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It's the most excellent sports game of all time - not! Gary Whitta sucks in his beer belly for a day at the beach...

When you've simulated just about every major sporting event on the face of the planet, what do you do? Simple. You pop along to the west coast of America, where new and increasingly bizarre 'sports' are invented by the minute and - bingo! - you've got an instant handful of brand new material. In this case it's long-standing American developers Epyx who, after several years of computerising everything from cycling to Sumo wrestling in their highly-successful Games, found their well running a little dry and found a plethora of new events waiting for them on the beaches of California.

Obviously enamoured by what they found there, they've now paid a return visit in California Games 2. The games features five new events from the Sunshine State: hang-gliding, snowboarding, jetsurfing, body-boarding and skateboarding. As has become traditional with Games games, players can choose to practice events just for the fun of it or buckle down and take part in a serious all-events competition with up to seven of their pals. Don't just stand there - get radical!

It's always a danger doing simulations of sports that are as little-known as the five featured here. Unlike soccer or athletics, for example, most people have no frame of reference with what the real thing's actually like. While not exactly a disastrous situation, it can be a bit of a setback if the game isn't executed ideally.

Unfortunately that seems to be pretty much the case here. On evidence like this, It seems as though the Epyx glory days are long gone - each of the events lacks that special flair and playability that the company's earlier efforts invariably boasted, and with only five of them on offer it seems difficult to justify the price tag.

Of the five, the hang-gliding and skateboarding are the best while jetsurfing is the weakest, simply because there's hardly any real feeling of control. Despite the fact that the graphics and sound do a fine job of conveying the beachside sand-in-the-shoes feel (although the game's PC origins are a little obvious), there's nothing at all outstanding on offer here gameplay-wise.

Events such as bodyboarding generate nothing like the kind of exhilaration that they should, mainly because they're so annoyingly limited. Also disgruntling is the lack of any simultaneous two-player events - the fun-factor of the skateboarding could easily have been doubled, for example, simply by racing two people head-to-head via a split screen. Ultimately California Games 2 looks like an attractive proposition on paper but sadly fals to deliver anything like its potential on screen. For die-hard beach bums only.