I've always tried to be pretty positive when I've put things up here unless they're about Robbie Deans or Chris Rattue. But it's impossible for me to say one good thing about this game.

I'm a casual basketball fan. I support the Cavs and Golden State, I check the scores, that's it. I'll watch the games every so often, but I don't follow it nearly as closely as NFL or rugby union. I bought this game at the recommendation of a good friend who is a lot more into basketball than I am after hearing him rave on and on and on about the My Player mode, which is gonna be the majority of what I write about in this review.

As Hadyn will be able to attest, I like to feel like I'm in a sport game, like I was the one who caused that 60yd TD pass to Andre Johnson. So My Player in 2K10 seemed like a perfect fit for me.

It's a concept you all will have encountered. Create a digital likeness of yourself [which ends up looking nothing like yourself], assign it a position, and hit play. This one's a little more in depth, with a whole host of options - you can customise shoes, and choose from [at a guess] more than 50 different shooting styles for each kind of shot you can pull off - running shots, fadeaways, stationary jumpers and the different varities of layups and dunks.

Once you've finished mucking around with this for half an hour or so, you'll go to Summer League. Here you've got to 'prove yourself' by performing key roles of your position correctly - getting assists, rebounds, blocks, steals, filling lanes, boxing out, screening properly, taking good shots [the game actually penalises you for taking bad shots, even if they go in]. You'll have a letter grade assigned to you and this will fluctuate depending on your performance. After 6 games of this and you'll either get sent to the D-League [the Heartland Championship of the NBA] or taken on by an NBA team for a Training Camp.

After this was when things went poorly for me. In my first career I managed to play 83 games in the D-League [on 12m quarters] before I found out online my career had glitched out and no matter what I did I wouldn't get called up to the NBA. On top of this, you'll find lots of weird things happening - players get stuck in a running animation when inbounding the ball, offensive and defensive players camp in the lane with no-one around them for no reason, your players will post screens metres away from players rendering them useless and cheerleaders can get stuck on the court for minutes at a time.

By far the most annoying thing though is that this game cheats. This isn't just that I'm a bad player, I've tested this theory for weeks. The game favours the home team, and tries all it can to let them win. I've raced away to a 20pt lead in the first quarter before playing away. All of a sudden, my team started missing wide open jump shots. And wide open fastbreak dunks/layups. My player, with a 99 overall 3pt, mid-range, shoot in traffic and shoot off dribble rating couldn't hit stationary mid-range shots after making several over 2 defenders earlier in one particular game. I tried it outside of My Player too - Cavs at GSW. The Cavs should win that match by 30+ in real life, but we won by 6. This was with Shaq missing 5 open dunks, and LBJ and Mo missing 12 [!] open mid-range jumpers. It's fucking annoying as hell, especially when the game gives you requirements such as meeting a certain shooting % in a game/over the season. And some of those requirements are stupid too - like limiting Carmelo Anthony to 2pts over the course of a game. Or when the '2K Insider' - kind of like a mentor to your player - tells you teams want to trade you, but there's nowhere to select this. There's also no way to request to trade teams, you're stuck with whoever you sign with. And the game makes stupid trades - like trading KG and Paul Pierce from the Celtics for Boris Diaw of the Bobcats.

I've never, ever seen so much hatred poured towards a game online, considering 2K/NBA Live fanboys are like PS3/360 fanboys in that they will usually support their chosen product 'til death do they part. You can find their outpourings here and more specifically the My Player problems here including where I asked for help. Or just check out the hundreds of videos on YouTube.

What makes matters worse is that 2K have promised a patch to fix most things, but it's not come out, even though the game's been out for 5 months.

Quite frankly, this game is utter shit. Even the 'party' modes such as the dunk contest glitch out - pulling the same dunk in two separate dunk comps [not rounds] with the same player and props gave a very different score. Glitches make it impossible to play, and it's more frustrating that enjoyable. Unless something picks up for 2K11, I won't be buying it. And in any case, I'll be waiting months and checking online before I do. Don't even buy this second hand, trust me.

