Personally I get a similar amount of pleasure from cleaning the oven or mowing the lawn, both of which I can do for free and both of which provide some tangible benefit when I'm done rather than just making my thumbs hurt.

A cheap shoddy cash in.

If you are a big fan of darts and watch it religiously then I can see this game being right up your street, especially during the months when it's not on the television. But for those of you out there that occasionally have a session with your pals down the pub then I suggest you stick with the traditional way of playing darts and avoid this title.

Quibbles and gripes aside it's safe to say Star Wars fans have had to often put up with worse, with last year's abysmal Lightsaber Duels immediately springing to mind. The biggest flaw of Republic Heroes, other than its generally unlikable source material, is that it feels unfinished. As a result, poor execution mars what could have been a likable child-orientated platformer.

It seems Secret Level somehow managed to circumvent everything that can make games fun as they produced Iron Man. It's not awful, but its decidedly below average from beginning to end. The game is not necessarily the laziest attempt at a cash-in I've ever played, but it's certainly on the right track.

Showing a complete lack of faith in either their own control system or their intended audience's ability, Double Helix have seen fit to implement a far too effective automated targeting system which does its best to remove every last element of skill from proceedings.

Whether you'll ever get to see much of it is highly questionable, though, given that the time between starting and becoming completely despondent with ArchLord is likely to be minimal.

It's ugly, it's poorly executed, it's riddled with technical glitches, its A.I. is laughable, it's boring, unoriginal and thoroughly unrewarding.

With such soulless and unplayable mechanics slapped onto an idea that was mediocre at best and marketed to kids via a familiar(ish) licence this represents not only the worst game I've played in a long long time but the most gut wrenchingly cynical example of all that's wrong with the games industry today.

Ignoring, as is really only fair, the poor timing of its release there's still a multitude of reasons why you shouldn't spend your hard earned money on Winter Sports: The Next challenge 2009. Mow the lawn, look at the lambs or just enjoy the extra daylight, whatever you do with these warm spring days make sure it's more enjoyable than playing this.

To put it simply, if the idea of thirty very simple arcade games with no real objective other than good old fashioned high score setting appeals and you can put up with the strained atmosphere of craziness then you may get some fun out of this well presented but ultimately flawed collection.

When the only reason you're compelled to continue playing a game is to point and laugh at how badly the entire thing has been thrown together, you know that it has major problems.

Apart from the topical title, Flushed Away shares the same type of brain busting boredom we've all come to expect from these sort of lazy cash-ins, with the added disadvantage of leaving itself open for some puntastic criticism... absolute toilet.

Such a regressive, unexciting game deserves nothing but our collective scorn: it insults the medium and its audience. The greatest kick in the teeth, though? Every website and magazine will go to the effort of writing a review because it's guaranteed to provide a steady stream of traffic. Look - I'm doing one right now! Sex sells no matter how loathsome and uninspired the tacked-on game proves to be, and everyone at Tecmo obviously knows it.

It feels rushed and poorly thought through and a distinct lack of identity is coursing through the game from start to finish.

Damnation strikes you as an unconfident, unconvincing effort, and the only possible conclusion is that Blue Omega lack a basic grasp on the fundamentals.

Sadly, Rebellion's staid middle-of-the-road performance continues with Shellshock 2: Blood Trails, which, although not unequivocally broken, is so thoroughly unappealing and 'last generation' that it's all-but guaranteed a well-deserved place amid the lower echelons of gaming mediocrity.

It is a title with a dull, repetitive level structure, unforgivably long loading times, lazy cutscenes, a generic musical score and perhaps most damningly, another game blighted by the continuing curse of sub-standard Superman videogames.

An abomination of a racing game, not only is it lacking in everything a good racing game needs (a sense of speed, fun tracks, controls that feel right and competitive AI) but it has all been put together with such an obvious lack of care or basic gameplay testing that you wonder why they bothered at all.

Most truly awful videogames usually throw up some kind of content-related plus point to touch upon by way of light relief to the flow of dirge, but sadly the only content plus point evident in Crazy Frog Racer 2 is that there isn't much on offer and its all over so blessedly quickly.

I simply cannot understand the half-arsed approach that has been taken with Godzilla; I played more engaging games 15 years ago on the GameBoy. With every level taking exactly the same design but with a slightly different background it reaches new levels of repetition.

A scintillating performance, marred only by the odd foul.