Initially, there's definitely a sense of euphoria and wonder, as this new 3D realm is revealed. 'Looking into' your favourite game is a great new experience but once you start to play around with different games, it's quickly apparent this isn't a level playing field.

At its best with Left 4 Dead, some primal instinctive part of the brain lights up as you realise you now have depth perception. Zombies flailing towards you suddenly have a natural order and a beauty as they spiral in space with a well-placed shotgun to the head. Blood spurts in awesome Jackson Pollock-esque fashion onto your virtual camera lens that views this apocalyptic world. This is the 3D at its best; it works straight out of the box complimenting the gameplay, even enhancing it.

The crosshair is solid, the effects inhabit real space, the feeling of tangible depth is palpable. Another showcase game is Burnout Paradise. While the immediate sense of space is perhaps less impressive – possibly for the lack of flying zombie corpses – it's intriguing how your eye begins to take new visual cues onboard, focusing on 'distant' junctions, objects and other landmarks seems to make timing turns and strategies easier.

My eyes! My eyes!

At its worst, though, it's a frustrating mess. A crosshair that makes you feel you've drunk five pints, constant ghosting from lights and effects, while struggling to make the stereo effect work at all without inducing eye-strain. Somewhat akin to magic-eye pictures, it's an effect that you gradually get more and more used to or not at all.

But the title we tried that should win a special award for being most migraine-inducing is perhaps Fallout 3. We staggered from Vault 101 euphorically looking towards what we expected to be some soul-lifting panorama of post-apocalyptic destruction, to be greeted by the same old flat view with a 'scenic overlook' sign poking out in the foreground. Hardly awe-inspiring compared to the first time we gazed around that view on a 2D screen. While at other times it feels like you're watching Chinese shadow theatre with cutouts held at different depths.

You feel this is the last trick Nvidia has to pull out of the 3D hat. As with SLI and physics processing it's another wait-and-see technology. There's promise in there, but little currently really delivers. The best description of it is as a £150 novelty, it's cute for half-an-hour and then…

Perhaps if there was head tracking, like we've seen created with the reverse Wii controller hack, that would add the extra immersion that these glasses are crying out for. As it is, until games are directly written for the system they're not much more than an expensive novelty. A shame: as they do a good job of oozing great potential.