Microsoft is on to a winner. Whatever deal brokered Minecraft’s appearance on Xbox 360 was instantly heralded a success – it’s already a recognised name and if XNA clone Fortresscraft proves anything, there’s a demand for a console version of Minecraft too. Let the money roll in.

But it’s kind of a double-edged sword. Minecraft – on PC – is a game that relies heavily on outside sources. Wikis, forums and knowledgeable friends are all important tools for learning how to play the game.

So if that immediate connection has been severed, will Minecraft on Xbox 360 suffer, or have compromises been made in order to fit Mojang’s sandbox game into a totally different audience?

Unfortunately the answer isn’t a clear one. 

Thankfully the gameplay has been left unchanged. You’ll start a new game by dropping into a randomly generated world, and from there it’s up to you to survive.

You’ll need to learn quickly though, because when night falls Minecraft’s varied beasts will appear – and they won’t care that you haven’t got the means to protect yourself.

For those not familiar with Minecraft, here’s a quick rundown. The only objectives are personal ones; instead you’re given a procedurally created world to exist in. You’ll need shelter from the monsters that spawn, but beyond that you’re free to roam.

Kill a pig, get a porkchop. If only it was that easy.

It’s a sandbox game in its truest form, where you can mine the landscape and use its materials for your benefit: from crafting a house of wood to creating tools or equipment to make your life easier.

It’s a game that focuses on your desire to explore, your need to survive and your aptitude to create. Grand castles, elaborate towers or complex railway systems – all possible should you want to build it.

With the inclusion of a step-by-step tutorial level and numerous tooltips each time you interact with a new material, menu or object, there is enough assistance to ease newcomers to Minecraft into the mechanics of its harsh world.

Menus have been adapted, too, and are now in keeping with the controller led gameplay. Crafting, for example, no longer requires placing materials into a 3x3 grid to create items.

Instead a set of tabbed categories can be opened, letting you pick and choose the tools or objects you want to craft. It’s a much simpler system than the PC original, and well suited to Xbox 360.

But more than this, it’s important because it lets you see exactly what you can build from the start, providing a subtle nudge of what step to take next. There’s no longer a need to suffer infuriating trial-and-error or trawl Wikis to learn the items you can create: it’s all here, in icon form.

There's different zones, from snowy tundra to expansive deserts.

It’s not perfect, however: there are still issues with direction. Sure, you’ll be able to create your own mud hut and survive the night, but what about after that?

The tooltips and menus can provide only so much information, and even that relies heavily on actually interacting with the necessary parts. In other words, there’s still a necessary element of having to delve into those Wikis for extra info.

This doesn’t spoil what Minecraft does well, however. Okay, so there’s an element of research needed for those who really want to explore Minecraft’s limits, but the sense of wonder is still as strong as ever.

Your mind will wander. Setting out on one task will undoubtedly shift after discovering an intriguing cave entrance or spotting some valuable coal on the side of a tall cliff face.

Then there’s the creation aspect too, which is limited only by your imagination. Add in the one-upmanship that comes from the multiplayer too and you’ll have hours of creation available.

All this in a port that hasn’t lost anything in the transfer: barring slower camera control, this plays just like the Minecraft version. The charming blocky visuals return, though admittedly it is like playing on an older PC with the time it takes to render blocks off in the distance.

Meet the Creeper. If he gets this close, you'll likely cack your pants.

There are a couple of concessions in the version number too. Equivalent to pre-Adventure Update Minecraft v1.6.6, the Xbox 360 version doesn’t have pistons, villages, NPCs, cats, fortresses, The End, enchantable equipment… quite a lot, in fact.

In a weird way this is preferable to the complex PC version, however, that now includes managing food to stay alive and other systems to enhance the overall experience. The current version is a better way to ease in the console crowd.

Just like the PC version though, this isn’t the finish line for Minecraft on Xbox 360. Later patches are expected, bringing with it the content already seen on PC and maybe even some new elements exclusive to the 360.

Since there’s redstone wiring (to create mechanics) and the Nether (a parallel, Hell-like world) in the current version, there’s enough to sink your teeth into before the more exciting elements of Minecraft begin to get patched in.

While there could be more done to highlight the finer points of Minecraft – maybe an in-game wiki system, for example – it’s hard to fault this as a port of one of PC gaming’s most important games in the last few years.

The menu isn't perfect, but it's the best solution for 360 gamers.

Practiced Minecrafters will find the Xbox 360 version intuitive to play, which also means that element of inquisitive wonder won’t be tarnished for those playing Minecraft for the very first time.

Minecraft for Xbox 360 won’t convert those not already intrigued by its freeform nature of gameplay and nor does it do quite enough to educate newbies – but that doesn’t stop it being a fantastic achievement and the epitome of sandbox gaming.

When exactly did Fable morph into a kids’ game? Not that there’s anything wrong with making entertainment for the little ones, of course, but it’s still unusual to see a series once synonymous with ambition and innovation now hankering for a few of those lucrative Lego bucks. 

Fable Heroes does indeed closely resemble the Lego games, except where Travellers Tales’ legacy oozes charm and variety, Lionhead’s entrant into the Xbox Live Arcade Next promotion is a game about hitting. Hitting, hitting and hitting.

It’s a rudimentary co-op hack-and-slash effort that sees you and three chums plodding through Albion’s most famous landmarks, hoovering up coins, killing all comers and generally wondering what the hell happened to your life.

It’s almost impossible to fathom just who this is for. Yes, Fable II and III made concessions to appear more accessible to a general audience, but anyone who’s experienced the richness and wit of those games will surely be bored stiff by Fable Heroes’ monotonous baddie-thwacking.

And as for the kids, will they have any affection for the likes of Hammer, Garth and Reaver? It’s not very likely.

Presumably it’s meant as a family game, given the Mario Party-esque dice-rolling intervals between each pad-thumping stage. Here you can send your puppet around a simple board, and then buy upgrades based on the square he or she lands on, but a confusing menu and lack of worthwhile character improvements makes it feel redundant.

There are branching paths at the end of each level, which unlock a different competitive minigame.

Perhaps the only bright spot in Fable Heroes’ rainy day is the chance to grief your cohorts. Certain chests dotted throughout the levels give you the option of picking a good or bad outcome (the closest the game ever gets to aping Fable’s traditional moral dichotomy).

Bad is always the best, resulting in a tag game that sees the person who’s ‘it’ chased by a storm cloud that sporadically zaps with coin-losing lightning, like some sort of defiantly British Sonic The Hedgehog enemy. It injects a bit of personality into the relentless grind.

Actually, there is a bit of character and humour dotted throughout. The jaunt through Mistpeak sees you fighting Hobbes in Santa hats with candy canes instead of axes (a bit odd for an April release, but never mind) and there are some lovely views of a picture book Albion as you stroll through the levels. Just a shame, then, that what you’re actually doing during that time is so uninteresting.

Sorry Climax – nobody’s falling for this. You can change the ancient mythology to “Celtic’ instead of ancient Greece, and you can even go on record in a behind-the-scenes video release on Xbox Live saying your character ‘Crom’ is nothing like the similarly named Kratos.

You can do all that, and people will still say your snazzy-looking action-slasher is a God Of War-alike. But when you foul up the all-important gameplay, that’s when you just make people angry, and that’s when the negative comparisons begin. So here’s one.

Pilot the angry, skull-helmeted husband of an accidentally murdered wife (‘O, ye Gods and thy trickery’ et cetera) around a bunch of identically high-contrast monochromatic environments, killing stuff and ‘collecting’ blood to fuel your Xbox Live leaderboard.

Bar the occasional choice of fork in the road – which interestingly can cause you to completely miss out largely essential weapon pickups – there’s no further side-setting, apart from the odd bland, shouted cut-scene. None of God Of War’s spectacle of scale or set-pieces.

