PlayStation Move Roundup

Once that's done you can begin your bid for stardom. Unlike in real life the best way to do this isn't by eating reptilian genitals or singing Coldplay songs in between having little cries about your kids / your dead gran / Liverpool. No, you must "star in" a series of "TV shows", i.e. "play those crap mini-games".

First up is Frockstar, presented by utterly unhilarious camp stereotype Randy Darling. As with all the rest of the characters, his face is animated by static images of different expressions which switch in at out seemingly at random. It's like interacting with a living Crimewatch photofit.

Your tasks involve things like taking off and putting on clothes (fiddly), striking poses (tricky, due due to inconsistent movement recognition) and applying make-up (impossible to do without making your avatar look like Heath Ledger's Joker). It's all far too frustrating and boring to be worth persisting with for long.

Big Beat Kitchen tries to disguise the fact it's a Cooking Mama rip-off by replacing the tiny ginger white woman with a big fat black man. As the gameplay still involves mixing pancake batter, frying onions and so on, this isn't a very effective disguise.

At various points the man starts rapping, presumably because he's black. You're supposed to copy him by waving the remote about. At this point the game basically becomes Cooking PaRappa the Rapper, a game which is much less fun than it sounds due to yet another shonky control system.

There's a dull D.I.Y. game which sees you trying to chop wood, paint walls and so on, or more accurately trying to work out what the game wants you to do without falling asleep. Meanwhile, Let's Get Physical is a family gameshow in the style of Bring On the Wall. If your idea of fun is shaking a remote about and occasionally pressing a button, you'll love it.

If you're a normal person, however, you'll be driven mad by the sound of the chirpy American host shouting "Whoah!" and "Awesome!" and doing endless puns on words like "wheel". In fact, you'll wish this was a family gameshow in the style of The Running Man just so it would be over quicker.

You can also appear in some terrible adverts which make the ones the Apprentice candidates produce look like vintage Fellini. They're neither funny nor fun.

None of the mini-games are any more enjoyable in multiplayer and none of them are worth playing more than once. Plus, it's hard to see who they're aimed at – generally speaking, the games are too hard for younger kids and too desperately uncool for older ones.

The mini-games do work, and if your idea of a good time is indeed struggling to put on clown make-up on or saw a virtual plank in half you might enjoy them. But I have no idea who you are.

3/10

The Shoot

Or, as it might as well be titled, My First Shooter. This is an on-rails effort with a family-friendly twist, featuring no blood, guts or death. The idea is you're on a film set, blasting away at wooden props and cut-out characters. Your mission is not so much to kill but to destroy enough fake baddies to please the director, who offers a running commentary on your performance.

There are various movies comprised of a handful of levels to play through, and they have Western, sci-fi, mafia, underwater and haunted house themes. The stylised visuals aren't particularly pretty but they do the job.

As you'd expect, gameplay mainly involves pointing and shooting. Score multipliers can be racked up by hitting enemies consecutively without missing, while points are lost for hitting the good guys. Do well and you can earn power-ups like Showtime, which slows down time and is activated by spinning round or whirling the Move controller like a remote. Or there's Shockwave – fire into the ground to make everyone on-screen explode at once.

The power-ups are good fun but the game could have done without the other Move-related nonsense. Sometimes enemies lob projectiles which you're expected to dodge by swinging the remote left or right. The game is desperately inconsistent when it comes to recognising these moves, and having to sway about when you're trying to maintain a x11 combo ruins the flow of the action.

When enemies get up close you have the option to swing the Move forward to perform a punch. But as good old Indy demonstrated, why swing a fist when you can shoot a bullet?

These tacked-on elements aren't the biggest problem with The Shoot, however. The real issue is that it's a casual game with a hardcore structure. It demands too much of those who just want to point and shoot rather than worry about combos and power-ups.

Only one movie (the Western) is unlocked to begin with, and it's only accessible in single-player. The others aren't unlocked simply by completing the levels – you must attain a minimum high score, too. This is easy enough as far as the first few films are concerned, but past the half-way mark the game starts demanding serious numbers of points which can only be attained through judiciously strategic play.

Which is all fine if you like that sort of thing. But if so, you're probably playing a hardcore shooter, not one which involves firing blanks at MDF cowboys.

It doesn't help that you must also unlock all the movies before you can access the two-player game. This seems bonkers – even Time Crisis: Razing Storm features a drop-in, drop-out co-op mode right from the start. There is a handful of Challenge levels for two players but these still require some unlocking and aren't very interesting.