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

The marriage of XBLA and boxed game is a nice idea, but the Pub Games themselves are lightweight and boring, and the potential benefits for Fable 2 players are the sorts of things typically bundled on Collector's Edition bonus disks in the first place - and typically overlooked by the majority of players who can think of better ways to spend the extra money.

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

Although you can excuse Sega for trying it on with a true classic like Sonic, foisting dated crap like Ecco on us yet again feels like a monumental waste of everyone's time. Download the free trial if you must, but don't even think about parting with your hard-earned cash for this. It might still look pretty, but Ecco plays like a dog.

The game only offers a couple of hours' entertainment and they'd be better spent watching the TV show or one of the films, or trawling the Internet for erotic Wesley Crusher fan fiction.

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.

Offering all the satisfaction of flossing with overcooked spaghetti, FIFA 11 provides an object lesson in how not to make a football title for mobile platforms.

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.

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.

Big Willy Unleashed is toss. The controls make playing the game feel like trying to do the washing-up with a pair of chopsticks, using clogs instead of rubber gloves. It looks revolting. The script is appalling.

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.

If you harbour kleptomaniacal tendencies and find curvy polygons racier than we do, then the increasingly repetitive bouts of volleyball and weakness in the rest of the package won't bother you.

When Soldier of Fortune Payback isn't being generic and shallow, its being utterly crap and thus does nothing to mitigate its gleeful and deliberate xenophobia.

Players wanting an exciting, fast-paced, on-rails light gun shooter on the Wii are far better served by SEGA's Ghost Squad and House of the Dead: Overkill. The developer's failure to fully embrace the arcade approach ensures this game serves no-one, least of all its tired licence.

Just consider the gorgeous and stunning packages of Resident Evil, Maximo, Devil May Cry or Killer 7. How are we supposed to accept this unpleasant lump of gristle in comparison?

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 strong sense of character is let down by poor controls, fiddly implementation, and bugs.

Were your movements less plodding, the weapons a bit meatier, the enemies even basically tactical, the story and dialogue more than perfunctory, the environments remotely imaginative, or the co-operative mode online-enabled, Terminator Salvation would still be far too rough around the edges, far too short, and far too cynical to withstand much critical inspection, but as it is, it's rubbish on virtually every count.

A terrible mess.

I gave up after trying three of the six short races and the simple shooting and collecting mini-games. Life's too short. I'm never going back, and God forbid gathering people together for the multi-player mode. If the controls don't kill me, the irritating farting ditty in the background just might. That's the last time I play this dreadful excuse for a racing game.

Perhaps it's because death is only a temporary setback that arbitrary cold-blooded massacres of innocents are met with a gaming blind eye.

Archaic and lethargic, The Expendables 2 seems far more likely to break a hip than a sweat.

Every aspect - from concept to execution - is so sorely flawed as to make even "GoldenEye: Rogue Agent" blush and to find a game so virtually meritless in this day and age is a rare thing indeed.

To describe what EA has produced here as dreadful would be to do a terrible disservice to things that merely inspire dread.

The designers didn't love this game, they just threw together poorly understood ideas from other games like "Halo" and "Half-Life" so that the management chimps responsible for the project could be satisfied that it was ripping off popular products.

Dogz isn't just a poor man's "Nintendogs" - it's a fundamentally rubbish game, regardless of the competition. Put simply, there's just not enough to do, and it's so repetitive that it's hard to see how even very young children could be entertained for more than half an hour or so.

The most striking thing about SOE2 is its tragic pointlessness. As a sequel in a franchise that is almost entirely unloved, in a world where there are countless games which do any part of this game better, it's sad to think that a group of people developed it, because then we'd have to blame them for putting out such a diabolical piece of cack.

The Eternity Clock is shambolic and underfed, even by the Timelord's previous low gaming standards.

The dreaded bottom line is that we've seen it all before, and much, much better.

The critical requirements of a Monster Rancher title, that monster-raising be streamlined and rewarding, and the RPG sections be challenging and playable, are miserably out of reach for Monster Rancher EVO, with almost every part of the title a confusing, tedious mess that should make the average player ill with boredom.

