I've had this installed on my Miyoo Mini for months but thought I'd give it a go after it did so well in Back Page Pod's recent Best Games of 2003 draft. Not having played a Wario Ware game before, but knowing vaguely what to expect, I thought it was great fun. The daft animations and funny little noises made me laugh out loud frequently, and the creativity but also accessibility of each of the microgames was impressive - it's remarkable how immediately you know exactly how to do, often just from a one word prompt, like 'Dodge!', 'Find!' or 'Praise!'. Favourite games include the one where you have to shake hands with the border collie, and the one where you have to use scarab beetle Wario to guide a golf ball into a hole, after which he laughs maniacally.

I will say, however, that I completed the 'campaign', for want of a better word, in about sixty minutes one Sunday afternoon and then went back to the endless mode to play all of the games in each level, which only took a few more sessions. It's a very short game, then, but I guess this is missing the point: anyone looking for a rich single-player experience should look elsewhere; this is very much a game to have a quick blast on while you're waiting for the kettle to boil, or cooking dinner, or, as Wario would probably have wanted, when taking a dump.

I don't know that much about the series as a whole, but I understand that all of the sequels never quite captured the magic of this first game. That said, I'd be interested to know if people recommended either of the Switch games for multiplayer, as the formula feels like it could make for a great party game.

I missed this when it was on Game Pass but picked up a Steam key for a tenner. If you don't know it, Cult of the Lamb is sort of like a town-building or farming sim with the twist that, instead of establishing a cutesy village à la Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley, you play as a sweet little lamb who's been charged by a satanic figure to develop a ritualistic cult in his honour. As such, your primary currencies are the faith and devotion of your followers, who you can brainwash, sacrifice and cannibalise as you see fit. Like in other games of this type, your main objective is to keep everyone fed and happy. You, in turn, use your followers' reverence to establish gradually grander and more complicated buildings to fill your woodland commune.

When you're not building your cult, you embark on 'crusades' into the neighbouring forests, hacking and slashing through hordes of creepy crawly enemies in procedurally generated dungeons, searching for valuable resources to take home with you. This part of the game has a roguelike whiff to it, with randomised weapons to choose from at the beginning of each run and boons you pick up along the way in the form of tarot cards, like a very pared-back Hades. Unlike Hades, however, it's quite simplistic, really, with a lot of dodge rolling going on and not many synergies to plan for.

Overall, it's a difficult game to review because, on the one hand, I found it very addictive and played it for nearly twenty hours, including several late nights in bed on the Deck, but, on the other, it's not that far removed from a clicker game - certainly, in the town-building bits, you're spending most of your time watching numbers go up and meters refill, and not much else. It's also a bit too easy, and towards the end I was building things arbitrarily because I had nothing else to spend my followers' devotion on, not because what I was building added to the gameplay. There's been some new post-game content added since launch, but by the time the credits rolled I was done.

I bought this in the current Xbox sale for about £8, having not played one of the Mafia games before, and polished it off over the last few evenings. I was expecting a knock-off GTA clone, but it's not, really. Instead, it's 20 completely linear narrative-led missions set in a relatively small, open-ish version of Prohibition era Chicago. You progress from one mission to the next consecutively, with no downtime in between; there are no side-quests or choices as to the order in which you complete each mission, and while you can (sort of) explore the world when you're driving from one part of each level to the next, there's no reason to do so as there's nothing to find. It feels very PS2-era in that regard (which makes sense, seeing as its a remake of a game from 2002), but I found the focus on the story missions with no open-world bloat padding out the runtime quite refreshing.

The missions themselves are...fine. You drive to places, shoot people and generally do lots of gangstery things. You hang out the windows of old-timey cars firing a Tommy gun. You steal lorries full of swag and drive them to lock-ups. You attach bombs to the undersides of rival mobsters' cars and then blow them up. You talk to people using words like 'Youse', 'Dames' and 'Gats' unironically. In fact, pretty much every gangster film cliché is ticked off here, including a section where you have to take someone out using a gun you find taped to the back of a toilet cistern.

Despite how hackneyed the writing and generally mediocre the gameplay is, however, I found the game overall had a certain charm to it - big seven-out-of-ten energy, as the kids say. The voice acting is surprisingly decent, and the story, as much as you've seen it all before, was sufficiently entertaining to keep me playing. The De Niro-lookalike main character, Tommy, is a hatchet man with a heart, and I found him endearing enough to see his story through to its inevitable, bloody conclusion. Despite playing this on the Xbox, nothing about is especially spectacular or technically demanding, and it only took me eight hours to finish, so I'd say it's probably better suited to the Steam Deck (and you can currently get it from CDKeys for less than seven pounds).v That said, I'm not in any rush to play Mafias 2 or 3 based on my time with this.

If you're after something undemanding and you enjoy the period of America that the game quite authentically portrays, then give it a go.