It’s a wonder that this hasn’t been done already, after all, Pimp My Ride has been on MTV for a while now and games that let you ‘pimp your ride’ are all the rage if the chart domination of Need For Speed is anything to go by. Not that we ever wanted anyone to make a Pimp My Ride game, in fact, we can’t really think of much worse.

What a surprise then that it plays just as you’d expect – terribly. You reside in Pimp City where all the residents like nothing more than having their streets filled with garish and annoying cars. It’s your job to make sure a selection of these residents don’t get left behind by pimping their old bangers, or ‘hoopties’ as they’re known.

To do this you must drive around the city earning cash until the preset budget is reached. Do you do this through an exciting series of races and challenges? Hell no, you pick up cash tokens, smash into cars and billboards and complete a couple of mini-games. Some of the lamest mini-games we’ve ever witnessed, by the way. First up is Ghost Ride The Whip, which sees your character walking alongside their car performing some crap dance moves. How well these moves are performed depends on whether you managed to press the right button at the right moment. You could call it a rhythmaction game if only it had any rhythm or perhaps some action even. Hot Stepper events are almost exactly the same as Ghost Riding ones, only you press buttons in a different way – exciting, eh? Even the music in both these events is the same every time – yes, that’s every single time, folks!

The last mini-game is called Cruising and simply sees you pressing a button at the right moment to go into Cruise mode and then pressing another series of buttons, which for some reason sends the watching crowd into a frenzy.

These mini-games are so mindnumbingly easy that you pray for later levels to have new events. No such luck, as every single level gives you the same ways to earn cash, albeit with slightly increased difficulty. When you finally do reach the required budget for the customer’s ride, you are sent on a mad dash around the city to buy up as many ‘dope’ parts as you can before the time runs out. If you actually got to design some parts yourself or there was any more involvement apart from selecting what you want and pressing ‘buy’ then this could have been mildly interesting. For each part you are simply given a choice of varying prices. You are never too short of cash so you simply go for the most expensive every time. The incentive to pimp the ride as best you can is in the form of a rival pimper who will dash around the city at the same time with the same ride in an attempt to win over the customer with their customisation skills. However, they never seem to buy the most expensive parts so they’re easy to beat.

Once you’ve successfully pimped someone’s ride, that car is available for you to use. However, nothing you’ve added to it can be used and it’s simply an ugly method of transportation. Not that any of the stupid crap bolted onto the car would be much use, except perhaps to attract car thieves. If you’ve seen the show you’ll understand.

Driving around these crappy cars is no fun either, as they don’t handle particularly well and there’s all manner of annoying scenery objects that will stop you in your tracks. Navigating through the streets isn’t simple either, as the arrow that points to whatever you’ve selected on the map is flat most of the time, making it difficult to tell which way it’s actually pointing.

Anyway, that’s pretty much as far as the game goes. You’ll pimp a total of 16 cars and then the game is over. No replay value whatsoever, unless you’re an Achievement whore. Did we mention the game crashes on a regular basis too?

Every part of Pimp My Ride seems to have been put together with the utmost laziness. You certainly get to pimp rides but it’s in the most rudimentary and tedious way that it’s impossible not to get bored by the time you’ve worked your way through a couple of levels. Even if you watch the show religiously we can’t see how you’d enjoy this, unless you simply have to own everything Xzibit appears in. Let’s hope this doesn’t make it to our shores, or worse, they localise it and replace Xzibit with Tim Westwood. Nooooooo!

Simon Griffin