stick shooters on the Indie Games channel for a fraction of the price, produced by inspired individuals who have moved on from Beat the Blockoids. Give them your Microsoft Points instead.

The game succeeds with this approach simply because it has so few contemporary rivals but it's a modest sort of success, one that proves the strategy RPG in its traditional form has run out of steam - but suggests that nevertheless, there's enjoyment to be had in revisiting old flames.

Dark Void's extremely short campaign - with no motivation for replay and no multiplayer options - is more like a portfolio of half-baked concepts hurriedly crammed into an uninspired package for ease of presentation, more show-reel than show-stopper.