Games preview

As value packs go, this five-game bumper may supply the most delight per pound of any release ever. The wonderful Half-Life 2, at four years old, is showing its age graphically, but remains a defining first person shooting experience as you escape a sinister and heavily patrolled City 17. What it lacks in Halo-style glamour is made up for by beautifully engineered kinetic puzzles and crumbling urban environments. The story continues in Half-Life 2 Episodes 1 & 2, which deliver even further ingenuity with exquisite use of the gravity gun and open spaces, while in Portal, a device opens gates between which you teleport to solve its perfectly formed and black-humoured problems. With Team Fortress 2's highly tactical multiplayer mayhem, The Orange Box is a good deal of epic and mystifying proportions.

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WWE SmackDown! Vs Raw 2008
PS2, PS3, PSP, Nintendo DS, Wii, Xbox 360

For fans of the peculiar muscle ballet of American wrestling, the latest in an endless line of simulations of this demi-sport will be reason for considerable happiness. For those not inculcated into the ways of Vince McMahon and his heavily muscled colleagues, the baffling success of wrestling games will have no light cast on it by this shambling mess of a title. Combining sluggish moves and shabby character models with interminable theatrics as each wrestler enters the ring, Smackdown Vs Raw creates an appallingly dull but long-lived set of bouts, from which most right-thinking gamers would want to escape. The plethora of fight modes, combinations of wrestling styles and options for engaging friends in drawn-out duels just extends the tedium. Lacking any innovation, this is sausage-machine development at its most exploitative.

ˇ THQ, £30-£50

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
Nintendo Wii

The Wii's arrival gave console-owning first person shooter fans a brief moment of anticipation that they would finally have a control method to rival the PC's hallowed mouse and keyboard combination. Anyone unfortunate enough to have played Scarface or the abysmal Wii version of Call Of Duty will rapidly have been disabused of that notion. But Metroid Prime 3 proves that, while no rival to mouse control, aiming with the Wii-remote and moving with the nunchuk controller is an intuitive, rewarding way of controlling heroine Samus Aran as well as interacting with doors and scenery. The elegance of its interface adds an extra layer of joy to the Metroid standards of multifunction weapons and visors used to scan your surroundings in search of plot points and clues. While no towering classic by comparison with Halo 3, this is easily the finest of its kind on Wii and is a lot more accessible than its predecessors.

ˇ Nintendo, £40