Over the last several days we've developed a love/hate relationship with Futurama, the new PS2 game from Vivendi Universal.

We rented the game from Hollywood Video on Friday and began playing as soon as we got it home. It's a real treat for fans of the cartoon; you get to play as Fry, Bender, Leela, and Dr. Zoidberg in 3D environments that are exceptionally true to the show.

The characters are true to the show as well, with few exceptions. For one thing, Leela's hair is pink instead of purple, and we're not sure why they did that. It's not like they had a limited color palate for the game, so there must have been some reason for it. (Color blind game designers?) The characters are voiced by the regular voice actors from the show, so that really helps make up for the hair.

The game play is pretty standard 3D platform adventure - you can control the camera and all objects are fully three dimensional. You dodge blasters and hop between rocks and over land mines, picking up treasures and Nibblers to gain lives and unlock game extras.

Our biggest complaint with the game is that you can only save at the completion of a level. So if you get nearly to the end of the level and die, you've got to go back and do it all over again. This proved to be exasperating at times; some levels took us about 30 minutes to get through. Also, the game doesn't automatically allow you to continue... instead you have to choose to load up your last saved game, which takes more time than it really should.

There are some rather complicated (and tedious) puzzles at the end of the game, and instead of spending three days figuring it out by trial and error, we gave up and consulted GameFAQs. We consulted the FAQ too late, however. It wasn't until we were nearly finished with the game that we found out from the walkthrough that it is possible to stock up on extra lives early in the game.

All in all, it was worth playing through, but we probably wouldn't pony up the $50 to buy it. Rent it instead.