Therefore it falls to the combat itself, as in Devil May Cry and its friends, to be of crowning importance. Pity, then, that it veers eccentrically between average and downright terrible.

Sure, there’s a basic combo system in place, and each comes with a different score value when executed, and the higher the score, the more your attacks are boosted by filling a ‘rage’ bar for powered up fighting.

The game’s visuals, though confusingly dark in action, are strikingly good-looking ‘for a download game’ in cut-scenes. 

Unfortunately, Bloodforge, lacks a lock-on facility, blocking and, critically, a counter system, meaning very early in the game the prospect of a boisterous, combo-laden melee encounter is made an impossibility.

Shouting bundle of rage Crom has no choice but to use LT’s quick roll move to deftly avoid each and every hit about his person, quickly turning almost every encounter into a mess of slash, evade, slash, evade.

Climax’s hopelessly broken camera and overblown 300-esque saturation finish the job, making a session of Bloodforge little more than a motion sickness-inducing wash of black and red smears, as even the weakest minibioss must be picked apart in five minute-long hit-and-run missions.

Any attempt to get involved in a fight with more than two opponents quickly ends in death, Crom’s finite health bar never quite topped up enough due to a worryingly slim outlay of healing items.

But it’s not enough to say that Bloodforge is ‘too difficult’. It’s taxing, sure, but even a steep difficulty curve can be overcome if there’s an adequate combat system and even the slightest curiosity on the part of the player as to what happens next.

This failure is Climax’s biggest crime. Every level looks the same, and nearly every enemy fights the same. Do you want to go to a grey-tinted swamp, a tar-slicked underworld or a barren, two-tone desert? Would you like to fight men with claws, swords or axes?

Sport is the topic of choice for the latest Who Wants To Be A Millionaire add-on for the popular XBLA title. A rather perfunctory offering on behalf of doublesix, focusing on supplying a fresh crop of conundrums rather than bothering to redress the set or providing colourful avatars in the same fashion as both the South Park and Star Trek question packs so blissfully did. 

Maintained is the patented difficulty of all the Millionaire updates to date. Casual sports fans need not apply. The selection of questions available will range from your basic lump-headed Wayne Rooney trivia through to the intricate ins and outs of Taekwondo.

If there’s one major flaw to this jumble of sport factoids is that it certainly feels skewed towards American contestants. American football, baseball and basketball seem to dominate the mid-money run, relying on both a firm understanding of the rules and geographical locations of state-based teams across the USA. Perhaps it is intentional but it certainly seems like a little localisation work would have gone a long way.

Otherwise its business as usual for Millionaire: no fanciful embellishes, multiplayer’s a drag and the presenter somehow manages to be more infuriating than the wibble-wobble nattering of Chris Tarrant.

If you still enjoy this rather generic quiz game and fancy a sporty twist then there’s enough challenge here to satiate fans of everything football, tennis and rugby.

Although technically our Buy or Avoid recommendations should steer you in the right direction on these map packs, chances are you already own them, as part of the COD Elite subscription. If so, you’ve probably already played the (RS)ASS out of them, and don’t need us. Sob.

For the six people who haven’t however, here’s our take: there’s nothing really special here. The two maps, Sanctuary and Foundation, bear strong resemblances to other levels from the Call Of Duty series.

The former is reminiscent of World At War’s Castle, in both grandeur and verticality, and the latter has strong hints of MW2’s Quarry in its different levels and Underpass in buildings and long grass.

These call-backs aren’t surprising, or even annoying: cribbing from past maps has worked well in previous map drops. For us however these two maps aren’t quite as good as the last set.

Snipers – which seems to be everyone these days – will have a field day here, even if both maps have a lot of places to break lines of sight (and hence be snuck up upon and shot in the back, again with a sniper rifle), and running routes are seemingly always fraught with danger no matter how well you prep. 

The main problem is there’s nothing to make these stand out: they’re alright, but not a lot more than that. If you have them already then you’ve probably got Elite, but don’t buy a one-off ‘content collection’ on the strength of these: check what else is in there before you do.

Nostalgia is the potent ingredient employed in FarSight Studios’ latest revisit to pinball cabinets of old. Four of the most defining and popular tables have been plucked from history, featuring some of the most visually impressive and astoundingly playable cabinets to ever grace an arcade. 

The last few years have seen Zen Studios’ Pinball FX 2 set a startling precedent for contemporary pinball gameplay on XBLA. Much of Pinball Arcade’s mechanics feel archaic by comparison.

Tracking the ball, slippery physics and three camera options all prove problematic – but each of the four tables have been lavishly replicated with due reverence and so such quibbles prove insignificant.

Best of the bunch is Bally’s Theatre Of Magic, featuring a multitude of challenges, twisting ramps and retro sound effects, while striking a tricky balance to appeal both to newcomers and skilled veterans alike.

Williams’ Tales Of The Arabian Nights and Stern’s Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! prove likewise thrilling, if falling just short of establishing the same level of refinement.

The only odd one out in the mix is Gottlieb’s Black Hole; no doubt marking a technological milestone at the time – the hidden reverse playing field is still sublime when first revealed – but it’s rather lacking in features by comparison.

Each of the licensed tables comes with a comprehensive breakdown of the whole board, right down to the tiniest of details and background information.

It stands as not just a fascinating retrospective of gaming history, but an XBLA entry that enlivens the genre, while truly providing a definitive digital proxy.  

Sports titles aside, it’s not often that the greatest threat to a videogame’s success is the ongoing profitability of its predecessor, but that’s exactly the factor Trials Evolution will have to overcome.

Selling well beyond two million units in total, RedLynx’s initial XBLA offering continues to feature prominently within both the service’s weekly top ten lists, and those detailing total sales in each and every year since 2009.

Considering this again challenges players to ride a motorbike inch by inch over increasingly impossible terrain, what could RedLynx possibly offer in order to persuade gamers one world of obsessive-compulsive hurt should be swapped in favour of another?

Turns out, the answer is ‘quite a lot’, including the removal of the crippling difficulty spikes right from the start. 

Bearing in mind the original Trials’ punishing difficulty and resultant runaway success, the extent to which Evolution’s challenge has been neutered may well confuse, and could potentially dismay.

On a second-to-second basis, stages come positively littered with checkpoints, exchanging the original title’s litany of gameplay brick walls for a more manageable handful.

What’s more, where levels once relied on an interaction between player and physics routines alone, more fanciful, arcade influences have started to appear.

There's more variety, especially with the level creator.

An automated platform here, Motocross Maniacs-style loop-the-loops there. The result is a videogame that packs in verticality like a North American city (and with similarly considerable spectacle), yet perhaps loses an element of the purity that formerly made it so popular.

Some elements even topple into outright annoyance as, say, the jets of water that strike the player’s bike, causing it to topple in ways that could unjustly ruin that elusive perfect run.

Rare as such moments are, considering Trials’ formula already straddles joy and outrage as awkwardly as its rider straddles three-inch planks, they might have been better removed altogether. 

Taking a wider perspective, concern over the original title’s steep difficulty curve has also been soothed by simply expanding its repertoire.

Featuring a track roster around double the length of Trials HD’s, Evolution achieves transitions smooth enough to ease still-painful memories of attempting to leap over the same darn tyre.

So much so, veterans should find themselves able to clear its entire campaign without significant fault, the challenge this time coming as gold medals are mopped up and a selection of post-completion extras appear.

Clearly, this structure is preferable to one that locks really quite an appreciable percentage of the game away from those who can’t wheelie on a sixpence.

Whether tracks actually undulate more or the effect is generated by a farther view is a matter for debate.

Some, though, will use the mere dozen or so stages of truly rider-igniting difficulty as an excuse to lament how the industry has gone soft. It hasn’t – there are just a greater number of options on offer.

It’ll send thrilling shivers down the spines of some to discover Evolution’s much-lauded multiplayer options bring to mind the baked bean track walls of Codemasters’ Micro Machines.

