Since I do a fair amount of bargain hustling in my gaming, I thought I'd do a tournament-style shootout between all the cheap, discounted game purchases over the past year. My criteria for inclusion was that each game had to be on sale, preferably at a substantial discount from the original price. I widened the net to allow import games and downloadable games, resulting in a Olympic-level competition of fourteen games. This will likely take a week of weblog posts to soldier through. Or more. I'm tired tonight.

I randomized the matchups and here how the initial seven bouts shook out:

Critical favorite Zack & Wiki versus virtual unknown Nodame Cantabile! What a way to kick off the fight card!

The game you love to hate, Lair! And one of those damn casual Wii games, Big Brain Academy!

A match for the ages: M-rated No More Heroes against E-rated Ben 10! Who will stand as the Wii's dominant force?

The heir to a beloved PS2 game, Cookie & Cream... matched up with a self-aware cartoon mockjob, Harvey Birdman!

Single-minded indie shoot-em-up or diverse mainstream PC port? It's Everyday Shooter versus The Orange Box!

East meets slightly less East! The Nintendo first-party faceoff! Slide Adventure: Mag Kid and Link's Crossbow Training!

The most violent match of all! Everything will explode! You will not have a seat left to sit in! Blast Works in one corner, Pain in the other!

How well do you know my take on these bargain basement buys? Can you predict which game will reign supreme? What impossible-to-predict twists and turns will forge the victor? Stay tuned, America!

I bought Zack & Wiki during that famous Smash Brawl sale at Toys R Us... they had a short list of games that you could buy for half-off when you bought Brawl on launch day. Zack & Wiki was far and away the best game on the list, and also the cheapest, as Z&W was already busted down to $30 only a few months after its release. $15? A no-brainer.

Nodame Cantabile was a similar deal... I picked it up as a super-cheap add-on to my $50 Ouendan 2 import through Play-Asia. Thank you, no-region-lock DS!

To quantify the system by which one cheapo game will be declared Fourhman.com's Best Cheapest Game of the 2007-2008 TV Season, I will judge each game in four key areas... awarding one to ten points based on my near-random feelings at the time. Those categories are Concept, Gameplay, Value and Timeliness.

The Concept judging area will discuss each game's genre, style, storyline, characters and methodology. Gameplay will analyze the controls, presentation and fun factor. Value will look at how great the discounted price was, in comparison to the original retail price. Timeliness will see how the game stacks up today, since discount games typically hit those prices some time after the original release, meaning that the title has to compete against an entirely different games marketplace... IE, does it still stand out? This initial round will largely judge the games on their own merits; I will switch things up for the finals as I pit the games directly against each other.

On to the first battle of Round One! Fight!

CONCEPT: Zack & Wiki arrived in October 2007 to a first-year Wii with an anemic library. Critics were thrilled with such a new, creative, exclusive IP. As a puzzle-cum-adventure game with gesture-based controls, Z&W was like nothing else on Wii. Unfortunately, the game arrived a month ahead of Super Mario Galaxy, the game for which every Wii owner in the world was saving their pennies. So no one bought it.

The basic idea is that you have to use the Wii Remote to navigate a series of closed-room puzzles (and I do not mean literal "rooms," just concrete levels with little carryover of items or skills). Somewhere in each level is a treasure and you must figure out how to get it. Much of it requires careful thought and planning, so you do a lot of scanning the map and thinking your way through obstacles.

Very original, cute character designs, a good fit for the Wii. 8 points.

Nodame Cantabile, on the other hand, is a DS rhythm game based on a 2001 mange series about a young orchestra conductor. It is very obviously a riff on Ouendan (Elite Beat Agents) but populated with midi-quality classical compositions. The manga was turned into an anime and a live-action TV series. Presumably - and you'll be hearing that a lot since I can't read Japanese - this DS game is based on the animated version.

Unlike Ouendan's bubble-beat system, Nodame Cantabile gives you your tapping cues as you watch onscreen sprites intersect. You tap precisely at the moment that the notes touch. There are a few minigames. Being an import title with almost no English option, I tried to spell J O E using Japanese characters... which means I generated a lot of screens like this one:

Yeah, I know those dames.

A music-based comic gets a music-based game, happily adapted from Ouendan's flawless formula. Nice art. 6 points.

