Japanese RPGs do, of course, have a place in this world – and that place doesn’t have to be just Japan. But there are certain unbecoming characteristics which too many have: stories told through overlong cut scenes and random battles being two fine examples. Enchanted Arms, delightfully, has both.

The action-based cut scenes are tolerable, but it’s the conversations – played out in the traditional and rubbish ‘one character on either side of the screen’ fashion – which tire. Mainly because the characters are generally irritating – and potentially offensive in the case of the incredibly stereotyped gay character, who makes Julian Clary seem understated. But the story itself is solid, if somewhat predictable, and keeps the game moving.

But travelling the world is a pain, because of those pesky – and inexplicable – random battles. It’s generally a very pretty game indeed, but why are most enemies – and the rest of your team, for that matter – hidden? It’s patently ridiculous.

It’s just as well that the combat system’s a bit of fun. Battles are turn-based, and take place on a pair of three-by-three grids – one for your team, one for your opponents. There are enough variables to make even the easiest battle vaguely interesting, but not too many to overwhelm: offensive, defensive and special attacks; three pairs of opposing character types; different attack and movement ranges; that sort of thing.

Not that it’s enough to hold back the sigh of frustration every time a random battle stops you getting on with things. There are a few visible fights though, for example those which earn the materials to synthesise a new character to add to your party. This synthesis system – which also lets you create new weapons – is rather excellent, because an annoying enemy can become a very useful member of your party. Most satisfying.

With the likes of Sim City 2000, Theme Hospital, Civilzation II and Transport Tycoon, the PSone was pretty well off for God games. The PlayStation 2, however, hasn’t been quite so fortunate, with only Theme Park World, Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis and the little-known Metropolismania. Thanks to Aqua Pacific – the 97th most profitable developer in the world, according to their website – we can add another two to that list: this automobile washing sim and Chemist Tycoon. We’ve chosen to review the former, because cars are cool and drugs are bad. Mkay?

Actually, calling this a God game is pushing it somewhat – business management would be a fairer description. As the owner of a carwash franchise, it’s your job to hire and fire staff, direct customers into the wash bays, splash out on advertising and make sure you’ve got enough cash to pay wages and rent. The game is split up into a number of tasks, with the first five or so thinly disguised tutorials introducing the various elements into the mix. After that you’re let loose to do as you please with the aim of turning a steady profit.

Like unicycing, it’s all about finding the right balance. Van drivers won’t pay more than a couple of quid for a wash, so won’t pull up if your prices are too high. Posh car owners on the other hand won’t visit if your prices are too cheap, clearly thinking that you get what you pay for. New drivers are happy to pay in between the two, and then you’ve got the staff and location to worry about. Do you have a large workforce of cheap but slow staff or a smaller team of quick – but slightly more expensive – workers? If you set up shop in the town centre you’ll find plenty of passing trade, but there can be traffic jams at times that will stop your customers from being able to drive off straight away.

If you fancy getting your hands dirty, you can wash cars yourself by rubbing the cursor over them until they shine. It’s a nice idea, but gets a bit laborious after a while. There’s certainly not as much to get to grips with as there is in, say, Sim City 3000, but it’s still a tidy little game that may keep you amused for longer than you’d expect. Indeed, trying to get a constant flow of customers is oddly compelling.

We can’t deny that there’s a low budget feel to this quirky cooking sim – not surprising considering it’s available on US import sites for as little as £12.99. Cheap as chips, you might say. If you buy very expensive chips.

It’s basically Wario Ware: Cooking Edition; you pick a dish, then create your meal by playing numerous speedy mini-games before having it judged by the titular chef herself. Some dishes involve several stages – pealing, cutting, boiling, mixing, dressing – others, like making the Japanese equivalent of a Pot Noodle, just have one. Filling the pot with boiling water up to the ‘fill point’, in that case.

