Wing Commander Arena is a rudimentary shooter, the sort of thing that might have passed muster as a homebrew PC title ten years ago, but an unimpressive trudge for console gamers today.

Super Contra might appeal to the extreme hardcore retro apologists out there with oceanic reserves of patience and superhuman skills. It's certainly a challenge, and if that sounds like you, go for it. But if you're a mere mortal and squeal when the going gets tough, then the chances are you'll agree that the sequel is just too damn bloody minded by design to warrant much attention 19 years on.

Alien Syndrome had the potential to be a decent by-the-numbers action RPG, but it struggles to even reach those heights with insipid repetition and a total lack of challenge crippling your incentive to see it beyond the first few hours.

Final Fantasy II was a poor videogame in 1988 and no amount of spit and polish will perform the necessary shifts to its foundations to produce a good one in 2007.

One for 80's obsessives (you know who you are...) and die-hard GH fanatics only.

This generation is drowning in impossibly good racing games. If you want something technical, you've got DiRT, if you want something easygoing, you've got SEGA Rally, if you want something cool, you've got PGR4, if you want Nascar 08, you've got problems.

The best Civ expansion ever? Yeah, why not?

A cheap, polished online-enabled offering that fans and newcomers should embrace heartily to their bosoms. It's exactly the sort of quality offering that Microsoft should be extracting from developers of Live Arcade titles and one that should bring a smile to the faces of any right thinking gamers.

With literally hundreds of better classic games out there to choose from, it's absolutely mystifying that something that's aged as badly as Yie Ar Kung-Fu can be held aloft as some sort of period piece worth re-investigating.

So, an improvement on the (initially) buggy port that the first GRAW on PC was, but even with the pleasingly significant interface and visual tweaks over the console version, this is still very much a an adequate but not spectacular sequel to an adequate but not spectacular tactical shooter. It's GRAW, but a bit better, and that's it.

All told, it's just a solid, by-the-numbers "Virtua Tennis" clone with a generic cast of Clap Hanz creations. If you really must have a tennis game on your PS2, the bargain basement will serve you far better than this rather apologetic 'will this do?' offering.

Another well-conceived and well-executed update, with enough new gameplay features that Rugby 06 owners should warrant investing in an upgrade (we'll conveniently forget the lack of career mode) and enough gameplay concessions that fair-weather rugby fans caught up in World Cup fever can confidently purchase without fear of overly complex control set-ups or endless technical rules vagaries.

It's certainly decent enough, but it's not good enough to unseat Virtua Tennis from its position as the best game of tennis on the PSP.

This is thoroughly disappointing in some respects - not least because Sword of the New World is one of the most beautiful MMORPGs we've ever clapped eyes upon.

Overall, it's a solid and unique JRPG which, thanks to some brave and interesting design decisions is worthy of attention, even if it will do nothing to convince genre detractors of that fact.

Golden Axe, then. Big, brutish, three-button sprite-based fantasy brawler with bags of nostalgic moments and inexplicable co-op charm: Yours to buy for the 39th time for just 400 points.

For your 400 points you get an absolute nailed-down classic that is, in many respects, just as much fun today as it was back when it was released.

The core game is, given a little time and concentration, excellent, if repetitive. Since Sony seems to have long left the Colony Wars series for dead and Nintendo likewise with Rogue Squadron, this game ably fills a gaping whole in one of gaming's most pure and heady genres.

That [50] down there is starting to look a bit mean isn't it? It would be if EE2 wasn't buggier than a shrew's breakfast and outgunned by a better, cheaper, alternative.

Cheap, cheerful, timeless fun, and ultimately short-lived - but isn't that the whole point?

By no means the best the genre has to offer any more.

As the back of the box says: Identify (that the game's a bit rubbish). Eliminate (it off your shopping list). Survive (with your dignity intact).

It may not last long, but it's entertaining while it does.

It's nice to be reminded of where games started going wrong back in the '90s. It wasn't 3D, it wasn't FMV; it wasn't anything like that. It was when we did away with big stupid smiling still photos of sportsmen gnawing on trophy handles as background graphics, with preposterous guitar music playing over the top, like a sort of hungover Sunday morning TransWorld Sport nostalgia vomit fantasy.

In every other respect, Super Stardust HD is an absolute star, the jewel in the crown of the PlayStation Store and quite possibly the best purists' shooter to appear on console since the legendary Geometry Wars.

In general, Carcassone is a quicker game to grasp but lacks Catan's depth and tactical nuances with the outcome of a game often feeling more like luck than skill. If you've only got a Silver Live account Carcassonne is a marginally better purchase thanks to its offline multiplayer and its short game length and puzzle-like aspects gives it a strangely addictive quality, yet the honest fact is that despite being a better adaptation, Carcassonne just isn't based on a board game quite as good as the one Catan is.

Thanks to the game's fundamental competitive structure, in two-player mode it shines and the charming art style, which ably mimics Japanese fighting game aesthetics, lends the package character sorely missing from its DS Sudoku rivals.

To produce a technically sloppy title is one thing, but the game is horribly flawed from conception to execution in a way we haven't seen since, ulp, Driv3r. Marred by a remarkably vacuous combat system, the pathetic driving and undercooked flying elements merely underline what a thoroughly wasted opportunity this was.