Chronically poor AI and a lack of challenge aren't the only problems Code of Honor suffers from. The levels are highly linear and feel artificial, with areas boxed in by fences, barbed wire and impenetrable bushes.

The basic mechanics are tedious, and they don't even work properly. To get much value out of this you'd have to be a serious Austen buff, or a really hardcore fan of finding stuff hidden behind other stuff.

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.

This isn't how nostalgia is supposed to feel.

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.

I wouldn't give Strike Suit Zero to my dog - and he can't even play video games.

Low-budget games can be delightful and surprising, but only if the core elements work. Here, they don't. In its best moments, this is only ever a reminder of better games. In its worst moments - of which there are far too many - Dark frustrates and irritates as only a clumsy stealth game can.

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.

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.

Insultingly simple and clumsy Live Arcade puzzle game, unworthy of your time.

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.

This isn't how nostalgia is supposed to feel.

Even on the most basic level it fails to drag itself out of the mire, with haphazard handling and regrettable collision detection conspiring to ensure that any enjoyment you eke out of it will be entirely coincidental.

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.

It's repetitive, disposable and artificially inflated. Most of all it's frustrating: frustrating because of the poor execution of a promising concept and because it's nowhere near the game that it could have been.

No-one cared when this was released on PSP in summer 2009, and they certainly won't give a flying fig about it now.

In the end, you feel every year of Duke Nukem Forever's ridiculous, fractured development seeping out of each unsatisfying frame.

There's a good game somewhere within Real Racing 3 - and there are plenty of free-to-play games that prove this model can work successfully while respecting the player. Firemonkeys, and perhaps more pertinently EA, have got that balance horribly, horribly wrong, to an extent where the business model becomes the game - with gut-wrenching results.

Its mediocre visuals will tax your PC like an Inland Revenue man hopped up on crack; we had to scale the settings right down in order to make it remotely playable, and even then it crashed us back to the desktop with depressing regularity. Perhaps it was trying to tell us something.

Nobody cared about yet another shovelware DS game like this cluttering up the shelves. "Why don't you all just buy the books instead if you're so interested?" he thought.

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.

The tasteful, minimalist aquatic theme of Art Style: Aquite appears designed to offset what is actually a rather tedious sorting game.

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.

Oh, Haemimont. You've broken my heart...Omerta: City of Gangsters is patchy and clunky, but it's also dull and frustrating.

Light should be better than it is, but it was doomed from the start. Very few great stories have come from such an uninspired setting, and hiding all empathy and humanity behind a haughty desire for a slick minimalism doesn't help.

Capcom fans deserve so much better than this.

Painfully thin.

A visually stunning, dreadfully fussy and cruelly unsatisfying hardcore game - one that does very little indeed to reward the near-infinite levels of patience required to get anywhere close to the value of your time or money.

Ready 2 Rumble Revolution has botched controls, faulty technology and unsympathetic style, but I suspect there's a half-decent arcade fighter residing somewhere underneath it all. Even if there is, though, it'll need to go back to the gym for some serious work before showing its face in the ring again. As it is, it dances like a buffalo and stings like wet cabbage.

Yes it's simple and probably meant for kids, and you can get a small amount of fun out of Wrestlemania 21 for a relatively short period of time, but behind the shiny superstars it has a pork pie for a brain. That's the most positive thing we can say, sadly.

Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad might have been enjoyable, in a silly, disposable way, if the gameplay was halfway decent. It isn't, and not even the nicest bottom in the world can make up for that.

The cinematic cut-scenes are poorly voiced, the characters unconvincing, and the plot is so-so at best.

It's such a shame that Nintendo - the creator of Mario Kart, which is arguably the most fun you can have with platonic friends - just can't seem to sort Mario Party's problems out, even for the seventh instalment in the series. Roll on number eight, eh.

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.

There are undoubtedly excellent ideas hiding behind the scenes; they're just stymied by the method of execution.

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.

I'm certainly not averse to this sort of thing appearing on WiiWare but My Aquarium feels like half an idea, lazily executed. If you like the idea of a virtual fish-tank, and don't mind that your input is minimal, then the price is about as right as it'll ever get for this sort of thing.

The pointlessly respawning (and stubborn) enemies quickly become a tedious pain in the arse, the combat mechanics feel redundant, limited and stuck in the past, and the whole locked door/find key/backtrack game design feels utterly stale too.

It has some redeeming features and won't be the most depressing footballing experience most of us endure in the next 30 days, but rather like most professional footballers, it would do better to focus more on its football than the surrounding pageantry - and on the pitch it can't even get the accents right.

The results feel neutered and unfinished.

Off Road is not as hateful as, say, RealPlay Racing, but you still shouldn't buy it.

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.

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

To make matter worse, the race will stop dead at certain points to forcibly initiate a mini-game in the guise of one of Dastardly and Muttley's futile foils.

Right from first touch, it's clear that Republic Heroes hasn't undergone nearly enough of this sort of testing, and the uninspired foundations are further compromised as they are built upon. As a result, this is a product that will make children frustrated and unhappy, the very opposite of that to which Star Wars should aspire.

A thoroughly unnecessary isometric brawler that ranks alongside Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean as being one of the worst uses of a high profile license we've seen this year.

