Playing PBR: Out of the Chute is some of the best fun I've had in a while, but it's for all the wrong reasons. You see, it's a game about Professional Bull Riding (PBR actually stands for Professional Bull Riders Inc.), and, well, that's exactly what you do. You ride a bull. It's not very fun or intuitive, but great to watch and laugh at.

And while I'd like to leave it at that, I'm sure I'm going to get some threatening mail from my editor if I do, so I'll elaborate: for the most part, you ride a bull by controlling your 'lean' with the analog stick. Stay on for eight seconds, and you'll get points for the round, including some extra if you manage a sturdy dismount. If you make more points than your competitors, you win.

And that's all there is to the game. You ride a bull for eight seconds, and you're done.

The thing is, it wouldn't be so bad if the bull riding mechanics were, well, good. But they're not. You're supposed to ride the bull by moving the analog stick to keep your rider balanced: if the bull is bucking forward, you want to lean back, if it's jumping to the left, you want to lean to the right, and so forth. This sounds...well, not terribly interesting, but it plays even worse.

The fact of the matter is that it generally doesn't matter what you do, whether you actually try to ride the bull correctly, leave the stick alone, or just rotate the stick randomnly and watch your rider flail like a drunken fool (which is what I did most of the time). Sometimes you fall off, sometimes you don't; most of the time you get disqualified for 'touching the bull'. This seems to happen randomnly and as far as I can tell has no connection to what is actually going on during the bull riding. And then you try to dismount correctly. I'm told this gives you bonus points, but I did it more for the ridiculous animation: the rider seems to bend in half at the waist as he touches the ground, tapping his shoes with his nose before miraculously standing up.

Then it turns into a game of "Try to run into the bull's path and get trampled half to death," which I found much more fun than the game itself.

After that, guess what, you get to do it all over again. In fact, the tournament/career mode is exactly that: three rides in one location before moving on to the next three rides in another location. If I were a betting man, I'd say that the actual arenas were modelled after their real-world counterparts, but at this point it doesn't really matter. The graphics are terrible, so even if they are true-to-life models, they're ugly ones at that. Your riders are little more than blocky people with face textures, and everything looks blurry and muddy. The animation is even worse; your cowboy flails spastically around like a ragdoll made of wood, while the bull just jumps up and down robotically, spinning on the spot. The audio is just as bad, but more forgettable. I'm pretty sure there're only one or two tracks of audio, and then some minor audience sound effects.

Oh! I almost forgot that you can play as the bull itself. Awesome. Especially since, on the Wii, the controls are literally nothing more than tilting your controller left and right, slowly, hoping the game will pick up its movement. Again, you're supposed to toss off the rider before 8 seconds are up, but the real game is to chase down the rider, the clowns, and claim the arena in the name of your bull god before stomping on everybody for good measure. If you want, you can play a multiplayer match where someone is the rider and someone is the bull. This is infinitely more fun, as you'll be screaming and yelling at the screen for eight seconds, then at each other as the bull's player attempts to run down the rider's player before the time is up.

There're even some unlockables that you can win. The first one I unlocked was that of a clown telling a joke to an amused audience, while his voice is nearly cut off by the ambient noise. The second one I unlocked is that of the same clown interviewing a pro about his bout with paralysis. Fascinating. I don't think I cared to look at the rest.

I can't imagine there's much of an overlap between bull riders and people who play video games. So I'm not really sure why this game was made. And looking at the final product, I'm not really sure why it was released either. It's poorly-made, not fun to play, looks bad, sounds bad, and doesn't have any redeeming features. The only fun I had with this was inviting a couple friends to watch how ridiculous it is. By the end of it, our throats were hoarse from laughter, and that's no bull. Ha!