50 Cent: Bulletproof [Xbox]

When the camera can be made to point at any of the humans, you'll see that the character models are excellent. The screenshots didn't lie -- the G-Unit crew looks sharp, and 50 is a marvel of smooth textures and solid animation. It's good to be the king.

It must have been lousy to be the level designers, though, since the rest of Bulletproof is murky, dark, and drab. It's no surprise that the game mostly takes place in corridors, homogenous rooms, and back alleys, but how about a little more effort to use interesting lighting and texture design?

Since the primary characters look so good, it's no surprise that they're voiced pretty well. Given that Pinocchio is less wooden than Fitty's performance in his own movie, you've gotta wonder how much of this is actually him. Not that it matters. Listening to the dialogue is perhaps the least painful part of the game.

Instead of decent gameplay, there are loads of unlockable videos and several discs worth of 50 Cent's music. The fact that anyone interested enough in Fitty to unlock the extras has probably already seen them apparently escaped Vivendi. Then we realized that this isn't a game, but a marketing tool, and so it makes perfect sense that the gameplay is little more than a commercial for the real product. Look out for the inevitable Xbox 360 sequel, in which we'll probably be able to buy actual swag from within the game.

You want 50's music? Buy a CD. Grab a DVD if you want to see the guy move. But if you want to pretend to be Curtis Jackson, take your fifty bucks out to a paintball range and let someone drill you nine times. It'll be a better experience than this.

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