GAMEPLAY: Zack & Wiki has a big problem. It's all trial and error, and there is a lot of erroring. It is incredibly frustrating to spend half an hour working on a puzzle, and then get randomly killed somewhere near the end. Like Chulip, there are plenty of cases where you simply do not know what will kill you until you get near it. You can't save in mid-level, and the game actively punishes you for failing by keeping meticulous track of all your failures... in addition to making Continues an item you have to buy.

I am also super-confused about the cramped menu screen, and the library of unlockables never seems to unlock anything, despite me being pretty deep into the game.

And although many of the gesture controls are fine, there are plenty that just do not work as promised. The onscreen prompts are often a mess, unhelpful and in the way.

Terrible save system, muddy menus, sort of an ambient hate coming from the game towards me. 4 points.

Nodame Cantabile is going to get unfairly knocked for lacking an English translation, but I get the feeling this sucks in Japanese as well. The problem lies in actually locating the gameplay. Unlike Ouendan, where you just click the song you want to play, watch the corresponding movie, and then get to playing... Nodame Cantabile is like that in reverse. You have to trot all over the map talking to people, advance through millions of text conversations, and then maybe you'll get to tap through the 1812 Overture.

Plus, this bear-beaver shows up every forty seconds. I speculate that he is proud of your recent accomplishments in clicking through choiceless text conversations, but I cannot be sure.

I know I'm missing 100% of the game's storyline, but shouldn't a rhythm game be more accessible than that? I laud the game for trying to create a music game with such a heavy storyline, but it is far more text adventure than music.

Since the music is all programmed (IE, not the actual "live" tracks of Ouendan), there is a neat audio trick where the song gets all wobbly and lousy-sounding as you miss your beats. That was cool.

Text, text, text, text, Rhapsody in Blue, text, text. 3 points.

VALUE: Z&W was initially a $40 release, then dropped to $30 pretty damn fast. It currently sits around $20, maybe even $15 in some quarters. Regardless, getting it at $15 way back in March 2008 was a damn fine grab. There is plenty of replay here, even if I don't much like it. 7 points.

It's a little tougher gauging Nodame Cantabile. As an import DS game, $50 is probably a fair standard price. As a slightly crappy import DS game, you should pay nowhere near that. Play-Asia currently has it for $25, and the bundle offer with Ouendan 2 is not as good as it was when I ordered (now at $70). So getting it for $10 was a decent success. 5 points.

TIMELINESS: There is still very little like Zack & Wiki. You could make a case for Strong Bad and Sam & Max being of similar ilk, but Z&W is (I think) designed to be far more difficult and challenging. There is probably zero chance of a sequel. 9 points.

Nodame Cantabile was DOA, just because it was nowhere near an acceptable rhythm game standard. With three Ouendan games (including EBA) already ranking high on the DS, poor Nodame Cantabile is relegated to a never-was. Hell, that freaky DS Guitar Hero is way better than this. You would have to be an incredible fan of the source material to really dig it. And reading Japanese would help. 3 points.

FINAL: Out of a possible 40 points, my basic arithmetic skills show 28 for Zack & Wiki and a meager 17 for Nodame Cantabile.

Zack & Wiki win and advance to Round Two!

Sony's detestable Lair seems to be heading into this as an underdog, positioned against one of juggernaut Nintendo's Blue Ocean non-games... the Wii edition of Big Brain Academy. But don't count Lair out yet, as it was a mere $15 clearance compared to BBA's relatively beefy sale price of $30 (both courtesy Target).

CONCEPT: Lair sounds like a winner on paper. Epic medieval battles with hundreds and hundreds of soldiers and ballista, with you riding herd over the whole scene atop a giant dragon. Shame it arrived several years too late to truly ride Lord of the Rings hype. Plus, it comes from Factor 5, a team with some serious experience in action-flight games... the Rogue Squadron series. 7 points.

Big Brain Academy, a first-party DS hit following in the shadows of Nintendo's own Brain Age series, was an early Wii release... with an emphasis on family multiplayer and Wii features integration (Miis, Remote tricks, sending challenges to Wii Friends). Several play modes frame a collection of brain teaser-themed minigames. 5 points.

GAMEPLAY: Lair is unplayable. And it's unamusingly cheesy.

The problems started with a forced SIXAXIS motion control scheme (thanks, Sony!), and a highly delayed analog patch didn't even fix it. It's like Factor 5 forgot everything they ever knew about flying in three dimensions. Dragons will arc unexpectedly away from cliff walls a half mile away. The graphics are inconsistent and glitchy. The story is a joke, poorly told.

