We all know what WTF really stands for, but in D3’s little world – or at least for this mini-game compilation – it has an all new meaning. That’s because the game is intended to be played during the odd ten minute break, or while waiting for the photocopier to finish fusing carcinogenic toner to wood pulp. It did have us saying WTF more than a few times though. We’d even go on record to say that it’s madder than Wario Ware.

It’s unfair to make such a comparison, however. The Japanese title was Byte Hell 2000, which does a fairer job of describing what WTF is all about. There’s no plot as such – possibly as D3 removed it for the US release – but from the looks of things you’ve been sent to hell and must carry out the most tedious jobs known to man. In Pendinomium you screw lids on pens: press X to ready a pen, press X to put the lid on. That’s it – and it goes on forever.

Not all the games are this mind numbing, thankfully. There are clones of Frogger and other retro classics, plus plenty more have goals or a number of lives. In Lumberjack you chop as many logs as you can without accidentally splatting a furry animal and the baseball game, with NES-style graphics, looked interesting initially, until we found that the aim is to monotonously catch one thousand balls. There’s a wrestling game with decent animation and detailed characters too, but all you have to do is tap X when the character has been pinned. Bah.

At the end of each game you’re awarded cash which can be spent on various capsule machines. Some contain Shenmue-like gashapon toys which have witty descriptions (“You have unlocked a red skipping rope. It could be used to start a fight” or “This toy is horribly painted. No child would want it”) while others contain tools. Tools like a restaurant bill splitter, a program that makes the PSP’s screen light up so you can use it as a torch, a Chinese horoscope thing, a hilarious replacement for your eyes, and an instant noodle timer. In the last of those, as soon as you press start a vertical FMV clip of either an oiled up beefcake or girl in a bikini appears and tries to do their best to entertain you for the three or four minute duration.

The presentation holds it all together nicely, with a faux e-mail system where random e-mails and pictures arrive sporadically, and also time sensitive messages. Play at night and the demon who dishes out jobs will tell you to go to sleep instead; play at noon and he’ll ask what’s for lunch. The games themselves are heavily stylised, with twee music, strange speech samples, subliminal messages and the odd random occurrence. Only four games are available at any given time, but you can do practice runs on those already unlocked.

There are things here that’ll make you smile; some you might even want to show fellow colleagues – unfortunately we can see ourselves strapping our PSP to our ears with elastic bands and walking around with the fake eyes on display – but if you’re after a real, proper mini-game collection then you’re better off with Capcom Classics Reloaded or waiting for Sega Mega Drive Collection. But, you know, it’s cheap, different and not another sodding racing game or shoddy PlayStation 2 conversion.

We’re continually surprised by the number of 2D shooters released in this day and age. Fair enough, there aren’t as many around as there are, say, first person shooters, but there have probably been more released on PlayStation 2 in Europe than on PSone. So much for a genre dying on its arse.

Although not as well known as the R-Type or Gradius franchises, the Raiden series is still more renowned than Gigawing, Gunbird and the like. There was even a Raiden game released on the Atari Jaguar, and that only had around 50 games released for it. So going by our rough estimate, two percent of all Atari Jaguar games were Raiden. This isn’t actually the third Raiden though – there have been at least ten spin-offs and semi-sequels since the series first began in 1990.

What sets this apart from other shooters is that enemies acknowledge your whereabouts and act accordingly, rather than moving on pre-determined paths. This of course means that there are no attack patterns to learn – which might be a blessing in disguise for some – and it also does a fine job of keeping you on your toes.

There are only three weapons, not including auto-firing secondary weapons such as rockets and homing missiles, but each comes in handy. For instance, when entering an asteroid field it’s a good idea to have the wide shot equipped, the standard straight-forward shooting laser is good for bosses, and the wavy green laser for when things get hectic. When you lose a life you aren’t stripped off all the fire-power you’ve accumulated – a bunch of power-ups spawn from your wreckage, ready for you to pick up again.