Contested exclusively on a new class of track – motocross – these see up to four players duke it out simultaneously over a range of pitfalls and undulations.

Predictably, it offers knife-edge entertainment, focusing wisely on courses designed to throw players into the air after unwise acceleration, rather than traps to trip them up altogether.

Suffice to say, describing the atmosphere while four buzzing competitors seesaw in and out of view as tense would rate alongside such understatements as ‘Hideo Kojima likes dialogue’ and ‘Kinect doesn’t really enhance videogames’. A few issues are worthy of discussion, though.

First, the running order in which players appear on track appears to be decided essentially at random, meaning players furthest away from the camera will be ‘punished’ with an inferior view for no apparent reason.

While this is less of an issue in head-to-head competition, with a quartet of competitors in action you’ll be wishing for a last in, first out staggered start.

Water jets: the cause of many an unpredictable accident.

Second, like Codemasters’ classic title, players who fall will find their rider repositioned on track at the next checkpoint, ready to resume racing speed once others have caught up.

Though it’s admittedly difficult to suggest what other action could have been taken, it’s rather annoying to see a competitor fall, get reset then storm out into an unassailable lead, simply because your attempts to tackle the course ‘fairly’ have resulted in reduced relative levels of momentum. Multiply this feeling by a factor of a thousand if this occurs metres from the finish line, as it often does.

Helpfully, scoring sees players awarded a mark of ten by default, with points removed based on faults and finishing position. So there’s an extent to which this effect evens out, as per penalty claims over the course of a football season.

Like our apt analogy though, you can bet the fat of every injustice will be thoroughly chewed over by all involved. Heck, if the argument centres upon a particularly unjustly positioned checkpoint, you can always break out the tool kit and design a replacement.

In terms of scope alone, the tools are mightily impressive and reasonably flexible, far surpassing those provided last time around. The observant will likely already be aware that besides a practically infinite number of traditional Trials tracks, Ubisoft has been keen to trumpet its ability to produce a selection of wholly unrelated gameplay experiences.

Table football, various racers, top-down shooters, that kind of thing. Besides more outlandish offerings such as these, there’s the chance to formulate minigames based on Trials’ baseline gameplay features – balancing a sphere atop your bike perhaps, or jamming the accelerator on. Make no mistake, though – this is unlikely to constitute the 360’s answer to LittleBigPlanet. 

Besides avant-garde, gravity-bending stages ape Silent Hill and Limbo.

To begin with, despite its power, RedLynx’s edit suite proves difficult to get to grips with unless you’re tackling a standard racetrack. Though we’re sure some imaginative souls will find time to tinker, there’s no helpful symbiosis of purpose between single player play and level creation.

There’s simply a campaign, and a separate edit suite. What’s more, the objects and processes with which RedLynx furnish players seem to tunnel creativity into certain well-trodden areas.

Rather than creating fantastic worlds of your own imagination as Sony’s flagship title might permit, you’re instead hacking together Rube Goldberg contraptions from items of scenery that you’d largely expect to find in a dirt bike setting.

While the results are certainly impressive in their breadth and ingenuity, especially given its status as a lowly Arcade title, the chances of creating anything truly fun seem relatively remote.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong for this review to wander bravely into the night, cloaked in bitterness and negativity. Trials Evolution is a joyously entertaining videogame.

One touched slightly by a publisher’s desire for broader appeal, sure, but enjoyable all the same for both thrill seekers and those who’d happily apply a Newton meter to their joypad triggers in pursuit of a perfect score.

The spectrum of nuance RedLynx has once again teased from just two input buttons and an analogue stick has to be witnessed to be believed. After all, at the most basic level it turns leaping onto a single box into a piece of compelling entertainment.

Do stunt riders become bored of flaming rings? We expect so.

When in mid-flow though, each twitch of the accelerator, every degree your biker’s midriff contorts, every second spent scanning the turf ahead creates fresh parameters within which the following few seconds must be played.

Every comic pratfall comes via an instantly identifiable moment of player idiocy that can then be perfected over a course of minutes, hours, and inevitably days.

Trials Evolution remains the very definition of ‘one more go’ gaming – only this time embellished with the robust editing suite to ensure players never headbutt an identical square inch of turf.

As lovers of Gears Of War 3, we’d just like to tip our hats to Epic Games. The stream of content for its multiplayer offerings has not only been constant, but by and large pretty good as well.

It’s how DLC should really work: release decent packs and keep your audience interested. The latest comes in the form of Forces Of Nature, a collection of maps (and other titbits) based around the idea of natural disasters.

This gives birth to Aftermath, Artillery and Cove, as well as the returning Jacinto and Raven Down from Gears 2. First things first, then…

Aftermath, ravaged by the effects of a tsunami, is easily one of the best-looking maps you’ll ever hope to see on current technology. As the sun beats down on the desolate environment, the real joy comes in the form of aftershocks and the occasional flood that throws off any attack you may be planning.

As such, most firefights are up close and personal, meaning it also provides a way to have a slightly different game of Horde.

Next we turn our attentions to Artillery. A breeding ground for One-Shot battles – just wait till you learn about the ‘trick’ Epic has deliberately implemented – the twist here, pun intended, is a ruthless tornado.

When it arrives, the entire dynamic changes as the storm reduces all visibility and makes any match near terrifying. It could be Epic’s ultimate triumph since introducing its map-changing techniques. 

All the new maps are a good addition to the Gears world, but some of the older ones may be better. 

To close off the new designs is Cove, easily the most claustrophobic and intense choice of the three. A coat of fog covers the majority of the map opening up ample opportunities for someone to pop up out of nowhere and scare the crap out of you. 

Aside from this it’s a welcome return to the fold for Jacinto and Raven Down – both which hold up against anything the third Gears has available – and the returning Guardian mode (finally!) remains awesome, if not a little frustrating due to some truly stupid spawn points.

It was always clear Fez was going to look the part. Winning an industry award for its graphics in 2008 – three years before release – was a clear indicator that developers and players alike had fallen in love with Polytron’s slick pixel art style and cutesy incidental detailing.

It doesn’t disappoint in this regard – tiny four-pixel caterpillars and other adorable fauna wander around sparse, curiously isolated islands, while passing clouds cast hazy shadows across pathways awash with buckets, shovels and intricately sun-baked masonry.

Lighthouses and belltowers tower over the landscape like a pixelated Myst, and the haunting synth soundtrack will take you to a similar place. But despite its stunning presentation, it’s still the gameplay within that provides Fez’s greatest case for ‘classic’ status.

Fez is set in a world which, to its cutesy, pixelated inhabitants, is experienced only in two dimensions. That is, until player character Gomez acquires – in one of gaming’s most striking prologue sequences – a dimension-warping piece of red headgear.

The titular fez sets up the simple conceit that will fuel much of the rest of the game’s platform-puzzler gameplay. A quick squeeze of LT or RT rotates the game’s environment 90 degrees, turning walls, platforms and doorways in place on a central axis.

But the world itself refuses to accept this 3D shift, meaning it’s actually a rearrangement of the 2D plane – depth of field a non-issue as platforms move in mid-air to create or remove routes.

Beyond a playful comment on game design, this becomes the basis for gameplay that runs magnificently with the idea, memorable moments cropping up only minutes apart throughout Gomez’s journey.

The world looks beautiful as it rotates before you and its various elements rearrange into new platforming conundrums.

While every main area of Fez effectively concerns rotating elements around a central vertical structure, twists on this concept are many and various.

From speedily rotating a tower clad in cracked masonry in order to chain together explosions from a bomb placed at the bottom, to realigning patches of ivy in timed conditions to ascend the screen, Polytron throws around new ideas – or engaging twists on established ones - with a flurry of invention rarely seen outside a Mario title.

But beyond the cheeky technical tricks and mind-warping perspective platforming lies a subtler (some would say much darker) heart to Fez. In the light of day, Gomez’s mission is to collect 32 cubes in order to balance out a world skewed by his powers, many of which have been broken into even smaller parts.

