As part of the Guild portmanteau it's a curio that earns its place, an eccentric exercise whose existence you can't help but be grateful for. Torn away from its more substantial partners, though, it never does enough to stand out on its own.

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

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.

For all the control innovations that come tantalisingly close to solving the riddle of joypad RTS play, Universe at War is constantly blighted by unforgivable slowdown that, at its worst, all but breaks the game.

Overall, despite the admittedly sloppy combat, Kuon manages miraculously to be even less than the sum of all its parts, diminishing and lowering the playability of the game as a whole.

EA has shoe-horned a PS2 game onto the Wii with little thought for what the platform is actually meant to do, and lo and behold - the result is a distinctly below average, derivative, boring and badly implemented mess.

Final Fantasy II was a poor videogame in 1988 and no amount of spit and polish will perform the necessary shifts to its foundations to produce a good one in 2007.

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.

The basic Lemmings meets Itchy & Scratchy idea is sound, but the final product feels half-baked.

Fun and challenging swordplay can't make up for bland and repetitive action between behemoths, making this far from the epic adventure it wants to be.

At its best, Tengami is something you want to freeze-frame and hang on the wall. For a video game, that shouldn't be taken as a compliment.

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.

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.

Your veritable cast iron "mixed bag" of timeless gems and pointless curios in which some work well on the DS, some don't and as long as you can deny all knowledge of seeing the Remix mode retro gamers won't be totally offended.

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.

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.

The most absurd thing about this game - where all the scenery explodes, where one of the characters is big and green, where you can hurl cars at people - is that it thinks it deserves either your time or your money.

Remember how it once was in its proud mid '90s heyday, not what it's become: a relentless, lazy cash-cow to lure in unwary souls drunk on memories.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Even huge fans of the originals are likely to be disappointed by Fare Wars.

There is a place for more substantial 3D games like this on the platform but Street Trace: NYC provides nothing to recommend itself over the slew of more tightly focussed and expressed rivals on the platform.

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead takes some very usable source material and fails to do much with it.

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.

The Football Playbook is unlikely to live long in the memory: it may be a reasonable proof of concept, but it's a long way from the beautiful game.

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

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

Unless you're astonishingly tolerant of technical and interface problems, and totally addicted to dull hack-and-slash RPG combat, don't buy this game. Forsooth.

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

It's hard, though, to shake the feeling that the only reason this game is free to play is that nobody would pay money for something so scrappy and generic.

If Alien Hallway bothered to adopt the 'lanes' system of PvZ, it might have worked, but instead this headlong battle quickly descends into a repetitive brawl of little consequence.

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.

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

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

I'm all in favour of games that transport us back to the good old days of vibrant originality, but Knack simply doesn't.

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.

If you don't have a Dungeons and Dragons background, the game will seem impenetrable and dull - and even players of the tabletop game will appreciate the detail, but hate the incredibly clumsy interface and lack of information and feedback.

A dreadful game.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's worse than ATV console games, thanks to a poor control system that's seemingly been designed with little thought for how the PSP itself is designed.

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.

Regardless of it being very hard to picture how its tedious, clumsy mechanics could possibly evolve into something fluid and entertaining, any game that puts you through a good 15 or 20 hours of overwhelming despair to get to even a chance of something worthwhile - which the server-wide near-silence suggests actually isn't, and certainly won't be until if and when there are enough players to populate large-scale tussles - is a failure.

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.

But despite its hugely endearing premise, the dizzying, chaotic novelty soon turns into a muddled scrimmage where success tends to be measured as much in luck as in skill.

There's the Mario Kart-esque attacks. An immediately obviously very stupid idea. And they're so poorly integrated that they destroy everything in their path.

Simply by staggering across the finish line first, Bound By Flame may seem to be an attractive proposition for PS4 RPG fans, but don't be fooled. With its shonky cut-scenes, its outdoor sound effects that play indoors and its linear maps, this is in no way a current-gen experience. It's a budget offering at a premium price - and a poor one at that.

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.

More to the point, why would you consider spending £4.50 on the gaming equivalent of pairing socks? I'm not sure even the developer, Intense, has the answer to that one.

Alien Syndrome had the potential to be a decent by-the-numbers action RPG, but it struggles to even reach those heights with insipid repetition and a total lack of challenge crippling your incentive to see it beyond the first few hours.

