Fighting games were ubiquitous in video arcades for more than a decade, until the video arcades themselves began to die off. Home console technology surpassed arcades, and so we lost our incentive to play games in public. And though we've since been treated to arcade-perfect home conversions of some truly great fighting games, if you've ever been thrilled to play these games in a competitive environment, then you know it's just not the same to play them at home against the computer or even with the same group of friends. No, fighting games are all about taking on all challengers. And now the true spirit of fighting games is reemerging in games like the new, online-enabled Guilty Gear X2 #Reload. Online play is definitely the main attraction here, despite a few apparent issues with the implementation. But, make no mistake: This is a great 2D fighter even if you don't take it online, and it features all the depth, creativity, and responsive action you'd expect from a top-quality game in this vein. Factor in a budget price point, and Guilty Gear X2 #Reload becomes a genuine must-have for fighting game aficionados.

Let's talk about online play right off the bat. It features the standard assortment of Xbox Live options, including quick match, optimatch, and leaderboards. You've also got a good amount of options when setting up a match, and you'll be able to find competition from both the continental United States as well as Japan, so there's no shortage of people to play against. We tested the game using a high-speed T1 connection as well as a more-down-to-earth DSL connection, and in most cases we experienced smooth, lag-free gameplay. However, we experienced frustratingly laggy sessions from time to time--even when the game estimated an "excellent" network connection to the opponent. We also occasionally had trouble connecting to other players' games altogether. Other players have anecdotally reported similar problems, so it's safe to say that the game's Xbox Live support isn't perfect. Nevertheless, the effort of finding a lag-free session against an opponent of similar skill level proves to be very well worth it--time will fly as you fight match after rematch after rematch. Guilty Gear X2 #Reload is a fast-paced, well-balanced fighting game with lots of depth and variety, so it's an excellent game online. And it has plenty of offline options, too.

For the record, Guilty Gear X2 #Reload is an upgrade to an upgrade of Guilty Gear X, which itself is a fighting game sequel originally released several years ago. Fortunately, this latest version of the game doesn't look or feel particularly dated--probably because it features a classic-style design inspired by countless other 2D fighting games from Capcom and SNK. Yet while the basic structure of Guilty Gear may be conventional and fairly familiar, its cast of characters is pretty exceptional. In this game, you've got everything from a pirate girl wielding an enormous anchor, to a hunched-over white-clad doctor who seems to be wearing a brown grocery bag on his head, to a debonair vampire smoking a pipe, to a scantily clad witch wielding an electric guitar, to an androgynous British lad who looks and sounds like a lass and fights with a yo-yo. You know we couldn't make this stuff up if we tried, and it's good to see that the designers of this series decided to keep moving in the direction of "weird," adding characters in subsequent installments, rather than introducing more straightforward sorts of characters. For good measure, this upgrade to Guilty Gear X2 packs in several more playable characters, including two powerful boss opponents who may fortunately be disabled for online play for balance reasons.

The game is brought to life with vibrant hand-drawn 2D character sprites and backgrounds, making Guilty Gear X2 #Reload look as much like an anime episode as a video game. In fact, the legions of fans of anime series like Dragon Ball Z and Yu-Gi-Oh! really ought to take notice of Guilty Gear, which has a similar sort of style and sensibility to it. Meanwhile, the presence of a hard-rocking electronic guitar soundtrack further helps set this game apart. Although the tracks may not sound drastically different from one to the next, it's still great that the designers have given Guilty Gear X2 such a cohesive musical style.

In addition to the usual modes you'd expect from a fighting game, including arcade, versus, training, and survival, Guilty Gear X2 features a mission mode, a story mode, and a variation on the survival mode in which big combos earn you medals, some of which restore a little bit of your health. The story mode is unique to each character and consists of a scripted series of battles interspersed with verbal exchanges between your character and his or her next opponent. The speech is all in Japanese, a point that many of the game's fans will probably appreciate, and the story mode helps provide a better sense of all the game's various personalities. The stories for the characters can even branch off at particular points, depending on certain conditions of your performance during the battles. The story mode isn't terribly complex, but fans of the game's character design will definitely want to spend some time in it.

