By Matt Slagle
The Associated Press

CBS has done well turning the crime lab into popular entertainment. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation was first, then came CSI: Miami. On the heels of last year's CSI video game comes another franchise spinoff for home computers: CSI: Dark Motives.

I'm partial to the original show's brand of high-tech sleuthing, and thankfully the nasty murder and mayhem in Dark Motives is set in and around the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas.

You'll interact with many cast members to help you unravel five gruesome cases. An added touch of realism is the voice work done by actors from the TV show.

You must canvass Sin City's seedy underbelly, uncovering clues with high-tech detective equipment like ultraviolet lights and casting kits.

The graphics were rather outdated by current standards. Each place you explore is presented as a two-dimensional picture - quite limiting when you consider many games let you explore areas in three dimensions.

Apparently that's what you get for the budget-minded price of $30.

If graphics were unimpressive, searching for evidence along the Vegas strip was an absolute drag.

The only true hidden agenda I could find with Dark Motives was to annoy. The game often became a never-ending process of dragging the mouse cursor over every square inch of the screen, hoping it turned from blue to green to indicate I'd found possible evidence.

Putting all the pieces together and building a complete case file was the best part. You get to interview suspects at the scene, talk to their friends, enemies and colleagues, then look for inconsistencies and come back with follow-up questions.

Unfortunately, even the best aspects of Dark Motives had flaws.

Take the dialogue. You can only talk to people by selecting from a list of questions. So, all you really have to do is click on every prepackaged question, then listen to the canned response.

The order of the questions didn't seem to have any bearing on the responses. I would have preferred a more open-ended system, or at least one where the outcome of the game changes depending on the questions asked.

Load times were annoying long too, considering I was using a computer well above the minimum system requirements of a 600 megahertz processor with 256 megabytes of memory.

Dark Motives is rated M for lots of blood, guts, some gross video sequences and other decaying body parts. It's nothing you haven't already seen on the show.

Fans will probably enjoy Dark Motives and its faithful presentation of the music, mood and story lines of the TV version.

For the uninitiated, though, there's not much here to make it anything but a very average adventure game.

On the Web: csi.ubi.com/index.php