There's just not enough imagination, invention, and engagement with the source material to entice me back. If you think the game plot sounds interesting then you're really far better off reading the book or getting hold of the superb 1945 movie.

So, what's the time? Oh it's time for good-expansion-but-not-good-enough-to-make-anyone-return-to-the-game-if-thoroughly-sick mark o'clock.

If the idea of 20 hours of palpitating living nightmares sounds like your idea of fun, then you have no choice but to part with your cash immediately. If only all videogames were this brilliant.

This is a game about hitting people. It's pretty damn good.

The beefed-up single-player content is worth the asking price on its own, it's still a fantastic multiplayer game (that's maybe not as perfectly balanced as it once was), and yes, it's shame there's no online play, but that's no excuse to pass up on a hugely enjoyable, addictive, rewarding title that'll last months.

Justified cynicism aside, Infinity Ward's latest effort unquestionably refines the cinematic World War II shooter genre to new giddy heights of bombastic brilliance.

It's still a fun game, and an incredibly slick one at that, but the law of diminishing returns has well and truly kicked in. It's time Insomniac got some rest and put Ratchet and Clank out to pasture - goodness knows they deserve it.

This heartwarming gestalt is a lovely and joy-bringing piece of our history, and anybody who ever popped a shiny round coin in any one of these machines' welcoming slots owes themselves a copy, today.

It’s good. Damn good. In fact, I’ll certainly go as far as saying it’s the best pure strategy game I’ve played this year, and that’s good enough for me.

In short, Shrek SuperSlam is the kind of game that kids are likely to spend a happy afternoon with, after which it will end up shoved at the back of the cupboard.

IT'S LESS THAN AN HOUR LONG.

Not a truly outstanding new Grand Theft Auto game then, but an excellent PSP game.

Choose to ignore these (and other) oversights, persevere with the drudgery of the maintenance aspect (the bit where, in a more conventional RPG/god game, you'd actually get to do stuff, like solve puzzles or kill things), and there's a lengthy itinerary of tasks to discover and perform - something that still appeals to my completist urges.

While fun can be had here, it's from the mini-games and the experience rather than solid table designs - and that's a cardinal sin in pinball.

Another frustrating 'nearly' package from Pterodon that's suffering from a dated look and feel. The single-player offering misses the mark, arguably, even more than it did last time.

Almost to its detriment, it doesn't play its hand early on; if anything, the game takes fully three or four hours before you really start to unravel its charms, and even then it never feels like a game in a hurry.

Fun, yes, but not exhilarating in the way that the best games should be. It also lacks the painterly detail of Battlefield 2's levels, which seem so natural in the density of their trash-strewn details.

For the poor, deprived Cube owners out there that have been thus far denied the chance to strut their stuff in front of their TV, this is easily the best Dancing Stage title on any platform.

All in all, it's hard to see how even the most ardent SpongeBob fan could get a lot out of this game, even with three friends and four controllers on hand. There's just not a big enough selection of games, fundamentally, and too many niggles.

To be presented with this utterly misguided and ill-conceived attempt to reinvent one of the best strategy-RPG series of the last two decades seems criminal and unfair. It’s a mammoth level grind, bringing together some of the action-RPG genre’s very worst conventions while leaving out some of the best.

It's very easy to win races, even on the Hard difficulty setting, the platforming sections offer no real challenge, and the fun to be had from blowing up opponents when you've clashed your kart wears thin after a while.

It's hard not to find at least some love for a game which thinks (for example) it's a good idea to put a crocodile in a Croatian jersey, hide it in a level and provide a CROcodile secret bonus.

Even with the new home cities, gameplay feels tired and characterless. Bombarding players with shiny baubles and inconsequential gifts can’t hide that.

It’s a masterfully understated, beautifully simple, engrossing ride that's as palpitatingly thrilling as it is serenely calming. It's also one of the most consistently compelling and memorable games we've ever played (or witnessed, for that matter).

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.

Sure, it's repetitive; sure it's not doing anything massively new, but what it does provide is an exceptionally polished genre offering that fans of the series and kart games in general can get a lot out of.

The Con is about as far from revolutionary as you can get and in no way suited to extended play, but to give Sony its due, it's easily one of the stronger and more accurately pitched portable fighters out there.

Spyro would score a 5 were it to work properly - smack bang in the middle of middlyness, doing nothing well, and utterly without imagination (for goodness sakes, travelling back and forth between two versions of reality - where did they get that idea from?!).