If you're one of those who has enjoyed the series on console, you'll enjoy it on DS. Otherwise, steer clear.

Charging 800 points for this when the aforementioned Castlevania: SotN comes at the same price is taking the proverbial. Steer well clear of this one.

Monster Jam is a terrible racing game, and a laughable attempt at recreating the hefty impact of monster trucks to boot. With zero challenge and aggravating control, I don't think "MotorStorm 2" has much to worry about.

There should be no shame in sticking to a formula, but Arkadian Warriors reproduces it with so little ambition it plays like an ABC of what the genre needs to avoid to move forwards; appearing content to wallow in a stereotype because action role-playing games are under-represented on Live Arcade.

The games are neither entertaining nor plentiful enough to keep you playing for long. That applies to the multiplayer as well as solo mode.

It's sort of enjoyable because swishing a sword and firing a gun and seeing off billions of stupid enemies without having to think about it too much can be fun. Not fun for long, though, and not the kind of fun it's worth spending 30 or 40 quid on.

So once again, we have here a modern day Sonic game devoid of the elements which made olden days Sonic games so good - speed, simplicity, a decent control system, that sort of thing. Sonic Riders Zero Gravity is not hateful, just pointless. A complete waste of time, effort and the planet's resources.

Whatever your thoughts are on the finer points of the game, it all boils down to one thing, really, and that's the fact that you're essentially mashing the same two or three buttons repeatedly, and largely winging it most of the time.

It's hardly spacesuit gripping stuff. While there are promising facets to Lost Empire's simple yet expansive empire building, ultimately it feels unfinished and uninspiring, and more of a lost opportunity than anything else.

Even the best endeavour seems futile in the face of a clunky control system and a lack of strong visual feedback. To call it a relaxing piece of leisure software doesn't excuse it, either.

Deadly Creatures has an intriguing premise, and makes a strong first impression with its shudder-inducing animation and cute environmental details. That may be enough to curry favour with Wii owners starved of action games, but over the long haul the scariest thing about these critters is how shoddily constructed they are.

There's remarkably little puzzle-solving, and on the occasions when you do need to find a power-up to get through an area, you'll generally find it right next to it. The plodding pace of the game also makes combat incredibly dull, as you might expect.

Art of Murder is poorly paced, illogically structured and often downright laughable.

Compared to Mario Galaxy or Ratchet & Clank - heck, even compared to Crash Bandicoot, another platforming mascot mired in mediocrity - Sonic Unleashed is an obviously poor effort from a series that is still hopelessly lost in the modern gaming landscape.

The generic can't-be-arsed title says it all. It's the sort of thing you might consider buying for your Dad, should you spot it in the GBP 1.99 bin at the supermarket two days before his birthday, even though you know he doesn't really play games all that much.

The simple appeal of 3D tank combat is one that certainly has a place on a service like XBLA, but this awkward update gets stuck between misplaced reverence for the original and distracting concessions to modern gaming conventions.

Ultimately this is soulless and boring with almost no redeeming features, and the worst tennis game of this generation by some margin.

When you've got a quiz where players don't even need to understand the question to win, you've got a quiz that doesn't really work all that well.

TV Show King is a quiz game, and it features questions. That basic level of expectance is all it manages to meet, and it's horribly clear that this is simply a "make do" release, put out there to mop up an existing market with the minimum of effort.

A frustrating gaming experience.

Poorly translated and badly acted, there's little here to distract from the terrible gameplay.

Mediocre, unimpressive and uninspired. The handling and physics are competent, but the missions are dull and the presentation is shoddy. The most fun to be had is in laughing at the voiceovers.

Absolutely horrible execution.

But by far the most irritating aspect of the handling is the inability to simply make your board go where you want it to.

It looks cute, it has a couple of nice ideas, but it's just not fun.

Pirates vs Ninjas Dodgeball is due for release soon, and that's a far more instinctive and entertaining affair. Save your points for that, and send this one for an early shower.

Sonic's stuck in a rut, then: he can run as fast as he likes, but no matter the fancy new tricks he learns, he just can't seem to keep up any more.

While Sniper: Art of Victory is superior to its brother in arms, and the sniping mechanic itself is reasonably well implemented, there are still too many flaws here to recommend it.

Lacking both a challenge and soul, and failing to even engage on a narrative level, what you're left with is an overly forgiving shooter with weak strategy elements, which only serve to make it even easier for you. Having played right to the end, I wish there was something I could point to in its defence, but all I'm left with is the empty realisation that they've managed to somehow make this even less entertaining than the flawed original.

