Eidos Interactive's Touch the Dead for Nintendo DS is a clean steal from Sega's House of the Dead and the innumerable lightgun games like it on a similarly-innumerable variety of platforms, including arcade machines, where you don't do much of anything other than shoot at targets on the screen, reload, shoot some more. Of course, in Nintendo DS, you don't use a lightgun to shoot, you touch to shoot. Like petting puppies in Nintendogs, minus the puppies and not exactly "petting."

You move through the game automatically as if riding shotgun on a tram though a bunch of indoor and outdoor locales -- an "on rails shooter" in gamer jargon -- and simply touch the touch-sensitive screen to shoot at baddies coming at you or sometimes popping up suddenly from the immediate periphery.

It's fun in that darkly comedic way of zombie infestation games, but visually, Touch the Dead is drab, chunky, blotchy... basically lacking the eye-candy required to keep you motivated, because simply tapping the dead to make them dead again doesn't really sustain the fun. The fact that you have to drag-and-drop bullets to reload your "gun" every few seconds doesn't help much either. A mere button push or an unlimited ammo option might have made Touch the Dead a good bus ride companion.

As it stands, play it for a while in one of those game demo kiosks in the mall and you've seen all Touch the Dead has to offer, move along.