Every once in a while you read about some whacked-out set of parents that attach an exercise bike to the family TV and force their kids to keep pedaling if they want to watch their favorite shows. Being raised by a relatively sane couple, I never had to "feel the burn" just to check out my nine daily hours of cartoons and reruns. For the past couple of days, though, I've known just how those less fortunate kids felt. Vivendi Universal's Futurama gives gamers an entire all-new episode of Matt Groening's "other" cartoon. The only problem is what you have to go through to see it all.

The cutscenes are a kick. Strung together, they make up a complete episode. It's the non-descript gameplay between them that bogs Futurama down. The unbalanced and tedious action will try your patience. While the game lets you play as four different characters, switching between them more often would have kept things a lot fresher. As it is, you play as Fry, the former pizza delivery guy, for far too long to open the game. Yeah, it's cool when you finally get to put down your guns and play levels featuring sexy alien Leela, alcoholic robot Bender, or lobster-like Dr. Zoidberg, but it shouldn't have to take that long to get there. Some retweaking of the story could have made this third-person action title a lot more interesting. It would have been nice if some of the game's novelty levels -- Fry's first-person 'mech-style shooter level or Dr. Zoidberg's platform-like race-against-the-clock level -- had appeared sooner.

The controls are very basic and intuitive, but not without their problems. Different level types use different controller schemes, which is cool in a "break-things-up" kind of way. It's how some of these schemes are laid out that can be a pain. On Fry's levels, for example, targeting is done with R1 and cycling weapons is done with the R2 button. More than once, I was up against an army of nasties and inadvertently traded in my high-powered weapon for a virtually useless hammer.

The game also suffers from its lack of any multiplay. I'm to the point where I don't even feel like I'm really gaming unless I have my SOCOM headset on and am tooling up some distant competitor, so the lack of even a split-screen fragfest mode to let you shoot up a buddy or two is a real disappointment.

In general, I don't find Futurama, the show, nearly as funny as The Simpsons; the humor seems more formulaic and forced. That said, Futurama, the game, is still one of the funnier discs you'll pop into your PS2 -- mainly because it does such a good job of goofing on a lot of what we hold sacred about our games. I can't recall how many action titles have thrown me into enemy territory looking for a missing part or two so that some all-important getaway vehicle can be fixed. Yet, this is the first one where such a perilous quest is introduced by a character desperately announcing that "the ship's all wanged up." And, thanks to the simple toon-shaded look of the TV show, both the cutscenes and in-game graphics make you feel like you're playing through an actual episode.

Is this an Olympic event yet?
Anytime the cutscenes are the best part of a game, that's trouble. But that's the story with Futurama. Fans of the show may be able to put up with the sometimes ponderous gaming just to get a peek at an all-new adventure, but not many else will. Like riding a stationary bike for a half-hour to watch Yu-Gi-Oh! -- it's just not worth it.