PopCap Hits brings 4 of the most popular Xbox Live arcade games to disk, presumably just in case you’re one of the few 360 gamers who don’t have Xbox Live. In this impressive if small compilation they come at a very reasonable price too.

Peggle has appeared on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, iPhone OS, Nintendo DS, and PlayStation Network as well as being a huge hit on the Xbox Live Arcade. The game is obviously inspired by the Japanese arcade game Pachinko (a sort of cross between bagatelle, pinball and a one-armed bandit). Each level of Peggle gives you a limited supply of balls to fire at field of coloured pegs. Hitting the pegs clears them out and there are lots of ordinary pegs to get in the way. You’ll find ways of scoring more by hitting specifically-marked pegs with special shots (rebounds, long shots etc). Shot planning is made more difficult by the lack of an aiming line but one can be unlocked for a few turns by hitting a special peg. A pot scrolls backwards and forwards along the bottom of the screen and if the ball falls into it, it is recycled.

In Bejeweled 2 Deluxe the objective is to swap one gem with an adjacent gem to form a horizontal or vertical chain of three or more gems, which makes them disappear. Bonus points are awarded when more than three identical gems are joined or form two lines of identical gems in one swap, this is called a combo. Gems fall in from the top to fill in gaps, and so on. This will sometimes cause chain reactions, called cascades, to be triggered, where chains are formed by the falling gems. Cascades are awarded with bonus points, which seems a bit daft as these are accidents 99.9% of the time.

There are four variations of the game to choose from: Classic, Action, (where you have to beat the timer), Puzzle, (clear all the gems to solve the puzzles) and Endless, (which is well...endless, there’s no time limit and the game always makes sure you have another turn available.)

By linking 4 gems together you can make a Power Gem, if linked to again this will explode and take all others surrounding with it. Link 5 together and you create a Hyper Cube, which can be swapped with any horizontally or vertically linked gem; this will then explode any other gems of this colour on the board.

The only problem I have with the incredibly addictive Bejeweled 2 is that in Classic mode, success is largely down to luck as far as the jewels that drop in are concerned - unlike Endless mode, at some point you will be backed into a corner so you have no turns left and preplanning to avoid this is not always possible, meaning the game suddenly comes to a halt and leaves you feeling cheated, but heck, there’d probably be people playing this until they dropped dead.

Astro Pop is an addictive and irritating mix of Space Invaders and Tetris in which you control a little spaceship that slides from side to side at the bottom of the screen. Groups of coloured blocks fall from the sky and you can destroy them by linking 4. You grab a block or blocks with the left trigger or ‘A’, and release them with the right trigger, ‘B’ ‘or ‘X’. Special blocks that do things like blow up all around them aid your progress, and some stony blocks hinder you by requiring that all the coloured blocks around them are destroyed before they pop. The game is good fun but things can get on top of you in a hurry, and the notchy feel of the left/right controls doesn’t really help, as I often found myself skipping past the row I wanted to shoot at, whether I used the D-Pad or the left stick for aiming. If obtained, a ‘Supa Weapon’ will clear a hopelessly messed up game, but I found myself needing one far too often for me to enjoy the game much. Four weird little aliens named Vector, Vixx, Sprocket and Turbot have a little back story going but they fail to conceal the fact that Astro Pop is an old game and gets samey very quickly. There are Classic and Survival game modes. In Survival mode the difficulty increases even more quickly than in the Classic game and the power up blocks come thick and fast, but it feels sufficiently different from the Classic game to justify its presence.

About 10 million years ago I had a game on the Mattel Intellivision called Shark! Shark! and Feeding Frenzy is pretty much a prettied-up version of that.

Starting off as a cute little angel fish, you dart around using ‘A’ or ‘LT’ and eat other fish of the same size or smaller to grow into bigger and different species. You can also suck a fish or fishes into your mouth using ‘X’ and once your growth bar is full you have completed the level and can move on to deeper more dangerous waters.

The game starts off nice and easy before piling on the difficulty with stinging jellyfish and bigger, faster moving fish making the play area (which is only about a screen and a half big) a very crowded place. All kinds of bonuses and not-so-helpful pick-ups are on offer; points are awarded for eating starfish, you can pinch pearls from oysters to make you grow faster and eating a poisonous green fish will reverse your controls. Puffer fish can only be eaten when they’re un-puffed and exploding mines are to be avoided, although they can be used to kill bigger fish. Lightning bubbles give you a speed boost and extra points are available if you manage to eat a whole school of little fish all at once.

There are 5 areas to explore: Angel Reef, Lions Pass, Angler Cove, Dory Isle and Shark Reef and 2 modes: Normal and Time Attack where you eat against the clock with unlimited lives. There are also easy bonus stages you help you rack up your score.

Apart from making the games available to those 360 owners who don’t have Xbox Live the compilation is good value as, from most well-known outlets, it retails for less than the sum of its parts on the Xbox Live Arcade. There are 2 true classics in Peggle and Bejeweled 2 and while Astro Pop and Feeding Frenzy aren’t quite of the same standard, they have both been huge hits on Xbox Live so you’re bound to get a bit of enjoyment from them too.