I gave a strawberry a haircut; another classic IGN review moment.

I had no idea that Bonsai Barber was coming, but as soon as I read about it this week, I knew I would be buying it sight unseen. I actually avoided reviews of it for a couple days, for fear I'd hear the game was bad. I wanted this one even if it was awful.

In Bonsai Barber you give haircuts to vegetables. Fin.

Now, I'm not stupid. I know this is a Flash game. I know this is little more than a browser-casual game, tailored ever so slightly for the Wii. But one look at a screenshot with a grumpy-looking potato getting buzzed by clippers, and I knew I would enjoy this.

Couple good things here. First of all, the Remote controls work quite well. I'd rather you could switch tools without having to invoke the tool menu, but the scissors, squirt bottle, dye brushes, etc all perform as expected and you genuinely feel like you have tight control over what you're cutting. The "hair" - leaves and twigs - is very well done. Separate branches move individually, as they should. There's a pleasant fractal effect that makes the outlier twigs and leaves seem very natural.

The game goes for kind of an Animal Crossing angle by having the game run according to a daily appointment schedule. You have five (out of twelve) plants show up in your barber shop every day. Once you give them all cuts, whether they're good or bad, you're done for the day, aside from the practice potted plant that you can abuse to your heart's content.

You can take pictures at any time during the cut and save them to the Wii Message Board. When satisfied customers go on vacation, they will send postcards to your Wii Message Board (although I have not seen that in action just yet.)

There's lots of unlockables... most of which are Trophy-esque rewards for "your first five star haircut" and the like. Tonight I got one for taking a bunch of pictures.

Clark's preferred haircut technique is to mostly ignore their hairstyle request via random trimming with the scissors, then he paints their leaves in colors he likes, then he cuts off all the hair entirely and takes a picture. It's like the four-year-old version of Saw in there.

And unless I miss my guess, this is a Nintendo-owned property (developed by Zoonami which is led by a guy of GoldenEye fame, yawn)... so perhaps these adorable flora could be sidelined into future Nintendo jam nostalgia fests. Let's get these guys into the next Smash Bros!

Look at this ridiculousness from IGN's review:

Yeah, you pretty much just do the cutting thing over and over again, and it's probably not really worth the $10... BUT DAMN THIS IS AN 8.0 GAME, IMPRESSIVE!

I know that it is difficult to review $10 downloadable games using the same 1-10 scale as $60 retail games. For example, they gave Mario Kart Wii an 8.5... and there is no way that Mario Kart is a middling half-point better than Bonsai Barber. The price totally has to enter into it as a valid part of the assessment. If not directly, then indirectly as a consequence of the physical size of the game.

Hey, maybe the gestalt entity known as IGN honestly believes Bonsai Barber is almost as good as Mario Kart Wii... but I don't think you can make comments akin to "not worth the money" and "completely repetitious" and still rank a game 8 out of 10. And if so, there better be some compelling reasons to do so. There needs to be some serious pluses to overcome minuses that huge.

At any rate, when confined to the realm of downloadable games in the $10 range, I think Bonsai Barber is pretty damn good. So far, I like it right up there with other such offerings. I like it more than The Last Guy or My Pokemon Ranch, but not as much as Flower or PixelJunk Monsters. For me, I don't mind the repetitiousness because the smart real-time design paces out the potential to get bored.