Stuart Campbell blah blah something or other blah blah

Summer is always a slow time in the videogames business, and never more so than when there's a World Cup on. It's usually around this time, then, that the videogames business starts to look around for ways of broadening its appeal, and every couple of years it tries to do this by having another stab at trying to attract more girls. Now, the traditional strengths and preoccupations of girls (empathy, social interaction with other human beings, little Prada dresses, worrying about the size of your bum) are rather more difficult to address in videogames than those of boys (fighting, fast cars, football, and, er, I'll get back to you on the rest after Nigeria vs Paraguay), so the initiative usually fails miserably (save for the occasional truly cringemaking effort, usually involving Barbie) and the games business gratefully reverts to its non-stop diet of fighting and racing games in time for the Christmas rush.

For this year's attempt, though, the business has employed the assistance of science, and science has duly done what science does best these days, namely conduct some expensive market research in order to discover the bleeding obvious. The bleeding obvious in this case is that women like puzzle games better than beat-'em-ups, which may well partly explain the unprecedented shipload of puzzle titles (Kula World, Tetrisphere, Kurushi, Xi, even the venerable Bust-A-Move 2 making an otherwise inexplicable reappearance as a brand new N64 release) that's suddenly hoved into view in the last couple of months. For a long time, the games world had apparently given up on puzzlers, for the eminently sensible reason that very few people are prepared to cough up 40 and 50 quid for weird, simple little games played entirely on a single screen with tiny coloured blobs for graphics when they could be wowing their mates with the state-of-the-art in superfast texture-mapped 3D racers, or ever-gorier fighting games set in ever more dramatic locations.

Since that situation hasn't substantially changed, the only explanation for the games industry's sudden rediscovery of belief in the puzzle game, then, is that it thinks that, finally, a substantial proportion of the games-playing audience is female, and would prefer, rather than twat someone's teeth out with a reverse flying roundhouse, to build lots of little lakes out of earth to catch rain in. For such is the premise of Wetrix, a Tetris descendant in which water falls from the sky onto a plain, and your only job is to stop it from flowing away over the edges. And sure enough, it's a game largely bereft of boysy bangs and bluster, with a flower-scented air of deodorant-ad femininity - while everything's very square, all the edges are soft and rounded (to the extent that placing your puzzle pieces accurately is rather harder than it ought to be), the music is gentle and twinkling, and the game is constantly soundtracked by the soothing, comforting sounds of softly splashing water. It's compulsive in the short term, but doesn't develop enough to hold the interest, so if you're inviting someone back to your place for a game or two of Wetrix, you're going to have to find some other kind of entertainment after the first 30 minutes or so. Maybe not such a dumb marketing idea after all, then.

WRECKIN' CREW

(Playstation, £45, Telstar)

The world's tireless search for a slightly interesting driving game continues again this month with this cross between the fantastic arcade hit GTI Club and the ancient cartoon series Wacky Races. From the former comes the idea of enormous tracks with multiple possible routes through them, while from the latter comes the idea of whacking your opponents' zany vehicles with giant mallets, broadsiding them with machine-guns, or zapping them with special magic space rays that shrink them to microscopic size and then running over them. It's a great idea in theory, but the fuzzy graphics, iffy control and annoying game structure (if we want to play the training section before the proper game, we'll ask, okay?) conspire to make it a lot less enjoyable to play than it ought to have been. It's still fun enough for a couple of nights renting, but your interest will run out long before the frankly ambitious £45 being asked to buy it outright will.

FRENZY!

(Playstation, £40, SCI)

Speaking of Wacky Races, though, their influence crops up unmistakeably again in this little-trumpeted shooter from the people who brought you the controversial blood'n'guts racer Carmageddon. This, though, is an altogether cuter effort, pitting the player (in a buzzy biplane) against several weird worlds full of the freakish Frankenstein armies of a classically old-school Evil Mad Scientist - expect to face a non-stop barrage of brains in jars, giant toy robots, mutant fridges, monstrous lava lamps and forests of pine trees that are really deadly rockets, all accompanied by an irrepressible carry-on-trumpets-and-whistles- and-cymbals soundtrack, and you won't be surprised. Gameplay is slim and a bit vague (in truth, this is another strictly-rental job), but it's all so loveable and different that you won't really mind.

TREASURES OF THE DEEP

(Playstation, £35, Sony)