The premise of Kirby Canvas Curse is almost too much to bear, so great is the indignity and injustice it inflicts on poor little Kirby. Be strong.

You are forgiven if you don't know who Kirby is. He is one of the B-listers among Nintendo's many mascot characters. He belongs in roughly the same league as, say, Mario's dorky brother Luigi. He is friendly and talented and terrific company, but he lacks a certain star power. Samus Aran he is not. Mostly this is a matter of physiology.

Kirby is bright pink, see, and he is a mound of soft doughy imprecision. He is a lump of fluff with little tiny cute stumpy arms and little tiny cute stumpy legs. He straddles the line between "oh, how adorable!" and "that's not a video game character, that's a ball! What is this, Pong?"

It's a good thing all the residents of Nintendoland are such good friends, because otherwise you just know poor Kirby would be the one getting picked last for all the teams. Princess Peach totally kicks his ass, and she is a professional kidnap victim.

So you will be sad to hear that the premise of Kirby Canvas Curse is that, one day, an evil witch turns Kirby into a ball. Yes, he was a ball already, but now his cute little stumpy arms and cute little stumpy legs vanish, and all that remains is pink, pink roundness and a cute little furrowed brow. He is so helpless that he can't even change direction by himself. Luckily, he has us, and have an astonishing array of powers.

We play the game, and help the disabled Kirby, by using the stylus on the Nintendo DS touch screen. As Kirby rolls along, if we tap him, he gets a quick burst of speed, which allows him to break through some of the walls and some of the floors. When bad guys appear (and when they do, they are usually mushroomy-looking sort of things), we can dispatch them by tapping them with the stylus. Provided we do so before Kirby rolls into them, they disappear and do no harm.

Some of the bad guys shoot missiles and fireballs. Being a pink ball of fluff, Kirby is naturally defenceless. But our pen is mightier than any sword, and we can use it to draw protective shields all over the screen. Wherever we trace out a line, we leave a glowing rainbow behind. If Kirby rolls into it, he will bounce backward, but the same is also true of the bad guys and their ammunition. If we are clever about where we touch the screen, and if we are careful not to run out of rainbow ink, we can:

a) keep our little ball friend safe, and;
b) direct him to the exit door and out of peril.

This all sounds sweeter than a bag of acesulfame potassium, and it is, but it is also vastly more than simple rainbows and pinkness. It is an old-style "platform" game with an entirely new control scheme, and the freshness is breathtaking. We must move our little friend from the floor to a sidewalk hovering in the air. We must bop the bad guys on the head. We must burst open the crates labeled with stars. We must find the exit. But we must do all this without a directional control and without a "jump" button.

We draw little rainbowy escalators to lift Kirby up and over and across. We tap furiously on the invaders. We tap Kirby himself, using him as a speedy bowling ball to clear the path to the door. We marvel at this very old game idea made so completely new. And we smile, even though our hearts are breaking at poor Kirby's plight.

When you tap some of the bad guys, Kirby takes on their superpowers. You will spend much of your time with Canvas Curse operating a pink ball who can spit flames. Do that for an hour and then just try to make a grumpy face.