There are some brief fun moments, but they are far outweighed by the frustration of bugs, the lack of a compelling story and some convoluted puzzles.

The basic design of the game is quite sound and if Piranha Bytes could clean the game up, it might end up becoming a classic. As it stands now, my nightmarish trip through the world of Gothic 3 made me want to send my disc on a one-way trip into an incinerator.

Having unlocked doors relock themselves if you move too far off-screen is kind of lame, and having a platoon of laser-firing stormtroopers materialize out of thin air around your character is really lame.

It feels painfully slow on the PC, and the controls are better-suited for a mobile touchscreen than a mouse and keyboard combo. It even manages to lose a feature in the translation, which is stunning given how much more powerful the PC is than, say, the iPad. Throw in the fact that it has little to nothing to do with the series proper, and it becomes impossible to recommend this spinoff, even to the most dedicated Total War fans.

The Golden Compass isn't the worst game based on a movie, but it's close. It's a combination of uninspired platforming, poorly implemented mini-games and slow and broken storytelling.

KoF12's online play is (to put it mildly) atrocious.

The graphics are distinctly last-gen, with bland, repetitive environments that feel as slapped together as every other part of this lackluster brawler.

The in-game fighters are ugly, poorly animated, 3D-rendered sprites that make them look as though all your favorite characters have been replaced by rubber dolls -- and not the good kind.

The experience of playing this game can be roughly compared to swimming through a pile of sewage to get to a diamond ring. There's a great game buried in the coded-up wreckage that comes out of the X3: Reunion box; it's probably not worth the effort to dig for it, though.

Sonic doesn't crash and it doesn't look horrific, and that's about all that recommends it. Maybe the 20th anniversary will be better.

It also runs poorly, replete with graphical glitches and technical hiccups that make the game feel shoddy and unfinished. At a moment when so many excellent shooters are on the market and thriving in the multiplayer scene, there's very little incentive to endure something like this.

The staggering lack of quality apparent in Dark Messiah of Might and Magic Elements has left us incredibly disappointed.

The presentation is passable, but the gameplay itself is an exercise in pure tedium. The pervasive sense of overwhelming boredom is what really kills it, since a competitive, group-oriented game should ideally be the exact opposite of digital Ambien.

With the limited variation in modes and the lackluster multiplayer, I simply couldn't justify spending an entire $30 on Tetris Evolution. Especially not when I can get a superior version for my Nintendo DS.

More than most other genres, if an adventure's core narrative foundations aren't solid enough to carry the rest of game, everything else is meaningless -- and Yesterday's is a story built on matchsticks and marbles. To play it is to see it come crashing down.

Although MechAssault: Phantom War isn't necessarily the worst game to ever pop up on the DS, it's pretty close to the bottom of the pile. The poor controls and bland graphics are a far cry from everything that made the original MechAssault game on the Xbox such a success.

Alexander isn't a matter of taste; it's a matter of functional incapacity. If you're looking to get your fix in this historical period, there are plenty better and recent arrivals.

Scant fun portions aside, if Far Cry: Vengeance cost the same as a soft-shell taco, I'd suggest you run for the border. I know Uwe Boll got one of his tentacles on the Far Cry movie license; I'm wondering if he directed this game as a warmup.

Lack of inspiration and sloppiness are the hallmarks of Shade: Wrath of Angels. Clunky controls, tedious combat, frustrating difficulty, a forgettable hero, a lame story, silly dialogue, monotonous levels, typos, and bugs all add up to a big mess.

You want 50's music? Buy a CD. Grab a DVD if you want to see the guy move. But if you want to pretend to be Curtis Jackson, take your fifty bucks out to a paintball range and let someone drill you nine times. It'll be a better experience than this.

The upside is that all of these problems are presumably fixable via a patch -- this isn't the first PC game in history to ship with something busted. And I sincerely hope the team at 2K Sports can get around to addressing the issues I've encountered, because MLB 2K12 is is a lot of fun to play in single-player, and should be just as fun online. But right now it's in dire need of some Tommy John surgery if it has any hope of reviving its career.

The Golden Compass isn't the worst game based on a movie, but it's close. It's a combination of uninspired platforming, poorly implemented mini-games and slow and broken storytelling.

One long exercise in frustration.

A thoroughly uninspired piece of hack work that gives you plenty of reasons not to buy it. Pick any one you like and save yourself the sixty bucks.

It's mostly tedious, sloppy, and stale, with bugs and crashes adding insult to injury. You could find a better shooter blindfolded.

There's no real story to hold any of this together, so in the end, Cars for the DS amounts to nothing more than some disjointed mini-games that are either too drab or too long to warrant unnecessary replays.

Something that only a true fan could appreciate. If this isn't an indicator to KOEI to let this series move on to greener pastures, I don't know what is.

I occasionally caught glimpses of a competent simulation underneath the bugs, poor instruction, and rage-inducing interface, but not even the best of today's strategy games would be tolerable to play if subject to the malfunctioning saves, crashes, and sloppy presentation of Port Royale 3.