Lacking both a challenge and soul, and failing to even engage on a narrative level, what you're left with is an overly forgiving shooter with weak strategy elements, which only serve to make it even easier for you. Having played right to the end, I wish there was something I could point to in its defence, but all I'm left with is the empty realisation that they've managed to somehow make this even less entertaining than the flawed original.

With a frustrating yet easy single-player mode that can be exhausted in less than an hour, it falls to multiplayer to improve the score - and it's true that playing with other people does liven things up a tad.

It's a stupid idea, and one that pretty much breaks Midnight Bowling. It's too silly to work as a bowling sim, but it's also too open to unfair play to work as a fun multiplayer game.

This is just a song pack, really - one that carries an RRP of GBP 29.99 (or GBP 39.99 if you need the guitar grip too). That's too much to ask for a sequel which barely does anything its predecessor didn't do, and doesn't even fix any of the problems with it.

Even if you remember the PS2 game with fondness, don't buy this one; your rose-tinted glasses will smash and you'll be left picking the splinters from your eyeballs as tears of blood roll down your cheeks. Also it's not worth £29.99.

There is so little replay potential here, so little urge to top high scores or perfect shoddy make-do attempts, that completing each task feels more of a relief than an achievement.

So for 20 quid, you're getting a hundred copyright-free books that are a pain to read and some fairly rubbish electronical features. It's not a brilliant deal, especially when you consider there's a similar application for iPhone which is free to download. It's much better, too, with more text on the screen at a time, sharper fonts and the option to choose white text on a black background.

The quintessential movie tie-in, a self-fulfilling prophecy of functional banality. On the surface it's brash, busy and superficially attractive, but underneath it's hollow, blatantly padded and more than a little monotonous. It's never much fun, but nor is it wonky enough to be terrible. It's simply there, a forgettable distraction.

It's fun for half an hour, but that's an awfully expensive 30 minutes. Don't buy RIDE unless you want to be taken for one.

An atrocious MMO wedded to a fleetingly enjoyable multiplayer shooter. Had Vogster just focused on the latter component, it might have had something worthwhile.

What does make it a poor game is the crappy driving, ridiculous shooting, cackhanded interface and nonsense story.

The original Super Monkey Ball wasn't designed with a balance board in mind, any more than monkeys are meant to wear waistcoats, and the end result is just as odd and incongruous. It might well be time to stop grinding that organ.

If this were the only console RPG available the numerous flaws might be worth suffering, but when compared to the ambition and polish that other games have brought to the genre in recent years Risen demands far too much and offers too little in return.

The titles that truly impress on bite-sized platforms are rarely those that try to ape "proper games", but the ones that turn hardware and storage restrictions into opportunities and innovations. Hero of Sparta isn't one of those games, and there are better Minis more deserving of your money.

Way of the Samurai 3 wastes too much energy juggling the numerous ways it can end your story and not nearly enough on making the journey to get there worthwhile.

There are clearly some talented people at Playlogic - notably whoever did the endearing cut-scenes, which play out like Hanna-Barbera doing The Matrix. How something so colourful and quirky became so bland is a mystery of the creative process.

Suffice to say, feeble half-baked offerings like this are a step in the wrong direction. Hopefully Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening will do a much better job next month.

Make a game with controls that don't work, and lovable presentation and playful creativity can't save it. It always hurts to punish a game that tries something different, especially when such obvious care has gone into its presentation, but Fret Nice fails to execute its ideas with competence.

All that is good about Scrap Metal is contained in the simplicity of its premise. Cars and guns.

The presentation is so poor, with the board and tiles constricted to an area around half the size of one of the DS' screens, that it's almost impossible to see the detail on each tile.

A plodding, tiresome game that is only able to frustrate.

Another hour that just offers the bare minimum of gaming, another shrug of disappointment.

What looked like a peaceful riff on one of Miyamoto's finest ideas winds up a far duller prospect than it ought to have been. Shame.

With Robocalypse content to be barely average in every department, this is one for only the most undemanding Tower Defence addicts.

Naughty Bear sold itself to a lot of customers by pretending to be adult, gritty and brutal. In fact, it's childish, facile and more pointless than manning the phone-lines for the Rob Green retirement fund. Avoid at all costs, or at least wait until it's inevitably slashed in price if you're really desperate for some sledgehammer humour and cheap Gamerscore.

A gaudy glimpse of the bad old days of mid-1990s 3D. And no-one wants that.

