Tying in with the currently-in-administration Retro Gamer magazine, GSP has launched a selection of classic game compilations at a tenner apiece. Each of the packs has at least four games on it for your money, and we've got three of them here for a quick round-up.

Let's start, illogically, with Retro Gamer Classic Puzzle Games Volume 2. It includes Krakout Unlimited, a decent enough Breakout clone, but one that lacks the pace and energy of something like Arkanoid. Levels tend to drag on a little too long, but it's fun enough while it lasts.

Nibbles 3D? We didn't really warm to that, either. It's a game that sees your worm and another worm chasing around a garden - in glorious 3D to be fair - aiming to get to the goodies first. There are lots of ways to die, and as a result you'll die lots. That said, you don't 'die' as such - instead, the game sets a time limit and the worm with the most at the end of that time, wins.

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Bizarrely, this game wasn't advertised as part of the contents on the back of the box, and instead, we couldn't track down the promised P-Slider. What is publicised on the box is the fine Boulderdash clone, Rockstory. We're suckers for clever puzzlers like this, and are happy to admit that it sucked a good few hours out of our lives without even trying.

The pack is then rounded off by Skool Daze homage Skool's Out. This too is a fun title, and whilst it perhaps doesn't retain the charm of the Spectrum original, it's still entertaining stuff.

Retro Gamer Classic Puzzle Games Volume 1, meanwhile, has a healthy crossover with the aforementioned pack. There's another Breakout clone, in the shape of Barkanoid 2, and this one's not very good either. It's simply not as tight, as clever or as well designed as the original Arkanoid game it tries to ape, and as a result we can't see many people spending much time with it.

Metris? Well, guess what that is. You can't go too wrong with a Tetris clone, although Metris - in spite of its impressive customisable options - fails to match the popular Windows version that was doing the rounds nearly ten years ago. It's decent enough, though.

Klix is a clone of the classic, and hugely underrated, arcade puzzler Klax. The idea is that you have a 5x5 box at the bottom of the screen and a conveyer at the top. Using your paddle, you must collect coloured blocks and drop them into the box at the bottom in certain orders. It sounds tricky, but it's actually simple, although the original is leagues ahead of this occasionally lethargic clone. It's not bad, but certainly a case of the original being best.

Finally there's the highlight of this pack, the devilishly addictive Locomotive 2. Each level is a single screen railroad, and you need to direct each of the trains to the relevant stations simply by flicking the points on the track. There's a lot to wrestle with, though, as there are plenty of trains on the screen at once, and you have to avoid collisions at all costs - far easier said than done!

Finally in this round-up, we have Retro Game Classic Arcade Games Volume 2, replete with nine titles. It's the only one that requested a full restart of our PC once installed (incidentally, you only need one installation routine for each pack, which we found commendable). Starting with Bemazed, which is a Pacman clone. A perfectly serviceable, visually decent - if occasionally uneven - Pacman clone, but nothing more.

Blox is a fairly confusing, if quite comprehensive, take on Tetris, whilst Peng sees you, er, in a snowball fight with some penguins. It's ludicrously good fun in the short term. Next? Psyworld, a passable outing where, from an overhead perspective, you have to get rid of the baddies on - you got it! - Psyworld. Decent, but there's no long term fun here.

Blasturon is a below par Space Invaders clone, whilst Gens Gold is a poor platform game that's hardly going to threaten the Mario development team. Grubs turns you into a grub (cutting edge journalism, this is) where, with deliberately tricky controls, you solve puzzles and generally keep yourself alive. Good fun, this one.

P-Slider, entirely unbilled on the back of the box (just as Nibbles 3D is advertised on it too yet doesn't appear), is likewise entertaining, albeit at times infuriating (for the right reasons). It's one of those games where you don't control the main character, merely the platform on which they stand, which you tilt according to the direction and speed you want your - in this case - penguin to go. Finally on this whistle-stop tour is Zak Zapper, a frenetic Space Invaders take-off that's good only for a couple of goes.

In all honesty, none of these packs is particularly special, and they feel like what they are; compilations of old homebrewed software (in some cases over three or four years old) inspired by some ancient classics. You'll get a couple of hours out of each of them, and the presentation is helpful, but there's little here that you can't improve on with some legal downloading.

This is definitely a case of quantity over quality, with little here to set the pulses racing, unfortunately.