1 point, and only because I like the mid-air combat where your dragon can beat the piss out of another.

If you try Big Brain Academy single-player, you would be forgiven for thinking the thing has about six minigames total. And although most of them are indeed fun, it gets incredibly repetitive. Despite that, I do like the individual test mode, which ends in the game "weighing" your brain, assigning you a crazy grade like "BAB+" and suggesting a career path.

Some of the most interesting minigames - the example I always point to is one where you have to listen to something via the Remote speaker and then find that onscreen - are frustratingly not available to play in single-player! And yet, even with the added games, multiplayer still feels like the same games over and over again. I'M COUNTING RED BALLS AGAIN, JOY. It also has that classic Mario Party problem where some of the multiplayer modes just take too long to play. 5 points. Pretty uneven stuff.

VALUE: $15 from $60 is far cooler than $30 from $50, mathematically. But by the same token, $15 is still too much to spend on a game like Lair. 8 points for Lair and 4 points for BBA. For what you get out of BBA, $50 is crazy.

TIMELINESS: There is no reason to ever play Lair. Sure, it's the only dragon-based flying action high-def game out there, but anything it does is done better somewhere else. Warhawk, for one. 1 point.

Big Brain Academy has decent replay value, mainly because it's one of those anyone-can-play titles you can trot out when all the non-gamers show up. But it's not going to create hours of fun these days and about a dozen other minigame games eat its lunch. 5 points.

FINAL: Whoa, did you see that!? 17 for Lair and 19 for Big Brain! Future combatants take note... this is what you risk by not having a good enough sale price! BBA just almost lost to Lair, for crissake.

Big Brain Academy moves on to round two, nearly beaten but unbowed!

Most likely, I would have picked up No More Heroes for full price about a week after it launched, but the idiot Toys R Us clerk laughed at my inquiry and said they would probably never get it in stock. When they did start selling it (about two weeks later, asshat), I was already deep into something else so I gave NMH a pass. Happy times ensued several months afterward when I found it languishing on a Target endcap for $30. It's brother disks are probably still there today.

Ben 10: Protector of Earth was released on Wii in October 2007, but Clark didn't get into the show until July 2008. So there you go. A cheapie title on PS2 ($30), the Wii version was initially ten dollars more... due to adding in the code that demands you sit within four feet on the TV screen, I guess. But time has a way of evening things out: now both versions can easily be found for merely $20.

CONCEPT: 10 points for No More Heroes. It's an M-rated, otaku-baiting, retro-loving, swear-packed, Tarantino-inspired monster of a game, as Travis Touchdown works his way up the ranks of the world's deadliest assassins. It redeems everything that was awful about Killer 7 while maintaining Suda 51's characteristically unique style and vision. There are precious few game designers out there who actively seek to give the big middle finger to the boring, cash-in-focused marketplace, and Suda 51 is top of the heap.

Not as much love for Ben 10. As a licensed property, the odds are already stacked against it. Happily, it is very true to the source material, with all the original voice actors and a nice assortment of characters and environments lifted straight from the cartoon. There's nothing new here, but nothing completely screwed up either. 6 points.

GAMEPLAY: No More Heroes combat is fun and clever. The gameworld allows for many ways to expand and customize your character. The Wii Remote usage is brilliant, proving that there's more that can be done with the thing other than mapping "attack" to "flail wildly." That said, things do get repetitious and you will be begging to advance the plot because that's where the real fun is, not so much in the doing and re-doing of sidebar missions just to level up Travis.

The biggest drawback is the empty, confusing-to-navigate open world and the crappy glued-to-the-street motorcycle. Oh, and the subpar graphics that are supposedly hidden by the game's art direction, only not really. 8 points.

Ben 10 kinda does a Metroid thing where your big awesome powers are all grenaded at the start and you have to earn them back. The various alien forms all act as keys to various level-locks... another Metroidy touch. You need Cannonbolt to launch up ramps, for example, and some early levels include ramps even though you haven't yet "found" Cannonbolt. So there is a fair stab at providing replay value through smart level design. Still, most of the time you're just destroying the A and B buttons for attack combos.

The Wii Remote motion controls are pretty much optional, so they do not actively get in the way. It is very cool to activate your Omnitrix by smacking your wrist, although it can hurt after a while.

It's reasonably fun, reasonably interesting. It's saddled by a few tech issues, but nothing that truly kills the overall gameplay. Minus a point for suggesting that the Alamo was somehow involved in the Civil War. 6 points.