All of the food preparation – and the whole game, for that matter – is controlled with the stylus. Crack eggs by dragging them towards the bowl (but not too fast, or they’ll break), cut carrots by tapping the screen, kneed dough by following the arrow prompts, peel potatoes by running the peeler over them, rub butter onto a frying pan – the list goes on and on.

The actual cooking stages last the longest and aren’t dissimilar to a rhythm-action game, requiring you to perform actions as prompted. Actions like turning the gas up and down, adding salt and pepper, and blowing on food via the mic to cool it down.

If you mess up a dish then Mama will either fix it or ask if you want to change it to something else. For example, if you burn meat intended for a curry she’ll ask if you want to make a stew instead. After successfully creating a dish, more often than not a new one is unlocked. Most are oriental meals – like octopus dumplings, grilled gyoza, soba and udon – although there are a good few traditional dishes too like pizza, meat pie, omelette, Salisbury steak and the humble sandwich.

There are some nice touches, liking being asked to put a tomato ketchup smiley face on your omelette as the finishing touch, and some dishes have mini-games unique to that dish only – like cutting up a crab then pulling the meat out of its legs to make ‘Chinese style crab and egg’. Plenty are repeated though – mostly the vegetable preparation ones. If you’re feeling adventurous then you can combine dishes, but once you’ve got good grades for everything it’s unlikely that you’ll want to put your chef gloves on again.

It’s quite interesting to find out what grilled gyoza, soba and udon actually are, but you certainly shouldn’t see it as tool to learn how to cook them. If you do want to woo your friends and family, then what you need is the Japan-only Shaberu! DS Ryouri Navi instead. That has photos, FMV clips showing how to cut meat and all sorts. Now if you’ll excuse us, we have to get back to the kitchen.

Yes, we’re reviewing it on Nintendo DS rather than a ‘bigger’ console version. We’ve liked the look of this ever since the first shots were released; the limited geometry of the characters and environments seem to work in the DS’s favour. There was a bit of apprehension before putting the cart in the slot though: we’ve had our handheld fingers burnt before by the shoddy PSP conversion of Star Wars Battlefront II. Thankfully this fares a lot better.

Developers Amaze – not to be confused with Headhunter creators Amuze, as we initially did – have not only managed to pack in plenty of content and extras, but they’ve pushed the DS hard, as only Nintendo previously seemed able to. Some of the environments – like the spacecraft hanger in the hub – are huge, and the DS copes well with seven or so 3D characters on the screen at once. Any more than this though, and the frame rate takes a tumble. It’s a treat for the ears too: Chewbacca growls viciously when pulling arms off, R2-D2 beeps and whistles like he should, and in addition to the John Williams score there’s a fairly funky rendition of the Mos Eisley cantina music.

Content-wise there’s a sandcrawler, loads of unlockable playable characters, and a wealth of daft cheats including a disco mode and the ability to turn all the guns into walkie talkies. A nod and a wink in the direction of ET, there. Or perhaps South Park. If you played the console predecessor you’ll know that co-op play was a blast, so fortunately Amaze have included single card download play for up to four players.

The on-foot missions range from cutting up Tusken Raiders on Tatooine to shooting down Boba Fett on Jabba’s sail barge, and mostly entail locating new characters then using their skills to progress. Jedi can use the force to rebuild objects, pistol carriers can fire grappling hooks, and R2-D2 can fly over large gaps. Some characters have rather useless, if amusing skills – when in her painted-on metal bikini Princess Leia can do a little dance to send enemies into a trance. Puzzles also feature, and are mainly of the block shoving variety.

Then you’ve got the faster-paced vehicle missions, most of which are viewed from overhead. There’s the famous Death Star trench run, the speeder bike chase from Return of the Jedi, the chance to pilot an AT-ST on Endor, and destroying Imperial Walkers by binding their legs together. These missions are pretty short and easy, but like the main missions there are plenty of reasons to return. Each level has ten body parts to find in order to earn a new character, while on the missions without a Jedi in your party, if you return with one then you can open a few more doors and paths.