Thanks to a quite absurd damage system, you can find yourself downed in three or four hits, usually meted out with all the precision of a Friday night drunk in Basildon.

Harmony of Despair isn't a failure of concept but a failure of ambition, one that leaves Koji Igarashi still waiting for his next great discovery.

Taken as a whole, Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days will probably amuse unfussy fans of nihilistic violence for a few evenings. But in a genre stuffed with far more interesting efforts, that still leaves it woefully below average.

Mafia II gets the last word by destroying the myth that the mafia is interesting at all. It contends that the mob world is a hell of boredom populated by aggressively stupid automatons. These drones wake up each morning, carry out a series of repetitious tasks, and return home.

Mafia II gets the last word by destroying the myth that the mafia is interesting at all. It contends that the mob world is a hell of boredom populated by aggressively stupid automatons. These drones wake up each morning, carry out a series of repetitious tasks, and return home.

But there are flashes of inspiration here, clues to the competence and ingenuity of the developer. Sadly these are drowned out by unnecessary bulk and repetition, resulting in an experience that's flabby and uninspiring regardless of your appreciation of its aims.

Four heads might not necessarily be better than three, but it's yet another of a great many reasons why Blue Dragon: Awakened Shadow compares poorly to the peers it so desperately tries to ape.

So, while Hydrophobia breaks new water, it treads old ground. The systems beneath the ebb and flow of its technical accomplishment are archaic and, without exception, lack finesse.

Beneath Arcania's often outstanding art direction and technical achievement lies a dry spreadsheet of must-have RPG elements, none of which is sufficiently developed to compel and all of which fail to balance against one another.

So that's 400 Microsoft Points (£3.40 / €4.80) for a mission that certainly wouldn't make it into the game's ten best quests, and two other additions that are essentially little more than variations on ideas from Fable II.

The comic book presentation is enthusiastically funny, the freeform action concept is commendable and the technology itself, when it works, is promising.

The only reason to buy Sonic Free Riders would be if it was actually free. And even then, only if you just really liked the box.

If you really, really want to play tennis with your Move controller, Racket Sports works well enough to fulfill that function. But think carefully about whether that experience is worth £25 (it isn't).

It's a short and rather insipid slog that simply doesn't have the charm or ambition to compensate for its wonkier aspects.

But with a miserly six songs present in the set list (versus 28 songs in the marginally more expensive Rock Band), and a pathetic selection of songs in the store, it hardly hits the ground running.

Maybe with a price cut and some rebalancing work this could be worth getting, but right now it's a bit of a shambles.

Hardcore? Don't be fooled, chaps. Maybe, somewhere, deep within the bowels of the hardcore gamer there's a desire to play endless, sprawling, repetitive games which offer no motivation to continue, but really, if you're looking for a hardcore RPG status symbol, then pick up Breath of Fire II or Golden Sun - or buy Zelda, because that's a real-time RPG done right.

The ports themselves are weak, perhaps the victim of an unrealistic development deadline, and the games aren't actually all that classic.

At the end of the day this isn't a matter of graphics whorishness, it's just that the GBA can't do the game justice. Underneath it all you can feel the spirit of the game struggling to get out.

Later levels tend to get merely more irritating rather than more enjoyable, and the many fans of the Oddworld series would have been better served with handheld versions of "Abe's Oddysee" and "Abe's Exoddus," rather than this frankly overpriced, lame effort.

A final point to raise is why Taito felt the need to demand that multi-player link mode would only work with 12 levels of the old version? It's hard enough to justify buying this ancient classic as it is, without removing the last temptation from the already hard pressed gamer.

The gripes are really mainly relating to the individual games, which for anyone remotely experienced will quickly become far too familiar and untaxing to warrant extended interest.

For all it brings to the table - space combat, Halo's shield, varied levels - not one single aspect is truly worthy of praise.

If you can live with all the problems, irritations and lack of inspiring gameplay, there’s actually a reasonably big game locked away. Real, hardcore Tolkien nuts, who live and breath the man’s work, may get something out of this.

There are some ‘clever’ bits, like a Winona Ryder look-alike shoplifter (surely she’s too pretty to lock up?), but on the whole it’s a ‘point and laugh’ kind of humour rather than a hearty laugh out loud spectacle.

After driving around the three cities, picking up fare after fare and learning your best routes and so on, there's really very little the game can offer you that "Grand Theft Auto 3" and "Vice City" doesn't do far better with its throwaway Taxi missions.