But for every cube, he is told by his mysterious spectral companion early on, there is an anti-cube. And it’s tracking down all of these which really keeps Fez ticking – and when Polytron gets seriously devious.

QR codes, strange diagrams scattered across the world, and even plundering the Achievements list for tips are only some of the keys to ferret out these hidden pickups, but it’s a crazed urgency that you’ll embrace until completion, threading your way round Polytron’s crazily idiosyncratic open-world masterpiece until every corner has been reached and, more importantly, understood.

Baseball’s a good fit for Kinect, and Grasshopper Manufacture knows it. Throughout Diabolical Pitch you’ll hurl overhead shots across the environment, stick your arms out to catch incoming balls, and assume the batting stance as you whack baseballs with a mighty swing.

Except here the baseballs are glowing spheres of fire, the incoming projectiles are metal orbs covered in rusty spikes, and the bat you wield is a white hot shaft of supernatural energy. Well, this is Grasshopper. You didn’t really expect a normal baseball game, did you?

Your goal is to use these abilities to take out incoming waves of demonic wooden animal puppets. Pitches are achieved by mimicking the overhead throwing action you’d see in real life, with the ball launched to the portion of the screen you aim for.

Your non-throwing arm can also be used to aim your throw or lock on to enemies and achieve headshots, which becomes necessary when fending off foes with bodies made of indestructible silver.

The more enemies you attack, the more you build up your ability to trigger one of the titular diabolical pitches – superpowered attacks that might turn your arm into a cannon, or imbue your baseball with an electrical charge that will jump to all enemies on screen upon launching a well-timed throw.

There’s an offline multiplayer mode, which acts as a competitive/co-op hybrid.

When it works, it’s great fun, with fruit machine point boosts and a combo system adding a score-chasing element to the mix. However, all too often Kinect fails to recognise when you’re doing something as simple as throwing a pitch. Many times this caused us to lose a level or a boss fight simply because our motions weren’t being registered.

It’s the same issue that plagues most Kinect games. If the hardware was a little more responsive and could easily pick up every motion performed, the experience would make for a fast-paced and entertaining challenge – not to mention giving you a good workout.

But Kinect lets the experience down far too often, which is a great pity because Diabolical Pitch is free from a lot of the other issues that plague games on the device.

It’s fun, inventive and has plenty of personality. If only its technical ability matched that imaginative sense of play.

Just as taking on Call Of Duty in the FPS market is a hell of an ask for even an established studio or franchise, going toe-to-toe with the heavyweights of the fighting scene is an unenviable task.

But even today’s brightest stars were rookies on the scene once upon a time and with a passionate and talented team behind it, Skullgirls is as solid and entertaining a developmental gambit as we’ve seen in many a year.

Like BlazBlue before it and Street Fighter II before that, Skullgirls boasts the expected ‘new fighting IP’ modest roster, with just eight playable characters – two of them are even locked from the outset, limiting your initial options further still.

But as with the best fighters, variety proves itself to be more important than quantity as you run through the available fighters before settling on a team.

Filia is seen as the game’s equivalent of a Ryu/Ken ‘standard’, though her ground-based projectiles and hair-fuelled dives and lunges make her feel more like SFIII’s Twelve than the Gi-clad go-tos.

Which, actually, is a fair assessment of the game as a whole – when the simplest character is the equivalent of one of Street Fighter’s most confusing options, it’s fair to assume that this is a game targeted at the hardcore end of the market.

This assumption is backed up as you delve deeper into the other characters too, each bending the underlying system with rules and properties of their own.

Backdrops are lavishly drawn and exquisitely lit, plus well populated.

Painwheel’s charged attacks and flight, Valentine’s various poison debuff attacks, Peacock’s many traps and zoning tools, Ms. Fortune’s removable head (which effectively becomes a second character)… there’s a lot to take on board in terms of even entry level character-specific stuff, though the fundamental mechanics on which these sit are submerged at the fighting pool’s deep end as well.

Constants are rare in the world of Skullgirls, so even the basic system is a challenge to learn and master. Far closer to the likes of Arcana Heart and Melty Blood than Street Fighter, the combo system rewards experimentation and hours spent in the lab with a couple of extra notches on the hit counter every time you land something new (and a new description as well – every number on the hit count has its own bespoke flavour text, rather quaintly).

Wall bounces, relaunches and OTG attacks are staple parts of most decent combos, the simple combo rule being that if it looks like something might be able to connect, it probably will.

To offset this and avoid newcomers rage-quitting every time they get caught in a death loop, the system is cleverly coded to look out for infinite combo cycles and offer an easy escape after a couple of rotations.

It’s a neat feature and one backed up by other aspects of the core system too in order to present as level a playing field as possible – boons like off-the-ground pick-ups and staggers tend to only work once per combo before they are either stripped away or scaled back, for instance.

Options are limited – solo players have just Arcade and Story.

And with so well thought-out, deep and complex a system, perhaps the most useful part of Skullgirls is the comprehensive tutorial. Somehow managing to offer newcomers a hands-on guided tour of the main mechanics while not patronising combo fiends and finger gymnasts, it’s a wonderfully laid out step-by-step guide to not just this game but all fighters.

As well as lessons specific to Reverge’s debut fighter, general fighting terms and techniques are explained and taught as well – those looking to make the leap up from mid-tier play to a higher level would do well to pick up Skullgirls purely for its educational merit, something we can’t say to be true of any fighter since perhaps Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution.

Considering it does such a good job of preparing average players for the next level, though, it’s a little strange that Skullgirls does an equally good job of ditching them after the seminar.

The basics learned, the tutorial over and an amusingly named Achievement banked, things starts to get a bit shaky when Reverge removes the stabilisers.

The practice rooms are oddly under-equipped compared to those of most modern fighters – the static dummy can be controlled by a second player, sure, but there’s no option to program it or have the AI take over for defensive drills.

There’s not even a move list to consult or any character-specific hints, trials or sample combos to work with and while teaching players about punishing unsafe attacks is a good start, it’s not much good without at least suggesting a few half-decent ways in which to do so.

Blockbuster combos can be linked together between characters, not unlike Marvel Vs Capcom’s DHC technique. 

That said, there’s a distinctly novel appeal and definite sense of reward to discovering everything for yourself – the days of fiddling around trying to work out Fatalities might be long gone but as Dark Souls expertly demonstrated, there’s a lot to be said for slapping modern gaming in the face for trying to hold our hands too often.

Stunning design, lighting and animation should be enough to win the hearts of all those curious enough to dip a toe into the trial version but the real question hangs over whether the understaffed character select screen and daunting depth will put people off dropping the cash to upgrade to the full version.

DLC plans are already in place to address the first issue and hopefully either a title update or the inevitable user-made FAQs and dedicated forums will help with the latter.

Games are often defined by a single trait. With this in mind, we pose a single question: have you ever been forced to slow down in order to speed up? Bizarrely, Wrecked insists you do so.

To receive a boost, you must hold the brake and then tap the accelerator twice in quick succession. Like Usain Bolt removing his shoes in the middle of a race, this makes little sense.

Unfortunately, such sloppy design choices are representative of Supersonic Software’s entire product, which stutters before crashing to a sudden halt.

Yes, eight years after the arrival of Mashed, the developer has produced an unfinished sequel that never lives up to the cult status of its older brother. What can go wrong with cars, guns, and friends? As Wrecked quickly shows, an awful lot.

With 6 tracks and 24 single-player challenges, this game short-changes those who want to play alone. Even newcomers will complete all objectives in less than two hours.

The slight variations on travelling from A to B rarely ignite any sense of fun, as the developer employs a bunch of dull and lifeless tasks to wade through.

Players are forced to destroy three opponents as quickly as possible, drop mines on static targets, and evade hilariously docile traps. Imagination is lacking, as tugging a caravan around an ice rink presents the most thrilling action on offer.

