'Splosion Man

There are also some ill-advised boss battles, which sit awkwardly with the platforming core. The first, for example, pits you against a giant robot that attacks with instant-death laser beams. The only way to avoid them is to stand in the right spot beneath a moving platform, so that its slow descent blocks the incoming beams. It's a fussy, frustrating task and one that stops the game in its tracks for no good reason.

Irritation also creeps in when sequences of pixel-perfect leaps must be carried out with split-second precision, while some less than generous checkpoints can make each failure sting that little bit more. To balance things out, you have infinite lives and repeated death enables the Way of the Coward option in the pause menu, allowing you to skip to the next level.

These concessions mean there's nothing that feels completely impassable, but when 'Splosion Man sails past a vital platform without grabbing its edge, for no apparent reason, or when the camera shifts to an unhelpful view beyond your control, it's hard to quell the feeling that the challenge isn't always coming from smart level design so much as the occasionally vague controls.

Minor but persistent niggles, they're never quite enough to counteract the innate sense of fun that Twisted Pixel naturally conjure up but while this goodwill keeps you playing through the difficulty spikes, sometimes your grin will be hiding behind gritted teeth.

There's also a co-operative mode, playable online or off with up to four players, which adds another 50 levels to the game. These rely rather too heavily on the idea of using each other's mid-air explosions to power yourselves to unreachable areas, and, even with an on-screen countdown mapped to the left trigger, mastering the timing required to pull of this manoeuvre is a bit of a fiddle.