The evil twin to Zelda: Phantom Hourglass shows just how bad broken touch-screen controls can be.

If this half broken, frustrating platformer counts as one of WiiWare's biggest releases then the service is in an even worse state than we feared.

An excellent update of an almost forgotten British classic, and a promising start to the Gremlin Presents series.

Thank goodness Rayman is back because his would-be usurpers have never seemed more inanely un-entertaining than in this vapid mini-game collection.

One of the most original sports games ever made but with so many flaws and limitations it makes you wish you could skip ahead several sequels and play that version instead.

Viewed as a visual novel where you have to sit through large numbers of identical, non-interactive fight scenes, you could enjoy it purely for its plot and characters, but this is not a game in the conventional sense.

A barely-interactive movie that follows a mother and daughter road trip that is disappointingly short on both drama and meaningful choices.

A disappointing series reboot, with the new graphics proving more trouble than they're worth.

Plenty of honest effort has been expended here, but Mario Party has never seemed like a sensible kind of game to turn into a portable title.

The visuals are amazing but the game's moral quandaries are impossible to care about without any context, let alone any decent gameplay or controls.

A great idea ruined by some very strange design decisions, that turn what should be a fun platformer puzzler into a gloomy and illogical word game.

A class BioWare download: short, pointless and missing everything that made the original interesting.

Whoever this shoddily made platformer is meant to please it won’t be those that like Sonic Mania, or any of the better 3D Sonic games.

Still virtually the same game as released on the PlayStation 2 in 2000, with only the most minor changes to the hatefully shallow gameplay.

The greatest offence here is not sexism but simply tedium at the game’s shallow action, although while the one note joke lasts it is a funny one.

Not so much a poor man’s Gears Of War as a tramp’s, which is perhaps why one of the few distinguishing features is playing it with a loyal canine by your side.

Why a show set in the 80s has a video game tie-in that recalls the worst of 90s licensed games is a mystery, but this has absolutely none of the charm, wit, or excitement of the TV show.

Despite its good looks and offbeat content, the process of winning rapidly becomes too fiddly to be much fun.

The latest and ugliest Puzzle Quest spin-off is still addictive, but its gimmicks are getting very old.

A cheap and nasty film tie-in that reaches a new low for Lego games and stands in stark contrast to the creativity of the movie and the toys.

Skater XL has a mid-budget price point and comes from a small indie outfit from which you wouldn’t expect triple-A polish and heft. It also has a substantial community busy designing mods and items for it, too. But unless you’re a truly fanatical skateboarder in real-life, your most likely reaction to buying it and booting it up is likely to be: ‘Is that it?’. It’s an exemplary control system in search of a game.

An extremely insubstantial Star Wars pod racing themed VR and mixed reality experience, that is technically competent but whose greatest value is in demonstrating the limitations of AR as a concept.

Despite its desperation to please, Foamstars is hard to dislike – but it’s difficult to say whether it has any staying power. There’s the expected battle pass progression trees, unlockable perks, and skin microtransactions to make your eyes roll, but it’s not as egregious as other live service titles in the same mould. In a similar vein to other B-tier online games with fun ideas (Knockout City, Rumbleverse, etc.), Foamstars feels like it’s caught against the tide, no matter whether it manages to stir up a dedicated player base or not.

A distinctly unambitious expansion that adds nothing meaningful to the parent game except a very short, and mostly dull, new story campaign.

It should be impossible to make a mix of zombies and scantily-clad samurai bimbos this boring but that’s the one and only accomplishment of this brain-dead button-masher.

A bad idea poorly realised and while the original coin-op retains its campy charm this remake is rendered pointless by the unsatisfying controls and glitchy performance.

A poorly thought out attempt to take on Call Of Duty and Battlefield, whose main gimmick is as a flawed as its other elements are overfamiliar.

An extra hour of combat and so much less, with a download that manages to undermine much of the impressive storytelling of the main game.

It's nice to see someone is making a new Pikmin game, but this half-hearted clone has neither the variety nor the imagination of its considerably cuter inspiration.

It’s clearly been made in a hurry and with no more care than the deeply flawed original, which means only the truly zombie-obsessed should apply.

