But while laudable in many senses, ultimately King Kong is as Carl Denham - fascinatingly single-minded and full of wonder, but ultimately shallow, and too caught up in its initial achievement to really think the rest of it through.

When the game starts giving you the opportunity to play as Kong, it's like Spinal Tap dropped by Ubisoft's studios and cranked it up to eleven.

That Quake 4 is merely a glossy, standard, by-the-numbers trudge through past glories is an irresponsible way to treat such a revered franchise; to then cock up the conversion to the 360 subsequently and then charge extra for the privilege is bordering on scandalous.

Double Trouble is still undeniably a lot of fun - clever ideas, decent puzzles, and so on - but rather like the name, which seems to be struggling to fit the standard jokey Game Name: DS format, the end result isn't quite good enough.

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.

There's more excellent-game here than there is tedious-game, but even when you get past the opening stages it still takes a little while to settle down.

When you've battled through all 14 single player levels, played it on co-op and worked your way through some solid multiplayer action, you won’t feel like you've played a next generation title; heck, you won't even feel like you've played the best shooter out this Christmas.

Of the shooters available on the 360 at launch, Call of Duty 2 is easily the most accessible and consistently entertaining single player offering, but if online is your thing you're better off considering what Rare has to offer ["Perfect Dark Zero"].

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.

When Aeon Flux isn't busy being average, it's tied up in its own gibberish, or nudging you towards your next confrontation with awkward controls. It has almost none of the excitement we play video games for and as such, is time lost and tears in the eyes of anyone foolish enough to waste their money.

No matter how good it is - and in Skirmish mode, it really is pretty good - it's a bit saddening. The future never seemed so far away.

It's a sign that next generation gaming may offer a wonderful audio visual experience, but it needs to be a tad more ambitious in the game design stakes.

A really solid rendition of what made those early Tony Hawk games great, but on your faithful friend, the DS. It's smart and sassy, and it looks far better than you could possibly expect.

It's like playing "PGR2" on a system that can do it justice.

However, at its marked-down price it does offer a low-risk introduction to the series for anyone who's not yet experienced the undeniably satisfying feeling of cleaving a path through an entire army of foot soldiers.

The setting lends itself perfectly to the premise, yet ultimately the overly forgiving combat system makes the game too damned easy.

It'll soak up plenty of your time, but it's a real trudge, and rarely presents anything new or exciting - you've experienced most of the good by the time you've qualified for the PGA Tour itself, and indeed most of us will have experienced it all by, er, well, had experienced it all by 2003.

To describe what EA has produced here as dreadful would be to do a terrible disservice to things that merely inspire dread.

Of RPGs with overblown production values, galaxy-wide spider-web narratives, protagonists of indistinct sex and abundantly irritating characterisation, Final Fantasy is still King and this chartered framework does absolutely nothing to impinge its power.

Amped 3 certainly isn't awful, and will keep you entertained for a long time if you can get past the hideous presentation and get used to its stop-starty nature, but the most recent SSX was enormous too, and treated the sorts of tasks that Amped considers its core as a second string to its traditional racing and tricking.

Unlike a lot of arcade racing games we've played over the years, Most Wanted is one of the few games that's destined to provide a lasting challenge, despite the inherent repetition at its core.

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.

So, the most beautiful world in a game? Perhaps. To look at it’s cohesive, well-formed, has some of the best, most inventive enemy designs ever conceived, and the shimmering draw distance constantly beckons you into it’s hazy good-looking promise.

It has neither the charm, nor the innovation, nor the wicked guns, and therefore ultimately feels like a bit of a chore.

A game best-enjoyed in short sharp bursts. That way you can appreciate the views, have some fun creating an offensive strategy on paper before briefly hammering it out on the field.

If you fancy the beautiful Christmas garlands or a customisable snowman or a Christmas tree... well, why not just head over to the Sims 2 site and download them. They've been up there for a year, after all. No, I'm not joking.

As much as I might admire the precise way everything's been put together, and enjoy compulsively dispatching Zone after Zone, I still can't abide the way it builds you up and then runs you straight into someone's swinging baseball bat without warning.

As a single-player experience, even in its slightly compromised state, it's easily one of the most intensely enjoyable console shooters there's ever been.