VALUE: No More Heroes went from $50 to $30; Ben 10 went from $40 to $20. So the price advantage here is negligible. I'll give NMH 7 points and Ben 10 6 points only because the former is a heckuva lot longer and more varied than the latter. So the value factor feels slightly better with No More Heroes.

TIMELINESS: A key category in this match-up, because Ben 10 was already a little off even when brand new... a competent yet predictable co-op brawler based on a TV show that only had a few more new episodes to run? Now that Ben 10 has been retired and the characters aged and reworked as Ben 10: Alien Force, the older Ben 10 merch just has no place. 4 points.

Meanwhile, No More Heroes remains a key M-rated, hardcore, high-quality experience on Wii. One of very, very few such titles. And the relative paucity of the visuals means that it doesn't really matter what the current graphical standards are, because No More Heroes looked like ass from the start. You'll be able to buy it whenever and enjoy it, sort of like all the true classics on the Virtual Console. NMH is going to remain in a lot of gamer's personal Top Ten Wii lists for a long time. 8 points.

FINAL: 33 for No More Heroes, an all-time high in this competition. Ben 10 had its work cut out for it, and there's no shame in scoring 22 points, but it's not enough to tangle with Travis Touchdown.

See you in the next round, Travis. You'll never make it. Why don't you just give up now and spare us the disappointment? Do you need a bathroom break? Did you take care of those nasty blackheads? But don't listen to me, Travis. Trust in yourself. Take it all the way to the top. Head for the garden of madness!

Cookie & Cream... the unexpected DS sequel to a truly underrated early PS2 release. Found in the Please Shoplift Me section of Best Buy for a paltry $10.

Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law... the unexpected point-and-click game straight from Adult Swim, brought to Wii via the tried-and-true Pheonix Wright engine. Now $20.

CONCEPT: The original Cookie & Cream was built around two-player co-op, with each rabbit stuck on half of the screen. Rabbit A (Cream) would have to hit a button or pull a switch so Rabbit B (Cookie) could progress, and vice versa. The DS version adapts much of that overlooked classic into a single-player experience, with one person expected to control both rabbits. The second rabbit's play is greatly reduced, limited to single-screen mini-games that pop up whenever the first rabbit hits a stopping point.

It's an idea that is flawed from the start. One person controlling both rabbits. Come on. 3 points.

Just as C&C is a dumbed down version of the original, so is Harvey Birdman dumbed down from its progenitor, Japan's long-lived Gyakuten Saiban series, known in the US as Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. Birdman retains the basic style - listen to testimony, then refute specific sentences with case evidence - but requires far less zigging and zagging across the map to collect evidence.

The true appeal is the humor and characters of the Harvey Birdman TV series. Just as in the show, the game plays with some classic and not-so-classic Hanna Barbera cartoon characters... Secret Squirrel, Inch-High Private Eye and Magilla Gorilla are among the guest stars. With a ton of all-new animation made expressly for this game, it's like getting another couple episodes of the series, with the added benefit of you being able to control the action, Choose Your Own Adventure style.

The interface is clever and the inventory screens trigger bonus funny sound bites... so I'll give 7 points in this category.

GAMEPLAY: Cookie & Cream takes all the terrible parts of the first game and makes them worse... like the punishing level time limits, and the idea that your rabbit takes damage when it isn't moving. Hello? I stopped moving because I'm controlling the other rabbit.

There should have been a solid game here. PS2 C&C is very solid, but something went dreadfully wrong during the port to DS. They probably would have been better off being the first DS game to require two DSs to play, so we could have a true experience akin to the original, just with no split screen and stylus control.

2 points for sucking. The music isn't as good as the PS2 version either.

Harvey Birdman, although sporting the proven Phoenix Wright gameplay, also suffers for it. Because the show is often absurd and full of non-sequiturs, so is the game. If you had trouble figuring out the proper evidence to present back in Phoenix Wright, you'll have even more here. Sometimes, the proper action just does not make any sense, or it is so obtuse that you'll never figure it out on your own. Even more damning, often you'll think you have the right evidence, but you still have to present it against the correct sentence in the witness's testimony. One sentence off and you're handed a failure. The game demands trial and error, and that is never fun.

There's five cases, all for-fans funny, but each is short... and with the required trip to GameFAQs.com for the answers, it will get even shorter. Harvey Birdman was initially promoted by Capcom as having some of their Street Fighter characters in it, but it's not what you think. There's no Street Fighter-based case, just some brief unlockable movies featuring Harvey and the Street Fighters cast. The means to unlock them is obscure at best, meaning it's entirely likely you'll play through the entire game and never even know you missed them.