Spectacularly miserable licensed fare - a tie-in game that recalls the bad old days when a movie title was leased out to some mom-and-pop developer in the middle of Siberia and put together with the help of a broken woollen loom and old chopsticks.

Since you can pretty much exhaust the available gameplay within half an hour of switching the DS on, it seems likely that this curiously half-baked compilation was simply a way for Activision to use the Tony Hawk brand to get their motion sensing peripheral into the market. Yet so flimsy are the games that it feels like they simply bundled the internal tech demos designed to test the hardware and dressed it up as a commercial game.

Amy fails on all counts. It's plagued by jerky movement, poor scripting, weak puzzles and shoddy checkpointing, but it's also a characterless mess of themes and ideas swiped from a dozen better horror titles. Neither quirky enough to be forgiven its unfinished feel nor polished enough to satisfy the base gaming itch, Amy is a crushing disappointment with little to recommend it.

Watchmen Part 2 therefore manages the rather impressive feat of actually being a worse game than its bone-headed predecessor.

A serviceable tactics game lumbered with an uninspiring setting and narrative, brought right down by bigoted stereotypes.

The games are irritating and forgettable, the scoring system is bizarre, the play modes make no sense and the constantly shrill urban-cartoon-hipster presentation feels like some ninja chav just injected a pint of boiling hot Red Bull into your eyeballs.

A fundamentally broken game, riddled with graphical glitches and bizarre bugs, that doesn't even have the good grace to be a fascinating failure. For all its yelps and screeches, it's deathly dull to play and so there's no incentive to suffer its idiosyncrasies.

My wife insisted on having a play as she was intrigued by the idea, although after five short minutes she declared, "What the hell's the point of this?" and went back to playing The Sims 2. Which just about sums it all up, really.

But the really depressing thing about PlayFirst's spirit-crushing little game is that it'll probably sell enough to result in a deluge of the bloody things, and force us to question the sanity of mankind. Again.

But the really depressing thing about PlayFirst's spirit-crushing little game is that it'll probably sell enough to result in a deluge of the bloody things, and force us to question the sanity of mankind. Again.

By favouring tired run-and-gun scenarios over actual sniping gameplay, you're left with a technically inept entry in the most over-populated gaming genre around. Show some mercy, put one in the back of its head, and leave it for the vultures.

Were your movements less plodding, the weapons a bit meatier, the enemies even basically tactical, the story and dialogue more than perfunctory, the environments remotely imaginative, or the co-operative mode online-enabled, Terminator Salvation would still be far too rough around the edges, far too short, and far too cynical to withstand much critical inspection, but as it is, it's rubbish on virtually every count.

Even the most ardent JRPG fan will baulk at the roughshod simplicity of the game's systems, restricting the game's audience to Japanophile anime fans who can overlook the experiences shortcomings as a videogame and approach it as a cultural curio. That is, a sexist, senseless and ultimately stupid cultural curio.

You'll flail your way half-heartedly through a miserable procession of encounters, against enemies that seem as thrilled to be there as you. In between, you'll weave through generic platform negotiation sections, before inevitably being forced to dispatch another prescribed gaggle of bored foes and, gasp, maybe a boss.

It's not funny, it's not fun to play and it's less erotic than psoriasis. As the Smurfs would say: **** off, Larry.

The sooner Gameloft stops wasting its considerable resources making console-lite games and starts figuring out how to make the most out of mobile platforms, the better. Like 9mm, Silent Ops is gaming at its most clueless and uninspired.

I'm all for artistic-minded developers that push the boundaries of convention and dare to try new things - I just want to be entertained along the way. Is that too much to ask?

Eragon drags up torrid memories of the bad old days when movie licensed games were not only terrible games, but had sod-all to do with the subject matter. Judged on its own merits, it's clearly below par game in every single area imaginable. Technically bereft, poorly designed and coma-inducing to play, it's about as far away from being an example of where gaming is today as you can imagine.

This is a poorly thought out, drab racer that might have been considered passable on mobiles but on dedicated games machines we deserve better. Don't buy this. Don't let anyone else buy this. Don't let the games industry know it's okay for them to port mobile phone games to superior hardware without upgrading them in any way.

