With a colourful alien world, cheeky satirical story and heaps of potential for self-directed exploration, Journey to the Savage Planet promises a happier and more completable small-scale take on familiar first-person exploration ideas, even if the back half of the game funnels you more and more towards prescribed scenarios and combat.

A hilarious, inexpensive and highly competitive party favour.

Some of the bombing runs in the solo campaign can prove quite arduous, but the dazzling pyrotechnics and adrenaline rush of flying your P38 Lightning through anti-aircraft fire make it easy to press the restart button if you fail your objectives.

The story and dialogue never cease to entertain. Objectives include rescuing prisoners, killing fearsome scarecrows and playing Cupid. But, although the developers want to ridicule, the action remains conventional.

Purists may cringe at the pause option, allowing players to assess levels and assign abilities without fear of Lemmings bumbling into trouble, but it helps pinpoint creatures in a chaotic herd.

The freedom to create chaos is terrific but some missions lack variety.

Surprisingly, there is plenty of freedom for tactical experimentation. An occasionally wayward camera and the inability to save mid-mission can annoy but the reward of new firepower and the chance to improve your mission grades keep you playing.

The game is immediately likeable. The presentation is cheerful and anyone can pick up the joypad and have fun.

Dull mini-games are also available, with winnings used to buy items to improve skills. Each stadium has wacky hazards but the selection of parks is limited.

Though the replacement of authored characters with procedurally generated avatars has mixed results, Watch Dogs Legion is unique among GTA-style open world crime games as a result. The city is vast and beautiful, your options for vigilante havoc very broad and the potential for it all to explode into a memorably janky anecdote generally sky high.

One of the most disturbing games of the year. In a good way.

Highly approachable and hugely entertaining for all ages, Wii Sports serves as a great introduction and advertisement for the innovative Wii motion-sensing controller.

With more than 200 characters and settings from dozens of different comics and films, LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2 is one of the most comprehensive LEGO games ever produced, even if the actual gameplay is starting to feel old.

Opponents cheat to keep every race competitive but it can be irritating, especially when rivals destroy your car within reach of the finish line.

It's a brief ride and the action can become repetitive, but the sharp humour keeps you smiling.

Adapting one of Hollywood's masterpieces was brave, but it's a pity the game designers lacked the courage of their convictions, choosing to shoehorn Grand Theft Auto into the mafia setting.

A captivating, story-driven fighting adventure with great characters, but not everyone will enjoy the violence and repetition.

Lacking any innovation, the best this game offers has already been done.

Though it's not without its faults, this is still an ace tennis simulation.

Mario Tennis Aces is a lot of fun and probably the most technically sound arcade tennis ever. I only wish its options and modes were as deep as its mechanics.

The action can be hard to follow, but fans will appreciate the realism.

Our hero is usually equipped with a sniper rifle, complete with a brilliant targeting scope.

To say that I had fun playing Beholder isn't really accurate. The game world is characterised by oppression, decisions with no good choices, objectives that just aren't obtainable without taking huge risks, and the ever-present need for creating detailed, precise paperwork. It's exhausting and sad. But if the goal of the game's developer was to provide a depressingly captivating moral accountability simulator where hardly anybody ever wins, it's a massive success.

This is a thoughtful collection offering dozens of very good games, and they look and play as well as you could expect without retro hardware or a CRT TV. The games aren't all classics, but there is something for everyone and chances are there's a brilliant game in here somewhere you never managed to catch the first time around.

The biggest concern is that the game's conclusion leaves many unsatisfying loose ends.

Players have no real interaction with the despicable duties beyond sending out waves of underlings who can be attacked without warning. Progress requires patience, juggling priorities and micromanagement. Fortunately, the flaws are softened by many clever ideas; it feels good to be bad.

No long-term thrills unless you have lots of friends with the same consoles.

From restoring the soundtrack of Rock N' Roll Racing with chiptunes and CD-quality tracks, to highlighting the rare but ugly Sega 32X version of Blackthorne, to jamming the best parts of all Lost Vikings releases into one game, this is an exhaustive look at three really cool ’90s gems that goes above and beyond what you’d expect from Activision-Blizzard. Anyone who loves one of these games, or who’s a fan of modern Blizzard and wants a window into its past, will be satisfied here despite a handful of slight disappointments.