It doesn’t look as sharp and polished as Gradius V, and the backdrops and bosses aren’t quite as exciting as those seen in R-Type Final, but it’s still better looking than 505 Games’ other recent shooters – including Samuari Aces, Homura and Dragon Blaze – with some nifty explosions after finishing off a boss. There’s also a boss rush survival mode and a co-op mode in which one player moves and the other shoots.

The thing with games of this ilk is that if they’re too easy then they’re pretty much over before they began – see Gigawing Generations, which can be blasted through in twenty minutes – but if they’re too hard then most gamers will get frustrated all too soon. Raiden III’s biggest triumph is that it manages to get the balance just right – on very easy you’ll probably get to the last stage, or thereabouts, on your first or second go, but stick it on normal and you’ll find the difficulty level almost perfectly pitched.

A shopping mall full of zombies isn’t a scenario as far fetched as it initially seems. The ones we visit are always packed with pasty-faced youths, hanging around in crowds wearing torn clothes, mumbling to one another and scuffing their feet, and elderly sorts blocking doorways and aimlessly wandering around. As much as we’d like to give them a prod or too, there’s always the old grievous bodily harm thing to worry about. Burly photo journalist Frank West doesn’t have to worry about such matters. He’s got 72 hours to kill inside the expansive Willamete Mall. And we literally mean kill.

It’s not just about mindless violence though. In addition to helping numerous survivors, Frank plans to get the first scoop on the zombie situation. Frank’s camera can be used at any time, and each snapshot is scored and falls into one of several categories: brutal, horror, drama, sensual and erotic. Brutal shots are easy – run a load of zombies over with a lawn mower and just take a photo of the remains; erotic shots are harder to come by. The better the photo, the more points you get, which in turn assist in levelling up.

There are almost countless weapons around to help you get through the hordes, and in every shop you’ll find something new to play with. You can carry more than one weapon at once and they’re all suitably different from one another, ranging from hockey sticks to shopping trolleys. Some of their uses are surprising – when we picked up a skateboard we expected Frank to use it as a makeshift weapon, but instead he got on it and skated off at full speed. Pistols, shotguns and stun guns can be found too. It makes sense to stock up on a couple of pieces of food, a gun and a katanta or similar before embarking on a trek across the mall.

The game design is rather innovative. Pushing left on the d-pad brings up Frank’s watch, which shows how long you’ve got left until his escape chopper arrives and also lets you activate helpful floating arrows to guide you to your next mission. If you just want to run around, testing out weapons – and trust us, that’s something you’ll want to do – or seeing what the shops have for sale then that’s fine. Some survivors will probably die while you fire off a few golf balls into a crowd, or wave a useless plastic imitation lightsaber around, but there’s no serious penalty. It’s doubtful that you’ll save everybody and see everything on your first run anyway. New missions are dished out via walkie talkie by a small team of survivors who’ve welded themselves inside the security office. It’s here that you can save and bring non-zombies to safety.

Less positively, the AI of your cohorts isn’t great – we’ve seen them run into walls and fall over plenty of times. Some of the sub missions just aren’t worth the hassle either. A report came in that two guys had barricaded themselves inside a store, then after fighting through the crowds to save them they repaid us with a beating. It wasn’t until a while later that we discovered we had to negotiate before asking them to follow us. And a clothing store full of zombies isn’t the best place to negotiate. It’s a bit annoying that you can still be attacked when using the walkie talkies or looking at Frank’s watch too, although it does add something to the overall tension.

The sub-heading relates to the four enhanced PSP-exclusive retro revamps of Balloon Bomber, Crazy Balloon, Cameltry and Legend of Kage. We can’t say they’re titles that we would have picked to receive a new lick of pixel paint, but then the games that we would have chosen – Elevator Action, Bubble Bobble, New Zealand Story and Rainbow Islands – have all been updated and re-released recently.

So we have nothing to complain about? Well, not quite. It’s suffered the same fate as Midway Arcade Treasures: Time Extended and Capcom Classics Reloaded. That is to say it’s not a compilation of the best of the best, but instead a load of odds and sods bundled together. Three versions of Space Invaders but no Bubble Bobble? The original Elevator Action instead of the superlative Elevator Action Returns? No horizontal shooters that would fit nicely on the PSP’s screen, just vertical ones which with their default screen settings are about the size of a postage stamp? Yeah, thanks.