It’s about as challenging as a game with infinite lives can be, although in an ideal world it would still be in development. The last few levels don’t feel properly tested: on Endor there’s a series of tricky jumps which are a bugger to judge due the way the camera is positioned, and during the final battle with Vader the characters keep changing into a fuzz of pixels. We spotted a few other glitches as well – like walls vanishing – but fortunately we never had to restart a level as a result. You might say Amaze have ‘forced’ the DS a bit too hard. Chortle.

There’s no way this review could pass without the following, so let’s get it out of the way: this is a shameless, if occasionally pretty, 3D clone of Advance Wars. From the strengths and weaknesses of each unit, to the special ability every General has, it’s near identical to Nintendo’s cartoon take on war.

The tutorial takes around half an hour to finish and explains how to move and repair units, buy new arsenal, capture bases, load up copters and sea carriers with troops and the like, then it’s off to battle an evil terrorist organization known as Shadow Nation, turn-based style.

Every vehicle has a limited supply of fuel and ammo, and thus can’t be out in battle unendingly. Some special manoeuvres – such as making the submarines submerge – use a large proportion of the available fuel, so you really need to think tactically. Injured soldiers can be healed in any buildings that you’ve captured, while mountains provide cover and can block the paths of airborne transports if they’re tall enough. If an enemy has captured a building you can damage it so that it won’t earn them as much money to fund new weapons, and it’s also possible to destroy forests to form shorter paths. So there’s plenty to get to grips with and keep your eye on.

Being in 3D, the camera can be spun around 360 degrees, and there’s a handy overhead map – although if the mission you’re on is covered in fog then the enemy units won’t appear on it until discovered. Visually it’s quite tidy, with some nice explosions and effects like ripples in the water. The music and sound effects aren’t much to get excited by though; they should have copied the excellent music from the early Command and Conquer games.

Until you get to know which units are best against which, some battles can be awfully long winded – get two bog-standard rifle troops shooting at each other and it can be three, often four turns before one of them snuffs it. The CPU player takes a while to make their electronic mind up too – usually there’s a ten second ‘thinking’ period between their first and second move. You can’t skip their advancements either, meaning if they have fifteen or so units on the field you have to sit and watch each one move, one after the other. Still, battles can be very tense at times and until Codemasters’ Cannon Fodder arrives it’s your only choice for tactical war on your PSP.

Our favourite non-specialist gaming review heralds from FHM, in which the writer infamously gave Ninja Gaiden one out of five because he couldn’t get past the first boss. We’d be interested in what FHM would make of this; it’s tougher than frozen leather, and all for one simple reason – there’s less room for evasive manoeuvres due to the PSP’s small screen. Well, that and the fact that from the very start enemies constantly come at you from all angles. You can’t even stop for a rest – try it and a magician appears to turn you into a useless insect.

Hirsute hero Arthur still jumps like a goon too, making it nigh impossible to change direction when jumping. Capcom really should have sorted that out. In theory this prettified retro update shouldn’t be that hard going though, as you can now save between levels and instantly respawn when you pop your clogs. There’s also a wealth of magic shields and spells to unleash, one of which makes you invincible.

At first we thought we were playing something rather straight laced, and having played Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts on the SNES a sense of over-familiarity clouded the air. However, once we got past the opening graveyard level we started to notice the differences. Like big shiny rings hidden away in seemingly impossible to reach places, power-ups that look like they need massive leaps to collect, and warp keys. Then around half way through the game a witch shows up with a shopping list of body parts. You can probably guess who has to go out gathering.

The way the game is designed didn’t click with us until we reached the very last level: just as we went to open the door to the final boss, we were told that we’d need twenty-odd golden rings to proceed. Couple this with the newly acquired warp keys and a shield with flying abilities and BANG! – everything suddenly fell into place, and what we initially though was quite a shallow affair deepened.

