Lucas Arts really needs to do something about Legos Star Wars II for the Nintendo DS. I love the Xbox 360 and Playstation Portable versions, but the DS version just plain sucks.

First off the game relies on what sounds like midi music and sound effects and I've come to discover that much of the pleasure I got from playing the Lego Star Wars games comes from those very authentic sounds, from the laser blasts and chilling theme song to the fun little pop you hear when you get Lego Chewy to yank a Stormtroopers arms from his sockets.

Next come the graphics, which I could learn to live with, but certainly don't live up to the rest of the franchise.

And to make matters worse, the developers decided to completely redesign all of the levels, making them shorter and, frankly, much less fun to play. Forcing you to run back and fourth along levels to accomplish simple tasks simply to lengthy gameplay.

But I could live with that, in fact I was coming to terms with the sub-par graphics, repetitive level design and horrid sound and music, but to top it off the game is filled to the rim with bugs.

My son, who initially loved this game, was playing it during our entire trip to New York City and while killing time in cab rides. After a day or two of play we both started to notice that the game has some insane design flaws.

To start with, there are levels you simply can't complete because the sub-human AI built-into the game can't figure out that there are places where you need it to do things to get past a bottleneck in a level. For instance, there are levels where you have to trigger two levers at the same time and no matter what I, or my son, did we couldn't get the other idiotic Lego character to go flick the switch for us. This isn't a problem in the next-gen games, but apparently the Legos were lobotomized for the DS.

Worse than that, there are levels where you have to switch between characters to make it through. For instance, in one level you have to take turns using Luke's force power and Lando's grapple ability. But the game has these glitches where your idiotic followers either continually kill themselves by jumping or walking off areas or, much worse, the game makes them materialize underneath things or in areas where they get frozen.

I saw this happen multiple times in multiple places. In one case Luke starting materializing underneath a skywalk and immediately dropping to his death, over and over and over and over again. Finally, we just had to turn the DS off and start all over again.

In another case R2D2 got frozen behind a bad guy and no matter what I could do I couldn't get him out, kill him or even switch to another character.

Finally, after a few hours of play the game started showing graphic's bugs, with the icon for the characters turning into a multi-hued mosaic of bits or the character itself beginning to look janky.

I'd say the Traveler's Tale developed game borders on needing a recall and certainly doesn't live up to the rest of the titles in the franchise. Brian Crecente