TMNT, the game based on the recently released Ninja Turtles movie, falls strictly under the ‘made for under 10s’ heading. While some of us twenty-somethings have fond memories of the Turtles, the new movie wasn’t made for us and neither was the game. Judged alongside great action platformers like Prince of Persia, TMNT comes up short, but as a game made strictly for kids, it’s not a bad effort.

The game follows the four shelled ninjas as they battle through various locations, with the actual story being told as a recap, with each turtle taking a turn to tell his own story. It’s all rather confusing, especially considering Raphael has become some kind of disguised solo superhero and the turtles rarely seem to fight together - they’re never all together on screen at once.

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Resident Evil 4 for the GameCube is, without doubt, one of the finest games ever made and its existence alone made purchasing a GameCube worthwhile. The PlayStation 2 version lacked some of the visual brilliance of the GameCube original, but the core game remained intact and was in many ways improved upon by the addition of the Ada mini-campaign. Two years after UK gamers first got their hands on the game it’s time for the PC hardcore to get their turn. Is Resident Evil 4 on the PC the ultimate version or another lazy port?

Before you go on to read about how great the game is, I better break it to you: Resident Evil 4 on the PC isn’t the ultimate version. In fact, it’s far from it, with the port being one of the laziest I’ve seen in some time. Almost no effort has gone into tailoring the controls to the PC, and the only visual options you can tweak are display resolution and if you want to run in widescreen or not. Lighting also seems to be rather subdued and lacks the subtleness of the console games. To make matters worse, there isn’t even support to use a mouse, so unless you plug in a controller (360 wired pad works very nicely) you’re stuck playing the whole game with just the keyboard.

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Can an action game be released these days without using some kind of ‘cover’ system? Just as bullet-time appeared in every other action game for a while, it seems that your game is nothing these days without the ability to put your character’s back to a wall. Rainbow Six Vegas is the latest game to use such a system, but unlike GRAW for the PC which was more or less a version created specifically for the PC audience, Vegas sticks very much to its console roots, for better or worse.

I’ll get the boring stuff out of the way first. Ubisoft has once again attempted to build a story into the action, and some effort has gone into creating team-mates that you care about. As with previous games, it doesn’t really work as well as Ubisoft would have hoped, but you’ll easily follow the basic terrorist attack storyline, complete with kidnapping, bluffing, a load of casinos and plenty of news coverage. It’s typical Tom Clancy stuff, and the lack of great storytelling doesn’t really hurt the game as a whole.

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