If you're craving a less kid-friendly experience on the Kinect at launch, then your options are limited to just one game--Ubisoft's Fighters Uncaged. Sadly, not only does it fail on nearly every level to offer a compelling fighting experience, but its broken motion controls also make it immensely frustrating. Lifeless animation, generic visuals, and a baffling scoring system all serve to sap the fun out of playing. And, in a crazy omission, there isn't even a two-player option. Uncaged isn't so much a game as it is a way to make you want to bang your head against a brick wall in despair.

The premise behind Fighters Uncaged is as short and generic as they come. You play as an up-and-coming street brawler named Simon, who must battle his way through other brawlers in underground leagues to save his father from a kingpin. Aside from a mention in the manual and a short cinematic intro, you hear nothing about the story once you start playing, which makes this setup completely unnecessary. The game offers up just one mode, called Fight. But, before you can get down to fighting, you must endure an excruciatingly dull tutorial that teaches you the basics in a drawn-out fashion.

You view your character from behind in an over-the-shoulder perspective, with your opponent directly opposite. To fight, you mimic the moves you want your character to perform. For example, punching out directly in front of you launches a jab, while arcing your swing launches a hook. An onscreen animation demonstrates the movement, after which you must perform it three times against an instructor before you can progress to the next move. The game handles lateral movement of your character, so all you have to worry about is performing one of the kicks, punches, and dodges on offer.

The tutorial stretches on for what seems like an eternity because you not only have to perform each move three times, but you also have to repeat the process for both limbs--it's like attending a fighting school for toddlers. Furthermore, once you've completed basic training, you then have to fight against the instructor three times in best two-out-of-three matches before you can actually jump into the leagues. There is a skip option, but using it means the game thinks you haven't completed the training, so you can't progress anyway.

While most of the basic moves are easy to learn, there is a noticeable lag between performing them and having your actions reflected onscreen. This means you often throw a punch, only to think it wasn't recognized and throw another one, causing the game to suddenly launch two in quick succession. Thus, fights quickly degenerate into the Kinect equivalent of button mashing as you swing your arms and legs in the air, trying to get the game to pick up your movements. This only gets worse if you subject yourself to the advanced training, where you're taught moves like roundhouse kicks and combos. They require much more subtle movements, such as sliding your foot along the floor for a sweep, and are rarely recognized at all.

If you somehow manage to drag your way through the tutorial, then you can take part in the leagues. You start off in league three, where you face off against six other fighters with names as cliche as Rider, Ratface, and Mover. The aim is to progress to higher leagues, where you battle against increasingly tough though no more interesting or entertaining opponents. Fights themselves are an exercise in frustration as the game struggles to recognize your moments. This removes any sort of depth because you can't plan your attacks or launch advanced moves.

One of the most confusing aspects of a fight is the scoring system, which fails to reward you for your hard work. To reach league two, you have to gain a certain number of crowns, which are awarded if you score above 6000 points against an opponent. However, how you score points is never clearly explained, so even if you beat an opponent, you might not get any crowns at all. This means you have to go back and fight opponents repeatedly until you score points to progress, without ever really knowing how you did so.

To make matters worse, there aren't even any decent visuals to look at while you're fighting. The character models are lifeless, with stilted animation and a poor design that plays off of generic street stereotypes, such as leather-clad bikers and tattooed thugs. The 2D prerendered environments just add to the misery, with little detail and no animations. Even the music is poor, with a grating 10-second hip-hop-style loop repeated ad nauseam in every menu.

Fighters Uncaged is a prime example of how not to make a fighting game for the Kinect. The presentation is poor, the scoring system doesn't reward your hard work, and worst of all, the motion controls are simply broken. There's not even a multiplayer mode to, at the very least, let you eke some enjoyment out of fighting a friend. The only thing you'll get out of this game is a sweat, as you manically punch at the air in frustration. No matter how eager you might be for a Kinect-powered brawl, Fighters Uncaged is one game that's worth leaving locked up.

Mortal Kombat Trilogy Review

It seemed like a good idea. Take all three and a half Mortal Kombat games and cram them into one. And at its heart, it was. In effect though, it ended up something else entirely.

Mortal Kombat Trilogy on the Sega Saturn is a nearly identical port of last year's PlayStation version of the game, for all the good and bad that entails. It includes 32 playable kombatants (plus the four MK/MKII alternates of Kano, Raiden, Kung Lao, and Jax), stages, fatalities (and all the other humiliating finishing moves), and a handful of new moves - all together providing quite a bit of value for the player, right? Well, there are a few problems along the way that keep everything from seeming quite so rosy.