It might look like Micro Machines but it is definitely not.

Furthermore, when races do get exciting, a terrible camera ruins the spectacle. It’s clear Supersonic wants to install a dynamic, heart-stopping viewpoint that recreates car chases from Hollywood.

The ambition may be clear, but the implementation is extremely different. Moving around corners, the camera will swing towards a new position, zooming in and out within a couple of seconds.

It twists and turns, making the track appear different and altering your control. At vital moments, the camera has a tendency to bemuse by overcomplicating an otherwise simple formula.

Online multiplayer fares slightly better than the lone journey, but only for a short while. Races are riddled with connection problems, galvanising the probability of silly mistakes.

Competitive play is humorously chaotic, but the excitement soon begins to falter. It’s difficult to continually engage with such a tight-fisted product, as the lack of original online options and tracks ensure the cheap laughs soon die out.

In the right company, local multiplayer is the most attractive aspect of this lazy package. Watching cars fly off track at all angles is oddly engrossing when reactions can be seen. Despite offering a decent night of entertainment for groups of players, Wrecked’s downfalls are never overcome.

As each player strives to get away from the elimination line, the use of weapons provide the game with a hint of personality. Whether you’re firing guided missiles into the rear of the leader, or shunting nearby opponents off track, playing on a single screen ramps up the pressure considerably.

Let’s get this out of the way at the start, shall we? I Am Alive is depressing as hell. Playing it will put you in a really dark frame of mind, and you’ll give up on humanity. Hearing Radiohead will actually cheer you up and you’ll be willing to gut your grandmother for the last Hobnob.

But that, ironically, isn’t I Am Alive’s problem. It’s one of the things this ‘survival’ game does quite well; it’s just a pity that its mechanics can’t match its dark atmosphere.

I Am Alive sees you in the unfortunate shoes of Adam Collins, a survivor of ‘the Event’ – a super cataclysm of city-wrecking earthquakes and horrific poisonous dust storms that kill anyone caught in them.

We join Adam’s story, presented as captured on a camcorder in cut-scenes, in search of his family a year after the Event. In this world of ruined bridges, skyscrapers and blocked streets, the city has become a horrific cross between a labyrinth and mountain range.

Luckily Adam is a climber, and he descends into the city to find his wife and daughter. It’s a good premise and well told as you enter a world were almost everyone wants to kill you and resources are desperately scarce.

Sadly, I Am Alive is something of a desperate survivor itself, having originally been delayed several times for ‘retooling’, and it wears the scars of that troubled history.

While the washed-out visual effects that give the world its decaying looks are quite stylish, they can’t hide the fact that it simply isn’t very good-looking and really lacks polish – something that comes across in much of its gameplay.

There should be some strategy to combat, but it's more frustrating trial and error.

Least affected is the climbing puzzle play that forms I Am Alive’s backbone. We’ve all seen similar parkour mechanics in games like Assassin’s Creed, but I Am Alive really ups the tension by introducing a stamina mechanic.

As you climb the ruins you increasingly get tired, especially leaping from handhold to handhold. If you run out of stamina, you’re forced to rhythmically hammer the right trigger to keep going, but eventually you’ll fall to your death.

The only way to avoid that is by consuming rare supplies that you find in the world, or using even rarer pitons to create safe resting places. It adds a whole new dimension as you’re forced to climb tactically, ensuring that you can get to a safe spot.

Some of the huge structures you scale are quite cunningly designed with multiple goals you need to reach, and the frantic music that swells as you get tired is a real tension-upper.

As you progress, I Am Alive throws other elements at you to up the stakes, like dust clouds in the lower levels that choke and rob you of stamina even as you climb, and sloped bits of building that you need to slide down and roll across to reach handholds.

While there’s too much repetition in climbing sections, which revolve around fetch quests, and not quite enough reward for exploring – this world is actually very shallow and linear – overall they can be gruelling to play.

Where I Am Alive really stumbles is on the combat front; these mechanics are simply shoddy. While you zoom into first-person view when you shoot enemies, the restricted third-person view for physical combat makes it horribly hit and miss.

Exploration is the better part of I Am Alive - while linear, it is often a puzzle to figure out.

You rarely get to shoot – armed enemies often leave just one bullet, and killing hand-to-hand involves waiting for a stealth kill prompt that often doesn’t pop up in time, or getting into a button-mashing battle with an enemy while his screaming mates hack you to death.

You’re meant to approach fights tactically, killing more aggressive foes first and making the others back down, but you really don’t have the tools for dealing with multiple foes, which leads to constant deaths.

Since you only have three retries before you have to go right back to the start of a chapter, certain sections of both the fighting and climbing action become exercises in frustration – and there simply isn’t enough depth here to make you want to plough on.

It’s a shame given some of its good ideas, but we can see why this title was continually delayed and then thrown out on XBLA. But the quality of stuff available on XBLA now is pretty high, and I Am Alive simply can’t compete at the price.

Tim Schafer's Double Fine Productions is turning into one of gaming's most exciting development studios.

After turning its back on retail (Once Upon A Monster being its only retail release since the bomb that was Brutal Legend) its decision to create predominantly downloadable games for services like Xbox Live Arcade and PSN has seen it carve out a niche of genuinely fascinating concepts and ideas that is really allowing the studio to flourish.

Happy Action Theatre is its latest project, and it's a rather unusual one, because it's not a game at all in the traditional sense and will be utterly wasted on anyone over the age of 12.

And yet, if you do have young children, you'll discover that Double Fine's new game is an essential purchase, as it powers your child's imagination in a way that no other game can currently manage.

The concept of Happy Action Theatre is simple: have fun. Yes there is a flimsy plot that sets up and justifies the quaint stylistic visuals that Double Fine utilises, but it's not necessary to follow in order to justify the 18 scenarios that have been included here.

If you fully submerse yourself in this lava you’ll get a Terminator 2 styled achievement. 

The mini-games themselves for the most part are like sandboxes, where the key to their success is your imagination. In this sense they are more like toys than actual games, as your imagination really does fuel the shenanigans that take place onscreen.

One scenario for example presents you with slowly rising lava. Dip your hands into it and your fists will turn molten, allowing you to fling fireballs with joyful abandonment. Fling them at a friend (and up to 5 can play) and they'll become encased in lava, and must be hit to break free.

Other scenarios lets you feed pigeons, fool around in snow drifts, move about underwater, dance in a kaleidoscope, level buildings King Kong-style, and simply take and overlay multiple pictures of yourself.

Yes there are some very basic traditional games included, based on classics such as Space Invaders and Breakout, but interestingly, these are the events that held our young audience's interest for the least amount of time.

Happy Action Theatre works best when you're free of the constraints of a typical videogame and can simply do what you like, whether it's pretending to jump into a pool of lava, or using your cat to level skyscrapers.

This is also its biggest weakness however, and a traditional gamer will no doubt wonder what all the fuss is about. Sure it'll be a laugh for an evening when you get some friends over, but ultimately, this isn't a game for you, it's a game for the younger generation, and it's a game that captures its target audience beautifully.

It's also an excellent showcase of Kinect's capabilities, creating an excellent sense of space and depth. It sometimes flounders when a lot is happening onscreen, but for the most part tracking is very good, proving that some of Microsoft's original proclamations about its device might not have been so outlandish after all.

Happy Action Theatre isn't a game for everyone, but the audience it's aimed at are going to absolutely love it. An essential Kinect purchase for anyone with young gamers. 

After concluding his business in Bright Falls, Alan Wake now finds himself in Arizona, trapped in the titular American Nightmare. Perhaps more importantly, he also finds himself on Xbox Live Arcade, an interesting change of scenery for a series that took five years to make its bow on Xbox 360.