6 points... can be frustrating, best not taken too seriously.

VALUE: I've never seen a MSRP-marked Cookie & Cream, so I'll have to assume $10 is a markdown from the DS standard of $25 to $30. That's a great deal, but the game stinks so hard that the score will have to be adjusted to 3 points.

Harvey Birdman debuted at $40, so $20 is pretty good. Just about right. I've seen the PSP/PS2 ports for even less, around $15 or lower. I'm still not convinced $20 is a good price, however, since this will only be played through once. 5 points.

TIMELINESS: There is very little compelling about Cookie & Cream DS, unless you're interested in seeing one of your favorite PS2 titles crucified at the altar of high nonsense. OK, there's WiFi play... but good luck finding anyone else in the world to play with. 2 points.

Harvey Birdman is a complicated thing. For a real point-and-click lawyer sim, any of the Ace Attorney series does it better... but there is very, very little of the Adult Swim brand on the gaming racks. So if you're after that cachet, you have this one, plus some mediocre efforts featuring Aqua Teen and Family Guy. For true fans only. 4 points.

FINAL: 10 for Cookie & Cream, a new low for this competition. 22 for Birdman, and the winner should be obvious.

He'll take the case!

Hero for the indie masses, Everyday Shooter puts an arty, musical spin on the moldy Asteroids concept. Sony marked it down to $5 during last year's Thanksgiving PSN sale.

Ambitious by almost any definition, The Orange Box offers five games on one disk... Team Fortress 2, Portal, Half-Life 2, and two HL2 expansion episodes. By all accounts, not a stinker in the bunch - although this PS3 edition has become famous for being buggy and abandoned by the publisher. For a game this fully-featured and well-received, it's a little surprising to see it busted down to a Lair price level of $15.

CONCEPT: I think I already described Everyday Shooter's concept. Arthouse Asteroids. It's a dual-stick shooter, meaning you use one to move and one to shoot, Robotron-style. But instead of the usual boring sci-fi theming, Everyday Shooter goes abstract, with blocky, pop art enemy types and level goals. Each board looks entirely different, so one single screenshot does not do the game justice.

But the true star of the game is the acoustic guitar soundtrack, designed to compose itself as you play.5 points.

I have to narrow the focus for Orange Box, because I only played Portal and I will probably only ever play Portal. I guess it's nice to have this waiting in the sidelines should a PS3 drought hit, but even then I'll probably just play MGS4 again.

So, Portal. Portal is proof that the first-person perspective game has atrophied to comatose levels over the past fifteen years. We can do more than just rehash Doom in WWII settings. On paper, Portal sounds like a puzzle game, but it is so well-rooted in the first-person experience that it becomes much more than what you would expect. This isn't just shifting the camera to "inside the puzzle" or rendering a puzzle game in three dimensions like Lode Runner 3D.

Portal plays with your perspective. Once you build the complete portal-creation device, allowing you to walk instantly between doorways you create, you've been handed a mind-bending set of tools to solve each level's problem. Add to that the concept of preserved momentum, and you have a methodology unique in gaming.

Not to mention the convincing environments (sterile lab setting gives way to razor's edge survival), the passive-aggressive guard robots, and the dramatis personae of GLaDOS herself. Brilliant stuff, 9 points.

GAMEPLAY: There's not much to say about the controls, given the limited structure. The level-specific combos and enemy patterns are clever enough to take a couple rounds to dope them out. However, you're (initially) stuck doing the levels in a linear order so if you're balls on one of them, you're out of luck. I felt like I was doing that first round far more times than I wanted to, and I wasn't good enough - or interested in becoming good enough - to see all the game has to offer.

Seems to take a ton of playthroughs to accrue enough points to work up the unlockable ladder, and the game just isn't that compelling in the final analysis. Somebody needs to figure out a way to have this game be playable while the damn PS3 is doing one of those interminable system/game updates, because that's about the only situation that would bring me back to playing it on a regular basis... as a loading screen for something more fun. 4 points.

Portal's strength - the first-person perspective - is also its greatness weakness. You're subject to the usual failings of the FPS. Lousy peripheral vision and camera reaction time, the disconnect in reality that becomes obvious as you adjust to timing your jumps, and general looseness of the console control scheme... not really Portal's fault, per se, but when you're that impressed with everything else, the limitations of the genre become even more glaring.

