WarioWare.

Failed. It’s much harder than you’d think. Okay, it’s now an attempt to mention it less than 133 times. Per paragraph.

Reviewing Hot Pixel without mentioning WarioWare would be like reviewing Girls Aloud without mentioning ‘pointless outside the pages of FHM.’ Or the sky without mentioning ‘blue.’ Or Halo without mentioning ‘Halo.’ When a game comes along that introduces a new way of playing to the mainstream it’s oft imitated. You need only look at the number of stealth games we’ve been subject to since the success of Metal Gear Solid for proof, but those games are merely inspired by Metal Gear Solid, and they do enough to differentiate from it to warrant existence. No such luck here. Hot Pixel is a shameless clone of WarioWare, and not a very good one.

It starts badly. Even before getting the plastic off the box there are the blatant lies. “200+ minigames!” screams the case proudly, yet upon playing the game it’s quite apparent that there are no more than 130 games on the UMD. That’s before factoring in just how similar most of them are. Sure, WarioWare had its fair share of repetition, but it was disguised so well that it’s hardly noticeable. Out of the 130 minigames on offer in Hot Pixel, there’s one in particular that feels like it's repeated a good 100 times in different guises.

Each minigame lasts seconds, in which time you have to work out what to do based on a short instruction, and then carry out the actions. Episodes mode splits the minigames into ten levels, (tied together with poor-quality videos of what can only be described as ‘some idiot’) in which you complete a number of games, battling with increasing speed and difficulty, before being faced with a boss. As you complete levels, games that are a little more fleshed out are unlocked for some slightly longer minigame action, and any games played during the levels are unlocked and can be played individually for high scores or practice. Sound familiar? This all might sound like a recommendation, ‘if you like WarioWare you’ll love this,’ but it’s not. Sure, on paper the only significant difference between Hot Pixel and WarioWare is that Hot Pixel comes on a UMD so it won’t fit in your Game Boy Advance but, well, they’ve made it a bit crap. With a simple formula that’s proven to work, how have they managed to get it so wrong?

Aside from the repetition, there are games that just don’t work. Collision detection is questionable at best in certain games, and other games ask you to collect items that aren’t even on the screen, taking success and failure firmly out of the player’s hands and into those of Lady Luck. In a further kick to the nuts, completing the game in normal unlocks tricky, which takes something that wasn’t that fun to begin with, and makes it less fun. In this mode the speed, minigame difficulty, and games remain the same, but it’s made trickier by effects which include imposing an image over the game so you have to guess what you’re doing, scrolling the game through the screen like a dodgy VCR, or pixelating the screen, all of which, yes, make the game trickier, but so would playing with your eyes closed and there’s not much point to that. It’s simply not a difficulty curve. It starts off far too easy, and then jumps straight to a difficulty that’s made artificially hard by giving near-impossible challenges and introducing luck as the major factor to progression. All it does do is make the game infuriating. Losing your last life after twenty minigames not through any fault of your own but because the game was just a block of colour instead of a game can produce the angriest of PSP throwing moments.

Having the patience (which is the most important skill you’ll need to get on in Hot Pixel) to complete tricky mode unlocks the even-more frustrating crazy mode which, as you’d expect, reduces the fun further until there's so little you find yourself thinking you’d rather be discussing the morals of sex and violence in videogames with Ann Widdecombe. Luckily, the implied inclusion of a fifth set of levels known as ‘deadly’ fails to materialise, the consequences of which could have been, well, as implied.

After completing the episodes (if you can afford to replace the six angrily destroyed PSPs) added longevity can be found in the playlists mode. It's the one thing that Hot Pixel adds to the genre, and if its minigames were better and more varied, would have real potential. Playlists allow the player to choose the type of games they want to play (ones they’re good at, ones they’ve played a lot, driving ones, amongst others) and set a time limit or a number of games, and just see how far they can go playing the type of game they enjoy most.

Practice mode allows the repeated playing of individual games, losing the annoying distractions, but as a result is far too easy. It gets quicker and quicker every game (like, well, WarioWare) but the increases in speed are so slow that it’s much more likely you’ll lose these games by giving up through sheer boredom than any lapse in skill. Needlessly complex high scores lose WarioWare’s simple system of one point per game beaten, which makes tracking them difficult. With base points depending on speed and difficulty, then a time multiplier, it’s just not immediately apparent how good or bad 549 points is.

Then there’s the most disappointing thing of all.

Some of the games are really quite good. Some of the minigames on offer here really could sit alongside the best in the WarioWare series. A game where you have to rewind after a skateboarding accident is hilarious, as is “unzip me, baby”; and controlling a tramp as he searches through a rubbish dump for booze is genius. Special mention also goes to the game where you have to fight through a crowd at a concert to get to the toilet before wetting yourself. There’s clearly the potential here to have created a game that could have been as good as WarioWare, if only the chaff had been replaced with a bit more wheat.

When it comes down to it, there’s essentially nothing here to recommend this over any other game, for example, something like WarioWare. That game has character, is constantly funny and contains a great selection of fun minigames. Hot Pixel fails to deliver on all counts.