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?

Bulletproof reads revelations from the Bible of production but knows almost no game. It's superficially slick, with its bling'd up 50 Cent avatar and glitzy rap, but really it's a third-person shooter that stumbles well under the benchmarks set for the PS2.

The only reason to buy Sonic Free Riders would be if it was actually free. And even then, only if you just really liked the box.

With 12 tracks, each of which can be raced in reverse, it's a relatively small package that, other than its licence, is lacking in any sort of interesting game design to mark it out. With a budget price tag it's an inoffensive proposition but, don't expect to return to it when your battery runs out.

It's really not that engaging a game in 2006 once you've got over the initial reaquaintence, and certainly not deserving of a standalone release on Live Arcade when there are so many more worthwhile games to download.

Absolute masochists might be able to sift through the pointless junk crudely glued onto the Rainbow Islands concept, and manage to find enough of the original's appeal to justify the time and expense but in a world where Taito Legends is readily available, offering the rather wonderful untouched arcade classic along with many others worthy of your attention for a fraction of the price, why would you even want to bother with this garish mockery?

As you move your craft around the playfield with either the analogue controller or the d-pad, precision of movement goes out of the window with your craft over-shooting the mark, often resulting in a loss of one of your limited lives.

It's a shame that such a much-loved series has come to this, but here we are. So to conclude, SingStar Ultimate Party gets one point for nice menu screens and one point for Carly Rae Jepsen.

Perhaps the main selling point is the presence of four-player co-op - especially given its online and local credentials. A bit of Gauntlet-style adventuring isn't something to sniff at, and far more enjoyable than button-mashing solo forays, where death results in having to replay entire missions from scratch. Nein, danke.

There is so little replay potential here, so little urge to top high scores or perfect shoddy make-do attempts, that completing each task feels more of a relief than an achievement.

It is an exercise in immense frustration and painful tedium. When it works, and this feels a stupid sentence at this point, it does manifest the correct semiotic indicators of first-person shooting. You are mowing down literally hundreds of baddies with big metal guns. But that's it. And it isn't all that much.

With about triple the number of mini-games, or a budget price launch, we'd probably recommend it as a quirky curiosity/novelty purchase, but if we have to hear another squeaky kid utter the word 'like', we'll probably self-combust.

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.

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.

In short, this isn't going to please anyone, apart from the few of you who are after a decent Virtua Racing for the lounge.

It's fun for half an hour, but that's an awfully expensive 30 minutes. Don't buy RIDE unless you want to be taken for one.

I'm certainly not averse to this sort of thing appearing on WiiWare but My Aquarium feels like half an idea, lazily executed. If you like the idea of a virtual fish-tank, and don't mind that your input is minimal, then the price is about as right as it'll ever get for this sort of thing.

A gaudy glimpse of the bad old days of mid-1990s 3D. And no-one wants that.

Catwoman becomes beyond sloppy. Ultra-sloppy, if you will. Like the Houston 500, right men?

The bottom line is that the core gameplay is tedious beyond belief - so much so that I doubt you'd even get value from renting it.

Right now, the Samurai Shodown series is like a wandering ronin bereft of its former honour; with its sake-sodden stare and rusty katana, it doesn't stand a chance against the superlative Super Street Fighter IV or BlazBlue: Continuum Shift.

A tiresome waste of a strong license, only the most blinkered fan will derive pleasure from this slog of an experience filled with wrong-headed design decisions intended to pad out a game that cannot sustain expansion.

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.

Barrel Blast is an abortive and uncannily anachronistic attempt at a character racer with impossible controls, dreadful, imbalanced AI and boring design. It's not even worth the hour of your time that it takes to get completely sick of it.

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.

A fairly limited package that quickly runs out of ideas.

There's nothing devastatingly awful about this, it's just thoroughly outclassed by most of everything else on the market.

It's repetitive, disposable and artificially inflated. Most of all it's frustrating: frustrating because of the poor execution of a promising concept and because it's nowhere near the game that it could have been.