It doesn't help that you're saddled with an inelegant control set-up that demands constant use of all four shoulder buttons at once.

It's not NBA Live, it's not NBA Street and it's not NBA 2K. And playing Chosen One you'll be reminded of this every couple of minutes.

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.

Warhammer Quest is a competent example of a digital board game but in trying to sand its sharp edges and ensure that it's accessible to all, Rodeo has oversimplified the already slight source material.

Ultimately, Cake Mania is too expensive, too slow and too limited to excel in this overcrowded field.

After plugging away at The Drowning for a few days and pumping money into its ravenous maw, it becomes clear that this is a transaction machine first, a headline-grabbing control scheme second and an actual game a distant third.

Creating your own army, and then constantly improving it with the spoils of skirmishes against live foes, is what will keep players coming back for more. With a more streamlined control system, and some tidier graphics, Battle March could be one of the best console strategy games. As it stands, it's strictly for the hardcore.

Shameless money grubbing.

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.

While there is some enjoyment to be had here, it is hard-won and rarely fulfilling. The imprecision of the combat and its lightweight feel combined with the ropey visuals conspire to date the game considerably.

The absence of any tutorial mode makes it an uphill battle for newcomers, while committed rugby fans will probably be put off by its lack of depth. New Zealand games don't even begin with the Haka, and where's the fun in that?

Babel Rising has a killer hook, but ultimately fails to use it for much more than the basics. Its entertainment value is simple and occasionally cathartic, but is exhausted far too early.

It had the incredibly difficult job of creating a new character in the Lost world with an interesting enough side-story, able to exist without disrupting the timeline or feeling like an aberration, and able to expose fans to at least a handful of things with which they would be satisfied, even eager, to tinker. There's no question it achieves that.

Way of the Samurai 3 wastes too much energy juggling the numerous ways it can end your story and not nearly enough on making the journey to get there worthwhile.

The poor technical quality of the game isn't quite enough to dim the innate amusement of thundering around New York as the Hulk, but it's certainly enough to drop this from "long awaited next gen remake of a great game" to "yet another movie tie-in that's only really good for a weekend rental".

There's an original story here, but it isn't very exciting, and it lacks the style and incessant comedy of its big screen brethren.

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.

The problem really is that, even online, the only incentive to carry on braving Circle of Doom's tedious environments and simplistic action is to obtain a high-powered character, or a monstrous weapon. Except once you've done that, it renders the game even more tedious and simplistic as you one-hit-kill your way around the same stultifying environments that you've been grinding through.

Centipede and Millipede are the sort of simple, repetitive, no frills shooters you can get more than enough fun out of by playing the free trial version of, so we should be grateful to Microsoft for allowing people to find out why they probably shouldn't bother with this one.

Like the best burgers, the best arcade games are simple, allowing us to enjoy the important flavours. BurgerTime World Tour is like a child sticking everything they can find between two halves of a bun, and then gorging on the resulting mess until they puke. Bon appetit.

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.

That almost all of these 11 games look like tired also-rans merely compounds the feeling that this is one of the most cynical cash-in releases ever conceived. Avoid.

Having Gary Oldman and Frodo do voiceovers doesn't make up for the fact this game looks and plays like something made five years ago.

It lacks the ambition and style of some of its four-wheeled contemporaries, and you could argue that this license would have been better served by a semi-simulation like Milestone's own SBK. But by focusing on what makes motocross fun to watch rather than ride, it replicates the excitement of jumping from lip to lip astride a two-stroke tearaway... just about.

I'm all in favour of games that transport us back to the good old days of vibrant originality, but Knack simply doesn't.

A soulless attempt at straddling the fence between the over-the-top action found in the Blitz series and trying to accurately simulate the sport of football like the competition.

A solid entry in a mostly wretched genre. It's cute, it's charming and makes you smile without ever really winning your heart. Still, if you've been fiending for a decent PS2 kart racer you can play without vomiting your bones out in horror, here's where your money should be going.

Possibly the worst videogame Nintendo has had the misfortune to publish. Avoid at all costs; this is disgracefully bad.