Games based on televised animated licenses are difficult to get right; evident in the preponderance of depressing evidence. For every Simpsons Hit & Run, for example, there has been a Simpsons Road Rage (or a Simpsons Skateboarding, or a Simpsons Wrestling, or a Virtual Springfield). Even Futurama's one foray into gaming was an on-tone but off-base effort, and now Family Guy steps up to the firing-squad wall with Family Guy the PS2 game. The tone and humor is pretty much dead-on, but two-thirds of gameplay, to quote one of the show's more memorable lines, has "a weenie like a Christmas-tree light."

Family Guy is broken down into three distinct gameplay styles, tagged to the main characters of Peter, Brian and Stewie. As Family Guy aficionados might expect, Stewie is the most dyanamic of the three. Faced off against his equally-ambitious, equally-evil half-brother Bertram, Stewie can platform-jump and air-drift around the game's environments and torch things with an upgradeable ray-gun. When that's not enough, he can mind-control certain characters in order to solve puzzles. His controls are a little sloppy, which leads to some platforming-based moments of immense frustration.

While the show's fast-paced, offensive and mildly schizoid humor remain intact throughout, giving every fan of the show a reason to take a crack at the game, the mechanics only go down hill from Stewieville. Victory is not yours for long.

Peter's challenges are straight, familiar brawler-territory, albeit brawler territory in which players can cross-dress - with ghastly results. Peter simply plows through waves of foes, kicking and punching and busting largely irrelevant "special moves." Certain enemies are purely impervious to certain attacks for no adequately-explored reason. Peter can also throw environmental items at other foes. The button-mashing is fast and furious, and the health items are few. Enjoy.

Brian, the cultured and alcoholic dogstar of the show, actually fares the worst of the unholy trinity. He's relegated to that bargan-bin of action gaming, the "stealth mission." You know the drill: Lurk and skulk from one safe-spot to another amid a gaggle of foes whose patterns you must memorize. And if they make you, you get to start the whole challenge over again. Witty, martini-dry Brian frankly deserved better than this try-and-die dogpile.

But it wouldn't really be Family Guy without high-speed, non-sequitur humor, and the game reflects that aspect in cut-aways to sudden, goofy, Warioware-esque mini-games, before which players are shown a brief tutorial that gives almost no time to figure out what the hell one is supposed to do. This sounds like criticism, but it's not; the mini-games are distracting and amusing enough in their own right, for what they are, and actually do a good job of reflecting the A.D.D.-flavored approach that is so integral to the TV show.

Really, the best shining bits of Family Guy (the game) are the embedded, um, corn-kernels of presentation and humor pockmarking the much greater, shall we say, steaming mass of raw material that comprise the play mechanics.

Though both the show's actual writers and voice-talent are in evidence throughout, and the game's cel-shaded look is perfectly appropriate to the subject matter, Family Guy is nonetheless what you'd euphemistically call a "collector's piece." The driving force for fans will be getting from one M-rated scripted bit to the next; gameplay itself is generic, been-there stuff. It's better than the lamer Simpsons efforts, but recommended only for the most diehard Quahogians.