An exceptionally generic platformer shaped around quick trial and error design and limp enemies, and built around a tired looking cel-shaded engine that does little justice to the visuals of the arcade original.

So easy on the eye visually that if you saw a demo of it running you might actually think it was going to impress you. But keep watching and, like a drunken rejection from a girl in a nightclub, it will quickly dawn on you that it's not going to happen. Like the gameplay, a solid base was never built upon and the end result is just boring.

Relentless FPS overlords might find their pulses raised briefly by the thought of endless, generic shooting and violence, but the rest of you would be well advised to direct your time and money elsewhere.

It's yet another example of a distinctly average "extreme sports" game that lacks the polish and creativity of the real-life sportsmen it's trying to emulate-slash-harness.

If you can tolerate the predictable levels, bad AI, targeting nonsense and the general sea of mediocrity that persists throughout then you might discover a flicker of entertainment.

The intricate layering of tasks and guard puzzles merely proves frustrating, and with the lack of anything beyond the game's eight lengthy single-player levels, which you probably won't feel much like completing, it's a game that looks good in theory but falls flat in execution.

Something Microsoft should have put out at a budget price from the beginning, because the single-player story mode is without question one of the worst platform games we've had the misfortune of playing in <I>years</I>, while the multiplayer is merely adequate next to the best in online console gaming.

Little more than an online update of a pretty dire Tetris update, Worlds simply isn't worth your cash, even if it's only 15 or 20 quid down the high street.

But no amount of colourful 3D graphics and soothing jazz can make up for tiresome puzzles, empty levels, unoriginal weapons and endless backtracking.

Since the saber-play is occasionally exciting, and that those of you who desperately want something that reminds you of the film might be prepared to put up with this in spite of its flaws. Me? I thought this was crap.

It's not thunderously bad, but it is offensively plain, and there are some really daft design decisions lurking among the ridges of this DVD.

Average execution, terribly repetitive combat, lots of reasonable ideas that don't quite work, a general lack of cohesion: it's not diabolical, but it's far from great.

When Aeon Flux isn't busy being average, it's tied up in its own gibberish, or nudging you towards your next confrontation with awkward controls. It has almost none of the excitement we play video games for and as such, is time lost and tears in the eyes of anyone foolish enough to waste their money.

Have you been-there-and-done-that with the previous Namco collections? Raided the MAME tomb? Been stung by other retro collections? If so, there's no need to bother with this one.

Instead, try teaching them to spell 'soulless merchandising opportunity' because this isn't a worthy companion piece at all.

If you want a game that does the franchise justice, you can probably pick up the fantastically entertaining Die Hard Trilogy on PSone for about one eighth of the cost of this.

You'll find yourself cursing the lack of inventory spaces, and the inability to drop objects (which was only introduced in Resident Evil Zero), and all told the trip down memory lane merely serves to illustrate how far games have come generally, and how forgiving we must have been back then to put up with such wholly irritating fundamentals.

In all seriousness, games should come clearly stickered with a 'Best Before' date to ward off unsuspecting punters. These are two zombie shooters that should never have been exhumed.

An exceptionally generic platformer shaped around quick trial and error design and limp enemies, and built around a tired looking cel-shaded engine that does little justice to the visuals of the arcade original.

It's yet another example of a distinctly average "extreme sports" game that lacks the polish and creativity of the real-life sportsmen it's trying to emulate-slash-harness.

Gone is the marriage of lush, detailed and hugely compelling space combat missions to key moments in the film trilogy, replaced by poorly put together ground-based approximations of the old style, and a series of gimmick-driven vehicle missions that barely even summon up an initial "wow" factor.

Offers too much tedium and not nearly enough fun, mic or no mic.

As far as Nintendo seems to be concerned, at least until the first DS outing, Pokémon begins and ends with the Game Boy. Pokémon XD is tedious and restrictive. The message is clear: if you want Pokémon, crack open a GBA.

The intricate layering of tasks and guard puzzles merely proves frustrating, and with the lack of anything beyond the game's eight lengthy single-player levels, which you probably won't feel much like completing, it's a game that looks good in theory but falls flat in execution.

This kind of release does the publisher no favours at all. If content is king, then Super Monkey Ball 3D is very much the Prince Andrew of the 3DS launch.

I realise first person shooters are getting shorter these days, but, come on. Did Saber Interactive really imagine that releasing a movie tie-in that you can sleepwalk through inside an hour was going to be acceptable?

I realise first person shooters are getting shorter these days, but, come on. Did Saber Interactive really imagine that releasing a movie tie-in that you can sleepwalk through inside an hour was going to be acceptable?

