Grand Prix Challenge

Format: PS2

This game is based on the FIA Formula One World Championships.

All the cars from Ferrari to Minardi are featured, along with the teams from the 2002 season, and drivers Michael Schumacher, David Coulthard and Mark Webber.

Grand Prix Challenge is both readily accessible to newcomers and satisfying enough for hardcore veterans.

The cars are intricately detailed. The tracks, weather and sound effects are ultra-authentic.

As your car roars around the track at nearly 300km/h, realistic scenery flashes past, including sponsors’ billboards, track officials, and fans cheering and waving flags, with palm trees swaying in the background.

The graphics, which run at 60 frames per second, are super-smooth with no slow-down, even when there are up to 22 cars on the track at the same time.

Players have four game modes to choose from:

• Quick Race, consisting of only a few laps.
• Grand Prix option, with all the colour and experience of a Grand Prix weekend.
• Championship mode, in which you drive in the full 2002 FIA Formula One World Championship season, with practice, qualifying and warming-up before the main event.
• Grand Prix Challenge in which you race in exotic locales and tackle ever more complex situations faced by Grand Prix drivers.

Yoshi’s Island: Super Mario Advance 3

Format: GameBoy Advance

Super Nintendo has brought back a revamped version of Yoshi’s Island which was so popular a decade ago.

In this game, you team up with Yoshi, the diminutive dinosaur, and his multi-coloured friends to tackle Kamek and Baby Bowser in this fun-filled quest to reunite the separated twins.

You guide Yoshi over the island’s perilous landscape and try to avoid the devious traps set by Kamek and his foot soldiers.

When you find morph bubbles, you can change into unique characters with special abilities. You can become a mole-machine and tunnel your way around the island or change into a helicopter and fly off to places you couldn’t go before.

Yoshi can do many things: he can jump, stomp, pound the ground, gulp down his enemies and turn them into eggs with which he can pelt more enemies.

Combating enemies and solving challenging puzzles are now more fun than ever.

Pikmin

Format: GameCube

Pikmin is a totally new type of game from the creative genius of Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto (inventor of Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong and others).

Billed as an “inventive life-simulation”, Pikmin is an action-strategy game set on a surrealistic alien planet.

You control an inter-stellar traveller Captain Olimar who has crash-landed.

Your goal is to help Olimar collect the lost parts of his spaceship which have been scattered all over the planet.

Luckily, Olimar encounters exotic plant-like creatures called Pikmin, who are friendly, fun to play with, and incredibly helpful.

You learn how to marshall your ever-growing group of Pikmin as they help you find your vessel’s lost parts, defeat predatory aliens and drag back your scattered debris to enable you to repair your spacecraft.

Different types of Pikmin have different strengths and abilities which you can use to your advantage: Red Pikmin can withstand fire, blue Pikmin can survive water, while yellow Pikmin can fly high and blow up obstacles with bomb-rocks.

With the excellent controls, you can control Pikmin individually, in groups, or in posses of 100.

In this imaginative and engaging game, you have only a limited number of days to explore the planet’s diverse environments and re-assemble your spacecraft before your oxygen supply runs out.

Pikmin is fun and easy to learn but challenging enough to keep even the most experienced gamer hooked.

No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in Harm’s Way

Format: PC

Cate Archer, the fearless and stylish secret agent, returns to save the world from HARM, an international organization of bad guys.

In this classy 3D action shooter, Cate is dispatched by her anti-terrorist outfit, UNITY, to foil a super secret Soviet project that could bring about a nuclear holocaust.

The game has a 1960s James Bond feel to it, and provides players with diverse and difficult scenarios in colourful and exotic locales. It also has an underlying sense of humour and fun.

Making a welcome reappearance from the first game are many popular characters, such as the dastardly Scottish villain Magnus Armstrong, the mysterious biochemist Dr Schenker, and UNITY’s top agent Bruno Lawrie.

Cate herself is more adept than ever, with a variety of new stealth skills (crouching, hiding, eavesdropping, and use of silent weapons so that her foes are not alerted to her presence).

The game’s stealth icon tells you when she is visible to others or well hidden.

You earn points with the completion of mission objectives.

Any intelligence items you track down – notes, memoranda, photographs, spy training manuals – earn you skill points and character improvements.