Monkey business
Ape Escape Sony PlayStation Sony £34.99
Have you ever been kicked to death by a turnip? Or diced one with a light sabre?
Ape Escape is a supercute Japanese game that could easily have come from Nintendo, and the background tunes hark back to the first appearance of Mario in the original Donkey Kong.
The graphics are bright but blocky and don't have the detail that was so nice about Nintendo's Donkey Kong Country.
But then, Ape Escape isn't a 2-D platform game. It lets you move freely in a full 3-D environment with smooth camera movements, though the dreadful clipping does mean floors tend to disappear, and you can almost swim through the bottom of a pool. Oh yes, the programmers have been playing Tomb Raider, too, and have created some really nice watery effects.
To win at Ape Escape you, Spike, an indefatigable young tyke, have to travel through time to recapture numerous intelligent (and cheeky) monkeys in your nets - a simple but effective scenario.
As well as having eight worlds and more than 20 levels for variety, Ape also includes several mini-games. It's a running, jumping, crawling, climbing, swimming, rowing, skiing, boxing type of thing.
When you manage to catch a monkey, the PlayStation's analogue controller vibrates, but the game can be played only with these Dual Shock controllers. If you don't have one yet, Sony sells them separately in translucent blue, emerald and crystal.
There are compatible alternatives from independent suppliers, but it does bump up the cost of a fine game.
New balls please
All Star Tennis 99 Nintendo 64 £39.99 Ubisoft (0181 944 9000)
With its empty corporate seats and exorbitantly-priced strawberries, Wimbledon fortnight is a curious season where previously indifferent sports fans pay homage at SW19. In an attempt to foster longer term interest Ubisoft gives us All-Star Tennis 99.
This offers the usual tournament options as well as some arcade extras. The most novel of these is bomb tennis, where ball meeting court creates a ticking explosive.
Graphically things are as inconsistent as the British summertime. The characters move smoothly enough but the animation is rudimentary. A willingness to dive at every opportunity merely highlights the lack of detail with the gravity-defying skirts failing to titillate even the most avid tabloid tennis voyeur.
Grunt fans are treated to a full range of player emissions but the crowd noise is unintentionally hilarious, with fans sometimes egging on nonexistent players.
Multiplayer mode repeats its role as saviour of sports games. Although there is too much wild button pressing, human opponents are the best way to appreciate the game, with doubles as enjoyably chaotic as the real thing.
All Star Tennis? With Chang instead of Sampras this is stretching the truth somewhat, and although a licence is no guarantee of gaming excellence, you can't help but feel uninspired with the players on offer. The lack of real competition volleys All-Star Tennis to the top of the N64 tennis ratings. But this top ranking is undeserved, because of the bugs and rough-edged graphics. On a quiet day the multiplayer game would scrape a match on Court One. But really, All-Star Tennis is one for the outer courts only.
Britannia rules, OK!
Ultima Online: The Second Age PC CD-Rom £39.99 Origin/Electronic Arts
The mortal affliction that is Ultima Online has already claimed one in 50,000 of the world's population - and that number is about to grow.
The Second Age isn't so much a sequel as a story so far, bundling a few new features and areas together with all the patches and add-ons to the original online role-playing game (RPG).
But its heart and soul are unchanged: as a character in the virtual kingdom of Britannia, you choose a career, hone your skills, trade, make friends, buy a house, go on quests, battle dragons... All this is by turns irritating, thrilling, boring and hilarious.
Getting started is still way too much like hard work - becoming a decent fisherman, for example, involves something in the order of 100,000 mouse clicks. But then the sheer scale and variety of the experience - combined with the kick of interacting with thousands of players worldwide - make Ultima Online more of a way of life than a game.
The main obstacle for us benighted Brits is the money. Game plus phone bill plus internet service charges plus monthly fee equals no birthday present for the boy this year. Still, how much did you really love him anyway?
