Pokémon Colosseum proves that a truly motivated and well-funded tween phenomenon really can keep going and going and going, even after its core audience has lost interest and moved on to such new projects as getting its driver's licence and losing its virginity.

It is the game no one would have missed. But now that it is here we must concede the truth. It is pretty good. It is fun. It is mind-achingly bizarre to look at. We really should all be glad somebody felt the need to develop and release it, never mind how late it is to the party.

Here is some background, in case your recent adventures in the back seat have driven the Pokémon story from your memory. Pokémon are small friendly monsters. They come in hundreds of varieties. They roam freely in the wild. Some of them are cute. Some are fierce. Some are birds. Some are fish. Some are rats. Some look like balloons. Some look like boulders. They come in every colour of the rainbow.

Pokémon are also sort of electronic, in a way that is never explained. They can be stored on PC hard drives and moved over the internet. They can be stored inside little pocket-sized trinkets called "Pokéballs," even though they may stand four feet tall and weigh 80 pounds in the wild. (They enter and exit the Pokéballs with dramatic flourishes of sparks.)

They are flesh and blood, inasmuch as they are vulnerable to poison and drowning and bites. But they are also pure data, easily restored to full health with a two-second check-in to the Rest Machine at the local Pokémon Centre. Nobody knows what Pokémon are, really. That is OK. The important thing is that they are easily domesticated. And also that they like to fight.

In the land of Pokémon, people carry collections of monsters with them everywhere they go. When they run into other people, they square their monsters off against each other in angry, vicious combat that does not end until one set of critters lies bruised and unconscious. People fight their monsters against friends' monsters for fun. They fight their monsters against their enemies' monsters to settle scores. They fight their monsters for pleasure. They fight their monsters for money. It is a whole society built around cockfighting, only with less blood and more electronics.

Okay, that is enough background. The new game continues a line that began with the two Pokémon Stadium games for the Nintendo 64. The basic idea is that, as you play Pokémon on your Game Boy, you will amass a large collection of highly-skilled fighting monsters. Colosseum, like Stadium before it, allows you to dump your collection onto your GameCube, where you can fight them in gorgeous fully-rendered 3D graphics.

That is the core idea, anyway. What is new here is something called "story" mode, which plays out a lot like one of the Game Boy adventures all on its own. You roam from town to town meeting people and fighting your monsters against theirs, trying to become the bestest Pokémon trainer in all the land.

A few twists are new. There are no monsters out in the wild. Instead of hunting, you must now steal Pokémon from other people. There is an over-arching plotline that has something to do with criminal thuggery and theft. These innovations are subtle and unlikely to draw much notice from any but the most hardened fans (who are, as you will recall, already distracted by other pursuits anyway). But the monsters you collect in this new adventure are also available to you in the Colosseum, so even if you have never touched a Game Boy you still move your collection from one place to another.

If this is not your cup of tea, too bad. Nintendo has been on a bit of a tear lately, constantly urging its customers to "Get Connected." This means the company would like you to plug your Game Boy into a GameCube. Apparently they have not noticed that to most of the world, the phrase "Get Connected" usually refers to the internet. Internet games are fun. They are great. Nintendo really ought to try them sometime. They are much better than silly gimmicks designed to get you to buy a bunch of proprietary hardware.

In the interim, however, we have a new game and it is pretty good. The people in it have bright spiky hair and wear silly clothes.