The TurboGrafix-16, which once roamed prehistoric game stores, was the size of six double-decker buses but had a CPU the size of a pea. It could also eat its own weight in vertical-scrolling shoot-’em-ups, many of which are now available on Wii Virtual Console. Indeed, four titles from the Star Soldier lineage are already up on the Wii Shop for 600 points - the best of which (Super Star Soldier and Blazing Lazers) are a must for any ...

Pinball - dead easy to do in a videogame, right? Actually, not if you’re going to do it well. You can’t just stick a load of ramps and targets on an oblong playing area, whack a pair of flippers down the bottom and expect it to work like a proper table. When pinball was a big deal in the arcades, the best designers were revered among fans much like Miyamoto or Kojima are today, except without the internet to make global stars of ...

The credits list betrays their terrible secret. Many years from now, members of the Target: Terror development team will recount that fateful evening in the summer of 2004 when Target: Terror’s boss, Eugene Jarvis (of Narc and Cruis’n USA fame), sent down the order: Dave - bring in your bright red boiler suit; Gina - go get those PVC hotpants you wore to the Christmas party. And all of you - bring your sunglasses. The next day ...

Question: if Iron Man can fly, why has he stumbled into every pitfall of the superhero genre? His game is messy, confusing and, at best, about as good as Catwoman or Batman Begins. Which is not good at all.

In this game of the film of the comic, you are the titular Iron Man - disabled billionaire inventor Tony Stark - in his rocket-booted iron suit, out to thwart evildoers. At heart it’s a shoot-’em-up with a great deal of ...

The story behind this struck us as a tad unlikely - the game Steven Spielberg always wanted to play with his family? Wasn’t he a bit busy with some movie when it was being made? But however it came about, Boom Blox is far better than it has any right to be. While we’d normally file celebrity-endorsed casual games alongside the likes of Carol Vorderman’s Sudoku, this is in a different league. It’s brilliant! ...

Any rhythm game that compiles the likes of Electric Six, Tenacious D, and Tag Team – yes, of "Whoomp! (There It Is)" fame – deserves some serious props, and we gladly send them in the direction of Battle of the Bands. Offering five distinct renditions (rock, country, Latin, hip-hop, and marching band) of each full song further sweetens the pot, but when the most interesting aspect of your game (by a wide margin) is the ...

The success of Wii Sports was always likely to spawn imitators but after numerous frames and tournaments with AMF Bowling: Pinbusters! we’re still left scratching our heads as to why this exists. It is, as a whole, considerably worse than what is one fifth of Wii Sports - in look, execution and enjoyment. ...

If you’re hardcore enough to derive happiness instead of pain from the Roguelike convention of starting from scratch when you die, but not quite hardcore enough to have imported this dungeon crawler ten years ago for your Sega Saturn, we recommend this terrific remake of Baroque.

Baroque’s death mechanic dovetails neatly with the narrative - it’s by dying and revisiting that you start to piece together the intriguing ...

Zany. Crazy. Wacky. Madcap. Troublesome words that set our wrongness klaxons a-whining whenever they’re used to describe something. They’re words you’d associate with the voice-over in trailers for comedies starring teenage ‘nerds’ who are trying to woo the hot cheerleader. And while we’ve not actually seen any of these words associated with Emergency Mayhem, they’re a perfect fit and no mistake. ...

What the hell happened? Ready at Dawn had a year and a half to successfully port one of PS2’s greatest games to the Wii - what we all thought was a match made in heaven - only to nerf the controls and subsequently bungle the entire gameplay. That’s not to say all is bad. You still get the lengthy, top-notch quest blending the best puzzle aspects of Zelda with a visual style that no other can match.

Graphics aren't ...