Shaun Palmer’s Pro Snowboarder 2

Format: Xbox, GameCube, PlayStation 2, Game Boy Advance

This action snowboarder game takes you to 10 real-world snow resorts where you can enjoy the thrilling experience of heading down a variety of steep courses.

There are three modes: Racing, Freestyle, and Freeride. There is a multiplayer option with split-screen play. Each freestyle level has a set of nine goals and you score points for performing tricks.

The game features pro snowboarders and Olympic stars such as Ross Powers and Jarret Thomas, as well as other top riders. They are all brilliantly animated. Their clothes flap in the wind realistically as they pick up speed down the slopes.

Each slope is modelled after a real-world ski resort and contains ramps, half-pipes and ski lodges.

Completing various tricks and goals improves your boarder’s abilities and enables you to perform even more elaborate tricks, qualifying you to move on to another mountain.

Praetorians
Format: PC

Praetorians is an epic 3D tactical game produced by Game Nation and set in the time of Julius Caesar’s campaigns to expand the frontiers of the Roman Empire.

You control three different civilizations, each featuring a unique set of troops and tactical strengths.

As a Roman general, you fight in a variety of terrains, from Italy to the deserts of Egypt and the cold regions of the Gauls.

The lands you seek to conquer are heavily defended by thousands of troops, all with special skills and individuals strengths. Your task is to manage your formations of cavalry, archers, spearmen, siege units and sword-wielding legions to maximize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses.

You can deploy scouts on solitary missions to penetrate hostile territory and seek out enemy strongholds.

Your most indispensable character is a horse-mounted centurion, who leads from the front line, inspires his troops, captures enemy villages and recruits new troops.

The visuals are excellent. The different terrains and landscapes on which you operate play a major part in battles.

The game is accessible to all, advanced gamers and beginner alike.

Up to eight players can take part in this game over LAN or the Internet.

IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles
Format: PC

This is a World War II flight simulation set on the Eastern Front during 1941-44 when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were locked in mortal combat.

It offers much of the gameplay of the earlier version of IL-2 Sturmovik, together with new aircraft and new missions, and gives you the chance to re-live some of the crucial, although less well-known, battles of this period.

Players can decide when they want to join the war and on which side. They can choose any time from 1941 to 1945 and fly for Russia, Germany, Finland or Hungary.

The planes you can fly range from the terrifying Stuka dive-bomber to the incredibly rapid Me-262 jet fighter and a variety of Allied and Soviet aircraft.

You can engage in many types of missions – defence against enemy air attacks, intercepting bombers, protecting naval convoys, and destroying tanks, trains and transport columns.

Although the main campaigns are based on the records of the original battles, your missions can within limited bounds speed up or slow down the progress of front-line movements.

Furthermore, results of one mission will carry on to the next. Resource-tracking ensures that targets destroyed in one mission will stay destroyed in the next, and intercepting trains and transport columns will affect your enemy’s supply lines.

O.R.B.
Format: PC

This stunning 3D real-time strategy game comes from Strategy First and is set in deep space.

Its backdrop is a clash between two alien civilizations – the Alyssians and the Malus – which are struggling for mastery of a solar system they share in order to win control of the system’s resource-rich asteroid belt.

Called O.R.B. (Off-World Resource Base), the game involves resource-gathering and army-building.

Asteroids serve a dual purpose: their resources are a valuable source of wealth, and they can also be used as bases or camouflage for your forces.

But once you gain an off-world resource base, there is no room for complacency. One moment, an asteroid on which you have built a base may be secure amidst a fleet of allied spaceships; the next, it could be adrift amidst an enemy battalion.

The visuals in this game are excellent. The artwork team, instead of depicting space as merely an inky black void, have gone to the trouble of sprucing it up with clever use of lighting, bright stars and colourful nebulae.