Just like the PlayStation version of the game, the character balancing and computer AI are atrocious. Fighters such as Noob Saibot and Jade are incredibly overpowered, with moves that run from rendering projectiles ineffective to making characters momentarily powerless. Meanwhile, the AI often simply works in clockwork response to your own actions. For example, try a special move and certain opponents will dodge it and execute an attack before you can block. This would be less obnoxious if they didn't do it the same way every single time, making it entirely frustrating and totally unlike playing a real human being.

When it comes down to it though, I consider this the best version of MKT out there, as it does have a certain amount of value in letting you play all your favorite MK characters against each other. My preference for the Sega controller for fighting games makes me like it slightly more than the PlayStation version, which in turn was worlds better than the atrocious Nintendo 64 revision. Unfortunately, there are a few things that could've been added to make it clearly better, such as character balancing and AI tweaks, and to a lesser extent, endings, vs. screens, and full animations for all the boss characters. After a year of waiting, it's pretty sad that they're not all present. Having a cartridge add-on for the game could've helped make the animations really incredible, though at least it's understandable that the developers didn't go that route.

In the end, Mortal Kombat Trilogy really symbolizes how out of hand the whole MK series has gotten with the "-alities" and all. Sure it was a great idea to include features people had rumored about on the Internet, but face it, Animalities suck. And Brutalities, even more so. It's the worst kind of punishment to get a demonstration of all of them after winning the game. Luckily, Ed Boon and John Tobias seem to have realized this, and have gone back to basics with Mortal Kombat 4, having only fatalities. Thank God.

Mortal Kombat Trilogy Review

Mortal Kombat Trilogy is the last gasp of this 2D game, and the only remaining question is: Will Mortal Kombat leave the realm of 2D with an awesome bang, or will it whimper and die? So, like the kombatants themselves, let's get right down to it: Players who enter the tournament on the Nintendo 64 should prepare themselves for feeble misadventure not worthy of the Mortal Kombat name.

If Mortal Kombat Trilogy on the Nintendo 64 has a plus side, it comes from its multiple play modes. In addition to the normal one-on-one fighting, Mortal Kombat Trilogy keeps the two-on-two and eight-player tournament mode (found in Ultimate MK3) and adds a three-on-three battle, which keeps the fight going for quite a long time. The game plays identically to the arcade, although the N64 controller isn't perfectly suited for a game of this nature.

The downslide continues in the form of character selection: The Nintendo 64 combines the characters from all the Mortal Kombat games into one package, but to conserve memory it left out such favorites as Goro, Kintaro, and the unmasked Sub-Zero. (By contrast, these characters are found on the Playstation version of Mortal Kombat Trilogy.)

But the N64 game receives its fatal wound from the graphics and sound. Not only will players encounter a massive amount of slowdown whenever more than a few bones go flying, but also several missing frames of animation are conspicuously absent. The result is graphics that look faded and jagged, as if they were cut out of a magazine, scanned, and then pasted into the game. When played side-by-side, the PlayStation version makes the N64 version look like it's on a SNES. Then there's the sound: The digitized sound effects are utterly atrocious. In fact, it's so muffled that players may as well put their speakers on the other side of a cement wall before starting the game. The music is typical of a non-CD game - that is to say, worthless. It's tinny and very electronic sounding.

Mortal Kombat Trilogy proves that the Nintendo 64 is merely mortal. While it surpasses the Playstation version in regard to load time, it still suffers a three or four second delay when loading a new character in multiplayer fighting. Ultimately, only Mortal Kombat addicts, who don't already own a PlayStation, will find this game worth picking up.

Finally, Capcom has a 3D Street Fighter game worthy of its heritage. But by the same token, Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha is perhaps too closely tied to its heritage. While the gameplay is great, it's standard SF fare, and you can't help but get the feeling that SF EX Plus Alpha is nothing more than a stepping stone to a more impressive Street Fighter game yet to come - as was the case with Street Fighter Alpha.

