The overall experience tends to favour the functional over the thrilling. It's adequate amusement for the price, perhaps, but still falls short of the gut-busting potential presented by online crazy golf.

Some of the most renowned old games ever have a terrible knack of ageing horribly. Take Gyruss. By virtue of the fact that it was created by Yoshiki 'Street Fighter 2/Final Fight' Okamoto in 1983, it appears to have been granted a disproportionate level of historical interest, despite not actually being anything special in its own right.

The only shame is that, when you finally manage to master the game with a single credit (and we're getting close), the only person around to show off in front of is probably a bewildered friend who's just popped round for a friendly game of Pro Evo.

Remember how it once was in its proud mid '90s heyday, not what it's become: a relentless, lazy cash-cow to lure in unwary souls drunk on memories.

There's a hellish amount of "...", even by J-RPG standards, and many sentences don't quite make sense - it's either a poorly written game, a crap translation to English or, probably, both.

While it never struggles to be entertaining, it never really stands out either, and ultimately proves rather forgettable. Worth a go, then, but you wouldn't write songs about it.

It uses the Wii tech so cleverly, remembering that simple is best, but letting it play in a way impossible on any other console. It's non-stop hilarious, and utterly adorable. If only it had been more inventive with the 3D potential, it would have been a stand-out classic.

Ultimately, Cake Mania is too expensive, too slow and too limited to excel in this overcrowded field.

But the chief difficulty is simply sustaining your interest. It's boring and easy, and it takes too long.

And with the improved mechanics of the second game, the old songs work even better - Bark At The Moon's once nigh-impossible solo is now made a hell of a lot easier while Frankenstein goes from being a chore to an absolute delight.

While the Wii version is a good game and takes to its new control scheme well enough to justify the port, it's just not sufficiently different to recommend a purchase, especially if you can source it elsewhere.

A simple videogame built from a slew of diverse but relentlessly derivative building blocks.

Pop Hits, by comparison, feels like a loosely thrown together collection of what the charts say is cool, with little regard for what will make for a fun karaoke party.

Playable within its faulty parameters, yet at the same time, something we've seen a million times before, and in many ways better. Roll on the next one, please.

Honeycomb Beat just isn't as addictive or substantial as it needs to be to make it a classic.

If you're interested in a serious relationship with gaming rather than purely out for a good time, please do take a look at Penumbra. It does some truly clever stuff, has an effectively creepy atmosphere and there's a few signposts in it that action and adventure games alike would do well to follow.

So if Konami Arcade Classics was a bag of Revels, I would happily munch my way to the bottom of the bag with very little spitting and surreptitious dog feeding. With far more good than bad, plenty of variety in the titles and some nice extras this collection sits proudly at the top of the DS retro compilation pile.

It's not the easiest game for newcomers to approach (the tutorial's dreadful), but even stealth virgins will see the light after an hour or so in the dark, and probably ought to add another mark to the score. Make ours a double.

Reality 2.0 is definitely a step in the right direction for Telltale, with a more interesting premise, a better structure and some absolutely hilarious set-pieces to look back on.

It won't change your world, but Avalanche Software - veterans of several Rugrats games as well as the forgettable 25 To Life - have delivered a game that is perfectly attuned to the capabilities and sensibilities of its tween audience, and filled it up with solid gameplay that assists or challenges them at just the right times.

After years in the wilderness, RTS is pretty cool again right now, and something as cheerfully straightforward as this is just what's needed to stop the big braininess of "Company of Heroes" and "Supreme Commander" leading to another plunge into an inaccessibility that turns more casual players off the whole genre.

EA has shoe-horned a PS2 game onto the Wii with little thought for what the platform is actually meant to do, and lo and behold - the result is a distinctly below average, derivative, boring and badly implemented mess.

I can't see anyone who enjoyed Oblivion enough to get through the main quest <I>not</I> buying this. There's lashings of new fighting and exploring, and it's more gorgeous than ever before.

Symphony of the Night presents exquisite design, extraordinary scope, aesthetic coherence and transcendent elegance mostly unmatched elsewhere on Xbox Live Arcade, or anywhere else for that matter.

It's a warped behemoth from the Ukraine, and one of the scariest games on the PC. Stalker will remind you of all kinds of prior games, and yet it will also defy your expectations. Like the mythological Chernobyl zone it is based upon, this game is a treacherous, darkly beautiful terrain. Not everyone is going to enjoy venturing into the zone, but some of those who do will find what they've been looking for.

Regardless of whether you've played a Virtua Tennis game or not, this is one of those games that no self-respecting gamer should miss out on, because not only is it the best tennis game on the market, it's also one of the best sports games ever made, full stop.

Even though it's lazy journalism of the worst kind, it's also a pretty accurate summation of Unlimited's appeal - a game where the journey is just as enjoyable as the destination.

Some gamers might relish this challenge, but the lack of any in-mission saving combined with unforgiving objectives and an imperfect interface will prove overly frustrating for many.