You can change the view to use the whole screen, but doing so makes the graphics blurry and the controls awkward. At least the emulation is spot on, with no obvious glitches or defects. Don’t expect any extras like arcade artwork, manuals or game history though – there’s none of that.

Fortunately the four updated titles are quite nicely done. They all have stylish tranquil backdrops, and Legend of Kage has been blessed with 3D characters. Rotating maze Cameltry plays a lot like the recent LocoRoco, while Crazy Balloon can be likened to Nintendo’s Kuru Kuru Kururin.

Elsewhere on the UMD you’ll find the still highly playable New Zealand Story, enjoyable scrolling fighters Rastan Saga and Kiki Kaikai and classic puzzler Qix. Others – like Alpine Ski, Space Dungeon and Space Chaser – we can’t be quite so positive about. These aren’t the games that Taito are famous for, so why include them over better known games? It doesn’t make any sense.

Soundvoyager is the only game we can think of that’s vastly improved by lying down and closing your eyes to play it. That’s because it is, essentially, an entirely audio game. So it’s instantly an interesting curiosity, and the most unique of Nintendo’s bit Generation series of accessible Game Boy Advance titles. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s any good.

But, hooray hoorah, about half of it is very good indeed. The Sound Catcher levels are the good half of the game, so we’ll start with those. The task is to, yes, catch sounds by manoeuvring left and right based on where the sound sounds like it’s coming from – so headphones are very much recommended.

There are a few on-screen cues which can help initially, but as alluded to above it’s infinitely more satisfying once the confidence has been built up to shun the visual world completely. It makes for a quite unique experience, as you’re free to concentrate solely on what’s coming in your ears, and picking out the new layer residing somewhere in the audio spectrum. Vaguely hearing something in the low frequency range in your left ear, then going after it and being right is incredibly satisfying, precisely because it’s not a skill most people have tested often.

But then there’s the annoying and rubbish half – the other six types of level. The game employs a branching structure – a branch for each of the other sorts of level, which alternate with Sound Catcher along said branches. Branches are chosen at the end of certain Sound Catcher levels by catching one of two sounds representing the next level. This isn’t particularly interesting, granted, but it was ages before we figured out how to get to other levels, so we thought we’d share.

It would be difficult to classify any of the other six sorts of levels as particularly good. Sound Slalom is comfortably the worst, the task being to repeatedly get between two points alternately emitting beeps. It’s really hard, has a time limit, and is unmitigated shit. Sound Drive and Sound Chase are both about not being in the same lane as other sounds; Sound Picker and Sound Cock (do your own joke) both involve finding sounds in a limited space; and in Sound Cannon you have to destroy sounds when they get close enough. None of them are as bad as Sound Slalom, but neither are any of them exactly enjoyable.

Sound Catcher is a simple idea well executed. The others levels try to do something more complicated, and sound alone isn’t enough to bear the complications.

This compilation – known as Clubhouse Games in the US – sadly isn’t a collection of memorable NES games, but instead traditional games like Blackjack, Chess, Battleships, Dominos and the bored secretary’s favourite Solitaire. There are some non-traditional ones thrown if for good measure though, such as Balance – in which players place blocks on a see-saw until it topples over – and the self-explanatory Shake the Bottle. There’s a sliding block puzzle too, which is ace because we like sliding block puzzles.

After picking an avatar you’re given 100 chips and presented with a handful of modes to partake of. Naturally you’re free to play any game you fancy, although if you’re feeling plucky then mission mode should be your first port of call. Here you’ll find such challenges as getting three strikes in a row at Bowling or clearing a Mah Jong board in under three minutes. Then there’s ’stamp mode’, which entails playing and winning one round/hand/match of all 42 games to win points and unlock goodies, including more games – Hangman, Ludo and Shogi – and fancier avatars. You might want to see these as medals to forewarn others of your elite skills when you play online.