The DS's wireless abilities means that it's able to offer two-player mode on a handheld, which would be tremendous, if it didn't require two copies of the game to play. A ridiculous rip-off for a game nearly two decades old.

Ultima's character has been corrupted and trammelled into a grotesque parody of itself in Ultima Forever. This game is a desecration.

This game gets a low score because there is no point to it.

And thanks to poor ball physics, the ball can quickly get stuck in a "loop" of identical bounces against indestructible blocks if you're unlucky.

You might somehow eke a crumb of satisfaction out of discovering new weapons, but the chances are it'll just make you want to boot up the real thing on a home console. The sooner this stench of mobile putrefaction is buried out of sight, the happier we'll all be.

The controls are awful, the camera is beyond appalling, the graphics are hideous, the environments are bare, the gameplay is unbearably repetitive and the whole thing is an utter chore to play.

Developer Beenox showed in the past, with Shattered Dimensions, that it not only has fresh ideas for Spidey but the development chops to create a polished and impressive game built around the character. There's none of that inspiration or attention to detail here.

With humour too dumb to even be offensive and one-note gameplay blighted by clumsy design, it's really only possible to cede Yaiba a couple of plus points: wading into zombies with a katana is moderately amusing even in this shonky form, and some of the jokes might raise a smile if you've recently suffered a head injury.

Seriously, it's hard to justify Bakushow in a world where Pictochat exists for free, as every critic in the world will probably point out.

As a game, though, it's so cripplingly inane it makes me want to eat my own teeth and replace them with sweetcorn prongs.

With literally hundreds of better classic games out there to choose from, it's absolutely mystifying that something that's aged as badly as Yie Ar Kung-Fu can be held aloft as some sort of period piece worth re-investigating.

The gameplay in Undercover: Dual Motives consists entirely of finding a thing, using it to do a thing, then having a conversation with someone who tells you you need to find another thing, and going to find the thing. There is no sense of suspense or mystery whatsoever.

Citadels is a sorry mess that should be avoided. Perhaps the developers will fix at least the basic functions in a few months but there is nothing here that raises any hope that it will even match its competitors then.

The world did not need this Leisure Suit Larry game, and it does not need any more.

AMF Bowling Pinbusters is like Wii Sports bowling only several thousand times less good. The game mechanics are awful and the presentation is a disgrace.

Although it shows some early promise, MindsEye is sunk by a ridiculous story, inconsistent writing, poorly designed mission scenarios, and utterly atrocious combat.

The art style, character models and environments had the shonkiness of a shareware title at the time, so seeing them run in high definition is hardly going to help. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

Flushed Away is absolute toilet. Sorry, again (but not as sorry as anyone involved in making the game should be).

But even if the controls did work properly, the level design and enemy AI are so stultifyingly generic that it feels like the last 12 years of game design didn't happen.

Feels like a total waste of time, and if we had any white boots right now we'd ram our studs through its rubbish cover so it could never bother us again.

It pains me to say it, but Sonic Boom needs to be the last noise we hear from the blue hedgehog for a very long time.

To make matters worse, you get sent back to a tedious menu screen every single time you learn one of the hundreds of thousands of stupid moves.

A total dud. There is nothing here that I wouldn't rather do with my PC thanks to a combination of poor feature quality, crap interface, storage limitations, stunted functionality and - let's bring something else into the equation - an hilariously optimistic price.

Up against World at War, Killzone 2 and Halo 3, it's a complete joke. The worst FPS I've played since Turning Point: Fall of Liberty.

Let's not beat about the bush and get straight to the obvious: Simpsons Skateboarding is diabolical... a cash-in in the purest sense of the term.

Whoever, wherever, whatever you are, there is absolutely zero reason to own this atrocious excuse for a video game.

Even if GTi Club Supermini Festa was a tenth of the price you'd be hard pressed to justify buying it. Its existence in 2010 is entirely redundant.

Anything that was good about Dead Island has been crudely ripped out, and whatever remains has been served up in such a way that it simply isn't fun, even at the basic "look at me, I'm killing zombies" level.

