"You've made Santa very, very mad"

I love my Nintendo DS. In fact, I love most of the games I've bought for my Nintendo DS thus far. I rather enjoy some of the eclectic, weird games that the DS library has brought us thus far. Classics such as Phoenix Wright and Trauma Center have given me many gaming moments that I will cherish for a long time.

Elf Bowling is not one of those games. It's not good. No good at all, I say.

I long for the days when I was but an innocent lad; innocent, before Elf Bowling corrupted me.

I go browsing in game stores fairly regularly. Even if I don't buy anything, I like to browse the games, seeing what's new and what's interesting. For the past month, every time I've walked by the DS section, this one game stands out: A single, unpurchased copy of "Elf Bowling 1 & 2." What is this game? Why would anyone buy something called "Elf Bowling?" I don't know, and apparently nobody else did, because I'm fairly certain the copy I eventually bought is the same copy that I saw collecting dust a month earlier. Yet, something inside me cracked. After seeing Elf Bowling stare me in the face time after time after time, it just dared me to buy it. So I did. $20 brand new it cost. Pretty affordable... for most games. For Elf Bowling, it cost $19.98 too much.

When I first booted up the game, that's when the pain started. There were three elves doing a five-frame animation on my top screen repeating "Elf, Elf, Baby," over and over again. Over and over... in a maddening, nonmusical pattern that is likely to cause an aneurysm if you listen to it for more than 20 seconds. I hate the game already.

The only way to end the shrieking unfortunately is to actually load up either Elf Bowling 1 or Elf Bowling 2, which isn't much better.

Elf Bowling 1 is, as the name implies, a bowling game. What little quirks about it make it to unique? Absolutely nothing. It has elves instead of bowling pins, and that's about it. You knock the snot out of the elves and make them bloody. Every once in a while, one of them will say, "Is that all the balls you've got, Santa?" Or, when the pins are being reset, the machine might accidentally rip one of the elves' heads off. In other words, do not give this game to a child lest you want to scar them for life. Of course, the horrible gameplay is enough to scar someone for life anyway.

After all, the meat of any bowling game has to be the gameplay itself, right? The DS is perfect for a bowling game. You can use the stylus in a sweeping motion to roll the ball, aim it, and maybe add some spin, right? Nope, that is FAR BEYOND the "physics" of Elf Bowling. Instead, you watch a little light go back and forth across the lane markers. When the light is where you want to throw, you press the A button or tap the screen. That's it. You stop the light and hit pins for ten frame. Then game over. Fabulous. Even a flash game made by a middle-schooler is more complex than Elf Bowling. The cheapness with which the gameplay was put together rivals some of the worst games ever made, including Big Rigs.

Elf Bowling 2 isn't any better, and in fact, it isn't even bowling. It's shuffleboard. Instead of tapping the button once like bowling though, you hold the button down to power up and let go to shuffle. There's a little gauge that shows how far you're going to shoot the elf, so it's nearly impossible to lose the game once you know when to let go of the gauge. So that's all there is to it. You hold down the button and let go until the game is over, which seems like an eternity. Oh, and you can play with two people. WOW, impressive.

By the time I sat through an entire game of Elf Bowling 1, then an entire game of Elf Bowling 2, I had nearly passed out. The graphics are terrible. The "humor" is awful. The gameplay isn't even fit to be a free internet download. Oh, and there's also "Elf, Elf, Baby," which I CAN'T GET ENOUGH OF.

Unless you have a strange fetish with collecting the worst games ever created, or buying every single DS game released, don't buy this game. $5 is too much to pay for Elf Bowling $1 is too much to play for Elf Bowling. There is no drug on the planet strong enough to make Elf Bowling fun.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 02/03/06