The story is about as shallow as the games, but it's there. Hot Pixel is about style more than anything else. There's some urban skater attitude mixed in with nostalgic video game styles from Atari's past, like Breakout and Asteroids. There's a mascot of sorts, who shows up before and after each chapter, but we're not sure why because there's no rhyme or reason to it. And because he's not particularly entertaining, we just found ourselves waiting for him to be done with whatever he was doing.

But he can be ignored, and the games can't. Unfortunately, most of them seem to be very similar and very repetitive, even for mini-games. Once you figure out what you're supposed to do, which is part of the challenge, there's little to no satisfaction in finishing the game or finishing it faster than you did the first time. It doesn't help that none of them are presented particularly creatively. Many of them, in an effort to hearken back to the early days, are composed of very, very simple block characters. It seems that if you're going to present a long list of simple games that last only a few minutes each, you need to mix up the pace and purpose of those games. Hot Pixel doesn't do that as often as it could.

The one advantage Hot Pixel has over the competition is the ability to download more mini-games from the Web – about 70 – which brings the total to over 200. If more become available and are more varied, it would make the other features – like a custom game playlist and ad-hoc network competition – more attractive.

Wherever the line is between very simple and very simple but addictive, Hot Pixels doesn't cross it in most cases. There are a lot of games, and none of them are particularly bad, but the collection doesn't deliver on the promises personality and doesn't hold up against the current competition.