Features// Pocket Does Boom Blocks

Darkness falls on the longest day and I find myself smoking cigarettes on the patio of a friend's friend's back garden, watching cats duck and weave through dripping flowers from a lush green bush of some kind. Stephen Spielberg's a strange man, though not so strange that Boom Blox doesn't fit into the Wii ouvre of family-orientated, uncontroversial fun perfectly well.

It's been on for a few levels and the drunkards inside are in cast-iron teams playing as if their souls were crashing to the floor amid the happy penguins who clap and grin from the boundaries rather than some 3D pixelated blocks.

The penguins worry me. Not so much as the animals of ambiguous species who, on one particular level, have formed some sort of tribal religion around the sequence of events unfolding on screen, the sequence of events which are not, really, that consequential, though they seem to matter to the stumbling buffoons trying to stop wobbling hands from bringing the holey pyramid tumbling in on itself and in the process opening them to a world of shame, enforced drinking and beatings.

I wonder if Jenga enjoyed this popularity in its heyday. Probably. Certainly the other game that took our interest for part of the evening was liar's dice which is enjoying its second millennium of love, so we are not afraid to revisit a worthwhile classic.

Boom Blox would have been impossible on another console and for that it should be appreciated, but I could not imagine taking it out of its shiny little box with anything less than five ciders down me. I'm still struggling to find a Wii game which I could imagine playing soberly for 10 minutes and that seems like a shame. Several of my friends have gone to the lengths of selling or at least atticking theirs after they realised the dust gathering was a wake up call to spend their money on cheaper frivolities in future.

SPOnG gave me Battle of the Bands to play too. Have you seen that? Or even heard about it? Not to sound like a disgustingly ungrateful snob, but it looks truly appalling and I have not yet been brave enough to touch it beyond the one time I was browsing games in HMV (I know, I know) and took it off the shelves to laugh at. I can be such an elitist twat at times, but really.

Radio 1 mentioned it when they were discussing RaA games in language akin to that my grandma would have used if she hadn't shuffled off this earth a couple of years ago in a misguided attempt to upstage John Peel. That in itself has put me off enough to tempt me to spit on the cover whenever I see it mocking me from beside the TV. I should probably move it.

With a summer which seems intent on drowning us before we can enjoy ourselves too much gamers are in desperate need of a summer smash which will keep us all glued to the tellybox, forgetting the muddy festivals and sodden barbecues of potential for lightly sun-kissed leather sofas and purring cats, laughing in Live outings into atmospheric new worlds.