Well over half of the games can be played against others from all over the world, which is impressive. You can search for Pictochat uses or converse using icons and provided phrases like “Well done!” and “Good game!”, and also check your worldwide ranking between rounds. It’s only just been released in the US, so it might be an idea to get a copy in quick and brush up on your card game knowledge to not lose the advantage. The comprehensive tutorials will teach you everything you need to know.

It can be quite hard to tell some of the tiles apart in Mah Jong, the ball physics in Billiards aren’t very convincing, and in Battleships the CPU player seems to pick boxes randomly rather than strategically, but gripes like these are few and far between. On the whole the AI is creditable, especially the lightening reflexes in adolescent wet-break timewaster Dots and Lines. Takeover, in which you have to propel a tiddlywink around a board to capture squares, proved to be a neat surprise – it’s one of those games in which everything can change in the last few seconds. The same can also be said for Koi Koi – a card game featuring Nintendo’s legendry century old hand painted Hanafuda cards.

In respect of value for money this puts a lot of the recent retro compilations to shame, especially when you consider that the likes of Midas and Phoenix were pumping out PSone Chess and Backgammon games for about £7.99 a pop only a few years ago. Indeed, if you’re planning to get stuck on a desert island any time soon then this would be an ideal collection to take along. You’ll need luck finding an infinite power source, mind.

This review nearly didn’t happen. Not because we couldn’t be bothered, but because we felt that it’s almost impossible to apply a score. After much deliberation, however, we came to the conclusion that, retailing at a measly tenner – or £5.99 if you shop at Morrisons – it represents good value for money. How long would that money last in a real fruit machine? Unless you’re really lucky, probably five minutes. If that.

Although you’d be pushed hard to tell from the shots, the six machines on offer are rendered in full 3D. The rest of the presentation isn’t quite as elaborate though, with no tutorials or such to speak of. And boy could it have done with some. On one machine, “Bonus Game! – Press X to Stop!” kept appearing, so we assumed that pressing X stops the reels. It wasn’t until later that we realised that X stopped the bonus game altogether. Seriously, why would anybody want to skip the chance to win lots of virtual money and extra goes?

At the start only one machine is available, with the rest becoming unlocked once you’ve achieved enough credits – you start off with 100, incidentally. In addition to bonus games you can hold reels and change the number of credits to gamble, while some machines have three win-lines instead of one. Unfortunately you can’t get on the board and play wildly erratic games of higher and lower, but each machine is reasonably different from the last.

You can save your progress too, meaning it’s possible to amass a bounty of credits then come back another day to blow them all willy nilly. It’s just a shame that the music plays on a continuous loop. Well, that and the fact that you won’t get filthy rich by playing it.

It’s not hard to see why the Guilty Gear games have built up a cult following over the years: the animation is impeccable, and the range of fighters is as varied as they come. Our favourite has to be Faust, a tall gangly fellow with a paper bag on his head, although a petite girl sailor who attacks with a huge great anchor ranks second. Then there’s Zappa, whose top half appears to be completely limp. It’s a right old freak show.

Although now scrunched up on a smaller screen, the characters still look the part, even if they’re not as fluidly animated as we’ve seen before. It sounds good too, with the brash rock musical tone still present. Rather than a glorified one-on-one fighter though, this time round you face up to three others in multi-tiered arenas that spread both screens. Think along the lines of a 2D Super Smash Bros Melee.

Sadly, it’s an idea that fails to bring anything new to the franchise. Or indeed the world of fighting games. There’s no depth or strategic elements – you just walk or jump over to enemy characters then tap every button available until they either die or leap to another tier. The story mode makes little sense while the ability to create your own robotic fighter isn’t anything like as exciting as it should be. Some of the super moves are quite flashy, but that’s about as thrilling as it gets.

To make up for the lack of touch-screen malarkey during the main game, the developers have included a host of stylus controlled mini-games. Just like Nintendo did with Super Mario 64 DS. They’re an excruciatingly basic bunch, like guiding a dolphin through some hoops, stacking up boxes as they fall and cutting objects in two before they hit the ground. There is one that stands out, however: a 3D pool sim that kept us amused for far longer than the main game did. A guilty pleasure? Oh certainly.