Viewtiful Joe: Red Hot Rumble [GC]

At first glance, Red Hot Rumble seems like a game for hyperactive 13-year-olds hopped up on Twizzlers and Mountain Dew. It's insanely fast-paced arcade fighting crammed with color and motion and power-ups and a thousand collectibles, all bouncing around the screen like so much candy from a pinata. Somewhere in all this activity is your little guy, punching, jumping, collecting, jumping some more, punching, punching, collecting, bouncing... oh wait, that's not your guy, that's the computer's guy, you're over there in the corner, punching, punching, jumping, collecting, collecting. It will leave you breathless and jittery and overwhelmed.

And so it is as first glance. Second, third, and fourth glance, too. It'll be like this for a while. There's a Red Hot Rumble zen you have to acquire before this is anything more than a wildly random smear of colorful chaos.

You'll get some practice getting it ready to play with your friends. Much of the content is locked behind a single-player story in which you have to beat the CPU to get to the levels and characters. This isn't terribly hard to do, but it sometimes seems completely out of your hands whether you win; the computer player seems to randomly alternate between godlike kung fu master and punching bag.

The action is all very in-your-face and multifaceted, with more emphasis on power-ups than the actual fighting. The goal-oriented levels invariably trump the mano-a-mano encounters. And it might not necessarily appeal to fans of the more measured and sometimes majestic Viewtiful Joe.

As far as the basics of gameplay, it's very much like Power Stone or Super Smash Brothers Melee, which are positively sedate in comparison. You choose a character with very simple controls: move, jump, punch, and special punch are pretty much all there is to it. And then you jump into an arena with up to three opponents, as well as a myriad computer controlled bad guys there for the beating.