Yet on the list of big console IPs that can squeeze into the tighter jeans of Xbox Live Arcade without looking too unsightly, you’d suspect Alan Wake would be near the top of the list, thanks to its potential for tidy slices of episodic content given the novel-like nature of the narrative. Right?

Wrong, if American Nightmare is anything to go by. The gameplay survives intact, at least. As with the full fat original, Wake’s main weapon is still light, shining his torch on the Taken to leave them vulnerable to attacks.

It’s the torch that’s dominant here, not the gunplay, and looking after the battery level becomes a crucial skill to master. It helps that Alan Wake himself is a surprisingly nimble character without ever convincing you he’s ever battle-hardened – deft looks in the direction of off-screen enemies replaces the need for a radar, scrambled dodges combined with a slow-motion effect gives you plenty of time to rethink tactics under pressure.

This isn’t news for Alan Wake fans. What will be new is how the carefully crafted pacing and atmosphere of Alan Wake is choked by the restrictions of Xbox Live Arcade, which quickly begin gnawing away at the experience.

Alongside Story there’s also Arcade mode, awarding you points for surviving against waves of enemies.

Expecting the same scale as Bright Falls is wrong but Arizona is suffocating with its small size. There are three areas in total, each with one NPC.

Exploration ends in locked doors and only linear progress hands you the key. Beyond hunting out manuscript pages, there’s little incentive to deviate from the path Remedy has clearly outlined for you.

And what a tiresome path it quickly becomes. Meet NPC, travel to objective, fight Taken, return to NPC, travel to next objective, fight Taken, next level.

There are only three areas in total but, without delving into spoiler territory, Remedy forces you to revisit these locations in a manner that would make Ghosts ‘N’ Goblins blush with shame.

Yet it’s not the concept of revisiting that’s the problem – it’s the execution, with the ritual of repetition wearing thin too quickly. To give an example, there’s only one puzzle in the entire game, which is also repeated three times, and the solution actually gets easier each time.

Judged as an Xbox Live Arcade game, American Nightmares has the production values but the novelty soon quickly wears off. Judged as an attempt to bring a big console IP to its smaller digital platform, Dead Rising 2 and Lara Croft can rest easy as the only truly successful examples thus to date.

In The Simpsons Arcade Game, we have Smithers (post-racial realignment, pre-hair dye), snatching babies for little apparent reason, cackling to himself as he makes off with them, through an array of colourful Springfield locations.

Returning to this arcade classic in the year 2012 does seem at best a little bizarre, given that the twenty intervening television seasons have portrayed a tortured, tragic soul behind Mr Burns’ assistant, rather than this uncaring, off-the-shelf henchman.

Were this game to be released now, as opposed to re-released, it could easily be interpreted as homophobic, given what we now know about Smithers as a character.

Still, motivation rarely plays a prominent role in an homage of this type, a Streets Of Rage knock-off so thorough you’ll be searching for rotisserie chicken hidden under every lamppost.

Across eight stages that clearly concentrate the quality of their design on their initial establishing shots, the Simpson clan must hack and slash in pursuit of Maggie, curiously kidnapped as described above.

Solo players can get stuck in with haste, and choose their favourite character to play with, while more patient souls might fancy occupying an Xbox Live lobby in hope of joining three other family members in battle. No doubt spouting series quotes more often than in the Nineties.

Such a promising formula turns to dust rather quickly, though. First, the characters themselves are about as balanced an new born foal, on a ball, on ice.

How the hired goons get a hit in at all, we’ve no idea.

While Marge players happily toss their vacuum cleaners around each arena, achieving a reach of which Mr Tickle would be proud, whoever’s in charge of Homer will feel like a T. Rex at a boxing competition, and not one that can just eat its opponents.

Second, there’s no ebb and flow to Konami’s combat. Though an acceptable number of different enemy types litter the streets, they’re defeated using almost precisely the same methodology. 

The result of this is either an endless jumping and kicking marathon – again varying in potency between each player character – or a quiet resignation to the fact that lives will soon be lost.

You’re awarded forty credits anyway, right? Most boss encounters progress in similar fashion, as hammering and taking the occasional hit wins out over patiently waiting for the best moment to strike.

Indeed, Konami might have profited from mandating a punishing lives ration in this respect, simply to provide players with a sense of challenge.

Remember that nodding bird toy Homer employed to cover his power plant shift? He could use that to play this game to completion. 

The Simpsons Video Game could be described as a relic best left as a memory – alongside its many Revenge Of Shinobi references. It stands only as a reminder of the videogame industry’s love of taking a basic concept and iterating it into non-existence, and will doubtless bore even the hardiest of potential players into submission long before its ‘insert coin’ screen. 

‘Fair’, to those who play online shooters, is also known as winning. ‘Unfair’, to those who play online shooters, is also known as losing. When losing, the object of the ensuing outrage is most commonly the whoring of a single, cheap tactic until it’s red raw.

On the development side, the best multiplayer shooters make strides to prevent the adoption of repeat-one-thing-to-win strategies, while in the worst can usually be found some ‘no-scoped-grenade-tagging-from-outside-the-map’ bollocks about which the community shall howl and the developer shall seldom fix.

On this scale, Gotham City Impostors sits somewhere in the middle. It is a game of two faces (there’s a Batman pun thing in there somewhere which we can’t be arsed to properly exploit).

On one is its dizzying array of possible loadouts, which naturally incline players towards experimentation and, so long as you’re in a game with others that are at level ten or less, keeps things diverse and fun and balanced.

Then there’s its miffy face. Because whether or not Gotham City Impostors is well-balanced is not a question answered among those waddling about the map, pants about ankles, virtual manhood flopped into palm, but one answered among the high level players, those festooned with the best gear, many of whom having discovered the ideal combination of weapon, gadget, protection and movement that makes them all but impossible to kill.

Battles are split between folks dressed as Joker and folks dressed as Bats.

Which is a shame, because on paper Gotham City Impostors should be the jolliest, most mirthful multiplayer experience on Xbox 360. There are roller-skates and grappling hooks and guns and rockets and exploding jack-in-the-boxes and mortars and colours of all garish kinds and spring-heeled boots and a capital F preceding any mention of un. 

But the quantity of fun to be found in any game, video or otherwise, tends to match exactly the quantity of sportsmanship adopted by those who play it, and since most online FPS players would swindle their mothers out of both her kidneys for a higher kill/death ratio, it rests instead on the shoulders of developers to ensure dirty tricks are kept to a minimum.

Being one-shotted for the sixth consecutive time by the guy with the hunting bow who crabs left and right with his back to a dead end and whose kills are eight times anyone else’s, it’s difficult to conclude that Gotham City Impostors favours those who play in the true spirit.

The Call Of Duty template has been adopted here with all of its accoutrements, be they good or bad. Player cards can be customised with characters and slogans and you can give your avatar a cheap one-liner to utter every time he kills someone – something tuned specifically to irritate any but those bearing them to the point of self-harm.

Also like Call Of Duty and others, levelling up unlocks the choicest weaponry and gadgets and add-ons, with the primary difference being the game’s sense of humour.

There are character skits of the Team Fortress 2 sort, for example, as well as instructional animations inspired by the Plasmid tutorials of BioShock.

Straight-up run and gun really comes down to armour and hitpoints more than the game’s fluffy collision detection.

If it appears we’re building a picture of a game whose components are cribbed primarily from other successful titles, do not worry yourself – that is exactly the meaning we intend.

Happily, though, the parts that are supposed to be funny are successfully so, as is the amount of satisfaction to be had from levelling and improving both your avatar and his or her chances against others.

But Gotham City Impostors does host a number of other problems that, while none could be considered deal-breakers, weigh heavily on the seasoned online FPSer.

We’re not fans of automated matchmaking systems in general. We can barely think of a game in which this works as it should and Gotham City Impostors’s offering wasted no time in showing its true colours.

In our very first match it threw us into a lobby with five low-level players and six level 15-35’s, then split the teams as illogically as might some mischievous human intelligence – a straight divide between novice and veteran. 