With the mood alternating between boredom and exasperation, Sanctum Of Slime is a spirit-crushing exercise that only a committed masochist could appreciate.

With the mood alternating between boredom and exasperation, Sanctum Of Slime is a spirit-crushing exercise that only a committed masochist could appreciate.

If you really need to be reminded of Splinter Cell's glory days, go back and pick up a cheap copy of Double Agent. Just do yourself a favour and give this pointless reissue a wide berth.

Mythos is almost competent as an action game. But if you come here expecting an MMO, and you like your MMOs to have a sense of purpose – whether it comes from innovative design, a world worth falling in love with or a certain awe-inspiring breadth – then this game is a bit of a wasteland.

As it is, Imaginary Range feels like a waste of everyone's time.

The best reason to buy Hydrophobia Prophecy - not for entertainment, but as a kind of digital tourism. You're paying for a look at everything the developers achieved over Hydrophobia's exceptionally long development, and to see what this game might have been.

Ideas like collaborative mission editing offer tantalising possibilities for the creatively minded, but they can't mask the flaws of a game lacking a central hook.

Smashing into crowds of rancid flesh-eating zombies ought to be a terrifying life-or-death battle, not like shooting fish in a barrel.

A relatively pretty update of the classic formula, but one that lacks the soul or spirit to make it even vaguely interesting.

With just a smidgen more subtlety it might have worked, but the cod 1950s B-movie horror shtick is rammed home in CAPITAL LETTERS and SHOUTY VOICES at EVERY OPPORTUNITY to the point where you just want to tell Digital Reality to just PLEASE SHUT UP.

Dream Trigger is a novel experiment that starts off refreshing, surreal and unique, but it's too content to regurgitate the same tricks and never evolves past its base mechanics. New coats of paint can only mask so much before it grows tiresome.

It may be fun and it may make you sweat, but as an interactive fitness companion it's a feeble, infuriating effort that lacks the stamina to compete.

Devotees may still play along, through fandom obligation if nothing else, but there's no spell that can change the fact that Harry Potter's videogame saga ends with a whimper rather than a bang.

Determined types fond of incessant repetition might eke some mild enjoyment from The Lost Town, but the rest of us can move swiftly along and leave the town to its inevitable fate.

You begin to think that behind Bodycount there is perhaps the story of an heroic development team tasked with doing far too much with far too little, who have performed a minor miracle in simply shipping something that works. Well, works some of the time. It's an explanation. But the killer fact about Bodycount is that it's nowhere near good enough to compete in the FPS arena, and serves nobody - player, developer or publisher.

If you're looking for a slick, tactile contraption puzzler, then you're far better off looking to the mobile scene for the many superior (and cheaper) offerings. By comparison, Crazy Machines Elements is a step into a murky past best forgotten.

It's impossible to recommend to anyone beyond its existing fan base.

It's short, shallow and repetitive, and where humour might elevate the experience, the pointless and clunky motion controls drag it down again.

It's just a waste of time. Too clumsy to satisfy any action gaming urge, and too wrapped up in its own turgid mythology to realise it's getting things so badly wrong, releasing it right before the onslaught of massive winter releases is a decision more audacious than any design choices in the game itself.

Okabu's first impression is dazzling because it gets the audio and visual design absolutely right, but it has neither the depth nor imagination to sustain this. And when the simple act of playing isn't fun, you're just going through the motions.

Ironically for a series based around the idea of a carefully staged experience that collapses into unpredictable chaos, you're always more passenger than participant on this visit to Jurassic Park.

A soulless cash-in that has little to do with its license, and nor is it much fun in its own right. If you're lucky enough to not encounter any game-breaking bugs and if you have a friend or two to play with, then it can be pretty entertaining for a few hours. But that's a lot of "ifs" for so little payoff, since overlong levels and axe-sponge enemies inevitably whittle this dungeon crawl down into a slog.

Operation Raccoon City is an under-designed and under-produced nightmare, a game that delivers the bare minimum in every category and stops right there.

If a game is going to force you to play like an a**hole, it should have a stronger reason for doing so than 'You're a ninja, duh.' Ninja Gaiden 3 has none.

Wrecked offers a tissue-thin single-player mode, poor frame-rate and camera, bland track design and clumsy online multiplayer, all for a premium price with expensive community-splitting day-one DLC.

It doesn't really work, as the game never finds the right way to balance the two modes of play, but this brief flicker of ambition offers just enough ballast to prevent this otherwise tiresomely unremarkable game from sinking completely.