At its core, Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha doesn't attempt to be anything more than a juggling- and combo-filled game like Super Street Fighter II Turbo - but with the play speed and graphic style of Namco's first Tekken game. Like Tekken, the animations of the characters - rather than their slightly jagged bodies or uninspired backgrounds - are supposed to be the stars of SF EX Plus Alpha's graphics. But unlike Tekken 3, absolutely no attempt is made to give the characters any freedom of 3D movement.

Dizzies have been replaced with super meter-draining guard blocks that stun and leave opponents temporarily defenseless, and super combos now execute at only one level of power and can be interrupted or chained together to form bigger and more damaging combos. Lifted from Tekken is Namco's penchant for "new" characters whose only distinction from "old" characters is appearance - nine of the 23 SF EX Plus Alpha characters mimic existing characters in some way.

There is, however, a new and decided emphasis on offensive attacks. The previously defensive Guile, for example, does a lot more rushing forward with kicks than he did in earlier SF games, and even Ryu and Ken have had their standard "roll back once with a kick button" hurricane kick shifted into an Art of Fighting-style multihit aerial kick. SF EX Plus Alpha is not a game for turtlers and not necessarily even a game for Street purists - this is now less of a game of strategy than it is a game of action, without a doubt. To keep the game flowing, SF EX Plus Alpha has reasonably forgiving controls that ease the chaining together of combos and execution of special attacks. The CPU opponent puts up a decent struggle, but I found that the features that brought me back for more were the expert mode, which lets you unlock four previously nonplayer characters and a few extra game options, and the bonus game, a polygonal version of the SF2 barrel-smashing bonus stage.

In the video and audio departments, Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha is pretty solid. Its old characters closely resemble their 2D predecessors - Zangief is the only negative exception - but lack the more dramatic flourishes that made SF2 and SF Alpha 2 so memorable. Some of the new characters seem to have picked out costumes from the Halloween leftover bins at a Japanese K-Mart, but their unique moves often make their inclusion worthwhile. Special effects are generally handled well, but not spectacularly, and the flat backgrounds are reasonable but not as impressively conceived as those in Capcom's original SF2 or the later release of SF Alpha 2. The game does have its visual moments, though, with a few nice close-ups of multihit throws that bring to life scenes that we could only imagine in earlier SF titles - images that, in my mind, are the only real justification for SF EX Plus Alpha's existence. SF EX Plus Alpha's audio is quite good, full of pleasant, upbeat synthesized techno and rock music, plus a number of clear voice samples that are easily as good as those in any previous SF title.

Taken as a whole, Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha is a fun game with great gameplay, better than average aesthetics, and a large number of characters. As we've seen many (perhaps too many) times before, Capcom has a tendency to use its "good" Street Fighter games as a foundation to build truly great ones. How long will SF EX Plus Alpha be worth playing? Your answer will depend upon how tired you are of traditional SF gameplay.

The Tekken series has always done well in arcades, but it truly came into its own as a home release on Sony's various video game consoles. The PlayStation and PlayStation 2 have received the brunt of Namco's Tekken series, but now it's time for the PlayStation Portable to get into the act with a port of the latest arcade upgrade for the series, Tekken: Dark Resurrection. This game builds on the content and characters from Tekken 5, adding more fighters, more moves, new backgrounds, new customization options, and more. Plus, it's one of those amazing portable games that raises the bar and resets your expectations about what a portable machine can do.

The largest factor in resetting those expectations comes from the game's graphics. While the PSP doesn't pull off a polygon-perfect port of the arcade game, the characters look and move as well as you could hope. The corners seem to have been cut in the backgrounds, which occasionally sport a grungy texture or two, and in the pre- and postfight animation, which isn't quite as smooth as the fighting. Those things aside--and they don't get in the way at all--Tekken: Dark Resurrection gives off a real "this platform shouldn't be able to look this hot" vibe. On top of that, the game's loading times are pretty manageable, averaging somewhere under 10 seconds between fights, and even less if it's a rematch on the same background with the same fighters. So the visual quality doesn't come at the expense of speed, which is great.