Which would not be so bad if newcomers were offered a level playing field on which to do battle, but the speed at which Gotham City Imposters ekes out its upgrades is both ploddish and dawdly.

There's a lot of colour and charm in Gotham City Impostors.

Perhaps, we thought, this is intentional, because even though none of the hundred-and-something downloadable items available on the Xbox Live Marketplace comprise anything more than cosmetic adornments, the doling out of weapons, upgrades and custom loadout slots had us poring through them to see if there was any way to speed things up through force of cash. The time between your first match and the moment you’ll feel as well-equipped as the old hands will be long indeed.

Because, as a new player, you’re little more than an XP-stuffed piñata, experienced players trampling one another to wallop you with a big, coloured stick.

You stand very little chance in a straight up exchange of hit point attrition, since most players you’ll come up against will have adopted body armour – something that took us a great deal of time to register and a great deal more to acquire. But, it is fun once you get over the hump. 

Well-equipped, Gotham City Impostors is a laugh riot, and if you can convince some friends to invest, more’s the better. If patience isn’t your thing, you might want to look elsewhere.

Equal parts turn-based strategy and word puzzle, Quarrel pits two to four players against each other in verbose combat. Seeking to control territory on a board of coloured squares, they must pit their wits against each other by of composing words of various sizes from eight letters.

So far, so good for your Nan to entertain herself with between cleaning her dentures and nodding off to episodes of Murder She Wrote, right? Putting octogenarian dental hygiene to the side for one moment, we’re actually pretty impressed.

Where some mash-up titles claim to offer a mixture of genre A and genre B, more often that not this involves two disconnected structures, linked by the most tenuous of threads.

Like a chess-like minigame, followed by the same old gameplay, dotted with a few performance modifiers. Not so with Quarrel. Here, the concepts are intrinsically linked.

See, while headstrong players might be tempted to embark on a board-wide crusade, each square that is swept aside results in one soldier remaining behind to hold the fort – and, crucially, one less letter from which to compose their next answer.

This forces an ebb and flow onto matches, as players weigh up the relative merits of going for the kill with a lower letter count, or pooling their resources in the hope of a future eight-letter takedown.

Moving tokens around the play board becomes so much more than an exercise in playing one set of odds off against another. The way you shuffle your tokens around, skilfully or not, determines how simple or otherwise each confrontation will be. It’s a formula so perfectly balanced we’re mystified as to why we haven’t seen it before.

Snakes that can spell the word mug? That's evolution, that is.

Frustrations do exist, but stem mostly from interacting our imperfect human emotions with such a calculating system. It’s incredibly irksome, for instance, to discover the perfect eight-letter anagram hidden within each round, yet find yourself unable to do anything about it because an insufficient number of soldiers are mounting your attack.

Even more galling is to be beaten hands-down by an American spelling and/or colloquialism. It’s enough to make you faucet dance with anger. Finally, and most importantly, a stricter limit should be applied to an opponent’s search time once you’ve managed to supply a valid answer.

There seems little incentive to work at pace when more exotic, shorter answers can be beaten with ease by your opponent using the remainder of the thirty second countdown to pluralise a five or six letter word. That’s just annoying. 

Overall though, the concept is a sound one - enhanced immeasurably by Xbox Live’s fallible userbase. How on earth this struggled to find a publisher is one of life’s enduring mysteries.

If Techland is to be believed, Dead Island was one of 2011’s unsung heroes. Selling well above what was predicted, it went against popular industry opinion that new IP’s are well rubbish.

Apart from an early brush involving controversy with a certain falling little girl, it wasn’t quite as headline-grabbing as the year’s bigger titles; post-release it sort of shuffled along, moaned a bit and then fell over.

Dead Island players could have done with substantial DLC a few months ago, but it’s still good to see some now. Though the game itself is packed full of content, a continual stream of additional missions that play around with the formula could have injected some much needed life.

And we’re not short of zombie thrills, even this early into 2012. With Resident Evil 6 and Operation Raccoon City sating that particular compulsion, Dead Island has begun to feel like a long distant memory.

This DLC, entitled Ryder White, brings the undead kicking and screaming back to life. An entirely separate character and mini-campaign, Ryder White focuses on the titular Colonel and his mission to blow up a bridge in the heart of Banoi’s city. 

As you’ve probably already guessed, as a mini-campaign focused on a military character, this is less about hitting zombies with oars, and more about shooting them with Dead Island’s RPG-infused guns.

Not its strongest attribute, the gunplay (like in the main game itself) borders on the fiddly. With the RPG mechanics on clear display it can make for a confusing experience as floating health numbers litter the screen. 

It's more Call Of Duty than Dead Island.

Unlike the main campaign, Ryder White also simplifies things to a single objective. Taking away player choice and focusing their efforts down to what is now, quite obviously, a corridor, also works against the game’s fantastic open environment.

Here, it’s just the combat that will keep you interested. There’s only one new character, Ryder himself. Unlike the main quest there is no co-op; this is designed to be a single-player experience.

The production values are high, though, and this genuinely feels like it fits into the brain-eating canon that Techland have created. That it fails to present an experience akin to the main game is something of a mistake and one of the only reasons we’d recommend steering clear.

Dead Island did a fantastic job of realising a world shot to hell, and gave you the freedom to react to it however you wanted. In comparison, Ryder White’s zombie adventure is a restricted and stilted affair that occasionally reminds us why Techland’s original game was so much fun. Dead Island is deserving of additional content, but it’s even more deserving of an entire sequel. 

You can tell the developer tried, at least. Based on the cult comic of the same name, ScaryGirl is a promotional tie-in that could have featured all of the shallowness you expect from such things. But it doesn’t.

There’s an unusually high standard of artistic merit, the visual design of the game beautifully immersing you in the surreal and slightly dark world of ScaryGirl.

And there’s even a decent stab at something resembling gameplay, the title character’s tentacle-like arm put to good use not just as a Bionic Commando style platforming aide but also as a combat mechanic, allowing you to grab stunned enemies, throw them around or whack them into another. This should all make for a rather good XBLA platform game but, for some reason, the magic just isn’t there.

For the most part, ScaryGirl just feels a little too uninspired and plodding. Like the worst Kirby games, you can bypass enemies simply by hovering over the top of them, and even when you are forced to stand and fight, the thoughtful combat system can be reduced down to a combination of button mashing and repetitive rote attacks.

It’s an experience so joyless that it is actually more fun to sail right over the top of the monsters.

Platforming, meanwhile, is mostly just a case of walking from left to right across a landscape about as under-designed as the 16-bit era’s nadir of licenced cartoon platform games.

When the complexity does increase – often requiring you to combo grapples and hover jumps together – it’s a welcome relief, but one that’s tainted by some misjudged decisions such as obscure camera angles that add unnecessary difficulty or multiple routes that have a habit of doubling back on each other.

Ultimately, ScaryGirl fails because of the context it exists in. 2D platform games have come a long way since the 16-bit days and we’re now spoilt for choice when it comes to interesting, original and, most importantly, well-designed platform games.

Following in the footsteps, quite literally in Kinect’s case, of Sega’s Rise Of Nightmares, comes Microsoft’s Haunt. A lighter take on the haunted house theme seen in Sega’s ‘mature’ gore fest, Haunt has more in common with Ghostbusters or Luigi’s Mansion and has found itself at the forefront of XBLA, set to become something of a poster child for Kinect’s capabilities.

At 800 Microsoft Points it should go some way to convince many Kinect has the potential to grow beyond dance games and fluffy animal sims, too.

It could be argued that its cheap price and XBLA status lend Haunt something of proof-of-concept feel, but what is presented is charming and engaging in ways many Kinect titles fail to be.

Trapped inside the eccentric Benjy’s mansion, players are tasked with restoring functionality to his ghost-trapping machinery and retrieve the ghastly ghouls that are terrorising his property.

