Being mean to F1 2009 is a bit like chastising the puppy from the litter with the crossed eyes and gammy leg. It means well and it will still hump your leg with all the enthusiasm of its siblings, but you can’t help wishing you’d bought a pedigree. But you can’t blame Codemasters getting its foot in the door. As we write, Jenson Button has just taken the 2009 championship and F1 fever is riding high. ...

Wii Sports Boxing let you punch your dad in the face. And get away with it. It was little more than a minigame, and a pretty imprecise one at that, but the inspired controls and glorious dad-punching made for a perfect family moment. FaceBreaker KO Party, despite offering a more substantial, solid experience than Wii Sports Boxing, hasn’t quite captured its style. ...

Games aren’t about bringing families together; they’re about blowing them apart. Daddy, Mommy, Billy and Sarah, the eerily perfect nuclear family at the heart of Family Table Tennis, and now Family Glide Hockey, understand this only too well. Ever since they discovered the joy of humiliating each other through competitive sport, they’ve been determined to strain their familial bonds via ruthless, cold-blooded competition. ...

EA have tossed realism out of the window for this year’s FIFA. And why not? Football’s started to get on our nerves lately, so it’s great to see all semblance of ‘accurate simulation’ given the boot in favour of a lightning-paced, thrill-a-second arcade goal-fest. ...

After a slightly disappointing effort at reinventing FIFA on Wii last year, EA have gone back to the tactics board and devised a brand new formation. ...

Call us musty old role-playing traditionalists, but the first thing we generally do after a monster drops an item is cram it in our over-stuffed invisible backpacks. We don’t, for instance, wear it on our heads, like Echoes of Time’s helpful AI companions choose to. It’s a bold fashion statement, no doubt about that, but we think we prefer the other way. ...

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King is about building a city (around the prerequisite FF crystal). When you start playing all four walls of the city are in place, which is all the play area you're ever going to need. After all, it's the job of the king to stay home and build his kingdom - not go out and adventure. But to acquire the resources to fuel your building, you'll need to send your teenage adventurers out to fight in ...