By giving players a real incentive to be the stealthy super-spy, it's opening the game up to being what it should have been. And by wrapping it in a memorable narrative and giving Sam Fisher the ability to be evil, you actually start to care not only about your actions, but the characters in the game too.

Battlefield 2142 may be a glimpse of the future of games. I'm just not sure that I like it.

Enjoyable, but perhaps another instance of the 'reviewer's trance'. That's the mildly hypnotic effect that seems to take over when games aren't dull enough to be boring but aren't exciting enough to cause any kind of, erm, arousal.

While the game is not perfect (the saucer is still too slow), Pandemic has made a game that's a lot more fun than the original. Crypto's return to plague sixties Earth is filled with amusing NPCs, psychic powers, anal probing, adult humour, and the chance to play on the other side for once.

All told, it's quite a lot of newness from an expansion pack, and in many ways makes for a pretty considerable shift from how the original game works.

Woods games have often done volume, but this one does fidelity - and while the next-gen golfing genre isn't exactly broad, we suspect being the best in a field of one will do them fine, especially since, in this case, it feels like it is mostly as good as it could be.

If you already have the Sims 2 on PS2, it depends on how much you want to buy the same game again, but with dogs and cats.

FSX is the finest non-combat flight-sim money can buy assuming you've got the sort of cutting-edge system that can do it justice.

Another adequate yet uninspired entry for the Ford Racing brand.

Neither particularly clever nor particularly beautiful. Instead it's relentlessly videogamey - distilling most of the clichés that onlookers might hold about both comics and videogames.

Those with less animated imaginations, less patience, and lower tolerances of fusty graphics and long turn resolution times should probably stick with Civ and Total War.

It's sad to have to say that, since we still think Nintendogs is an amazing achievement and a great game - it's just not a great game for very long. In other words, if you're a grown-up, if there are limits to your patience and your time, and if you want a game that's not just for Christmas, it's probably not a good idea to pick Nintendogs.

A fundamentally broken game, riddled with graphical glitches and bizarre bugs, that doesn't even have the good grace to be a fascinating failure. For all its yelps and screeches, it's deathly dull to play and so there's no incentive to suffer its idiosyncrasies.

The coin-gobbling design exists to kill you off as quickly as possible, and with such a repetitive design you've soon seen all there is to see. But that said, it's a coffee break fix to remind yourself of a lost era of gaming innocence and comes for the price of a large drink in Starbucks. We still dig it.

It's GUN on a handheld platform, but it doesn't work quite as well as it does on consoles.

It's a brilliantly pitched game that, while will inevitably turn many players off either by its reliance on random battles or by the generally low technical standard, is far more accessible than it sounds in synopsis.

It could have been an interesting title but the problems with control, weird gameplay style, terrible graphics and rigged, repetitive games just kill any joy that would be garnered from playing it.

If you loved the original games then that might carry you through to completion but for those who are new, prepare for a long slog.

It's really, really good gaming, assuming you don't let the game push you around like a playful big brother with little a superiority complex. God Hand just wants to have fun. And so do we.

There's little argument overall that Tiger Woods 07 is the best possible starting point for golf-game beginners...but anybody who was getting a bit bored of the same formula last year will be even less impressed with this outing.

The core combat is still as rigid and throwaway as the Mortal Kombat series has ever been and bereft of the kitsch appeal of the earlier games, Armageddon is pretty much as forgettable as brawlers come these days.

Like the Opera browser, 42 All-Time Classics is a software package, and a brilliant one, the perfect match for its format and the perfect Christmas present for a Mum who's finally bored of Brain Training. More than that, it's so adaptable, so sociable, so easy to enjoy in any situation (over lunch, between train stops, with your least favourite uncle) that it's nothing less than an essential component of any DS library.

It's only masquerading as its own game - really, coming straight to this without having played its predecessors will be frustrating and bewildering, and the inability to play as Space Marines, Orks et al online a real slap in the face.

Scarface is certainly several notches above the derivative insult we expected it would be, and those who can bear to wait another year for the next GTA will be well served by its faithfulness to the popular formula. Groundbreaking it isn't, but fun it is.

The DS's wireless abilities means that it's able to offer two-player mode on a handheld, which would be tremendous, if it didn't require two copies of the game to play. A ridiculous rip-off for a game nearly two decades old.

Regardless of it being very hard to picture how its tedious, clumsy mechanics could possibly evolve into something fluid and entertaining, any game that puts you through a good 15 or 20 hours of overwhelming despair to get to even a chance of something worthwhile - which the server-wide near-silence suggests actually isn't, and certainly won't be until if and when there are enough players to populate large-scale tussles - is a failure.

Unlikely to be the killer app that gets people swapping their DS for a PSP. But if you're looking for a compilation of pub games, and a simple, quirky, turn-based strategy, you could definitely do worse.

A massive improvement on the previous Taito-related DS efforts issued to date. As short-lived as it is, and despite some irritating control and level design issues it's a lot of fun.