Not since the days of the Spectrum and Commodore 64 has a tenner got you so far where gaming is concerned. For in spite of the £30+ price tags that brand new releases attract, it's generally a year or so before you can pick up those titles at a third of the price.

Focus Multimedia, over the past few years, has moved into the gaming market with a vengeance. And we're looking at four titles here that give a fair reflection of the highs, lows and middle ground of bargain game hunting.

The undoubted highlight of the four is the reappearance of Ubisoft's wonderful Beyond Good & Evil. This was, to the shame of gamers worldwide, a title that never earned the commercial success it richly deserved at full price, and you can only hope that common sense prevails and its new £9.99 coating wins it more friends.

Whilst it does admittedly possess some minor flaws, they're so dwarfed by the daring marriage of narrative, action and adventure that you'd be churlish to worry too much about them. A must buy. Really.

Less successful is CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. A blatant cash-in on the hit TV show, sadly the game doesn't measure up to the energy, intelligence and pace of its source material. It does have a few merits in its favour though. By securing the voices and likenesses of the CSI cast there's an authenticity to the proceedings, and you can imagine that the avid CSI fan will get real enjoyment out of it. For non-fans, it's an okay-ish murder mystery that makes up for in length what it lacks in challenge. Troublesome at full price, less of a risk at a tenner.

A jump back up in quality next for Chessmaster 9000. Aside from the obvious comment that there's only so much you can do with a game of chess, that hasn't stopped the developers throwing everything at the wall here. Immaculately presented, and with full-on tutorial modes that cater for pretty much any ability, it plays a mean game of chess and includes plenty of side attractions too. The online version is where the fun's really at, of course, but we confidently predict that the single player mode played at top level could happily whup all but a handful of people in the world.

If you're wondering where the weak title of the quartet is, it's coming right up. Bearing little resemblance to the film that it's licensed from, Pirates of the Caribbean for some bizarre reason lacks much in the way of action and pace.

Instead, it's a strange, uneven and compromised hybrid of role playing elements with a few touches of action that never really comes off. It looks nice, but the vast audiences who embraced the film will hardly warm to an undercooked RPG, no matter how hard the developers have tried. It's not awful - far from it, in fact - it just doesn't really hang together.

Nonetheless, of the four we've looked at here, at least two we'd happily lay down a tenner for, and the remaining two we'd not play for long, but would at least get a few hours of amusement. If nothing else, they're the latest exhibits in the increasingly compelling case for embracing the budget gaming market.

Four games, two of which score highly, the other two of which are fairly forgettable. You'd be hard pushed to declare any of them a rip-off, mind.