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.