I didn't really have any idea what Treasure World was when I picked it up. I just knew it was a treasure hunting game somehow connected to the real world. Someone told me he found a lot of treasure by walking through Times Square, and my imagination took over from there. I imagined geocaching, but on a Nintendo DS.

So I immediately drove to the nearest Gamestop with my DS in tow. I bought Treasure World, put it in my DS, and drove home. What did I find?

Read about it after the jump.

One of the things I love about videogaming is that it it doesn't mean any one thing. It's a generous umbrella. Sometimes videogaming is The Path or The Sims or Flower or Seaman or Aquanaut's Holiday. Sometimes it's Animal Crossing or Little Big Planet or some thinly veiled social networking gimmick on Facebook. And sometimes it's Treasure World, which is a wireless network scanner that unlocks a random knick-knack whenever it finds a new wireless network. End of sentence. Period. Stop. That's pretty much all you get with Treasure World.

If you're happy with dressing up an avatar or arranging little musical landscapes, you could make an argument that there's more to Treasure World. If, say, you're the kind of person who doesn't have the faintest clue what I'm talking about when I complain that there's no gameplay in Little Big Planet, you might be tickled pink with Treasure World. You'll love discovering all the items that add notes to the Ode to Joy soundscape. You'll be delighted to work your way through the tangled web of unlockables. You'll want to dress up your robot as a baseball player or a pirate. You'll prefer one color of foliage to another. You'll care about logging onto the website and using your online keys (I can't be bothered to get around the fact that Nintendo doesn't support WPA wireless network security, so I'd have to completely rework my wireless network to go online with my DS; sorry Mario Kart and Rockstar Social Club).

For everyone else, Treasure World is a litmus test for how much of a sucker you are for collectibles.

What I learned from Treasure World is that I need a game wrapped around my collectibles. Collectibles are an incentive that exists behind a game rather than instead of it. As I suspected after multiple attempts at playing Little Big Planet, collectibles for collectibles' sake aren't sufficient for me. Treasure World sealed the deal. There is nothing here for me. It is a set of menus to be navigated without sufficient reward or payoff.

It's also a pretty cheap gimmick. I live 4.6 miles from a Gamestop (thanks, Google maps!) in the foothills north of Los Angeles. In the drive home, with Treasure World set to search mode, I found 207 "stars", each of which is the game's way of saying it found a network and therefore unlocked something. The next day, I drove 23.2 miles to a press event in West Los Angeles, nosing through densely packed commercial zones. On the trip there and back, I found 1137 stars. Each star presumably unlocks either an item that makes a musical note, some sort of background wallpaper, a doo-dad my robot can wear, or a musical arrangement. If I were an easily distracted child, I might think of this as pretty cool stuff. But unfortunately, I'm a guy who's into videogames. There's nothing here for me.

Not to say I'm sorry I picked up Treasure World. By tracking the geographical area covered, it does something no other videogame has done (?). This is a great concept around which I hope someone will build a game. I can imagine something really cool. I look forward to someone doing that really cool thing sometime soon, because Treasure World, which gets to sit in the closet next to my copy of Electroplanketon and Wii Fit, certainly isn't it.