There's no denying, however, that the platforming feels a little tired and the constant blibbering of the characters is rather trite.

It's a 9-flavoured 8, but again the mechanics of the court sequences are often so stupidly frustrating that it would be wrong to mark any higher.

Then there's the combat. It's messy. You'll fling ranged spells at enemies and they'll mysteriously miss, presumably due to line-of-sight issues, but it's difficult to tell. Even melee combat seems buggy at times, with monsters you can't hit even though they're stood right next to you.

In some senses, Insomniac does need a clip 'round the ear for doing very little to innovate the gameplay in any meaningful sense, but if you're happy to play through a wonderful high definition version of an old classic, put your money down - you won't be remotely disappointed.

Overall, if you're still searching for the definitive Namco collection, this isn't it.

Essentially the same game that didn't come out over here on the SNES 12 years ago. Except better, and with more content, and with easy touchscreen navigation of menus.

If you take FM2008 at face value, you're left standing eyeball to eyeball with the finest football management game ever made. But just like Aliens: Special Edition was fleetingly more engaging than the cinema release, this year's FM feels like a game that further polishes an already highly buffed formula but fails to take it to a genuinely higher level.

For the price, and for the quality of offer, Tomb Raider: Anniversary is easily one the best games released all year. Blessed with an excellent control system and chock full of masterfully designed levels, as far as puzzle-based action adventures go, there have been none finer for years.

The bottom line is you won't find a better value, more generous or more diverse FSX add-on than this one.

Unfortunately, AOE3's ship has sailed for most folks, and this just isn't exciting enough to quite justify also splashing out on the original game if you don't already own it.

In short, EA Playground is fun for neither kids nor adults. The mini-games don't have the depth of those in Wii Sports or the quirky innovations of those in Wario Ware. The visuals don't have the appeal or charm of a Disney/Pixar game, or even that one about the puppets in the garden Tom likes so much.

I love the concept, and applaud the idea of using the Sims framework to create something more hands-on in nature...But the game is undeniably patchy and full of scrappy design decisions that push the player away rather than drawing them in. It's so rough around the edges that I even ejected the disc to check it said review code.

Between the obvious chinks in the artificial intelligence and glaring clipping anomalies (with characters walking through walls and floating down staircases), only a truly hardy adventurer will persevere. Did I say hardy? I meant foolhardy.

And if the shield was gone and the enemies were fewer, and more varied, it could have been a lot like an actual videogame, with a difficulty curve, rather than a bewildering ascent up a six-foot cliff onto an endless plateau of tedium.

In most ways that matter, this is a fine conversion of an enduring classic, and is exactly the sort of game that makes Xbox Live Arcade one of the most exciting gaming platforms around.

Ease of using the touch-screen aside, it's something we'd prefer to flick to on the mobile while on the bus rather than dedicate the DS slot to. Nevertheless, it fulfils its puzzling duties.

So this is pretty much the same game again, with a few new missions and multiplayer maps, a couple of new mechanics and a new faction. After a year and a half. If this is the best the world has to throw at me, I might just retire again.

There's not much to like about SWAT: Target Liberty. The squad-based mechanic is imbalanced. The levelling-up and weapon selection systems don't have significant effects on how things play out. The plot is silly, the cut-scenes are rubbish and everything's so small it makes your eyes hurt.

Lack of coherency, imagination and self-awareness.

Terrible graphics and extremely limited interaction. Even my girlfriend, who normal gets obsessive about these sorts of pet games, lasted a day before she gave up.

The ideal alternative to Wii Sports. It's a highly enjoyable, well-designed game with simple appeal and real depth. It's the game the Wii's been waiting for - well, one of them, at least.

Its mediocre visuals will tax your PC like an Inland Revenue man hopped up on crack; we had to scale the settings right down in order to make it remotely playable, and even then it crashed us back to the desktop with depressing regularity. Perhaps it was trying to tell us something.

True, it all feels more like doing homework than playing a game. But the incentive to keep going is you do find yourself learning new words. If that appeals, My Word Coach offers a stylishly presented, relatively entertaining way of doing it.

It's a substantial undertaking, too, with breadth as well as depth, and with a control system that demonstrates the Wiimote's capabilities more fully than its direct competitors.

It falls short of its predecessor, which succeeded thanks to cheeriness, simplicity and fluidity. However, it still stands out ahead of its own worst Jackass era, and many of the new inclusions, especially the video editing and Nail The Grab, deserve your attention.

It won't get you out of your Tony Hawk funk if you're already bored to death, but then you've already got SKATE for that so hurrah.

Sight Training is no fun. There's not enough to do and what there is to do is tedious. It's hard to believe it improves your visual abilities any more than eating carrots makes you see in the dark.

Overall, NBA '08 is not a bad game. It just tries to make up in presentation what it lacks in depth.