Not that he should mind, considering he’s a spirit himself, capable of speaking to you through the paintings – he guides you through taking on the varying ghosts and puzzles and helps you through Haunt’s creepy hallways.

What helps make Haunt such an enjoyable Kinect experience is the inventive and concise ways in which it utilises Microsoft’s motion controller.

The torch is your best friend and will rather smartly act as your primary input into Haunt’s environments. 

Players control a torch in one hand, which acts like a cursor for what has to be the easiest-to-understand of setups, and movement is simplified to a single track, controlled by walking on the spot.

Immediately, it removes most of the nasty issues raised in Rise Of Nightmares and builds on many of the ideas already seen there.

You’ll fight a range of ghosts, each with unique attacks, and every one of them will force you to defend yourself in a different way. Some attack with sound, forcing you to cover you ears, others hinder your sight making you cover your eyes, and some, more traditionally, just throw household objects your way, making you duck out of their path.

It’s not long before the tables are turned, though, and inheriting some of their abilities leads to some of Haunt’s more inventive ideas.

Shouting to inflict damage and hearing your own voice bounce off Benjy’s decrepit walls helps Kinect give a greater sense of connection to the world than it has managed with any game before.

That doesn’t necessarily mean all of Kinect’s issues are relieved, though. Haunt still manages to confuse with some convoluted gameplay that gives the impression of movement through porridge, like a game played at half speed.

It can also feel as if Kinect is slow to read your responses, compensating too much as a result, and rarely does it feel like an environment you can truly interact with without the game’s approval.

We can’t complain about spending a portion of our working afternoon playing a Sonic game. Or can we? Yes we can, when it slaps the rose-tinted spectacles off the zitty face of schoolboy nostalgia and stamps them repeatedly into the ground.

Sonic CD is boring and, occasionally worse than that, it’s frustrating. Running down ramps and flinging the blue hedgehog off into the sky is fun, but we’d forgotten how often Sonic CD goes out of its way to halt the most rewarding bits of a Sonic game and force us to restart, over and over again.

Spikes, enemies, walls and springs all conspire to stop every decent run-up in its tracks and often frustrate any simple attempt to try it again except to restart the level from the last checkpoint. 

Defeating that nonce of a balding boss, Doctor Robotnik, is a banal series of attempts to strike at the weak point and dodge an incoming attack, before repeating until he’s dead.

And the ill-conceived bonus levels featuring a Mode 7 race track seem like an excuse to crowbar in a weak Mario Kart clone, jumping on what would have been the enormous success of Nintendo’s addictive racer, the previous year in 1992. 

Chastising a 20-year-old game for being archaic probably makes us look like bullies, but when that game is repackaged and resold, it’s our business to tell you whether it’s worth the money.

Sonic CD has a few extras: the resolution has been upscaled, you can switch through three graphic modes (classic, smooth and sharp) and Tails is unlocked after one completion.

But unless you’re a rabid Achievement whore or dedicated Sonic fan, the only reason to buy Sonic CD is to remind yourself just how much this series has evolved for the better over the last two decades.

Choplifter, the Apple II original, is still remarkably playable despite being 30 years old this year. Something to do with its uncomplicated control system and clearly defined goals no doubt, but there’s oodles of charm too.

Having ripped through several screens of flack-spewing turrets and men with guns, we were always careful to clear the area before touching our chopper down to pick up our precious human cargo, individually represented by a handful of pixels that wiggled onboard in two frames of animation.

Then came the hard part, the helicopter equivalent of tiptoeing back to base, balancing the tentative need to avoid being blown out of the sky against a fuel gauge that burned out faster than a space shuttle rocket booster. 

Any attempt to bring that basic concept up to date would probably have ruined the experience altogether, but inXile has treated this remake exactly as it deserves.

Graphically, it’s been brought in line with contemporary XBLA games with a sprinkling of new features like Achievements, an online leaderboard and a five-star rating system that can unlock new choppers with better armour, weapons, fuel capacity and other stats.

There’s also a new dimension (literally) that inXile has brought to the classic: the shoulder buttons turn the chopper perpendicular to the horizontal direction of travel so that it is facing the screen. You can’t move along that plane, but enemies will often pop up and attack in the foreground, so this is the only way of killing them.

Buildings in the foreground are choice locations for an rocket-propelled grenade attack.

While Choplifter is a reasonably skilled shoot-’em-up, it doesn’t require much co-ordination, so dealing with a third dimension and the corresponding controls required is well within the ability of the average gamer.

There are small differences to gameplay, and only on some levels. A vanilla mission might require players pick up civilians, UN employees and wounded soldiers and take them back to base, but there are more interesting objectives thrown in to keep things varied.

Each mission comes with a hidden objective that is left for players to discover, like rescuing reporters stranded on top of a building you pass on the way to a hotspot indicated on the mini map.

Sometimes there are no rescues, just an attack mission to take out anti-aircraft installations and other targets. There’s even a nod to the current pop culture resurgence of zombies, by devoting an entire level to the undead, which spawn in their dozens along the ground and rush towards the hostages as you attempt a rescue.

Choplifter HD is a bit more than a novelty. That is to say, it has more longevity in it than a nostalgia-fest that might have had less effort put into it, but cracks begin to show in the HD veneer after a few hours – and this will be long before perfectionists will be able to five-star every mission and score all the Achievements available. It’s a fun download, but the 1,200-point asking price for it is a bit steep.

Tower defence is one of those genres with a staunchly devout group of fans; everyone else just rolls their eyes. If you don’t enjoy the genre, stop reading – Iron Brigade will not appeal to you.

By utilising a third-person view, Iron Brigade mimics a fresh approach to the genre that we recently experienced in the excellent Orcs Must Die!, enabling ‘Trench’ operators to directly take on the assaulting enemies alongside the towers they build. 

The tower defence itself remains an unchanged template; certain enemy types are defeated using specific tower variants, while remembering each wave and where they attack from is necessary to score the highest grade.

Most interesting is the ability to change the equipment of each Trench. By limiting each mech to an absolute maximum of four towers and two weapons of varying strengths and capabilities, the real challenge comes from picking an output best suited to the mission at hand.

This means there’s a lot of trial and error in the later levels, an element that may deter those less familiar with tower defence. There is, however, the option to team up with three friends online, where co-ordinating loadouts will really help make each battle a success.

Iron Brigade might not embody that same charm that we’ve become accustomed to from developer Double Fine, but it is a refreshing take on the genre. Its alternate World War II setting is imaginative, its combat is a blast, its strategy is well-designed but, most of all, it’s damn fun. At the end of the day, isn’t that what really matters?

Hey you! Remember Voltron? No? Well, that’s hardly surprising. Unless you were born in the Seventies, chances are you have no idea what a Voltron is, let alone have the slightest desire to buy or play a game based on it. And trust us when we say that’s probably for the best.

Flitting between genres with gay abandon, this 20-years-too-late tie-in manages to capture neither the explosive action of giant robots fighting giant rubbish aliens nor the campy charm that the frequent anime clips on display happily flaunt.

It’s an utterly tiresome twin-stick shooter for the most part, and one rendered entirely irrelevant by the existence of the excellent twosome of Gatling Gears and Geometry Wars – it has the precision and enjoyment of neither, whether it sees the Space Lions battling on land or among the stars.

But sometimes, Voltron loses the plot entirely. It pretends anime sequences are QTEs even though the cartoon footage gives it no branching options for success or failure, then makes you endure the most sluggish and tedious giant robot fights ever seen in a videogame, with only the slightest degree of interaction and an even more modest amount of enjoyment up for grabs.

If you are one of the oldies who remembers Voltron from back in the day, do yourself a favour and don’t soil those memories with this trash. And if not... well, there’s no reason you should even consider downloading this. Outside of the fuzzy, rose-tinted anime clips, it’s almost entirely worthless.