The gameplay in Tekken: Dark Resurrection is also spot-on with what you'd expect from the series. The controls are responsive, though the occasionally tricky diagonals on the PSP's D pad took an hour or so of getting used to before we could pull off combos and juggles without trouble. If you like, you can also use the analog stick to control movement. The fighting itself is right in line with previous Tekken games, though there are three characters here that weren't in Tekken 5. Armor King returns to the lineup, and there are two all-new characters. Lili is a rich girl with street-fighting skills, and Dragunov is a Russian special forces operative who fights in a sambo style with plenty of powerful strikes. Both of the new characters fit right into the lineup and seem as deep and interesting as the rest of the cast. Also, unlike most Tekken games, Dark Resurrection starts with the complete cast of 34 characters available, so you won't have to dig through story mode multiple times to get all of the fighters.

Players who are familiar with the Tekken series will be right at home with the available modes, many of which come from Tekken 5 on the PlayStation 2. In addition to the arcade mode, which lets you unlock crazy prerendered ending videos, there are plenty of submodes, including a robust practice mode, team battles, time attack, and a quick battle that lets you pick your first opponent. There's a versus mode that lets two players compete locally over an ad hoc connection, using the same sort of lobby system that has appeared in previous PSP fighting games. You can also merge your rankings with other players' rankings, so you can have something to compare your time-attack times against.

The best part of the game is the way it uses artificial intelligence profiles. This is something that appeared in Tekken 5, but the ghost recording system and online options make it more worthwhile here. Ghosts are profiles that are meant to replicate another player's fighting style. While it certainly isn't perfect, they do seem to make for more interesting and unpredictable fights than the average fighting AI. You mainly fight these profiles in the Tekken dojo mode. Here, you move from dojo to dojo, fighting your way to the top of each one by beating these ghost profiles. The game comes with plenty of ghosts already present, but you can also record your own play to make your own ghost and then share it with your friends locally. You can also get online and download packs of ghost players for use in the single-player game, which is cool. Getting online also allows you to upload your ghosts for use by other players. It's a shame that there isn't any online combat, but considering that the Tekken series has yet to go online on any platform, it's not an altogether surprising omission.

In most of the game's modes, you earn money for winning fights. You can take those funds and use them to customize the look of your characters, much like in Tekken 5 or Virtua Fighter 4. There are plenty of pieces and colors to purchase, and they range from standard changes, like new hairstyles and glasses, to weird stuff, like a dog that clings to the back of Paul's gigantic haircut. Your ghosts carry these items, so you can give them a custom look before you send them out into the world to do your devious bidding.

The game contains a lot of solid music that plays while you're fighting, and the theater mode serves as a sound test, letting you listen to any of the music at any time. Additionally, the game has the same sound effects that Tekken 5 had, which makes the hits sound nice and hard, though the relative lack of bass on the PSP's stock speakers means they don't deliver quite as well as a set of good headphones will.

With plenty of modes to mess with and the promise of ghost exchanging, Tekken: Dark Resurrection is a long-lasting game that impressively delivers quality 3D fighting to the PSP. It makes smart additions while retaining everything that makes the Tekken series so popular in the first place. Fans of portable fighting games can't go wrong with this one.

Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion XL Review

Punch Time Explosion XL doesn't just take inspiration from Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. series. Rather, it's as if Dexter, Samurai Jack, and a bunch of their Cartoon Network buddies staged an invasion to oust Mario, Link, and the rest of the Smash Bros. gang from the land of zany multiplayer brawlers and claim the territory as their own. The Cartoon Network crew makes a spirited effort, and they give Punch Time Explosion plenty of personality. But once the superficial and short-lived pleasure of seeing Blossom and Ben Tennyson battle each other in Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends wears off, the shallow combat and frustrating platforming quickly grow tiresome. Though this updated version for consoles adds a few new modes and a number of new playable characters and stages to those featured in the original 3DS release, these additions don't make the gameplay any more exciting.

Like the games that it imitates, Punch Time Explosion XL is a fighting-focused party game in which up to four characters clobber each other on a 2D plane. There are a total of 26 playable characters; eight of these, including fan-favorite Johnny Bravo, are new to this version. As you take damage, a number displayed as a percentage increases, and the higher this number gets, the farther you're liable to go flying when hit. You lose a life when you're knocked from the stage or fall from it. Each character has standard attacks and a number of signature moves at his or her disposal, as well as a special attack that can be performed once a meter is full. A variety of weapons--flyswatters, magic wands, and so forth--spawn frequently, and if you're quick enough to grab them before an opponent does, they can significantly increase your power. In addition, special items show up that, when collected, summon non-playable Cartoon Network characters like Panini and Valhallen to lend you a hand for a short time.

