Carnival Games for the DS does an excellent job of recreating the carnival experience at home. It's fairly expensive, over very quickly with nothing to show for your efforts and is filled with freaky looking people. The only thing missing is the stench from the petting zoo and the queasy feeling from eating too much fried dough.

The game is the handheld version of the Wii hit of the same name and endeavors to recreate all of the fun minigames and utilize almost every bell and whistle on the DS at the same time. You'll use the stylus to navigate the maze of over twenty carnie infested games as well as do things like hurl balls into baskets, wield strong man hammers and shoot widdle plastic duckies. You'll use the control pad and buttons to drive bumper boats and RC cars and you'll blow into the microphone to inflate balloons, or yell into it to win some tickets. Even Wi-Fi is used as you can share games with a friend, thereby inviting them to your own personal Midway of Misery.

With all of these ways to play the various games, it's a shame that the games aren't very much fun to play. The games are either too easy, as with the classic strongman hit-the-bell-with-the-hammer game, or maddeningly frustrating such as the RC car race. This is in part due to the controls being equally imbalanced. When playing the mini-basketball game, the touch screen registers every tap without a problem, however when blowing up the clown's balloon with your water pistol, aimed with the stylus, the smallest stylus movement causes massive aiming problems.

However hard or easy you find the games, once you've played them all, none of them are exciting or interesting enough to warrant going back and playing them again, however in order to unlock the various pieces of clothing, hats and accessories you'll have to play the games over and over and over. You can either come in third to win tickets used to either purchase items or play more games, or you can come in second or first and win specific prizes. Don't worry, you can also do so poorly as to win nothing but the joy of having one less ticket in your grubby, popcorn encrusted fist meaning that in order to play some of the more expensive games, you'll have to spend even more time with the various offerings. Along with the traditional carnival games, you can ask a Swami a question and find hidden activities such as riding a teeter-totter with some random child

At least there are a good number of items to slap on your character. At the game's onset you'll pick a gender, hair style and outfit and then accessorize from there with your winnings. The character models in the game are nothing impressive, and downright scary for the various carnies, and you can't actually see your character when playing any of the games, so there's really no joy in having your character equipped with elf shoes and a prizefighter's belt. That being said, without the need to win accessories and outfits, there's no reason to play the game.

Visually the game does an adequate job of representing the various activities, switching from 3-D models when navigating the midway to 2-D representations of the games themselves. With all of the customization available to your character, you'd think that the other inhabitants of the game would be similarly tricked out; however you'll see the same freaky looking games attendants as you move from spot to spot. The other players are similarly bling-less leading you to believe that you are the only person in a ten mile radius that can lob a ball into a tilted basket.

At thirty bucks, Carnival Games for the DS can add "overpriced" to the laundry list of negative adjectives used to describe it. It's short and uninteresting with any slight joy of a playing a good mini-game far outweighed by the frustration of playing the bad ones. Send this one to the bottom of the dunk tank.

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