Portal also takes a little too long to get rolling. But when it does, it's as unique and clever as everyone has been saying. 8 points.

VALUE: $10 is definitely right out for Everyday Shooter, and I wouldn't spend the $5 on it today. Last year, as the PS3 was lurching along in fits and starts, Everyday Shooter could command some attention, but not any longer. Still, there's a pile of replay value, for those of you who would feel so inclined. 4 points.

$15 for Orange Box is pretty amazing. They sell Portal alone for $20! Of course, the troubled PS3 version of Orange Box may never see a proper bug fix update, which means the rest of the package may be stuck with a fair number of issues. So you have to count that against it, even if you do as I did and play naught but Portal. 7 points.

TIMELINESS: One year later, Everyday Shooter just doesn't retain that wow factor. Shmups are everywhere on the various console download networks, and many have received far more care than Everyday Shooter. It was the "It" game for a very brief period. 3 points.

Portal, however, still stands unmatched. You'd think we would have a glut of small-scale first-person puzzle adventures by now, except that being as smart as Portal is not easy. 8 points.

FINAL: Everyday Shooter tallies 16 points, but critical darling Portal scores 32 for the win.

Nintendo of Japan is even more adventurous than Nintendo of America. Meet Slide Adventure: Mag Kid, a wholly new IP, based around a very intriguing DS peripheral. Play-Asia.com had a crazy summer sale where this game - plus the specialized add-on - was only $15.

And now the Colonial Response: a modern version of the NES Zapper, reduced to solid state plastic parts since the Wii Remote already contains more than enough tech to simulate the simplistic light guns of yore. Although the Crossbow Training + Zapper bundle was originally $20 in the fall of 2007, it shot up to $25 after the holidays and has unfairly sat there ever since... except for at Walmart, where it has been normal stock at $20 for months.

CONCEPT: Slide Adventure: Mag Kid has a fantastic peripheral-dependant concept. The ass-end of a laser mouse gets plugged into the GBA slot on your DS, simultaneously providing a way for the DS to track physical motion and raising the entire unit up to a comfortable reading angle.

The entire game takes place from a top-down perspective, following the adventures of refrigerator magnets brought to life. By gliding the DS across a flat surface, you move your magnet character through the floors, desks and countertops of a normal household. Enemy magnets are dispatched by slamming into them, and they can then be absorbed so as to borrow their powers Kirby-style. (In fact, given Nintendo's willingness to float Kirby through bizarre game schemes - see Kirby Pinball, Kirby Tilt-n-Tumble, and Kirby Canvas Curse - I'm surprised they didn't just turn the laser mouse doohickey into a new Kirby game.) 7 points. I'd give it more but the non-compelling character visuals turn this new IP into a dud-on-arrival.

Link's Crossbow Training is a series of tiered shooting gallery challenges, mostly notable for re-using a ton of Twilight Princess graphic assets. Even $25 is a budget price for a Wii game, discounting the tech-less Zapper, and this game does nothing to hide its half-a-game status. It doesn't offer anything new about the Hyrule of Twilight Princess, casting doubt on the need for the Zelda dressing. 5 points.

GAMEPLAY: A great concept, an interesting piece of physicality... but not so great gameplay. The flatness of the world leads to confusing map boundaries and the flatness of the storyline (such as I can glean from context clues in the Japanese cutscenes) is hardly as innovative as the control scheme.

The critical fail is the lack of a true, seamless open world... much of your time in lost in lengthy scenes of the house's occupants unknowingly transporting you around the house. Instead of just sliding from room to room, in effect you have a complicated flowchart of movement, where getting to Dad's desk requires going from the bedroom to the kitchen to the den every single time.

The core idea is grand, but the execution is tedious. The actual motion input is cute and fun, but the game seems determined to slow you down and break your pace. Plenty of minigames and ancillary modes help prop up this score to 6 points.

Compared to light gun legends like the Point Blank series (hey, why isn't that on Wii?!?), Link's Crossbow Training is like a free browser game. Although there is a reasonable variety of level types (pop-up shooting gallery, on-rails shooting, 360-degree rotating shooting, free-roaming shooting), there's no alternate modes or options. It is what it is. You compete for high scores and unlock the levels in a linear progression.

It should be a WiiWare download, quite frankly. I'd play it quite a bit more if I didn't have to rustle up the disk. It's an impulse choice, not a destination game.

