Xiaolin Showdown

Start with a second-rate cartoon license. Add a dash of a bargain-bin party game, then stuff it inside half-baked 3D roaming combat and stir well. Finally, let the mix rot in the sun for a week. What do you get? You’d be half right if you said “something really icky,” but you’d be totally on the mark if you said Xiaolin Showdown on the PS2.

Xiaolin Showdown is a four-player, free-roaming competitive fighting game (though you’d be hard-pressed to tell by reading the blurb on the game’s packaging). You select one of the show’s characters to play as against up to 3 other competitors in various arenas. Your goal in each arena is to beat up both enemies and other players while collecting items, money, and pieces of a scroll that show up at regular intervals.

Once three scroll pieces are snatched up, it’s off to a special minigame finale. Perform well, and you’ll earn points to make your character stronger, as well as earn money and attack items. Along the way you’ll also be encountering familiar series environments, artifacts, and characters (all voiced by the original actors from the cartoon).