Despite being all polygoned up, no foolish attempts have been made turn the once famous franchise upside down – apart from some 3D running down stairs bits that make use of the extra dimension. Arthur still amusingly runs about in his boxers when low on health, and has the same wooden poses as his 2D counterparts. On the flip side, what really stands out is how wonderfully organic the backdrops and environments look. Often it’s as if you’re making tracks through a living, breathing creature, with pulsating walls and slime pouring out of orifices. One of the bosses – a ghost in the shape of a stingray – is made up of countless tiny pixels, and watching him mutate and fly around is oddly compelling.

So yes, it’s a game that’s likely to frustrate. From start to finish it continually treads the line between challenging and unfair. And as we know all too well, that line is very thin. But it’s not impossible to make progress. Once you learn the strengths of each weapon and work out which ones are better left on the ground – like the puny daggers – it becomes a lot easier, and when the flying shield is in your grasp all that swearing and teeth grinding will appear to have been over nothing.

In the beginning there was gibberish. The superlative Star Fox 64 gave the furry critters the power of speech, although if you owned the PAL version – Lylat Wars – you could go back to nonsensical ramblings if you wished. Rare’s Star Fox Adventures and Namco’s Star Fox Assault – plenty of talking animals there. Now we’re back to gibberish again, only this time round you can record your own twaddle to distort. So, don’t come running to us when Slippy’s feeble cries for help start getting on your nerves.

The microphone isn’t the only piece of DS apparatus to get a good airing, as the touch screen both displays a helpful map and is used to manoeuvre the arwing – drawing a circle pulls off a barrel roll, tapping the upper part of the screen boosts, and tapping the lower half decelerates. To fire you can use any button you fancy; in our case, left on the d-pad. You can also drag a bomb icon onto the map to detonate it, which is very handy for clusters of enemies. The control system seems alien at first, but by the time you’ve completed the four tutorials you won’t want to rain down laser death from the skies any other way.

At the start of the game we’re told how the Star Fox posse has separated, leaving Fox to tackle the toad-like Aquarians on his tod. Slippy has found a female and settled down, Falco has gone off to be a loner, Peppy has been made a general, Krystal has mysteriously vanished and Star Wolf – a band of ragtag rebels – are still on the loose. As the plot – with its choice of paths and planets to tackle – unfolds, each of them comes back into the fray, with Slippy being the first to tag along. In true Star Fox form you’ll have to replay the game a fair few times to see and do everything.

Rather than being on-rails as per the first Star Fox, Command plays more like the free-roaming ‘all range’ missions from Star Fox 64. It moves at a fair old lick, but sadly the DS isn’t quite powerful enough to show far off objects even if they’re dead ahead on your radar. There are all sorts of environmental objects though, from mountains with gun-turrets on top to skyscraper tower blocks.

Advance Wars provides a second source of inspiration, as after choosing a planet to save you’re presented with an overhead view of the surface and must plan attacks and movements – turn-based style – by drawing a path. Some missions have ‘fog of war’, which must be rubbed out to reveal bases, further enemies and such. Annoyingly, the fog comes back every couple of turns. It’s similarly frustrating when you’ve won a few battles and think you’re on a winning streak, only for an enemy squad to make a beeline for the Great Fox carrier and destroy it outright. You can load up Great Fox with missiles, however, which can be used to blast the opposition right off the map, saving you a battle.

As a whole, Star Fox Command is a tidy and curious package that goes a long way to restoring McCloud’s once great name. Yet you need to ask yourself two questions before opening your wallet. First, did you really (really, really) like the open ended missions in Star Fox 64? Because that’s all you’re going to get here. Secondly, are you prepared to put in the effort? Having to play missions three, maybe four times all over again can irritate. Sure, they’re pretty short – the clock starts at around the 140 second mark – but they still require effort. Think along the lines of loosing a battle in Advance Wars.

We’d also argue that the dialogue isn’t as witty – nor skilfully cheesy (“Hey Einstein, I’m on your side!”; “I admit defeat… unless this does not work!”) – as its predecessors, although that’s not really a reason to keep your stylus docked.