The simple, unpalatable, grisly truth for everyone connected to this important summer blockbusting title is that it's so far away from being the title it deserved to be, it could well be reflected upon as one of the biggest disappointments in the history of videogames.

A wonky also-ran.

It's too complex for a party game; you try explaining the importance of ball choice and oil patterns to small children or drunk people.

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

For 25 quid, you could hire Richard Blackwood and Daniel Bedingfield for the afternoon and still have change for an egg sandwich, a Panda Pops and the bus to Lewisham Travelodge. You'd have more fun.

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...

Graphically assured as it is, almost every other element of the 15-year-old series has been cut back, tampered with pointlessly or outright ruined. The series hasn't been good for a long time now, but this year is the first it's been actively bad. The wait for a great new WWE game continues.

A wonky also-ran.

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

Sight Training is no fun. There's not enough to do and what there is to do is tedious. It's hard to believe it improves your visual abilities any more than eating carrots makes you see in the dark.

There's very little challenge or strategy, and very little imagination has gone into anything besides the visuals, which were done by other people anyway. Xbox 360 wasn't a good system for kids and families before this came out, and nothing's changed. Teach them to play Viva Piñata instead.

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.

The idea of an interactive comic as narrative expansion is a sound one, but Ignition entirely fails to do the concept justice.

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.

A tiresome waste of a strong license, only the most blinkered fan will derive pleasure from this slog of an experience filled with wrong-headed design decisions intended to pad out a game that cannot sustain expansion.

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

The idea of an interactive comic as narrative expansion is a sound one, but Ignition entirely fails to do the concept justice.

The game looks rubbish and is dull to play. Flicking a Wii remote might be more like throwing a dart than pressing a button but it's not much more fun. The novelty wears off in about the same amount of time it takes to throw a dart. Toss.

The sad truth is that there are better looking, better designed twin-stick shooters on the Indie Games channel for a fraction of the price, produced by inspired individuals who have moved on from Beat the Blockoids. Give them your Microsoft Points instead.

In short, EA Playground is fun for neither kids nor adults. The mini-games don't have the depth of those in Wii Sports or the quirky innovations of those in Wario Ware. The visuals don't have the appeal or charm of a Disney/Pixar game, or even that one about the puppets in the garden Tom likes so much.

The mini-games do work, and if your idea of a good time is indeed struggling to put on clown make-up on or saw a virtual plank in half you might enjoy them. But I have no idea who you are.

To call Lost Swords a failed experiment would be an insult to every ambitious game that fell flat on its face. It feels like Namco put barely any thought into making the not-so-micro-transactions justifiable or even making sure that the single-player focus felt consistently engaging.

Right from first touch, it's clear that Republic Heroes hasn't undergone nearly enough of this sort of testing, and the uninspired foundations are further compromised as they are built upon. As a result, this is a product that will make children frustrated and unhappy, the very opposite of that to which Star Wars should aspire.

Once the novelty of the game concept has worn off, which doesn't take long, the frustration caused by the controls really kicks in.

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.

It wasn't appropriate to make a GBA Dynasty Warriors, and the inevitable disappointment of an already extremely tired series has been fully realised.

All it had to do was actually simulate farming. That, apparently, is too much to ask from a game called Farming Simulator. In its own weird way, the complete lack of ambition shown by this underdog has disappointed me more than any lacklustre blockbuster ever will.

FlingSmash's title might be short, snappy and to the point, but the game itself only manages the first of those three.

I expected better from Terminal Reality. Ghostbusters wasn't quite the real deal, but it suggested a studio that could go on to much better things - and then Kinect Star Wars, and now this. If you don't want The Walking Dead tarnished forever, then avoid Survival Instinct: it is simple hackwork, fan exploitation at its most crude.

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.

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.

The sad truth is, if you already have a Wii, you've already got a better boxing title in the shape of Wii Sports - a game that not only allows you to pummel away at a cartoon representation of your sister, but also effortlessly possesses more charm, more wit, and - worryingly - a lot more precision than anything this can offer.

If you want to play with chums, you're going to have to reselect your gang for every two-minute game, as the interface will dump you all back in the wild as soon as it's over. Easier is jumping in with strangers, but none of the tracks/games hold enough allure to inspire much of this.

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

It's dull, it's lacklustre, and it entirely betrays the series' name by having no perceptible sense of speed.

If it's erotic imagery you're after, just get some porn. The visuals will be more realistic, the acting will be better and the plot will make more sense.

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.

Hopefully this is the last we'll see of the human d-pad experiment. I spend enough time under the thumb as it is.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Small and fussy, Storm of Vengeance crudely pastes Warhammer 40K branding on top of a thin and generic one-button mobile game framework. What depth it does offer is limited in scope and too often obscured by game mechanics that become irritating or repetitive almost immediately. It's simply no fun to play.

For everything else in its amazing catalogue of flaws, errors and catastrophes, though, the biggest problem is that the game just stops whenever you can't work out what to do.

There's no excuse to the get the basics this wrong and there's no reason why slicing your way through a wall of enemies shouldn't be fun. Yet there's nothing that's fun here, only a monotonous bloody grind that copies everything from its peers except their polish.

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.

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.

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).

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 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.

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