What we're left with really is a Saturday morning cartoon retelling of the tale, with none of the memorable dialogue, very little actual exposition, too much brainless padding and key events reshaped to fit the brief.

Pineapple Smash Crew's weapons are by far its strongest point, an arsenal well engineered enough to support a much more intense game. Here they're wasted on a shooter that starts slowly and never speeds up, with solid foundations but nothing on top.

It's a wholly unoriginal game, devoid of interesting play options and mostly inaccessible for the multiplay ambition around which it was designed. Nevertheless, even the most average things can still be enjoyable, and in this regard Battlezone is not an unpleasant distraction.

It's still a solid platformer with some neat ideas, but it's undone by a host of camera and control issues. If you popped your gaming cherry playing Banjo as a youngster, prepare for nostalgia tinged by disappointment, as you discover it's not quite the classic you remember.

It's fun for a while, but by no stretch of the imagination is it worth £35.

It's barely got any good ideas, and the few it does have are not its own. It could have been a Monster Hunter Lite, with more emphasis on big bosses and gory finishing moves and less on collecting raptor talons and moss to make into a hat – but instead it's just a hollow, characterless echo of the game it's trying to be.

I love Fallout 3. I love it to an almost indecent extent. It was far and away my game of 2008, and doesn't look like being knocked out of my personal top spot for a good while yet. But when you sift out its role-play, the ammo-box inspection and the exploration and draft in a fleet of health and ammo regeneration points to compensate... well, affairs just feel shallow and somewhat naked.

Time may not have been particularly kind to Flashback, but 20 years on, it hasn't been forgotten. It's unlikely we'll be able to say the same for this remake in 20 days.

There are some highs, but they all come early, in the thrill of your first Air Jack or Cyclone, or the first hilarious ragdoll enemy death or the sight of Vin Diesel on a scooter. After that, nothing really changes. It's all smoothly presented, accessible, and easy enough to play for a few hours, but it has very little to offer beyond not making you especially angry.

Eve Online is now 10 years old. Dust 514 may also have a decade of evolution ahead of it, so I hope this is far from the last word on what has started out as a distinctly average and rather buggy shooter. It could well be a game with a bright future, but right now it's saddled with a very dull debut.

It's easy to pick up and play, has generally tip-top production values, has a moreish appeal and only a couple of bits where parents might have to help out the little ones. Sadly, grown-ups needn't feel like they're missing out, for as much as it contains most of the ingredients that should make it interesting to everyone, Monster House quickly becomes too repetitive and shallow to deliver on its early promise.

At best, this might have been a cute piece of original downloadable content on a system that sorely needs some. As a full price piece of software, it's genuinely worth less than forty quid's worth of dog-eared primary school maths books.

If you were hoping for the return of Time Crisis to herald some kind of rebirth for on-rails shooters, then you'll be sorely disappointed. The arcade mode is dumb fun for a short while, but is little more than a tired throwback, while the addition of FPS missions will be barely tolerable to even the most forgiving shooter.

Even if the surface mistakes were removed, its problems are so fundamental to its design that it's hard to imagine it transcending into a serious competitor for the big boys.

Fan of the first two games will initially feel at home here but, under prolonged scrutiny it reveals itself to be the weakest of the set.

As you alternate furiously between confusion and excitement, the explosive gaggle never lets up even for a moment. You'll launch a curtain of certain death, dash, homing missile strike, dash. Dash dash. Laser in the face. Die! WHY WON'T YOU DIE?

X-Men Origins: Wolverine may be unapologetically violent, but it's also unapologetically repetitive, and it's the one apology that needs to be made.

Remove brand loyalty from the equation and between the existing online pleasures of Warhawk, Killzone 2, Metal Gear Online, GRAW2 and Rainbow Six, with the promise of even more realistic and tactical games such as Operation Flashpoint and ArmA 2 in the near future, it's hard to imagine why any PS3 armchair soldier would want to invest too much time in a game this small, ordinary and generic.

IT'S LESS THAN AN HOUR LONG.

It's good, uncomplicated fun, but you won't ever want more than the demo version supplied with the Xbox Live Starter Kit. As a £40 purchase, Whacked! can get F---ed!

The problem underlining it all is that the games are way too easy.

In my mind, said mixed bag, when emptied onto the table, would yield all manner of mostly shiny looking baubles, most of which have some redeeming features but very few of which are worth pursuing for longer than a couple of minutes.

It's certainly one for the fans and Neo Geo completionists, but curious retro-heads and fighting game fans might get the wrong impression of SNK if they buy this particular compilation.

Neither a triumph of design nor storytelling and stymied by poor execution, Wayward Manor is a rough proposition. But there's something worthwhile here, even if it's the unusual power fantasy of being able to haunt an aristocratic family from the safety of the rafters.

Ease of using the touch-screen aside, it's something we'd prefer to flick to on the mobile while on the bus rather than dedicate the DS slot to. Nevertheless, it fulfils its puzzling duties.

The best thing you can say about the game is that it's technically impressive, and the openworld structure is a good idea - but that's it. The game's central purpose seems to be to make dismemberment as easy to pull off as possible, but as soon as that novelty has worn off you're left with a hollow, repetitive experience which quickly loses its initial appeal.

Combine this ruthless beating with the ugly stick with the essential lack of variety inherent in these arcade air combat games and you have a title only really worth considering once it's in the bargain bins.

Unfortunately, it also features some of the things that remind us why adventure games fell out of the mainstream, with tedious fetch quests, aggravating scenarios and a spirit-crushing trash-sorting mini-game conspiring to gradually strip the joy out of it all.