The playable characters exude all the charm of their TV selves; Flapjack's absent-minded, goofy grin is infectious, and Buttercup's glare tells you she means business. But a small number of voice samples that repeat much too frequently make the game's sound design grate; hearing Ben Tennyson exclaim "I should have picked a flying alien!" for the umpteenth time as he's sent soaring off the field in defeat may push you to turn the voices off altogether.

The environments in which you do battle contribute to the craziness. One arena has you fighting on the rooftops of Townsville while a giant robot smashes the buildings under your feet. Another finds you in the mouth of a giant whale who sometimes belches huge amounts of water and dead fish into the sea, threatening to expunge you as well. The result of all this is a chaotic game in which the unpredictability and zaniness generate some short-term fun as you discover what happens on the various stages and what the various items and supporting characters do. But whether you're playing against CPU opponents or friends, this chaos also makes it difficult to take much satisfaction in victory; so much happens all the time that the ultimate outcome seems as dependent on chance as on skill. You can opt to play with fewer items or no items at all, but stripping away these distractions only makes it more clear that the underlying combat is shallow and that attacks have no sense of impact. Characters tend to come together and dish out their attacks willy-nilly until one is sent flying.

XL has a few modes that weren't in the original 3DS release. Arcade mode lets you compete in a series of brawls against computer-controlled opponents. It sometimes pits you against overwhelming odds--you may need to fight all three Powerpuff Girls at once, for instance--and these battles are more frustrating than fun. As in so many fights in the game, victory here is at least as much about luck as it is about skill. PTE mode and Drones mode put the focus on something other than clobbering each other. In the former, the winner is the player who collects the most energy cubes; in the latter, it's the player who destroys the most robotic enemies. But you'll likely still spend much of your time in these modes fighting your opponents to prevent them from accomplishing their goals, so these variations don't significantly change or improve upon the Standard mode.

Punch Time Explosion is at its best in Story mode, but even here it has some serious problems. An evil force is corrupting the universes of numerous Cartoon Network characters, providing a fine excuse for the Powerpuff Girls, Numbuh One, Dexter, and a bunch of other CN stars to band together and battle evil. The enthusiastic and funny narration by a CN voice-over guy who just wanted to relax and enjoy some cartoons on his day off lends the story an authentic Cartoon Network soul. Platforming takes priority over punching here, and bounding across chasms and over hazards with each character's double jump is pleasant enough. Or at least it usually is; some sections crank up the challenge in ways that only result in frustration. For instance, at one point you must make your way across a series of floating barrels that have a tendency to spin when you land on them, making it overly difficult to get your footing and make the leap to the next barrel. What makes this and situations like it doubly irritating is that losing all of your lives often results in a significant setback, requiring you to repeat minutes of easy gameplay to get back to the tricky bit.

Your side-scrolling escapades are also frequently put on hold when you're required to defeat a number of small-time bad guys or a single, more powerful cartoon character. These turn out to be some of the worst moments of Punch Time Explosion's Story mode, since they can almost always be won by repeating a specific signature move over and over. On occasion, you're required to protect a character as you defeat 25 enemies, a situation that encourages you to rely on this tedious but effective approach to knock the bad guys away from the clueless and vulnerable character you must keep safe.

Other diversions also crop up from time to time in the form of basic turret shooting sequences, mine cart levels, and the like, and these are more welcome, preventing the platforming from growing stale. New in Punch Time Explosion XL is the opportunity to tackle Story mode with up to three friends, playing locally. Of course, sharing the adventure with friends makes it more enjoyable, but the game doesn't always make the experience an accommodating one. If one player runs out of lives, he or she may be sitting things out for several minutes.

Frustratingly, many of the playable characters and battle stages are locked at the start, so there's a good chance you'll need to sink in some time before being able to beat up your friends with your favorite character or in your favorite Cartoon Network locale. Since the gameplay gets old fast and the characters are the game's greatest asset, it's disappointing that so many of them are unavailable from the beginning. Punch Time Explosion has a host of cool characters, but without the support of exciting gameplay, their presence can only benefit the game so much. This XL version is crammed with even more fan service than the original, but it still fails to create an enjoyable experience that makes the most of its terrific cast.