It's one thing to churn out the same game ten years after it was made. It's another to churn out an inferior version and charge people full whack for it.

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

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.

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.

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

Judged purely on its own merits on this platform it looks like it might be vaguely interesting, but all too soon you're dragged into the real world and forced to acknowledge that despite its warm touches of humour, the hackandslash action is nowhere near the standard we expect from a full-priced game these days.

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.

Absolute masochists might be able to sift through the pointless junk crudely glued onto the Rainbow Islands concept, and manage to find enough of the original's appeal to justify the time and expense but in a world where Taito Legends is readily available, offering the rather wonderful untouched arcade classic along with many others worthy of your attention for a fraction of the price, why would you even want to bother with this garish mockery?

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.

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

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.

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

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

Spaceforce can't be recommended despite some interesting ideas.

Chromehounds is really, really, really boring to play...Not one that I can imagine Xbox 360 players sticking with for more than a handful of hours tops, no matter how starved they are for new releases at the moment.

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.

Planet Coaster 2's flexible creation tools are as compulsive as ever, but the fun butts up against an exhausting UI, uninspired management gameplay, and conspicuous content gaps that feel like cynical spaces for DLC.

There's not much to like about SWAT: Target Liberty. The squad-based mechanic is imbalanced. The levelling-up and weapon selection systems don't have significant effects on how things play out. The plot is silly, the cut-scenes are rubbish and everything's so small it makes your eyes hurt.

A gentle cadence and quirky characters can't counter Mythwrecked's repetitiveness, making this more Greek tragedy than odyssey.

Bulletproof reads revelations from the Bible of production but knows almost no game. It's superficially slick, with its bling'd up 50 Cent avatar and glitzy rap, but really it's a third-person shooter that stumbles well under the benchmarks set for the PS2.

It might look a little like Yoshi's Island, then, but it's a worse game in every regard. 19 years on from the original, its design has been denuded of almost everything that made it great: a series once fecund with ideas is now coasting on past glories.

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'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.

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.

To be presented with this utterly misguided and ill-conceived attempt to reinvent one of the best strategy-RPG series of the last two decades seems criminal and unfair. It’s a mammoth level grind, bringing together some of the action-RPG genre’s very worst conventions while leaving out some of the best.

Stood next to any of the better games of the year, Gungrave feels like a depressingly hollow experience designed to showcase some nifty graphics.

Beautiful music, cute visuals, and a peculiarly charming attitude make you want to like it. Recognising that it's aimed at younger players makes you want to forgive it. But it cannot be denied that this is a big ol' mess of nice ideas executed badly, with the most important ingredient completely missing.

A competent entry with some poorly executed ideas and a striking lack of personality.

Great ideas and a storied history are mired in mediocre combat and a disappointingly unpolished delivery.

The combat's weak, the storyline's excruciating, it's technically deficient - Haze really is this year's most significant gaming disappointment.

Xevious has been bettered hundreds of times over down the years, and only the most diehard retro fiend will want to part with their cash for this now.

It would be easy to score this game as plain mediocre. After all, it essentially works, displays a misguided and seemingly half-hearted attempt at innovation, looks pleasant enough, passes the time and will likely meet the low expectations of its surprisingly large fanbase. But should such calculating mediocrity be continually excused?

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.

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.

Instead of the kind of solid, varied combat which the RTS genre has been steadily evolving towards over the years, Ancient Wars: Sparta falls back on resource management for its core gameplay. Distressingly, this is a sub-"Age Of Empires" affair which rapidly becomes a chore.

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.

Maps are too long and slow-paced when they should be frenetic and bite-sized.

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.

It's a game that strains for profundity and meaning - that's particularly evident in its Trophy titles - but finds them ever beyond its grasp. Some will be soothed by its contemplative mood, others will relish the challenge of mastering those devious patterns, but to me the two felt like an awkward mismatch.

Anybody who remembers the good old days of Contra should steer clear of Shattered Soldier, unless you have some sort of sadistic urge to lay waste to your senses and pollute your fond recollections of this once proud series.

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.

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.

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.

In short, there isn't much reason to buy it - however much you love monkeys. And we love monkeys, which makes us even more cross.