Babel Rising has a killer hook, but ultimately fails to use it for much more than the basics. Its entertainment value is simple and occasionally cathartic, but is exhausted far too early.

The saddest thing about Sakura Samurai is that the foundation is there for a much better game.

But Declassified also exposes failings of Call of Duty's form and fashion. The game is a cliché, its thrills limited, its time-stretching ploys clear. It's infused with the character of Call of Duty, but stripped of the spectacle it reveals the underlying game to be wholly plain and an uninteresting use of your time.

Fascinating and frustrating by turn, there's just enough to make you cling to the hope that one day the development team will actually find him. For now, I'd love the big, glossy, elephant folio art book of the Epic Mickey series, but I can probably do without the games themselves.

Nano Assault Neo is my least favourite kind of game; the kind that follows in others' footsteps with little to call its own. It's not a bad game in the conventional sense - it's not tedious or broken - and it's even moderately amusing, but it's not especially refined and I'm not sure why it exists beyond trying to score a quick buck during a deserted launch window.

At its core, this game is also a decent platformer, but the silly drawing gimmick and incessant backtracking spoil the fun.

There's no passion or care in Urban Trial Freestyle's construction, no sense of playfulness of fun. It's a game that does the bare minimum required to look like another game, and once the resemblance is close enough, it leaves it at that, with all the rough edges still on display.

Pathetically short, entirely uneventful and clearly stuck together from existing assets, Awakened doesn't add anything to its parent game other than a punchline that makes it clear that Isaac's trials on Tau Volantis were ultimately a waste of his - and our - time.

I can handle the graphical bugs - those overlapping buildings, the misshaped roads, the fire fighters who have chosen to stand on the station roof and spend their time endlessly vibrating. What I can't handle is the knowledge that things aren't working properly, that whatever success I've made is a sham, the result of misshapen game mechanics producing outcomes that are frequently contradictory or even nonsense.

Perhaps the most damning thing of all about Next Dimension though is that throughout our time with the game, we never once felt the impact of a blow or watched a character reel in pain &#150; there&#146;s virtually no weight to any attack and hit contact is unconvincing.

A dreary, badly made game which offers no real closure to the series and bears no relevance to either Blair Witch film. A waste of your pennies, despite the reasonable price tag.

If you have any respect for the way games should be made then give Interplay a clear message that it simply has to do better than this to compete in the games market. Treat BOS with contempt it deserves and avoid it at all costs - even buying this at a budget price would be irresponsible.

If only your enemies displayed the same kind of intelligence, the game might be a lot more interesting - but in fact, the enemy AI in MOO3 is terrible, far worse than in the previous game in the series.

The problem lies in the way you coast through the levels without any real sense of progress or achievement until you realise you&#146;re finished.

A charmless, shoddy, unfinished, unplayable mess and does nothing that a dozen other games haven't done infinitely better.

It's not bad because it's unplayable. It's bad because everything it sets out to do feels 15 years old, or frustrating and repetitive.

A punch, kick and throw marathon that bears more resemblance to early 90s side scrolling beat &#145;em ups from Capcom than a 21st Century action adventure on a next generation console.

The repetition of the exploration, the game world, and the unsatisfying combat leaves Galerians: Ash failing to engage at any point.

This is the first time EA BIG have gotten the mix between style and substance truly wrong. But that's what you get for listening to the marketing department - and not the gamers.

We're hugely disappointed in this utterly botched effort by Sega. What should have been the revival of a classic franchise has been turned into a poor rip-off of a Capcom title that wasn't even the dog's bollocks in the first place.

The basic toilet humour running through the piece can't hide the short-lived gameplay, and leads to an extremely unfulfilling and tiresome experience that any sane person would be hard-pressed to push on with.

Apocalyptica's lazy design and sheer lack of imagination is more than enough to ruin any chance it had of developing the relatively interesting premise. Forgive Konami, father, for they have sinned.

X manages to fail on almost every level.

A total waste of a fantastic licence - incredibly anti-climactic, a mere six hours long, full of uninspired levels and identikit enemies, and achingly tedious to play. Once finished I had to quickly uninstall it lest I ever accidentally clicked on that hateful icon again.

It's one of those games that seems to be actively trying to bore or frustrate you at every turn, and it's so charmless and poorly designed that it makes you wonder whether it was just that nobody had the heart to say anything.

Catwoman becomes beyond sloppy. Ultra-sloppy, if you will. Like the Houston 500, right men?