The bit Generations series, of which this is a member, is part of Nintendo’s mission to make games simpler. Not as simple we need though: it took us about a week to realise that pressing select lets you scroll freely around the level. The game only uses two other buttons. We have no excuse.

Those two buttons are used to exert mild attractive and repulsive forces, the game working on a strange version of Newton’s first law of motion, under which the body you control generally travels with constant velocity unless you decide to apply one of the aforementioned forces.

Celestial bodies in the systems which form the game’s levels come in several varieties. Red bodies are big and should be avoided, but can be orbited and their mass used to navigate in the manner described above; grey bodies are small and can absorbed by or made to orbit the body you control; blue bodies can be absorbed, and will add mass sufficient to absorb larger bodies; eventually one of the bodies turns yellow, and getting that in orbit completes the level.

A convoluted explanation of what is, after five minutes of playing the thing, a very intuitive game, there.

Early levels tend to comprise small numbers of largely independent bodies, but before long you’re presented with terrifying systems of complex intersecting and nested orbits. The very idea of having any say in where your body goes through some of these systems is initially laughable, and there is a need to develop better, more careful ways of getting around. Most levels respond best to gentle input and just not smashing into massive red planets repeatedly, but there’s a place for gung-ho attitude, and it’s to the game’s credit that it gives you that degree of control.

The game asks a lot of you: squeezing through tiny gaps between moving objects without direct control is no mean feat. But, despite a couple of levels treading the line, it never crosses into unfairness. The unfussy presentation helps – if there were lengthy elaborate explosions every time you impact with another body, we might have been less inclined to persevere.

But persevere we did, the rewards coming in triumphing over physics in situations which at first look impossible. And there are few joys so pure.

Like the way a cheese burger is different from a normal burger – in that it contains a slice of processed cheese, and maybe some mystery sauce if you’re lucky – Monster House is a bit different from the usual rushed out licensed pap. For starters, it’s not another run, jump and collect the spinning things platform affair – not because you can’t jump, but because it takes inspiration mostly from Luigi’s Mansion.

The choice of camera is an unusual one: it’s slightly fish-eyed, making the lead characters appear all gangly like some Tim Burton creation. There’s also a faux retro game entitled Thou Art Dead, which you have to find tokens in the main game to play. It’s best described as a combination of Ghouls ‘n Ghosts and Castlevania, only not as good as either. These novelties aren’t valid reasons to actually go out and spend money on Monster House, but at least they stop it being totally generic.

The plot follows the path of its silver-screen daddy, involving three kids who explore a haunted house in their neighbourhood, only to be separated when they come under attack from possessed furniture and the like. All three characters are playable, each with a unique skill – DJ can stun enemies with a camera, fat kid Chowder can throw water bombs, and red-headed Jenny can use a catapult to break door locks and hurt foes. They’re also armed with water pistols, although we fail to see how a mild spray of water is able to turn a wooden chair into a pile of splinters. After a brief tutorial, the focus moves to re-grouping the team then finding a way to destroy the house’s “heart”.

The titular dusty abode continuously watches over you as if it were alive. Pipes appear out of the floor to block your path, glowing windows act as search lights, rugs start attacking and televisions fire deadly bolts of electricity. In some rooms you just have to destroy all the ghoulies to proceed; in others there’s a basic puzzle, usually involving create pushing. There are also keys and tools to find – often hidden in a vase or box somewhere nearby. By far the most entertaining rooms though are the ones that spin around, so that you end up walking on the ceiling.

Although visually pleasing in places, the frequent back tracking and limited enemy types hinder any real enjoyment. Seriously – the bosses aside, we counted five different enemies. Five. The fact that Thou Art Dead can be played online for free doesn’t do the game any favours either. Unless for some reason you want to spend £30 just so you can play it with a joypad instead of a keyboard. In which case you’d be a mentalist.