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This year I have had the privilege to review two of the best sports games I have ever played.

The first was The Bigs 2, though unlike Naly I play it on the Wii where pitch curve and speed and batting timing and upstroke are controlled by actually pitching and swinging.

The other is FIFA 10. I have never played a football game that looks this good, plays this good and is equally joyous and frustrating to play.

Players who have played previous titles will quickly pick up the controls and the nuanced shooting system (you really just want to tap that shot button). And after watching the vague tutorial videos you’ll be juggling the ball and taunting your opponents in no time.

But the best part of FIFA isn’t the gameplay. The load times are a complete non-issue as the game lets you play a one-on-one with the goalkeeper while the game loads around you. And the soundtrack is fantastic dub/reggae dance hall tracks mixed with nouveau new wave tracks like Peter, Bjorn and John. So good in fact that I went to iTunes and bought some of the songs.

And while we're talking sound, the game comes with sound tracks from a bunch of different languages. So when you're bored with the whinging British commentators you can switch to the much more entertaining Spanish, French, Portuguese or Germans. It's always a barrel of laughs to hear "Goooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaalllllllllllalalalalalalallllaaaaaaa!!"

Like many EA games this season (including the terrible NBA and NHL titles) FIFA has a season mode that is live updated with real stats and like those other games you have to pay for it (though my NBA game came with a free redeem code, so maybe you don’t have to pay for that one).

If you have one of those new fandangled HD TVs you’ll be quite impressed with FIFA, or maybe you won’t because you’re a smarmy git. I don’t know.

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Some of us may remember the gorgeous arcade game NFL Blitz. Though some people I know preferred to spend their money on Street Fighter and the like, I pumped dollar after dollar into NFL and NBA Blitz. Those videogames were stripped-down versions of the real game, aiming to provide quick pickup and understanding of the games they portrayed.

This year, I decided I wanted to get to know and understand two new sports - AFL and Baseball. AFL was easy, I just joined a club in Wellington. But for Baseball, I couldn't be bothered joining a team. I tried watching it and found it boring - it's like chess but with a big stick. 'OOOOO, he's on a 3-2 count, what's he gonna do, try for the walk or go for the hit?'. It has it's own language that isn't explained to you; 'so that breaking ball hit on his third at bat now gives him a 4 RBI count for the day' and is like an exclusive men's club.

A few weeks ago though, I saw The BIGS 2 sitting on a shelf at JB Hi-Fi and eventually decided to buy it. I was apprehensive, but wanted to try something new instead of getting Madden 10 immediately. It's a decision I still don't regret.

Read the review

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I find ice hockey to be an incredibly confusing game.

At the basic level I understand that you need to get the puck into the goal. But then you can do crazy things like skate in behind the goal. There are offside rules. You can “ice the puck”. It seems you can use your gloves if you’re not the goalie. And you can fight other players as long as you don’t fall over.

So what’s the best way to represent a fairly complex and not very popular sport in a video game? Well in the new EA Sports NHL 10 it seems the idea was to just market to people who already know the rules and let the rest catch up.

They tell you in the tutorial how to hit the puck, but not how to pass. They teach you how to check, but not what to do when the goalie has the puck. They teach you how to fight but not what will happen to either player when you do it in a game. And they definitely do not tell you what offside is.

This makes it very hard to just jump straight in if you’re new to the game, like me. Moreover the default difficulty is set to “pro”, which meant in my first game the Pittsburgh Penguins were beaten by some third rate Swedish outfit..

At least the controls were intuitive and once I had turned on all of the assists and turned off most of the penalties I was able to eke out a 2-1 victory.

I suppose if you’re a hockey fan then the whole thing might make sense and the internet is a great place to meet other people in strange niche groups so online play is a must (I kid, hockey fans, I kid!).

