"I rub you long time....."

Love. Love changes everything, or so they say. Love has started wars, love has ended them. Love has brought people together, and as Joy Division point out, love will tear us apart again. Sinatra made a living singing the sounds of love, and Meg Ryan has launched an audience-bothering assault on the cinema by acting in love over and over again. Love has turned Tom Cruise into an insufferable fool, and has turned sinners into saints. We as a people love the thought of love. We're all romantics at heart, no matter how much the more manly amongst us hate to admit it. And as pointed out in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, 'Love makes you do the wacky'. But nobody takes the wacky quite as far as Sega do in Project Rub on the DS - a classic love story, in which boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy faces hordes of angry bulls.

Our intrepid hero begins his romantic meanderings by rescuing a fellow who has accidentally swallowed several goldfish. Forcing the man to regurgitate the fish wins our boy the admiration of the crowd, and draws his attention to a true beauty in a blue dress. She seems to have a taste for the extreme side of life, and so in order to win the heart of the fair maiden, the wannabe Heathcliffe joins a troop of travelling circus folk - the Rub Rabbits - who specialise in the sort of mental shenanigans that would have even Johnny Knoxville and the Jackass crew turning and running (makes sense, really - Michael Jackson met Macauly Culkin in just the same way). But while he is busy trying to pull this lovely lady, a threat is brewing - our boy has a rival for the fair maiden's affection - a rival who is going to go to whatever lengths necessary to win the wench's heart....

From the goldfish-heavy opening, it is clear that this is a game with a finely-tuned sense of the ridiculous, and as such the plot for this game feels like great fun. It, at heart, amounts to little more than a series of random outlandish events in the lives of our main characters, with things becoming even more off the wall as time passes: suffice to say that evil giant candles from - and I quote - a "foreign dimensional space", giant snakes, man-eating plants and a car that uses pedestrians as projectile weaponry all feature at some point. And yet the most bizarre part is that Sega somehow manage to make it work, and ultimately the plot miraculously pulls together in time to build towards a finale that actually feels somewhat natural - and even quite dramatic - in the context of the game.

The fact that the trippy plot actually works feels more like a happy accident than a deliberate act on the part of the developers, though, as Project Rub ultimately amounts to a way of showing off all the various features of the DS by way of a series of mini-games. Think Wario Ware with added romance. As a launch title it proves a very effective way of showing off what your new toy can do, but to be honest it isn't exactly the deepest well on the farm. That said, it is still a very addictive experience.

In the story mode the mini-games are split into three different groups - mostly comprising of the regular games that are spread over five 'rounds'. Usually you unlock several of these at once, and successfully completing these games partly fills up a love-heart between your character and the harlot, while losing - naturally - empties the heart slightly. These games are a mixed bunch, using most of the DS's abilities quite well. Each game takes place over five increasingly difficult rounds, with a somewhat inexplicable 'break time' after the first three, in which you get a very brief cutscene of your lady drinking lemonade, or indulging in some other such frivolity. One will see you trying to guide a unicyclist across a very tight and twisting path using your stylus, while another sees you literally blowing out the aforementioned evil candles. Another sees you having to shout as loud as you can to get the girl's attention after she wanders into the middle of a brass band (certainly not a game you want to be playing on the bus - you'll look like a right oddity), while another sees you using the stylus to colour in various shapes. Other games work more on giving you quite a cerebral workout, such as the brilliant game where you are presented with a nine-by-nine grid. Some for the squares in the grid are turned the right way, revealing part of a picture, while some are upside down, the aim being to touch the squares that need to be turned round to finish the picture, with the catch that all the squares around them will also be turned. With a limited number of moves in which to complete the picture, this proves to be quite a challenge, and is one of the highlights of Project Rub. And then there's the game that sees you trying to rescue plucky skydivers using the awesome power of mathematics - noteworthy for standing out as odd even in a game where logic has clearly packed up and left home for the weekend. These games work well on the whole, and are generally quite addictive, but there are some games that are fairly poor in comparison.

There's a dancing game that places the various buttons that you need to press in a timed sequence on the touchscreen. This is all well and good, but you can't escape the fact that there are enough actual buttons on the DS to cover all the moves, which makes it slightly irrelevant. Then there's a bowling game when you must send our hero rolling across a busy road in order to knock down all the people waiting at the bus stop (those wacky Japanese developer-types have obviously been at the Special Brew again). This can prove to be quite frustrating, as you must ensure that your human wrecking ball doesn't get run over on the way, yet cars can appear and mow you down after you've launched him on his merry way. These let the package down as a whole, and smack of lazy design, especially considering the madcap genius of some of the other mini-games available.