Legendary is the gaming equivalent of cheap supermarket own-brand beans, but instead of costing eleven pence it costs the same as a prime steak cooked by a top chef. It's a bad, bad game. One of the worst I've played on this generation of consoles, in fact. In that regard, at least, the title is surprisingly accurate.

With a dash more ambition, and a lot more technical coherence, at best it would only have been a middling distraction before next year's Dead Island 2. In its current form, the kindest thing would be a short, sharp stab with a screwdriver behind the ear.

Game development has evolved to the point where it's pretty rare that a PS3 or Xbox 360 release is actually anything worse than mediocre, but Rogue Warrior is easily the worst game I've played on either platform for a long, long time. You could call it cheap, exploitative trash, but it's not actually that cheap, and the exploitation elements are probably the best thing it's got going for it. Trash though? Absolutely.

Some games are so excruciatingly terrible that you feel compelled to review them, if only as a benevolent act of public service to ward off the curious and daft.

Terrible graphics and extremely limited interaction. Even my girlfriend, who normal gets obsessive about these sorts of pet games, lasted a day before she gave up.

Perhaps Sports Island Freedom is best summed up by the person I forced to help me test out the multiplayer mode. His verdict, following several long minutes of tedious menu navigation and 48 seconds of gameplay: "What is the point of this? It is appalling."

All quibbles about presentation and content aside, the game is simply incapable of delivering the sort of fluid gameplay the concept demands.

What should have been a dramatic return to form for Sonic, as signalled by the hugely promising trailer videos from earlier this year and the bold decision to use the original Sonic the Hedgehog name, has turned out to be an absolute mess.

A fundamentally broken game, riddled with graphical glitches and bizarre bugs, that doesn't even have the good grace to be a fascinating failure. For all its yelps and screeches, it's deathly dull to play and so there's no incentive to suffer its idiosyncrasies.

Even if you loved the film, even if gullible children are tearfully begging you to buy them this game, even if there's been a nuclear holocaust and the only games to survive are this and "Army Men: Green Rogue"; please, just say No.

The graphics are bland and stiff, the story is an absolute joke (the ending particularly so) and whatever depth the levelling system might offer requires acres of patience to unearth.

It's as if Pandemic's once shiny, happy puppy grew old and tired, as is the way of things, but then instead of being put down was handed over to a bunch of tramps. Who shaved all its hair off and fed it on Tesco Value Pilsner and let it get mange. It's time for THQ to get the shotgun.

Enemy Front is a bad game on almost every level, but it gives me no pleasure to report that. It's not a lazy game, as you can see the developer trying as hard as it can to mimic the juggernauts that dominate the genre, but nor does it show enough personality or ambition to break out of the tired old paradigms.

The controls are awful, the camera is beyond appalling, the graphics are hideous, the environments are bare, the gameplay is unbearably repetitive and the whole thing is an utter chore to play.

It's pretty clear that Pimp My Ride is not aimed at us. And by "us" I mean "people who have at least a basic understanding of what makes a good game". It's the equivalent of a movie like Norbit or a TV show like...well, like Pimp My Ride.

Lacking both depth and balance, Cursed Clash is ultimately a transparent attempt at trying to sell something solely based on its association with a popular IP.

It's reminiscent of a browser game you'd click away from ten seconds after loading, or the kind of half-arsed demo that appeared on magazine coverdiscs in the early nineties.

A sloppily-handled misfire that ruins the original's reputation.

People don't live in movie studios. They live in houses and flats that are lit for comfort, not to fulfill the technical requirements of an aging webcam. If you really want to put yourself and your friends on the TV, leave this failed experiment on the shelf, and put the money towards a digital camcorder instead.

Aside from championship you get standard quick race, split-screen and time trial options, and Drift Combo, an incongruous, aggressively arcadey and frankly unplayable mode that challenges you to string long sequences of slides together.

The controls are awful, the camera is beyond appalling, the graphics are hideous, the environments are bare, the gameplay is unbearably repetitive and the whole thing is an utter chore to play.