Mother was right when she told you cartoons will rot your brain. The animated cast of Electronic Arts' 3D car combat game Cel Damage should rightly be charged with contributing to the delinquency of minors and adults alike; with beautiful cel-shaded graphics and deep-as-a-dime gameplay, Damage pounds home Saturday-morning style wackiness in a most mind-numbing fashion. Thank EA for all but ensuring yet another generation will grow up to be as dumb as really dumb hammers.

The technique of cel shading--the drawing of a thin black line around every rendered object's contours--has been improved dramatically on the Xbox hardware; Cel Damage is a gorgeous, fully playable cartoon, and every little element in the game stands as testimony to the simple power of this graphics tool.

Past the visuals rests a competent, if uninspired game that's best savored with four players madly fighting for split-screen automotive supremacy. Cel Damage offers a total of ten suitably zany playable drivers and nearly 40 ACME-style weapons; it's safe to say that there's not a human among us who won't delight at collecting a giant axe and using it to chop an enemy motorist's car in half. Here, carnage becomes not only a means, but the end, and you'll delight at the havoc you can wreak...for perhaps three hours, before coming to grips with the fact that mindless destruction (even themed mindless destruction) gets real old, real fast… Real fast!

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