Crash Nitro Kart is a go-kart racing game that is all about saving the universe.

"That," you are saying to yourself, "is dumb."

You are quite correct. That is dumb. But the great strength of the Crash Bandicoot series is its boundless enthusiasm for all things dumb. It celebrates dumb. It is happily unembarrassed, no matter how dumb things get.

Dumbness is not the problem here. Dumbness is an asset. It nearly saves the game. The problem is inexcusably poor game-design choices. These obscure the dumbness, which is good, with frustration, which is bad.

If all this is a little new to you, here is a quick introduction. Crash Bandicoot is an animal of indeterminate species. He looks a bit like a fox, but he stands upright on his hind legs and wears pants, so he is probably not a fox. Mostly he is a mascot, like the San Diego chicken, or like that miserable thing the Blue Jays hired when they gave B.J. Birdie his walking papers. Crash does not talk much, but he does run and jump and scuba dive. Occasionally he races go-karts, which here turns out to be a lucky thing, what with the universe needing saving and all.

If you are having trouble believing that the universe is actually in jeopardy, that is OK. You may disregard that bit altogether. The point of Nitro Kart is much like that of any other go-kart racing game, which is to drive as quickly and as irresponsibly as you can, using every means at your disposal to make the raceway inhospitable to your opponents. This is mostly a matter of finding things on the track and throwing them at the other racers.

You begin each race by lining up with seven other go-karts. Lights blink in the air, counting down to the start, and then you are off. You hold down the gas, you pull into the lead, and you try to get ready for the sharp right turn you see coming up. On the ground, glowing green arrows point you in the right direction. When you drive over one, you leap forward with a blast of extra speed. You quickly realize that winning the race will be a matter of learning where all the green arrows are and then making a point of never, ever missing them.

You find treats on the track. Many of them are projectiles, to be hurled at any go-kart unlucky enough to be in front of you. Some of them cause explosions. One of them turns go-karts into giant blocks of ice.

All this sounds like great silly fun. It is, sort of. The speed bursts are great. The ridiculous music that toots constantly in the background captures exactly the right mood. The bouncing little go-karts look hilarious.

But. We are playing the game on the N-Gage, which is a cellphone that also does games. Its display screen is taller than it is wide. This probably makes good sense for cellphones, but it is a real problem when we are trying to see what is coming up around the next turn. We cannot see nearly enough of the horizon.

We cut a corner a little too close, and in an instant we find ourselves disoriented and lost and driving in the wrong direction, far from the green arrow we were aiming for. This is rotten and no fun and the sort of thing that spoils our mood and makes us want to turn off our game machine. It makes us feel like a horse wearing blinders, which is exactly not the vibe we want when we are aiming a missile at somebody's head.

A vertical screen is not always a bad idea. Even here, it could have been fine, if only the developers had pulled the perspective back a little, making the virtual camera follow our go-kart from a little farther away. But that would have made all the little racers smaller, and would have made it tougher for us to see all the jaunty little animations, which somebody obviously worked so hard on. Presumably an artist threw a hissy fit and won a fight with a play tester.

Artists, take note: That is enough out of you.