AMF Bowling Pinbusters!

Back when I was a lad, during the summer holidays you could slap down a crisp five pound note at your local bowling emporium and play as many games as you liked until 6pm. You don't get value like that any more. Just a couple of games of skittle-troubling requires you to forego food for the rest of the week.

It's not even as if the fundamental bowling experience has improved at all. It's the same sweaty, ill fitting shoes, the same sticky floors and the same group of annoying brats on the neighbouring lane getting high on slush puppies.

Yes, the digital interpretation of ten pin bowling improves on the real thing in many respects. But the one thing that's harder to top is the euphoria of knocking ten physical objects down with a medicine ball. This tactile appeal is very hard to replicate.

There have been some decent efforts on the mobile platforms, but now N-Gage gets its first crack of the whip with AMF Bowling Pinbusters!. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a gutter ball.

Vir2L has wisely chosen the exaggerated-reality route here, with slightly cartoonish (although rendered in 3D) characters to choose from and outlandishly flashy venues to play in. The presentation in general is certainly colourful, if a little soulless.

And soulless is a word that will spring to mind throughout your time with AMF, especially when it comes to the bowling experience itself. Knocking pins down here requires precious little skill, and soon establishes itself to be a simplistic - yet curiously sluggish - affair.

The first step is to set your direction. This simply involves pressing left or right on the thumbpad to set the starting point of your bowler, with no precise pointer or control over the angle of your throw. With this set, it's onto the Power stage.

After an annoying pause for a transitional animation, and what seems like one too many clicks of the 'OK' button, a curved bar appears with a moving pointer. Hit the sweet spot near the top of the bar and you'll throw an absolute cannonball shot pinwards.

Anyone who's played a bowling game - or even the real thing - before will tell you that all-out power rarely leads to a strike, so offering such a precise system on the power side rather than on the accuracy side is a strange inclusion. In fact, you'll usually benefit from falling short of the mark, and soon you'll abandon even trying for full power.

With this stage out of the way it's on to the Spin stage, which is the only way you can affect the angle of approach to the pins. Holding left or right applies aftertouch, curving your ball in the required direction. The only thing is, by the time you can see what adjustments need to be made, it's often too late to do so thanks to an unhelpfully close camera angle.

With such a poor system at its core, the rest of AMF Bowling Pinbusters! becomes a trudge. There's a full World Cup mode, but why would you want to play such an inherently uninvolving game repeatedly, with the only variation being in the garishness of the setting and the appearance and competence of your opponent?

Similarly the Precision mode, whereby you have to pick off a series of designated pins, seems a little pointless when there's such little skill involved in terms of aiming. Practice mode suffers in similar way, and its inclusion is wholly unnecessary.

The other major single player mode, Duck Pins, is a novelty at best. It's essentially a miniaturised version of ten-pin bowling (or skittles to you and I).

Throughout the game there's also the incentive of unlocking additional playable characters and bowling venues, but as the core experience remains the same it's really no incentive at all.

What little credit AMF Bowling Pinbusters! earns stems from its offering up of something new to the N-Gage service. If you're hankering for some bowling action on your Nokia handset, complete with an online hi-score table, you may well derive an hour or two of pleasure from the game.

Unfortunately, it also drops well below the average standard of titles on the service, and as such should be avoided by the vast majority.