Unravel the mysterious history of a dead planet in a brief, overly simplistic first person walking simulator.

After a solid few years the Dragon Ball games are regressing, particularly in this flawed fighter.

Disappointing follow-up to the already lightweight Shattered Dimensions, which seems to go out of its way to waste all the potential of the character(s).

A tragically awful attempt to revive the Dark Alliance name, with horribly repetitive combat, empty storytelling, and a dragon horde’s worth of bugs.

A lo-fi 8-bit style twin-stick bullet hell shooter whose exhilaratingly weird music and catalogue of surreal weaponry is undermined by technical problems and a reliance on luck.

The worst Guitar Hero spin-off yet with a half-hearted tribute to a band who barely deserved one anyway.

While it lasts an entertaining and fairly imaginative tech demo, but none of the mini-games will have you coming back for more.

It's not quite the return to glory Mashed and Micro Machines fans would've hoped for, but despite its flaws this is still a great party game.

Yet another downloadable Robotron clone, but one with some interesting, if peculiar, ideas.

A relatively promising next gen debut, but it’s still missing lots of older features. And even with a few new ones it’s hard to think of this as anything but a work in progress.

Like the recent and mostly terrible, Tomb Raider Reloaded, Mighty Doom uses the well-worn Archero template, this time to somewhat more interesting effect.

It's a great idea, and filled with some top grade Suda51 weirdness, but Kinect is nowhere near accurate enough to make even such a simple game work properly.

A crossover between the world’s most famous manga characters results in a peculiarly underdeveloped fighter, with an especially disappointing story mode.

Maybe Russian games are meant as punishment not entertainment. This limp strategy RPG is surely the former.

A game about fighting office block-sized monsters, where you spend most of your time battling far less interesting human-scale enemies, with clumsy and repetitive melee combat that pales next to the all-too-few behemoth fights.

A silly premise with some very clever ideas, but unfortunately none of them are implemented well enough to help this one-on-one fighter make history.

A World War II-themed Splinter Cell, but with too many technical and design flaws to satisfy.

A loving homage to PS one era JRPGs, but its small innovations are suffocated beneath a dead weight of clichés and conventions that in most cases were better off left to the past.

Your castle itself may look unique, as you build eccentrically-shaped rooms and staircases, but your courtiers look like Wii-era Miis, and the fundamentally uncreative nature of its gameplay makes it a depressingly pedestrian experience.

Bizarre sliding block puzzler that despite numerous issues is oddly more tolerable than it should be.

Not the fast action arcade game you might remember, but a low budget animal-fancying sim for girls.

As match-three puzzlers go this is well above average, but the cynical microtransactions make it a horrible slog to actually play.

A moderately interesting idea in theory, but the flawed execution makes this horrendously overpriced piece of DLC a waste of both time and money.

Without virtual reality support to increase the novelty this this would-be walking sim proves a disappointingly bland experience.

Bringing back such an obsucre franchise is one thing but stranger still is that so little passion has been expended in reinventing this listless vehicular combat game.

A technical disaster in almost every conceivable way, which obscures not only the hilarious characters but the fact that the game is considerably less compelling and nuanced than the original.

Its goals are noble enough, but this low tech shooter takes its realism too seriously – as the drudgery and unfairness of trench warfare is made all too real.

Shooting tin cans hasn't got any more exciting over the years in this forgettable lightgun game.

Experience life as a train driver or passenger with inexplicably mundane real-time railway journeys.

As poorly named game as there's ever been, since this doesn't recreate the experience of Jacko's music or life - just a few motion-controlled dance moves.

One of the most unique-looking shooters of recent years, but not necessarily in a good way. Especially not when the action is this unrefined and purposefully annoying.

Some very clever ideas are completely squandered by a game that is neither scary, enjoyable, or thought-provoking – although it does manage irritating and dull with great aplomb.

A welcome tonic to overly large open worlds, Mafia 2’s story and missions remain worth experiencing if you haven’t already, but its age and intrinsic flaws are still obvious.

Some thought has clearly gone into making this an entertaining game, but sadly not enough money or time.

