A decent port and has enough going for it in its own right to be considered a worthy purchase, just maybe not an essential one.

Even if you can forgive the technical cock-ups and lack of multiplayer action, all you're left with is a fairly uninspired single player campaign that'll take you all of 12 hours to finish.

Speed Kings is vaguely entertaining, and certainly there are worse racers, but with "Burnout 2" and "Midnight Club II" to compete with, it's as if Climax couldn't see the point.

With camera issues, a cowardly gaming mechanic and the frankly awful stealth sub levels, what you're left with is perhaps the best example of graphics over gameplay we've ever seen. Unless you get off on repetitive bash 'em ups, leave well alone.

But perhaps the over-riding criticism of Brute Force is that it should have been an FPS. It seems like Digital Anvil designed it in the third person for the sake of it, without acknowledging that it completely screws up the opportunity to play it split screen, thanks to inherent third person viewpoint issues.

If variety is the spice of life, then Wario Ware is the digital equivalent of Phall curry, burning the inside of your face with its charm and originality.

The award for best/only recent IndyCar sim that manages to be strangely absorbing while faithfully reproducing the sport, albeit in an aesthetically displeasing way, goes to... IndyCar Series!

We'd also like to point out that Sega has a whole stack of arcade games in its archives, and could have been a mite more generous than including just four in the package. One for obsessives only.

This feels more like MotoGP Complete than MotoGP 2. That's not to say that you won't play this for yonks and yonks. The problem is more that you may already have done.

Entertaining though Lost Kingdoms can be when it's raising two fingers to RPG convention, it's still blighted by conventional RPG problems.

One of the most impressive strategy games we've seen in years.

There's an original story here, but it isn't very exciting, and it lacks the style and incessant comedy of its big screen brethren.

Once you've scratched the surface and delved around beneath, that's when you'll realise that a game like PlanetSide needs constant development and a flow of new content to keep it fresh and interesting. And at the moment, that just isn't happening.

It is blighted on so many levels by the blundering stupidity of its malformed stillborn design that recommending it is beyond us. The blue pill never looked so tasty.

As an animated movie tie-in, we've come away genuinely impressed at the overall standard on offer.

One of the best expansions for The Sims, but as the latest in a series of six it's about as exciting as news of another "Friday the 13th" sequel.

It transcends the very genre it once created.

The lack of any new multiplayer options is a bit disappointing, but it's priced as an expansion pack and there's certainly enough here to keep any fan of Medieval engaged for quite a large number of hours.

Despite the fairly humdrum single player campaign, Tides of War is well worth engaging in for the Live experience alone. PC gamers, however, can save their cash.

Any game that has you physically dodging oncoming cars from your television is no ordinary game.

If you don't have the patience to learn button combinations and toil over the fine points, then perhaps there's no hope for you, but for the rest of us, the reward structure is tuned finer than Dennis Rodman's haircut, it's funkier than a jazz sandwich, and if you don't like basketball, then this is more than likely to convert you.

It's never as tense as its console sibling, and it suffers from a few frustrating flaws, but the core sneak 'em up gameplay - evading enemies and cameras, silencing alarms, collecting data and using your spy tools - is well represented.

After Red Storm beauties like "Raven Shield" and "Splinter Cell," and even more recent efforts like "Vietcong", Conflict: Desert Storm on the GameCube is a pretty embarrassing release.

The main coup of the PC version over the PS2, however, is that it that the on-track visuals have been given a massive overhaul.

If you're an old school arcade veteran looking to prove yourself again, then this is perhaps the purest gameplay experience you'll find for a long time. Even if you're a rookie looking for something 'new', you can't go wrong, but you might well find the barriers to entry a little harsh to say the least.

At times it's just too frustrating to be described as "fun", and being turned away, a stone's throw from the end of a level, by the Game Over screen just because you didn't understand precisely how to complete a fairly arbitrary objective is enough to saturate you with disbelief like an anvil landing on your face in the middle of a field.

The basic toilet humour running through the piece can't hide the short-lived gameplay, and leads to an extremely unfulfilling and tiresome experience that any sane person would be hard-pressed to push on with.

A thoroughly enjoyable game that matches its predecessor in every way. It's true that the plot never becomes as epic as Golden Sun hinted it might, and it's also true that the game will be a little too 'freeform' for some RPG fans, but it is basically the middle of a story - and thus plays as such.