Xiaolin Showdown has the elements of a good game, but the execution is so sloppy and shallow that it ends up falling flat.

In short, the Brain Boost games are curt, emotionless, audacious, and as a tool for self-improvement, a little bit pointless.

Just one big, frustrating mess. It looks bad, it sounds worse, and you'll be wishing you were playing almost anything else by the end of the first level.

There's simply nothing redeeming about Acme Arsenal. It's an incredibly poor, woefully unentertaining use of a great license, and an absolute bore to play. It doesn't get nearly enough right to be anywhere close to average, and becomes its own worst enemy with a cavalcade of embarrassing glitches.

As I painfully maneuvered my Charlie from room to room, I grew more and more desperate in my attempt to find redeeming qualities in the game.

It's being sold now for $20. In a week, when they are selling it for $4.99, it will still be overpriced.

I wouldn't recommend Turning Point to anyone, under any circumstances...and if that's not the definition of utter failure, I don't know what is.

And while it's true that every brain training game is probably assisted with a healthy dose of pseudoscience, it's Brain Boost that shows its seams the most. And because of that, Brain Boost feels the most condescending.

As I painfully maneuvered my Charlie from room to room, I grew more and more desperate in my attempt to find redeeming qualities in the game.

Pandering to every college student and aspiring rap artist's deep-seated Scarface fantasies, 25 to Life is a 3D action-shooter that not only fails to innovate on any level, but rolls back design and technological advancements to the early PSone era.

The miserable camera system often zooms in too close to see what you're doing, or makes it impossible to see a necessary location without moving.

You'll spend so much time fighting the Wii Remote and accidentally building towers in the wrong places that you might as well just go to a backyard sandbox or actual beach.

So yeah, it's stupid. It's brutally stupid, to be honest. But "Underpants Deadguy Cutters: Ultimate Tittykill" has enough game to keep you going for a few days, and it sells for twenty bucks less than usual. Honestly, I don't know why big breasted women wading through gallons of blood took so long to get to America.

But decent tech is all for naught when paired with a bland and embarrassingly brief experience like Tony Hawk's Motion, which contains just four settings (two each for skate and snow), each with five total objectives.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor isn't without its charms, but it's hard to believe that the younger target audience will wade through the difficulty spikes to see the convoluted narrative to its conclusion.

But when the game's core mechanics are middling at best, dragging other players into it is just asking for a reputation downgrade. When the world has so many better games to offer, you have to ask yourself "Why play this?"

The miserable camera system often zooms in too close to see what you're doing, or makes it impossible to see a necessary location without moving.

So much in this game speaks to either a lack of time or pure laziness on the part of the developers.

There's simply nothing redeeming about Acme Arsenal. It's an incredibly poor, woefully unentertaining use of a great license, and an absolute bore to play. It doesn't get nearly enough right to be anywhere close to average, and becomes its own worst enemy with a cavalcade of embarrassing glitches.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor isn't without its charms, but it's hard to believe that the younger target audience will wade through the difficulty spikes to see the convoluted narrative to its conclusion.

If you play the game on 360, there's a Kinect mode that consists of a series of gameplay challenges (hold out against the Death Eaters chief among them), but the implementation is awful.

The core problem with Napoleon Dynamite: The Game is that it totally disregards the humor of the film (and, as such, of the audience it's attempting to reach). The whole joke of Napoleon Dynamite was that Jon Heder's titular character constantly claims to have more skill than he actually possesses. In the game, you have all that skill and more.

If Pocket Pool developer Hyper-Devbox were really smart, it would stop beating around the bush and come up with an Official PSP Porn Viewer, with all the bells and whistles you'd expect from iPhoto. Masquerading this nonsense around as a game that people are expected to pay money for when pool halls are cheap, photos of women are free, and good PSP games are plentiful -- well, it's embarrassing for everyone involved.

It's a surprisingly silent, boring affair, and you're probably better off just watching the ATHF clips with your pal, or one of the four full episodes included on the disc (one of which has never been aired, and is awesome).

An example of just how much the little details matter in game design. They're what make Gears of War work so well, and where Quantum Theory stumbles just too often to be worth much of anyone's time. The experience of playing it is something like watching a student copy off of an answer sheet for a test...and somehow getting the answers wrong, anyway.

Uneven production values have wound up creating one of the cleanest and quietest "gritty" games ever. While the fighting environments are rich with lots of detail and natural lighting, they also appear to have janitors on duty 24/7.

From looking at it you'd probably never guess it was an Unreal Engine game. It lacks any real distinguishing features, struggles to run smoothly in places, and, aside from a few nice special effects, never remotely approaches the expected visual impact.

If you don't have the resources to do something like Rocky and Bullwinkle justice, don't bother making a game at all.