Net gain

Virtua Tennis World Tour
PlayStation Portable, £34.99
Sega, ****

Timing is everything in tennis, and that includes the marketing of the sport's videogames. Release a game around Wimbledon time and you have a chance of serving an ace - any other time and you're more likely to hit a double fault. Virtua Tennis World Tour, though, is different.

This fantastic game is worthy of attention despite its late summer release, and is the pick of the PSP launch titles. The main reason is the tennis itself. The simple controls mask a depth and subtlety that appears after lengthy play. Like that other great gaming sports series, Pro Evolution Soccer, Virtua Tennis is a game that rewards skill and plays for real. But don't go thinking this is a po-faced sim. The imaginative and addictive minigames - hitting a tank with your volleys or serving to knock down skittles - are an important part of the action, and fit in with stop/start PSP gaming on the go.

These pick up and play elements tie in nicely with the main career mode that sees you playing tournaments and building your players up to top the rankings. But the key to all of this is the fluid nature of the action, which transfers wonderfully to the PSP.

Wireless multiplayer also works a treat. Yes, initial play can be a little frustrating as you struggle to improve your player's skills. And the typically Sega-ish synth muzak during matches can be annoying. But these are minor gripes. Virtua Tennis: World Tour is the star of the PSP launch.
Greg Howson

Mercurial powers

Archer Maclean's Mercury
PlayStation Portable, £34.99
Ignition, ***

Truly original games for the PSP - as opposed to tweaked versions of PlayStation 2 games - are in desperately short supply right now, as is generally the case for a console when it launches. So Mercury deserves credit for its originality, even if it isn't going to win any prizes for pushing back the boundaries of videogaming.

It is a simple but addictive puzzle game, and thanks to modern technology, it takes the concept a lot further. Mercury presents you with a series of maze-like levels, in which you have to get a certain percentage of your virtual mercury from a start point to an end point, within a specified time, by tilting each level using the analogue joystick and letting gravity take its course. As the game progresses, you start to find switches (on which you might have to position one piece of mercury in order to open a gate to let another blob progress), splitters for dividing your mercury and gates that will only allow mercury of a certain colour to pass through.

You could argue Mercury is mildly educational, as colour-coding plays an increasingly major part in the game (so you will need to work out, for example, that yellow and magenta combine to make red). Mercury should perhaps have had a greater number of levels, but as you progress, difficulty levels go sky-high.
Steve Boxer

Role reversal

Dungeon Siege 2
PC, £34.99
Gas Powered Games/Microsoft, ***

After a long summer of bad games, the first of the blockbusters is usually one of the better signs that autumn has arrived. Not this year, apparently.

Dungeon Siege 2 is a strangely barren affair. The first game was a decent if uninspiring Diablo-clone with a fancy 3D engine and a few silly quirks, like the pack-mule that never flinched, even when attacked with spears and fireballs. It's the unlikely highlight of a game that tries hard to build roleplaying credibility yet fails.

You can have up to six members in your team (including the beast) and, as before, the action is all about taking on quests from stereotypical merchants and townsfolk, finding and pawning treasure, and fighting off a steady stream of enemies. The 3D engine has been improved, coping effortlessly with zooming and rotating and throwing in some very imaginative boss characters, but still labouring over basics like picking up treasure - thanks to an over-sized and sluggish cursor. It's also easy to get lost in the land of Aranna, especially when trying to keep track of multiple quests with an archaic system of "save points" that forces you to re-tread whole areas of the map.

The above-average score pays tribute to quantity over quality, as this is a huge game with plenty of "dungeoning". With Microsoft's predilection for dominating genres, however, it's hard to believe this is the closest thing to roleplaying it can manage after two bites of the cherry.
Mike Anderiesz

Top 5 games

Mobile downloads

1. Lemmings

2. Wall Breaker

3. Tetris

4. Pub Pool

5. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

· Source: 3, O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone, © 2005 Elspa (UK) Ltd

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