I recently upgraded my ageing 5 year old PC and screen and so I was able to play the game at full frame rate in the highest resolution it supported. It looks great, albeit a tiny bit aged. The first part of the game had a few lame characters and environments (like the tree village) but after I collected all 5 medallion pieces the game got REALLY good. It surprised me with just how many extra levels I had to fight through to get to the end of the game... and the end of the game was just nuts. I took all my wits and knowledge of the game's weapons and fighting tactics to make it through alive.

Anyway, Serious Sam 2 is highly recommended if you can grab a used copy cheap somewhere...

It's a great fun well made whack-a-mole type game on steroids with cool retro graphics and music, and lots of variety.

It was my 8 year old son, Conan, who found it. He loves playing games on Miniclip and he showed me Pest Control. He was stuck on a few tougher levels and I said "let me have a go", then I used my 20+ years of mouse clicking skill to hammer that mouse button like a machine gun and blasted through all the levels he couldn't beat. He, and my other son Callum (aged 5), were slack-jawed in amazement at their dad's awesome gaming prowess Be sure to check it out!

There are two expansion packs (Fight For Life and The Experiment). I found Fight For Life pretty tough, and The Experiment a bit easier plus more fun on the last level with the crazy weapons and mega boss. There's also a sequel, but I've only played the demo so far. I'll probably get it though, but first I'm going to try out Zombie Shooter by the same developers because everyone seems to love it.

Anyway, I hadn't tried Incredibots out before, but I'd heard about it. So that night I went home and played it with my boys. It's pretty neat, they were laughing their heads off. It's got loads of options and you can make some complex stuff with it. I recommend taking a look.

Then today I played Fantastic Contraption, which I'm sure many of you have played already. In contrast to Increditbots, this was simpler to get into but more limited in scope. Still it was great fun. Again, recommended.

I still haven't got round to playing World of Goo yet, how crap is that?! Must play it soon.

You can read about the making of the game here.

I got it recently for an ultra low price because someone at BFG was selling a load of second hand games and he had a list of pretty decent GBA titles (I checked out their reviews on GameSpot to make sure none were turkeys) and I snaffled them up for myself and the kids. That's the cool thing about GBA games is that there are TONS of *really* good games out there that you can buy for next to nothing second hand. I've built up a giant wish list of them using GameSpot to filter the reviews in score order.

Some other GBA games I enjoyed over the last year were:

- Metal Slug Advance (This was classic but also fiendishly hard, I got right to the end boss and had to get on an aeroplane and haven't played it since)

- Astro Boy (A really neat platformer with some nifty moves. Was a bit strange at first but then I got really into it. Highly recommended).

I've also got Super Mario 3 sitting around waiting to be played and I bought my eldest son Pokemon Leaf Green because apart from Pokemon Pearl and Diamond all the other DS Pokemon games seem a bit rubbish.

Anyhow, I'm loving playing GBA games on DS (I missed out on having a GBA, really wanted one but bought a GameCube instead at the time, which I don't regret, it was awesome). I'll report back as I have fun with other classics.

I'm particularly fond of coop games that I can play with my sons. I used to like coop games when I was a kid (Gauntlet anyone?) and also got really into coop FPS games when Doom and Hexen were new (played them via dial-up modem!), but then coop seemed to disappear from FPS games until it's recent revival in games like Left 4 Dead.

XBLA has some great Coop games that make use of two or more controllers. I recently completed Castle Crashers with my eldest son - it is a fantastic game. I plan to do a review soon, but basically I believe it to be the BEST side-scrolling beat 'em up that I've ever played. It gets quite tough but is full of variety and fun.

Also we had great fun completing Assault Heroes and are working our way through Assault Heroes 2 right now. They are a really good fun brainless blast. If they had come out in the 80s they would have been smash hits.

A couple of other coop games that I'll check out soon are Schizoid, which is intriguing because you have to defend each other, and Mutant Storm Empire, which has a good fun demo.

If you can recommend any other decent coop games suitable for a 7-year old, please let me know! Thanks in advance.

Jasper's Journey is a retro-style cute-looking downloadable platformer game for PC and Mac. Other games from Lexaloffe include the well received Chocolate Castle and also Zen Puzzle Garden.

You play as Jasper, a kind of purple haired imp-like creature, who is ferried from level to level by a cute purple dragon in search of your stolen cat. Along the way you've venture through several different lovely landscapes with plenty of secrets to explore whilst battling various small creates and big bosses. The blurb on the site says "frantic monster pummelling action" and you wouldn't guess it at first but it's definitely true later.

I downloaded the demo for this quite a while ago and straight away I enjoyed the well-made retro graphics and the strange atmosphere (which I'm sure is made stronger by the lack of in-game music and the 8-bit sounding sound effects) all tied together with a good solid platform game engine. The first few levels were pretty easy and my boys watched me breeze through them. We became addicted and played it constantly and then it started to get hard... like really hard.

The save game points weren't frequent enough and some of the enemies were just crazy hard to kill and some of the platforming was pretty tough - so it did become very frustrating at times. You don't get much health (just up to 3 shields and a single hit will remove one) and it's possible to run out of ammo (which is replenished by collecting fruit, or buying more in the shop with the treasure you collect). We actually stopped playing it for months until I got a newsletter from Lexaloffle which mentioned an update. The update had more saved game points! This was enough to get me playing again and I managed to get to the end but discovered that I really didn't have enough firepower to take out the final boss. So I went back a couple of saves and really carefully collected every piece of treasure I could in order to buy the triple shot potion to beat the boss but I was 5 gold short, ARG! But I bought the butterfly potion instead which actually proved pretty handy and I was able to beat the boss after many tries.

After I finished it my boys wanted to play it and I let my 5-year-old try Easy mode (I completed it on Medium. I wouldn't try hard unless I wanted to punish myself for some ultimate sin). Easy mode gives you infinite ammo (makes fruit collecting pointless though), and when you get hit and are shieldless you loose your treasure Sonic style and can pick it up again. However, it will still too hard for him, he got to level 2 but couldn't really progress.

So to conclude, this game has a great vibe (charming in fact) and is well made. I totally recommend it for adults who are experienced players, but not for young kids (kids beyond about 8 will probably consider it too poofy). If it was considerably easier and had more levels that you could just breeze through then I'd have given it a higher score.

I'll be keeping an eye out for the next Lexaloffle game for sure.