It's one of those games that reminds you how far we've come over the years, because it's just full of the old bad design habits that we all used to take for granted.

You've lost a lot of respect and you've ruined the enjoyment of hundreds of your admirers. Look me in the eye and tell me you're not ashamed.

It's no fun to drive, and in fact driving itself is something of a challenge. On top of that, having begun life on other formats (including N-Gage), it makes only a token gesture to adapt to the DS's featureset, allowing you to navigate menus but do nothing else with the stylus, allowing wireless multiplay but demanding multiple copies of the game, and using the bottom screen for little more than a topographical overview of the course with markers for each car.

In short, there's no real feeling of accomplishment when you level up, which means there's no real incentive to do anything other than belt through levels in a bid to get them over with quickly and move on.

This is a superhero game that actually makes you hate the superhero you're playing as for their rubbish attacking skills, poor movement and general refusal to do what they're told.

Is it unfair to demand £19.99 for something that's as unfinished, badly designed and devoid of deliberate entertainment value as Aurora Watching? Definitely.

The inclusion of some unlockable Tekken characters and a slightly more balanced multiplayer mode might be enough to give you a fix if you do absolutely nothing else in life but play beat-'em-ups and you've actually run out, but otherwise there's no reason to take an interest.

Unfortunately, while the movie's version of piracy is a picturesque mixture of high-adventuring, quick-witted, swashbuckling derring-do, The Legend of Jack Sparrow is a weak mixture of low-brow, quick cash-in, button-bashing doggy-do.

A wasted opportunity; one that turns your anger to frustration then to plain, empty sadness.

Despite being two-thirds the price of most DS games, it's still not worth it. You'd be far better off having a wash and going to a friend's house for an unfriendly, loud, fight-inducing game of poker, where at least everything can descend into betting on Mousetrap.

But it’s not fun, and it’s certainly not worth the effort. The DS, as hopefully this constructive and helpful review will have shown, is the perfect medium for recreating management sims. Just not this time.

Superman Returns is so criminally lacking in any inspiration, though, and is such a dismal waste of the licence that you'll want to curl up and rock yourself into a trance. At least then your mind can entertain you with thoughts of what a good Superman game might be like.

This truly is a game wallowing in the mire of generic, insipid, uninspiring platformers, and unable to see any easy way out. Whenever there is an opportunity for it to do something interesting or different, it disappoints by not doing it and returning to predictable form.

Should you want to, you can almost play Monopoly, Boggle, Yahtzee and Battleships on it. Just in a really tacky, and depressingly lonely way. And you might want to take advantage of the wireless multiplayer, but really that just makes you weird. Play proper board games if you're in the same room, for goodness sakes. It's a lazy mess, and you deserve better.

What really nails it to the ground and steps on its throat for Eurogamers is the localisation: now the characters are impossible to relate to or to understand, the plot is unrecognisable (mercifully, as there is no deviation of play paths you don't actually have to know what's going on to know where to go next) and the sparkles of flair that clearly were in the original, now dulled and obscured by wrongly assigned words.

Microsoft's Live Arcade offerings are generally well worth the asking price, but Feeding Frenzy, sadly, isn't one of them.

But while Arc has obviously attempted a Super Smash Bros-style game within the Guilty Gear universe, the end result is something truly horrendous.

There's nothing wrong with using a brand name to sell you game, unless that game happens to be among the most uninspired beat 'em ups released in several years. If you remember Activision's "Minority Report" game, then this is about as good as that.

It's not so broken it's completely unplayable, but it's not even basic enough to warrant trying to satisfy an hour's curiosity.

It could have been an interesting title but the problems with control, weird gameplay style, terrible graphics and rigged, repetitive games just kill any joy that would be garnered from playing it.

SEGA might as well have released this as The Adventures of Fiery Boob Lady, and left their mothballed franchise with at least modicum of dignity.

As we perch on the cusp of a bold new console generation there's simply no justification for games this anaemic and sloppy, especially at full price. Even in its best moments, The Sopranos is dull, shallow and repetitive - a game already five years past its sell-by date.

It's an exercise in frustration and annoyance, and the payoffs aren't worth it - nothing you unlock makes this game any fun.

It's the sort of bland shooter that if you tried it on MAME you'd barely give it a second look - so why does anyone think that gamers will part with 400 points for it? Sometimes the past is better off left alone.

Movement is on the analogue nub, camera controls on the face buttons. It's a system that has worked okay for other PSP shooters, but there's a stiffness here that makes it feel more like Super Treacle Squad than a simulation of impeccably-trained Special Ops.