After completing a scene successfully, you either go to a love scene or a boss scene, both of which are single-level games. The love scenes really aren't as exciting as they sound - in fact, they're rubbish. Challenges presented to you include such thrilling missions as holding hands with the ladyshape as you walk - basically you just need to keep the stylus pointed at her hand the whole time. Aside from an interesting scene where you must perform CPR - using the microphone to blow into the patient's mouth, and the stylus to give chest compressions - these scenes are very dull and repetitive, and frankly they go on far too long for their own good: usually the knack to beating them is simply finding your rhythm and sticking to it, and once you've found your groove, you can pretty much switch off mentally and wait for the more interesting levels to appear.

Thankfully, the ingenious boss levels more than make up for this. From the first boss level, which sees you facing a horde of charging bulls that you must poke with the stylus to calm down - while avoiding poking the skiers that litter the stage - to the level that sees you chasing your rival's van down a busy motorway in your own car, shooting passers-by at him with a giant catapult, these levels really ramp up the challenge level from the regular mini-games, and are impeccably well designed - you may think that using the touchscreen as a steering wheel would feel contrived, but it really feels very natural, and you'll be weaving in and out of traffic like a pro without even having to think about what you are doing.

When any of these mini-games is completed for the first time it becomes available in the 'Memories' mode, in which you can pick them to replay in order to gain stars, Game-And-Watch Gallery-style. In most cases the challenge is ramped up, with the games featuring ten levels instead of five, and giving you only one life instead of the standard three, with a star available for each level you complete, and it is a joy being able to spend a greater length of time with your favourite games. However, the love scenes and the boss scenes which only had a single level in the main game still only have the one level to try turn your hand to, which is a real shame. It would have been great to see the boss games spread across five or ten increasingly difficult levels, but as it is you are just left with a carbon copy of the game you played in the main mode, and since you only get one star for completing these it feels like quite a waste.

And then there is the rather chillingly-titles 'Maniac' mode, in which you dress the lady up in a costume of your choice, and proceed to poke her with the stylus, watching as she cries out in pain and tries to defend herself. This is deeply disturbing, and raises some very real questions about just what is going on in the minds of the developers, and yet surprisingly it is here that the greatest level of depth lies in the game. In order to unlock the various costumes for your victim (and there are many to unlock, as well as different shoes and hairstyles), you must gather as many stars as possible from the Memories mode, and unearth the hidden rabbit icons that are to be found by tapping the exact right part of the screen during the cutscenes in the main game. Since the main story mode is only likely to last you a day or two, much of the time you spend with the game will be spent trying to unlock these costumes for completion's sake, and it is a deceptively large task. There are even some costumes that can only be unlocked by having the right Sega GBA game plugged into your DS - and the Sonic The Hedgehog hairstyle that can be gained this way is a worryingly attractive look on your lady....

This game, while initially appearing deceptively simplistic during the mini-games, boasts a very distinctive graphical style. It's almost like looking at a photo in negative - the skin on your characters is jet black, with no facial features discernible whatsoever. The developers claim that this is so that you can imaging that the female lead looks just like your dream girl, but it is more likely tat they just rightly realised that it looks really quite cool. There is also a very bold use of colour - with the characters appearing largely in silhouette form the little splashes of colour that you see - such as the spiky mohawk that your rival sports, or the enigmatic goldfish that adorns your character's shirt - really stand out, as do the stylish backgrounds (especially on some of the later levels when our hero is essentially on a bad trip). Throw in a deliberately blocky look to the proceedings and it all starts to have quite a modern art-ish vibe. However, some levels, such as the car chase scene, look far more traditional, and it is here that you notice just how smoothly this game can run, and on occasion it uses a very passable 3D engine.

The sound is similarly stylised, and is again very impressive. The tunes on display all sound as if the developers wrote a very standard video-game ditty, and then rather than simply synthesising it using the best that modern technology has to offer, instead opted to have a barbershop quartet sing the songs. While the tunes themselves are very few in number, and extremely simplistic, the fact that they seem to be played out entirely using actual human vocals makes them extremely memorable. There's even a smattering of speech thrown in for good measure - when you are allowed a brief rest during the mini-games, a female voice announces that it's 'bweak tiiiime' in a manner that is far more seductive than a simple handheld should be able to manage.

When it launched with the DS earlier this year, Project Rub was a great way to explore what the various feature of your new machine could do. It makes very good use of both the touch screen and the microphone, and looks and sounds incredibly impressive to boot, making it a great way to show off your latest machine. However, over six months down the line developers have grown used to the DS and it's strange new ways, and have begun to produce far more complex games that use the machine to the best of it's abilities while providing quite a bit of depth - something that is sadly missing here. Project Rub is a great exhibition piece, and some of the games here are very well designed and thoroughly entertaining, but there's no escaping the fact that as our sense of wonder at the capabilities of the DS begins to fade, this is a game that is destined to be forgotten in favour of games that prove to be more rewarding in the long term. So Project Rub may not prove to be the all-time love that you are looking for, but if you let it into your heart it can perhaps be a great springtime fling, where passions burn high for a short but oh-so-sweet while, before burning out forever.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 02/01/06