It's just a great pinball game, with intelligent table design that manages to pack in features without losing focus. I cherished the version I had for the homebrew GP32 handheld, so the sight of it resurrected once more for the PSP is a genuine joy.

As a concept, it works. The physics is decent enough, but the game itself never finds the tone or hook that elevates its gameplay model into something truly compelling.

It's a clever twist on an old standard but the cannons prove to be an irritation rather than a true challenge - their fast, ruthless volleys reducing too much of the game to a painstaking crawl, claiming a few pixels of space at a time as you inch towards a vital catapult. Fun, then, but in need of balancing.

It's just about worthwhile as a chance to test yourself against some long-forgotten mechanics, but you can't shake the feeling that Just Add Water is just joining the dots.

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.

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.

As it is, for all the added beauty and inherited class, I don't think there's enough freshness or sophistication here for that to happen.

It's complicated, often unhelpful, and engrossing. It's the shy boy your mum told you to make friends with. It's a troubled and stubborn creature, with a funny run.

The inability to upload high-scores is a minor disappointment, but otherwise Bit.Trip Void is an unqualified success, and for 600 Points from the Wii Shop it's well worth investigating.

If you're going to play a King's Bounty game for the first time, make it The Legend - and I'd say that whether or not it was available so cheaply. If you're all done with that and crave more, then Armored Princess will not do you wrong.

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

Ubisoft Montreal has never been afraid to try new things, but after a few missteps with games like last year's Prince of Persia, perhaps the bravest thing it could have done with Assassin's Creed II was simply to make a classic open-world adventure, filled to the brim with things you want to do and the narrative motivation to continue doing them. The fact it's done so suggests we really should trust the studio when it says it's taken its lesson, and fills me with hope for the third game in the trilogy. In the meantime, we not only have the Assassin's Creed game we'd hoped for in the first place to play with, but one of the best open-world games of the year.

For fans of twitch-gaming this surely ranks up there with the best that this anachronistic sub-genre has to offer.

It's fun for half an hour, but that's an awfully expensive 30 minutes. Don't buy RIDE unless you want to be taken for one.

Whereas once we treated Left 4 Dead as a stopgap between Half-Lifes, this is no longer a weird little side project with modest expectations, and Valve is confident enough to play around with it, safe in the knowledge that you can trust your players. Left 4 Dead proved it. And whereas that game had a personality, this one is overflowing with it.

There's simply too much that is vaguely explained, and too much aimless wandering looking for the next vital objective, and that can't help but drag down the score for a game that, as last time, comes close to being something genuinely special.

Plenty of people would rather sit on the sofa, thanks, and play a proper videogame with guns, and good for them. But small girls, show-offs and people who are too drunk to care in the first place will have a great time with Just Dance.

SCEE Cambridge has done Media Molecule proud and fans of the original game won't be disappointed. PSP owners who missed out first time around should be sure to give it a go, as LittleBigPlanet is undoubtedly one of the standout titles for Sony's handheld.

Far from being mere exercises in nostalgia, these hugely entertaining HD versions underline exactly why we all got so excited about them in the first place, and suggests that while God of War III faces off against a lot of big names in 2010, the greatest threats to its dominance lie in its own past.

Platform game fans would be better served by Jak & Daxter, while action game fans can go back to God of War. Bloodlines isn't a terrible or frustrating game, but it's as unnecessary as all those chickens.

And viewed as what it's meant to be - a game for kids - Jambo! Safari isn't too bad. It's simple to understand and there's plenty of stuff to do. You get to drive a big car and throw ropes about and pat lions. There are no guns or scary bits. You might even learn something, although nothing you learn will be very interesting.

It can't engage and enchant groups in the way Wii Fit does, nor does it attempt to. But as I said the first time around, if you are serious about improving your fitness levels and have neither the inclination nor the funds to join a gym, Active is currently the best of its kind

Whereas once we treated Left 4 Dead as a stopgap between Half-Lifes, this is no longer a weird little side project with modest expectations, and Valve is confident enough to play around with it, safe in the knowledge that you can trust your players. Left 4 Dead proved it. And whereas that game had a personality, this one is overflowing with it.

Without a doubt, EA isn't treating the expansion of The Sims 3 lightly - World Adventures might be a bit of a thematic stumble, but it makes for a significantly bigger and more varied game, far more so than any prior Sims 1 or 2 expansion has achieved. It's impossible not to recommend it to avid Sims players, but anti-Sims snobs will inevitably find it to be an annoying side-order of collectormania and repetitive puzzles.

Once on-track, few F1 games have managed to be as encouraging when it comes to pushing yourself to attack corners and better your lap time, and fewer still have proved as much fun. This may not be the revolution the Formula 1 sub-genre has been waiting for, but you're not likely to find many Wii owners complaining.

Who knew that, locked in the time-honoured traditions of Super Mario Bros., one of the greatest co-op games ever was waiting to get out? Well, Shigeru Miyamoto did. In unleashing it, Nintendo hasn't moved its classic series forward one jot; it hasn't had to. But it has given it a riotous new lease of life.

It's fundamentally a great game and the best option for console-owning quiz fans.

Modern Warfare 2 balances the spectacle and silliness of its single-player campaign with a deep, enduring multiplayer core, carefully covering its bases for players of all persuasions. But there is no denying it seeks merely to build upon the successes of its forebear while doing very little to expand its scope or redefine them.