It seemed to be a good game if you’re a fan of the sport; for me, however, it was just like watching hockey on ESPN: I would rather football was on.

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Many, many years ago my friend Paul and I would sit and play Need for Speed. We’d laugh as we smashed each other’s high per­formance sports car off the track. Cars we had never seen in real life but had coveted in various motoring magazines.

Then Gran Turismo came out and the game changed, so to speak. You still raced around a track, but you raced in Toyota Corollas and Mazda MX5s like you’d see down the road. Then you could spend some of that virtual money on tooling them up.

The top cars weren’t the Lamborghinis or Ferraris they were Nissan Skylines. It was the birth of the boy racer games.

So Need for Speed followed suit and the last few titles have followed this formula. Get a cheap, boring car (like a Ford Focus) lower it, chuck in some nitrous, pretty it up with paint and rims then go and race. And it wasn’t so bad.

The Need for Speed Street titles were fairly open street racing; Grand Theft Auto without the Theft.

So with this new title, Need for Speed Shift, we go back to the track and back to the awesome super cars that only Russian billionaires can afford to own (and that rap stars can only afford to lease). But it’s just a racing game. I can’t see anything to separate it from any other racing game I’ve played.

It’s fun, don’t get me wrong. In fact I think it will always be fun to drive cars (even virtual ones) at high speed around fairly realistic tracks. And it’s even more fun when those cars are more than just Subarus and Mitsubishis they are Bugattis and Aston Martin and some names I never heard of before (the kind of cars that look fast when they are standing still).

But I miss the thing I alluded to in the first sentence. The game has no two-player mode. Sure I could play online, but what about the people who are sitting with me in my lounge? My partner loves racing games and wanted a race; when I said we couldn’t she gave up on the whole thing.

So close and yet so far.

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To say that Madden is the greatest game ever seems a little too much. You can definitely say that it’s the biggest game franchise of all time, because that’s a fact. It’s the flagship of EA sports and has creates a huge buzz every year.

Madden is also responsible for creating huge numbers of American football fans who may have never seen a live game before and possibly even for helping the modern “fantasy football” leagues. There is an urban legend that one of the current General Managers in the NFL actually listed playing Madden as part of his job experience (which might explain the Lions).

This iteration differs slightly from other recent releases in that there is no flashy “gimmick”. No Hit Stick, no QB Vision, no create-a-fan. Instead EA seems have listened to their old motto: “If it’s in the game, it’s in the game”. The presentation feels a lot more like a television broadcast.

Players, and this will sound crazy, mill-about more realistically. They all move separately too which sounds odd, but in Madden 09 it drove me mad that players would all run up the field in sync, everyone had the same gait. For me this is the biggest advance in realism since Madden 2001 when the helmets became shiny and reflected the stadium lights.

You also have the freedom to do crazy things like lining your quarterback up as a linebacker. Sure it’s not realistic, but it could happen.

Beyond the in-game stuff, the online roster updates are so very welcome, so the teams reflect what is happening in real life (for example the Eagles getting Mike Vick and Vikings with Brett Favre occurred after the game was released). I’ve been waiting for them to bring back online roster updates for years. It makes the game feel more and more real (you know, for a game).

And the ratings actually mean something. If your guy is Adrian Peterson he’s going to outrun a linebacker. If it’s Troy Polamalu tackling you, it’ll most likely stick.

On the downside, those online updates seem to also download ads which will run on the screen while you’re playing the game. I noticed this when I saw ads for the new McDonalds McAngus burger show up.

Also when you buy the game, you don’t get the whole thing. In the Madden online shop you’ll find all these “extras” which allow you to do more things in the franchise mode (like talk a player out of retiring or accelerate an injury healing). To buy them all costs about $15 NZ, this seems reasonable until you add it to the total cost of the game.

Overall, it’s Madden. If you like sports simulation games, this is the best one out there.