It just doesn't have enough substance to stand out on it's own.

Boingz does provide a moderate amount of challenge (especially if you aim for a gold-medal ranking in each stage), and the springy little creatures kinda get under your skin with their attentive oval eyes and adorable aimless humming. The experience just seems better suited to a browser-based Flash game than a standalone WiiWare title.

Call me a purist, but I like my traditional racers on consoles -- not my DS -- where I can sit on my couch, marvel at the crisp graphics, and feel the feedback coming into my racing wheel as I drive along the road. But if you really want to race on the DS -- and it's your only viable option -- GRID works as intended...mostly.

While the game does a solid job of recreating the console tracks and maintaining a steady frame rate, the scaled-down visuals don't always depict how your competitors are wrecked, which sucks away a lot of the appeal of the experience.

It just doesn't have enough substance to stand out on it's own.

Somewhere deep within Fracture, far, far below its offensively derivative crust, lies a worthwhile, original game. It's very much a game with a gimmick -- terraforming terrain on the fly -- and while that gimmick works well (if a bit too predictably), Fracture is thoroughly unexciting.

The biggest issue with the game, besides the slow pace, is that each level feels roughly the same, despite the shifting settings of each stage.

The most frustrating thing about Deca Sports is that it's not bad -- just bland, uninspired, and of questionable value.

The game is like Manhunt, except with adorable teddy bears. Wait -- can you compel your victims to kill themselves in Manhunt? No? OK, maybe Naughty Bear's actions are slightly worse.

Blitz II may be well ahead of its most recent competition -- EA's NFL Tour fiasco -- but after the initial wave of gross-out injuries, you'll see this for what it is: an anti-NFL dare reliant on limp shock value and a subpar football game.

But it's frankly bewildering that Taito is charging $15 for an extremely marginal upgrade to a game that we played some 13 years ago.

Edited down to a tight package this could probably make a pretty good machinima feature (or Sci-Fi original motion picture for that matter). But as a game, it fails.

Genki's seeming inability or unwillingness to fix the slidey physics even a little bit keeps each game from greatness. Hardcore TXR fans will likely cry foul at that remark, but anyone who wants their virtual racing to at least slightly resemble the feel of real driving will feel the same way.

A punishingly difficult action game.

The monkeys stick to the comfortable security inside their balls and the platforming stays recognizably formulaic.

But whether you're playing online or off, you just can't shake the feeling that the PC version of Blazing Angels 2 is a messy afterthought, made all the more disappointing for wasted potential.

The game's multiplayer and arcade modes are both valiant attempts at providing replayability, but neither are varied or deep enough to keep anyone but the most frantically bored or underexposed gamer entertained for longer than five minutes.

It's a shame that Metal Saga's high points -- the humor, the music, and its relative freedom -- are mired in disappointing production values and a concept that hasn't improved since the series' 8- and 16-bit days. It's droll and "different" -- but it's so different, it's the same.

BlackSite the narrative and BlackSite the game never meet in the middle.

It's a game populated by animatronic mannequins, its plot driven by flat, unsympathetic characters. Worse, the dumb AI destroys any sense of danger, so the tension that runs through great stealth games never materializes.

An unintuitive mess. Never mind the fact that gamers are instinctively prepared to press a button to accelerate, but charging your boost by braking is an impractical affair that can also get you into trouble when you're stuck at the bottom of a hill and need a boost to get up.

Omega Five isn't anything special -- a blessing in some respects, but ultimately its curse. It's a side-scrolling shooter, highly reminiscent of the 16-bit era (even the music is in line with the best shooters of the late '90s), and while it's a short game on the whole, its challenge is nearly insurmountable and definitely not for the mass market.

It quickly degenerates into as absurd a mess as four turtles that are supposed to be ninjas with a rat for a sensei sounds like on paper. As Michelangelo might say, "cowabunga dudes, this is one gnarly game wreck."

To be fair, Dark Kingdom doesn't have any single game-destroying flaw, except perhaps for that murderous bastard camera. It's an average, if occasionally very frustrating example of a genre that's abundantly represented on other platforms.

The act of reloading requires you to physically slide the bullets into the gun with the stylus. Sounds simple (doesn't it always?), but it's not. In fact, it's frustratingly unresponsive.

As neat as the touch-screen controls are, they don't take attention away from the rest of Freedom Wings' faults. The whole thing feels like a 1990's shareware PC game; it loves to dole out its action in small chunks.

Yoshi's latest adventure simply proves that it really doesn't matter which way you look at a mediocre game -- it's boring from every angle, and no amount of spin can prove otherwise.

This game attempts to combine the best aspects of serious tactical shooters like Flashpoint with the run-and-gun action of the Battlefield series, but does neither very well. [40 = original score]