You wouldn't think it possible, but cartoon games have an even worse track record than film adaptations. South Park, Futurama, The Simpsons - all have debased themselves thoroughly when making the leap from telly to joypad. And yet even by those low standards, Family Guy is a pretty desperate experience.

505 Game Street has been commercially smart to jump aboard the Brain Training bandwagon quickly, but it has made a huge mistake in throwing a faceless copycat effort out there. Hopefully people will not be remotely fooled - we're certainly not.

It's a sub-par offering in almost every respect, chock full of insipid, charmless, half-baked zero-fun games that would embarrass a start-up indie studio.

The activities are largely pointless, gratuitous exercises in showing off the girls in their bikinis, and any attempt to give the game some sort of justifiable kleptomaniacal purpose is beyond insulting - even to serial wankers.

Frankly terrible considering the rich potential the Wii controller offers for games of this ilk.

The bottom line is that the core gameplay is tedious beyond belief - so much so that I doubt you'd even get value from renting it.

The nagging question is why on earth should a second-rate FPS game that's so indebted to its peers - and one of which, in the case of BF2, does a persistent character thing for free - think it can get away with demanding a subscription fee for any of its content? Answer: It really can't.

The characters make annoying noises all the time and their hit-and-miss one-liners are repeated too often. All in all Acme Arsenal is a chore to play, even if you're...

The worst kind of licensed game: utterly ignorant of the series' charms it's designed to complement, and bad enough at what it does attempt to make baby Hera cry.

A very short, and very dull, brawler. Double Dragon does include some nice "extras" - configurable controls, and some arcade flyers, which should be worth an extra point, but throws the point away with quite possibly the worst (unstoppable) menu music I have ever heard in my entire life.

To produce a technically sloppy title is one thing, but the game is horribly flawed from conception to execution in a way we haven't seen since, ulp, Driv3r. Marred by a remarkably vacuous combat system, the pathetic driving and undercooked flying elements merely underline what a thoroughly wasted opportunity this was.

To produce a technically sloppy title is one thing, but the game is horribly flawed from conception to execution in a way we haven't seen since, ulp, Driv3r. Marred by a remarkably vacuous combat system, the pathetic driving and undercooked flying elements merely underline what a thoroughly wasted opportunity this was.

As the back of the box says: Identify (that the game's a bit rubbish). Eliminate (it off your shopping list). Survive (with your dignity intact).

Wing Commander Arena is a rudimentary shooter, the sort of thing that might have passed muster as a homebrew PC title ten years ago, but an unimpressive trudge for console gamers today.

The ideas aren't all bad and on paper this must have sounded like a rich and promising game. However, the game far overreaches itself and the coding, visuals and execution of those ideas is comprehensively unpolished.

Turtles is about as shallow as gaming gets, with even less to offer than Renegade, a game already three years old by the time this hit the arcade...Even at 400 points, that's pretty shoddy value.

If Churchill had died, we might all be speaking German, but at least we wouldn't have to put up with nonsense like this.

As Tenchu Z is already outclassed in every area by last generation stealth games like "Metal Gear Solid 2," it fails almost completely when stacked up against "Hitman: Blood Money," "Splinter Cell: Double Agent" or upcoming treats like "Assassin's Creed."

Poor controls, lacklustre source material and almost non-existent extras all combine to make this one to avoid unless you have a particularly nostalgic longing for this particular slice of gaming antiquity.

The combat's inexcusably awful. The duelling is absolutely mind-numbingly uninspired. The platforming and exploration feel tacked-on, overly basic and adds little variety, and the fetch quests plumb new depths in their tedious pointlessness...One of the most dreadfully vacuous and uninspired movie tie-ins in recent memory.

It's a crude and unappealing game, marred by at least three design decisions (the scrolling, the time-limited weapons, the long-winded upgrade system) that immediately make the gameplay a grind rather than a blast.

Some of the most renowned old games ever have a terrible knack of ageing horribly. Take Gyruss. By virtue of the fact that it was created by Yoshiki 'Street Fighter 2/Final Fight' Okamoto in 1983, it appears to have been granted a disproportionate level of historical interest, despite not actually being anything special in its own right.

Then there's the combat. It's messy. You'll fling ranged spells at enemies and they'll mysteriously miss, presumably due to line-of-sight issues, but it's difficult to tell. Even melee combat seems buggy at times, with monsters you can't hit even though they're stood right next to you.