PlayStation 2

Strike Force Bowling

Well, that's it, Strike Force Bowling. Not a giant game by any stretch, but you're also talking about a game that costs less than a tank of gas these days! And for that, the game is worth the money. It's certainly not a realistic bowling game by any stretch, but it is fun and with up to four players it not bad to have to whip out at a party or if you just want to throw a few games. Good job.

Strike Force Bowling delivers a comprehensive bowling package with multiple gameplay modes, inventive locations, and several bowlers to choose from. The first thing you need to do is create your bowler. This isn’t as creative as it could be. You basically pick from one of eight character models, male, female, robot, skeleton, or alien, enter your name and it’s off to the alleys. You can then tweak four attributes like power and accuracy by removing points from one attribute and adding them to another.

The game does have some cleverness. If you pick the old West setting, instead of pins, you are knocking down whiskey bottles. The lane over the bridge in China has an Asian theme, from the dragon markings on the ball to the characters used to register the score. In the medieval setting, you are bowling with pumpkins, and if in a single-player mode, your opponent is a skeleton.

The game is roughly the same on both the PS2 and the Xbox. Don't be fooled by the fact that the Xbox version is five dollars more expensive than the PS2 edition, or that there is an "online enabled" tag on the Xbox version's box. The only real difference is that the Xbox version is "Xbox Live aware," meaning that it will connect to the Live servers so that you can field friend requests and invites while playing the game. In the end, Strike Force Bowling is a textbook example of a budget game. Its no-frills approach is inoffensive but also quite drab.

It has a few unlockables and modes of play, and though some of them are kind of cool (like cosmic bowling), the game fails in the simple task of capturing the excitement of actual bowling.

All in all, if you’re looking for a basic bowling game with some depth and extra modes and such and aren’t really looking for anything that authentic, Strike Force Bowling is worth the pocket-change price. But beyond that, it’s not a good enough game to really wow most gamers as an authentic sim or anything. At the end of the day, you’ll end up wishing for an online mode, more human opponents and an easier easy mode for the young’uns.

The desire to finally have another PS2 bowling title may cause some to blindly walk about tossing $20 at any clerk holding a box with "bowl" stamped on the front. This is understandable since we don't have much the way of bowling games. Still, just because pickings are slim, rotten apples do not magically become less rotten.

Developing a bowling game and trying to make it worthy of a purchase must be a difficult task. Why, you ask? Well, bowling is a sport completely dependent on the minute motions of the human body, along with the broad strokes that are easily imitated by a videogame. A game developer has no problem programming an on-screen character to walk forward, walk backwards, to pull out a gun and shoot it, to hop slightly or to jump twenty feet in the air.