Easily the most authentic Predator game ever made but also a paper-thin multiplayer game that offers far too little content and variety for its asking price.

The creator of Final Fantasy creates… a not very good smartphone mini-game, with annoying controls and all the longevity of a terminally ill butterfly.

Part DLC and part Warzone knock-off, this is not only the worst Call Of Duty ever made but one of the most cynical video game releases of all time.

The movie quiz series goes multiformat and low budget with less features and generally less fun.

One of the worst Pokémon spin-offs ever, as well as one of the most unwarranted sequels. Simplistic, boring and terrible value for money.

A Star Wars version of Overwatch is not the worst idea ever, but its full potential can only barely be glimpsed through a miasma of cloying microtransactions and purposefully shallow gameplay.

The anime films may be critically acclaimed but their video game counterpart is nowhere near as interesting – although there is a couple of hours of mindless fun to be had.

Something of a greatest hits collection of ideas from Ubisoft’s other open world games but it also has some fun new ideas of its own… as well as a mountain of glitches and microtransactions.

Immersive sim meets four-player co-op in this vampire themed first person shooter that features competent gunplay but a lack of ingenuity in its challenges.

A mediocre remake of a game that really doesn’t deserve to be remembered, although it’s still fascinating to see what passed for adult entertainment back in the ‘80s.

Another overly simplistic WiiWare puzzler, that benefits hardly at all from being a video game.

It's been a long time since we've had a decent Star Wars game though and this miserable misfire is very much more Attack Of The Clones than it is Empire Strikes Back.

By no means the worst mini-game collection there's ever been but in terms of genuine party entertainment it's only a few steps above the Tory Conference.

Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 feels like the equivalent of a straight-to-video movie, and one of the really bad ones that don’t even have any washed-up actors you’ve sort of heard of. Instead it’s just a cheaply-made, unwanted sequel to a franchise that should have never got past the first one. And yet somehow it’s still the best the series has ever been.

It looks and controls like the originals, but this lacks anything of the challenge, design flair or variety of a really super Monkey Ball.

The move to the Wii hasn't brought with it any significant changes, just more wasted potential.

It certainly looks and sounds the part but this downloadable game is just as shallow as most retail tie-ins.

The anti-Chinatown Wars shows everything that could have gone wrong trying to make Grand Theft Auto on DS.

If Crystal Skull made the original films look better, then this does the same for Fate Of Atlantis.

Spiritual or not this is a poor sequel to the Panzer Dragoon games, and its tame and repetitive action will certainly not win the series any new fans.

One of the few games that can accurately be described as so bad it’s good, with a gleefully bizarre mix of bad voice-acting, appalling console optimisation, and surprisingly decent gunplay.

More than just a tech demo, but still far from a defining VR experience – especially given the plain visuals and unfocused story and gameplay.

A fine idea in theory but while designing your own robots does have some unwanted limitations it’s the dull multiplayer that really shorts its circuits.

Utterly pointless and almost completely boring, this soulless scrapper has little to do with Fable and even less to do with having a good time.

A disappointing misstep for Harvest Moon's sister series, where neither monster fighting nor crop planting offers any real entertainment or variety.

The worst Mario & Sonic game yet and not just a waste of a crossover but a genuinely poor mini-game compilation, and one that makes both the Wii U and the GamePad look bad.

A poor man's Panzer Dragoon is still a relatively rich meal for anyone, even if this has little real connection to the original.

Appallingly uninteresting platformer whose bland visuals are almost as dull as its uninspired level designs.

A survival game that, despite a few interesting ideas, struggles to provide any reason to persevere with its overfamiliar gameplay and poorly handled storytelling.

More interesting than most official Dynasty Warriors spin-offs, but still deeply repetitive and suffering from both a lack of originality and budget.

To add to its problems the game is also surprisingly ugly, often looking much more like an original Xbox game.

The excitement and flow of rugby is there, but the numerous technical and budgetary limitations see the game's aim go wide.

A classic case of a racer that doesn't know whether to be a simulation or arcade game and in the end never ends up a satisfying example of either.

A poor quality video game by any measure, but what this joyless throwback is doing being a key launch title for the PlayStation 4 Sony only knows.