I know a friend, a pretty good guy, who plays paintball quite extensively. Me? I've lost the thrill of playing it when I got shot in the butt with a paint pellet. But this friend, he digs into it like it's a sunken treasure, playing against the fiercest of competition and preying on his targets like Ted Nugent hunts wild bears. He lives for the thrill of victory and grinds his teeth when he wallows in defeat, like a true sportsman. But even he runs into his testing moments, and one of them came about when we were playing a round of Splat! Magazine Renegade Paintball late last week on the Xbox.

He played it for a few minutes in a two-player session and all I could see upon his face was a frown. "Man, if this thing were an animal in the woods, I'd put it out of its misery", he told me. No joke. I wouldn't make up a story like this. A paintball enthusiast such as him gets into a paintball video game and finds that the sheer joy of his sport has been reduced to rubble by lacking development and a number of problems that beleague it into something of a travesty. It's one of the worst games of the year, no doubt.

In the game, you're given a number of modes to choose from, including the likes of an all-out manhunt or a game of capture the flag, and then take off to outdoor and indoor terrains, each with their own tempo and speed, to take out the competition and complete your goals. Sounds like fun, right? Well, it's the exact same thing that the Greg Hastings paintball video games had, and, get this, they actually came across as enjoyable. Not the case here. Splat! Magazine Renegade Pinball may ride the high horse when it comes to its license, but everything else is clearly dragging.

Take the gameplay, for example. There are first person and third person perspectives to choose from, which would be nice if either one of them had any sort of appeal in their control schemes. The problem is, sometimes you have to be absolutely precise with your shots, as auto-aim is taken away and gives you the unfair disadvantage of trying to be absolutely perfect with tagging your prey. On top of this, the computer AI is ridiculously unbalanced. You could take nine shots and miss completely, and they take one, and bam! You have to respawn. It's a reverse ploy of the formula from the movies where the bad guy never hits the good guy in the 47 shots he fires, but the good guy kills with one.

There are team tactics included with Splat!, but they render themselves useless. You could give your team a command to back you up or get into a position to protect the flag, and half the time they're completely unresponsive. The other half, they get perched into positions in which they come across as either completely useless or wide open for a pick-off. And I thought other FPS games had it bad when the team members were dummies. They seem like college graduates compared to these morons.

The arenas you battle in look somewhat decent, but not exactly something you might consider for this generation. There's muddy textures and unfocused fuzziness throughout, along with slowdown and lapses in animation. Think of playing Greg Hastings but with your eyes blinking annoyingly in spurts and you get the idea. Even the menus lack any sort of pizzazz or presentation that the folks at Splat! might approve of. The only thing really represented from the mag are a staffer or two, who jump into combat. Yeah, you know, that's how I want to be remembered, as a tag-on character for a dumpster game. Something for the old resume, you know.

You think that's bad? The sound department takes a worse approach. The music in the background here consists of generic rock tunes. I mean rock tunes that are so bad that I know a few cover bands that wouldn't even approach them, even after an evening of seeing who can drink the most Jack Daniels in one gulp. The sound effects are sparse and lack any sort of diversity. Worst of all is the announcer, trying to cop an attitude and come across as aggressive and failing horribly, instead sounding like some kind of reject from the show Jackass. I know used car salesmen that are more tolerable than this guy...though not many.

The game tries to make up for its numerous shortcomings with multiplayer, one of the two saving graces. Split-screen and system link are available off-line, and work alright, but then that's if you can tolerate the numerous problems plaguing the game (like my friend couldn't). Online is a completely different, and more miserable story, as the Xbox Live finds itself plagued with bugs and kick-outs during matches. I swear, I ran into like two strings of matches that were back-to-back in the number of times I've played. Globalstar has insisted that they would fix this, but so far, I haven't heard any positive feedback on changes. And I probably won't for some time, if at all.

The only other saving grace I mentioned was the map editor. This is a neat idea for a paintball game, as you can build your own utopia to hunt other friends around in. But it's only if you've managed to succumb to the game's limited charms otherwise. I wouldn't buy this game just for one feature- that's like investing in a broken-down Saab because you happen to dig the model of car radio installed.

Bottom line, the game's not worth its budget price. Hell, it's not even worth less than that. Splat Magazine Renegade Pinball clearly rushed out of the gates without any sort of polishing or zest to make it a worthwhile addition to your library. The controls are bland, the presentation is nausea-inducing, the AI is unbelievably champion-like, and the online play riddled with problems. I tell you, I'd rather have my friend grab his paintball gun and shoot me several times in the stomach than try and endure this mess again.