To be fair, it is rare that you can expect magic from any video game based on a TV show or movie. Sure, the ravenous fans of Pimp My Ride may cruise down to the local game shack in their pimp mobiles in droves to pick the game up, but sales numbers do not a great game make. Ask any Star Trek fan. Even that TV show, with it's millions of fans, has had numerous failed video game crossovers.

Pimp, as I'll refer to the game, offers very little in the way of fresh gameplay. Everything you do in Pimp has already been done in more games than I care to list – from the tired DDR style, button mashing, analog stick wiggling, mini-games, to coin and token collecting, to the car driving itself. And what is the TV show all about anyway? To be honest, I've never actually watched it. But I'm almost certain that it involves taking some poor homie's hooptie (that's a piece of crap car by the way) and turning it into a drivable work of art that reflects the person's tastes and interests. Sounds cool no doubt. I wish someone would Pimp My Ride. Does the game deliver the goods? Well, you do get to “pimp rides” so to speak. But the how of it just ain't as cool as that sounds. For some odd reason, the way you pimp those rides involves racing around the city streets of a particular neighborhood, collecting coins, playing the aforementioned mini-games (disguised as “cool” cruising opportunities), running over signs and smashing into parking meters all in an effort to make enough money to begin the automotive pimping process. Say what? No, no. It gets better. For some odd reason, you actually make money by crashing into other people on the road with the car that you are supposed to be fixing up. But don't worry about wrecking the ride you're supposed to be pimping. Crashes consist of nothing more than ramming another car head on at 70 MPH, and watching both cars bounce harmlessly backwards from each other. Then a glorious spray of coins flies out of the car and then back into yours. You know, I did say I've never seen the show. Maybe that's what they do? Somebody correct me if I'm wrong. The two particular cruising opportunities I mentioned above are the Pimp Walk, where you walk beside your car, door open and set to cruise control, doing flips and other “cool” urban dance moves to some generic Hip-Hop beat as the neighborhood crew look on, and another similar game where you simple drive your car slowly by the crew. Both games involve a DDR style mini-game. Just press the right buttons at the right time. Do well enough and you'll score some cash.

Once you've scored enough of the green, you'll be ready to begin the actual pimping of the ride. And once again, you'll find yourself racing through the neighborhood – this time with a very short time limit and, as I recall, six specific shops to hit within the time limit. Each location has an inventory of a specific body part for the car: stereos, interiors, rims, body kits, paint jobs, and custom work. There's also another place you can stop at, called the Xzibit challenge where you can pick up extras like navigation systems, etc. You race as fast as you can to each shop – once you hit a shop and choose the part you want, you play more of the same DDR or analog mini-games to get the part you choose as cheaply as possible. It is fairly difficult to make it to all of the shops on your first go, but with a little practice, and familiarity of the neighborhood you'll be able to do it. You are in competition with another custom crew. Your goal is to pick up more and better quality parts than they do so that when the owner of the pimp-i-fied car sees them both, they'll choose yours (no real suspense here – you can already tell which one they'll pick based on the two bars which show you how well you did compared to the AI crew).

And that is the game in a nutshell. There are 16 different POS-es to be pimped, each owned by a different person with different tastes. But it's not like its really important to pay attention to what they like. Just buy all the best parts you can (the ones with the most stars), and you'll win. To me, this is a complete cop-out. Someone should have done some blue sky game design here and figured out a truly cool way to put the essence of the Pimp My Ride TV show into the game. The show may be about cars, but just because a game is about cars doesn't mean it should be a racing/driving game. Pimp My Ride is about style, about turning crap into art. It's about making people proud of their rides – not about racing or collecting coins! And one of the cardinal rules of designing games in a realistic settings is that the gameplay should make some sense. Perhaps Pimp would have been a better game if it had been built around a different genre concept all together, but it's a little late for that.

Add to this choppy 20-something frames per second during cut scenes, repetitive music played during the mini-games, lackluster character and car models, less than acceptable vehicle physics, and you've got a perfectly good waste of a blank Xbox 360 DVD, not to mention a few precious hours of your life. Unless you've got a huge crush on Xzibit, or you're so gung-ho about car cames that you buy every game involving them, I recommend renting the game before spending your hard earned money.