Then there's the Zapper itself, which feels like a toy and never seems to properly align. You'll do better without the Zapper casing; just play with your normal Remote + Nunchuk stance. 7 points. That'd likely be a 8 at least if this was an always-available Channel game.

VALUE: $15 is a great price on Mag Kid, an imported, Japan-only game packed with a funky exclusive, collectible peripheral. The original import price had to be in the $60 range. 9 points.

$20 from $25 isn't much, but there's no way I was buying Crossbow Training at $25 after seeing it originally sell for $20. I have principles. The Zapper is largely junk, and the game isn't much more than fodder for parties already burned out on Wii Sports and Wii Play. 5 points.

TIMELINESS: Nintendo likely has no intention of prepping Mag Kid for an American release. So this game will probably become one of those mystical Nintendo legends over here, like Sin & Punishment or Tingle's Rupeeland. Sure, the gameplay is mediocre, but so was Sin & Punishment, and the optical laser tech is very interesting. I imagine the DS homebrew scene would love to reverse engineer some games for it. Slide Adventure: Mag Kid will remain unique for some time. 7 points.

Link's Crossbow Training was barely a value proposition when it launched, Zelda-verse notwithstanding. Shooting gallery games are a dime-a-dozen on Wii, and now that WiiWare happened, you even have your choice for dedicated Channel gaming. Still, the game retains Nintendo's usual polish, even if the final result is a budget release. 5 points.

FINAL: 29 for Mag Kid, 22 for Crossbow Training. The strange and rare overtakes the familiar and simple!

Not enough hardcore games on the Wii? Maybe, unless you consider shmups to be hardcore! Not only is the Virtual Console packed to the gills with them, but here comes Blast Works. A traditional shmup with an interesting hook: enemy ships, once killed, can attach to you, creating a giant ridiculous Katamari starship of death. Add to that a complete game editor, allowing you to design your own levels, enemies, ships and firing patterns - plus the ability to download other players' creations - and you've got uber hardcore. Original retail was $40; I found it for $20.

Ragdoll physics demos have been popular for some time, but none have the polish or gameplay quite like Pain. Appearing on PlayStation Network for $10 - and marked down to $5 during a special sale event - Pain lets you launch hapless abuse-addicts into a thriving downtown area. By controlling the character mid-flight, grabbing objects and lurching around on the ground after landing, the goal is to chain combos and run up a huge high score.

CONCEPT: Not much new for Blast Works, excepting an honorable attempt to combine everything into one package. Shoot-em-ups are a relatively stable breed; aside from theming and level layouts, you probably know what to expect. The sticky enemies of Blast Works make for an interesting tweak on the formula... but the included levels really offer nothing new or intriguing or even pretty-to-look-at. 5 points.

In contrast, Pain is almost nothing but theming. From the faux-metal theme song to the Spencers Gifts-level sexy characters, it's a ton of paint covering a very simple concept: chuck people off a catapult. Pain is a throwback, because although there are plenty of Achievement-style mini-goals, you're really doing nothing but tallying up a high score. It's repetitive like an old arcade game. 6 points.

GAMEPLAY: Although the Katamari aspect is amusing, it's still just a shmup. And if you're not onboard with that, Blast Works will die on the vine. The one big feature - the level editor - is a complete mess. It's impossible to use and the results are unrewarding. The game's subtitle is "Build, Trade, Destroy," which implies that user-created content is a major slice of the gameplay... but unfortunately there's nothing smooth or clean about how this all works. Trading designs with other players requires registration to a very skeevy, non-professional-looking website. I know the Wii has online issues, but surely something like this could be handled at the head end, not on some backalley URL. 3 points.

Most people will tell you that Pain is worth a couple plays and that's it. I'll say that once you get into it, it's quite a bit of fun. There are several remixed layouts of the main arena, and figuring out how to unlock them all is a challenge. A small pile of extra modes (and multiplayer games) help fill out the title, but only about half of the bonus games are worth playing... and none are as cathartic as the main mode.

Yes, Pain is shallow. But at least it's something relatively new and shallow, unlike poor Blast Works. 6 points. Since the expansion pack was not on sale I'm leaving it outside the scope of this competition. But as an aside, the play value of Pain is increased quite a bit by the Amusement Park add-on.

VALUE: Blast Works is overpriced at $20. I know it somehow ranks on the short list of everybody's overlooked awesome third-party Wii games, but it's downright awful. There's a reason some of these are overlooked. 4 points.

