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.