Burton's Bytes: Spin-off that makes sleuthing simple

Audiences all over the world have lapped up the weekly show's intriguing plots and Hollywood-style gloss.

The original show has given birth to a couple of spin-offs: CSI Miami and the darker CSI New York, starring Gary Sinise. CSI's popularity in the UK has even encouraged the show's producer Jerry Bruckheimer to give the OK for a special episode to be shot in London.

CSI: Dark Motives is the second game in the CSI franchise to emerge from the Ubisoft stable. The original game wasn't half as glossy as the TV show that inspired it. Basically a series of static scenes, all you had to do was move the mouse around the screen and click on everything in sight until the evidence was gathered and the case solved. Sure, the game threw in a couple of puzzle elements but, really, the first CSI was nothing more than Myst-lite.

Loading up Dark Motives, I clicked on the install with a growing sense of trepidation. It all looked eerily familiar. And indeed it is. There's the usual amount of mousing around required, some cool cut-scenes (the game utilises the brutally realistic close-up view of body damage used to such great effect in the show) and a bit of voice acting by the original cast who must have been slumming it.

This time around, the puzzles are a bit more fiendish and the game offers fewer pointed clues, although you can ask for a hint from a CSI colleague at any point. This will lose you points, though, and downgrade your eventual rating.

In each murder location, you'll start out with a specific area to check out. Moving the cursor around the screen, you'll see it turn green when it hovers over something interesting. I guess it helps move the plot along but it's about as phoney as Resident Evil's glinting jewels/weapons etc.

Once you've spotted a clue (not much of a challenge) you can whip out any number of gadgets to help detect and collect. As with the TV series, your character has a UV light projector that can uncover suspicious stains (this is an adult game, remember) or dust for fingerprints. Hell, you can even ask for a urine sample.

Once your job is done in the field it's over to the lab, where everything is cross-checked and analysed. Do the prints match up to a suspect? What was that strange stain on the bedclothes? What kind of car was the suspect driving? I suspect fans of the show will get a kick out of following in the footsteps of Gill Grissom and the gang.

Dark Motives offers up five different cases to solve. The first - the death of a motorcycle stunt man - acts as a primer for anyone new to the game, with near-constant hints leading to the fairly predictable denouement.

In common with the series' running time, it seems as though each mystery lasts between 45 minutes and an hour.

Surprisingly, though, I ranked highly on my first mission despite asking a morgue-ful of questions and making full use of the available help. Perhaps I'm a natural investigator? Or maybe CSI: Dark Motives needs a tweaked difficulty level if it is to offer a real challenge to all those would-be supersleuths.

Fun but frustrating in parts, CSI: Dark Motives offers fans of this show something to sink their teeth into until the next series starts, sometime next winter.

MTV: Music Generator. Publisher: Codemasters. Format: PS2. Price: varies: HERE'S an unusual title in the ever-expanding PS2 pantheon. MTV: Music Generator isn't so much of a game as a piece of software that you run on your PS2, and allows you to create music (of sorts).

Although the original PlayStation had something similar (as did the Game Boy Advance) genuine music making software has tended to stay where it belongs: on the PC.

With a decent sound card, hefty hard drive and some sexy speakers it can really do justice to electronic music creation. But if you are a novice at this sort of thing then MTV: Music Generator is a great way to try your compositional skills out without spending a small fortune. The riff library contains more than about 4,000 samples to get you started and it's a simple task to mix 'n match drums, bass lines, melodies and even vocals to your heart's content.

Once your top pop melody is ready you can save the whole lot on a memory card. That way, you can impress your pals by playing the track back when they come round (probably for the last time if you are tone deaf like me). Even better, you can record samples from your favourite CDs and add them to your own creation - although the PS2's lousy memory (two crummy megs, remember) doesn't let you get too far.

Still, at least you can splice together some video to create a visualisation of your masterpiece as well. And the software is so simple, even your gran will be churning out top tunes in no time.