$5 for Pain is just about right. It feels like a fair price for the repetitive silliness that Pain offers. 7 points.

TIMELINESS: As I said, there is very little unique to Blast Works, and what the title does do looks and runs like crap anyway. Even though there's the potential for infinite user-created content, it all sucks. 3 points.

Pain has already received an expansion ($), PS3 Trophies (free), and a stupid assortment of extra player characters as $1 add-ons. So even though most gamers want to pigeonhole Pain as a tech demo, it has not been abandoned as such. 5 points, because the pricing scheme on the DLC is far too punishing.

FINAL: Blast Works scores 15, 24 for Pain. Pain advances!

The first round of the Cheapo Game Shootout is over! Now the seven winners head into round two, where we will determine the ultimate Cheapo Game for 2007-2008!

As we enter Round Two of the 2007-2008 Cheapo Games Shootout, the following combatants stand ready for battle:

Zack & Wiki: Quest for Something or Other (Wii)
Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree (Wii)
No More Heroes (Wii)
Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law (Wii)
The Orange Box (PS3)
Slide Adventure Mag Kid (DS)
Pain (PS3)

Which game will stand as Best Cheapest? In Round Two, we'll cut this list in half... only three games will advance to the Final Round!

Each game will have to face off in six specific categories, with a potential three point maximum in each (although an effort will be made to limit the awards to a single 3 and a single 0, to name the best and worst in each comparison bout). The highest scoring trio will head to the judge's table.

TRICKS OF THE TRADE: Best in Leveraging the Console

Pain, in this original form, comes up the weakest here... as it does nothing special with the PS3's featureset. Harvey Birdman only ranks higher for using the Wii Remote as a pointing device. BBA is right beside it, placing a little higher since it does use the Remote's speaker every few seconds (albeit for crap like "You can do it!" and "Try harder!") Orange Box has online play that everyone hates, thanks to the developer essentially abandoning the game to its error-filled netcode (and starchild Portal is just a PC port anyway).

Zack & Wiki comes with a ton of gesture and motion-based controls, but it's all stuff you've seen before. Unlike No More Heroes, with operates on clever and judicious use of motion controls, including the never-before-seen idea to recharge your weapon by masturbating. Also noteworthy is Mag Kid, which utilizes the DS Lite's GBA port for an impressive single-use accessory... and comes up with a game that could only be done on a portable device.

HIDDEN OCD VALUE: Best in Unlockables, Collectibles and Secrets

The Orange Box may be getting a bad shake since I only played Portal, but it's my sweepstakes so whatever. The only gameplay-extending unlockable I saw in Portal was the commentary track. Harvey Birdman only has some short scenes featuring Street Fighter characters, and they are impossible to locate and unrelated to the actual gameplay anyway. Big Brain Academy actually has negative collectibles. There are a few minigames that only appear in multiplayer mode and can't be used in Practice Mode. I will never forgive this game for that.

Mag Kid. Um. No idea. I'm sure there's something.

Zack & Wiki's unlockables scheme is completely confusing and screwed up. There's a bookcase that separates out bios on the game's characters, bosses, treasures, etc, and I can't even unlock the bios for Zack and Wiki. Pain comes with silly in-game achievements, plenty of modes with difficulty tracks to work through, a tiny list of unlockable characters, and a much larger list of characters that sell for a $1. Not bad.

Standing apart is No More Heroes, which has a ton of collectibles. Wrestling masks (which are all pretty lame), skill and weapon upgrades, t-shirts and other items of clothing (which are great), and, eventually, some concept art.

THE FIRST IMPRESSION: Best in Box Art

OK, Pain is right out, as it completely lacks box art, being a downloadable game. The Orange Box is famous for having a lousy cover... can you imagine anybody picking that up off the rack and thinking "Yeah, I'd like to try this game with my high school band teacher and an ugly Muppet taking a subway exit!" Garbage.

Mag Kid is also a muddle. Even if you can read Japanese, that would still look like nothing more than a sales flyer for Super Potato exclaiming 20% off all DS models in stock. And I've never liked how Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree ripped off the box art to the original Animal Crossing.

So that leaves us with Zack & Wiki (respectable kids' cartoon look), No More Heroes (badass sketchy otaku fanbait) and Harvey Birdman (beautiful Ralph McQuarrie-esque full painting).

Next time: No More Heroes leads the pack as we head into the second half of the Semifinals, but how will Travis Touchdown and company fare as we investigate the music, the cast, and the multiplayer!