Crap Games, And How Awesome They Are
So, I just played some new street racing game demo called 'Juiced'. If it was anything more than an alpha version it'll die painfully when released. Put simply, half the things didn't work, the auto gears which you couldn't disable were crap, and all the models were flat colours with no texture. The car handling was okay, but the included Supra had a tendency to randomly spin its wheels when taking any corner over the legal speed limit, which caused the gearbox to panic, shift into top gear, then run off and hide somewhere under a blanket. The game engine isn't intelligent enough to realise different gears are actually different, thus the wheels keep spinning, except now at 150mph instead of 35, meaning the car becomes harder to control, and when you finally get some grip the car virtually stalls because it's in 6th gear at 15 miles per hour. The damage system, highly cited as one of the main selling points of the game, basically meant that if you touch anything, bits of the car wobble and eventually crease a bit. After two bumps, you get a warning message and all your precious nitrous (which you can't even actually use in the demo seemingly) leaks away. Another hit and your engine power halves. Kerbs also are inaccessible terrain for such groundsnorting beasts as a stock 1.8 Toyota, causing any mild wide drift on a corner to result in your car imploding. Combining this with the amazing understeer/oversteer only handling means that the only reason I didn't get annoyed at the game was because I was laughing at how bad the graphics are. I had a game that graphically 'good' in 2000, and it ran many times better. Nobody seems to have explained to 'Juice Games' the concept of textures, two of the cars are blank colour with painted-on lights, and the other has garish thick lines to mark the panel gaps. Don't forget that the menu's Quit button is greyed out and unusable, but this is redeemed by the fact it crashes to desktop after every race. I think their last publisher was right in pulling the last game they made if it was anything like this.
Covnersing with a friend of mine on this matter, he started going on about some new street racing game called SRS, but when I pointed out the developer last worked on Max Power Racing it seemed to shut him up a bit. Max Power Racing was possibly the most crap thing ever. It also held the dubious honour of being the only game ever to have a target market of charves. The sort of vehicular selection was along the lines of lowered Nissan Micras, and if you got really far, possibly a Renault Clio with a rear wing! The 'ultimate' car in the game was a Cossie which somehow had several thousand horsepower and did a few hundred MPH. Coming to my point, it was one of those games you play loads multiplayer simply because it's so bad. Take Syphon Filter 2, where you have to be a metre away from someone facing in the opposite direction to hit them with a knife. It's possibly still one of the funniest multiplayer games I've played.
Imagine this: a game contains, hidden in every level, a magical weapon with shiatloads™ of ammo, an almost limitless range, killing with a single shot, and each shot causing a giant explosion which kills anything within a 10-metre radius, including the user. This was the Syphon Filter M79. Most multiplayer games were a scramble to get to it first, pausing only to shoot the other person in the head, chest or torso with your pistol for an instant kill at any range, or to fumble with the controls and fall to your death in one of many unexplained bottomless pits lying around these inner-city locations. Once you did have the M79, the only way you could be stopped is for the other player to somehow get within 10 metres of you without you spotting them on your omnicognisant personal radar, so that when you shot them you would also be destroyed in the ensuing meltdown. Then, with both players dead, there would be a manic sprint for the dropped weapon, with the aforementioned diversions again. When everyone would arrive on the scene and find it vanished because they were too slow, back to the M79 spawn they would go. The only weapon that could compare to the M79 was the equally rare K3G4. This fired some sort of magic bullet which dissolved armour with a single shot and of course killed with single shots to an unprotected fleshy body. It also held several hundred rounds, and fired a shot approximately every 1/10000th of a second. Unfortunately, this weapon could normally only be procured from weapon boxes. These innocent-looking grey cuboids required the player to stand next to and stare at them for several seconds before they were intimidated enough to reveal their contents in white text over the light grey background. Then, if you chose to take the chance of procuring the weapon from inside, you had to remain completely idle and hold triangle for a moment or two, until you were locked into a lengthy unabortable ritual during which you managed to prize open the block and slowly lift your exalted price from its greyer interior, all while remaining totally vulnerable to enemy gunfire. Thus your enemy, on spotting you battling with the box for the superweapon of doom, simply had to stroll over to your location and calmly shoot you in the testicles as you were bent over struggling with the load. This would cause a catastrophic failure in the fabric of the universe. As you keeled over, manhood in tatters and life extinguished, the weapon would be flung from your arms and land on the ground nearby, allowing the opponent to amble past and nab it from your dying grasp. After that, they would generally camp where they wouldn't be spotted and obliterate you as you passed. Yes, the simple weapon box, the most dangerous thing yet discovered by man in any game.
Note I commented that your enemy would shoot your in the testicular glands, rather than knife you. This is because of the wonderfully illogical, unpredictable and totally awful behaviour of the Syphon Filter knife. A general knife fight would follow these lines: enemy player spots player standing forlornly in an open space. Enemy sprints, sorry, lollops over behind the player and swings his hefty knife, causing him to become totally immobile for several seconds from the intense physical stress caused my tearing a knife through the resisting air. Despite visually passing through the player half a dozen times on its jittery journey, the knife would nevertheless not touch them in the slightest. As the enemy struggles to regain consciousness after the massive energy loss of moving his arms, the player simply steps forward, never once looking anywhere near the enemy, and waves his blade vaguely in a random direction. The arteries in the enemy's neck spontaneously explode, and he slides to the ground in a fountain of blood, his game is over. After a few minutes of immobility, the player finally recalls how to move and bobs off in search of an M79. In reality, it was never this simple. Both players would be running round in circles like headless llamas trying desperately to stay in the enemy's view so as to remain invincible to the metal flashing through the air, while simultaneously attempting to make the blood supply to their brain rupture itself by waving at trees with a dagger.
Yes. It was funny, but it was also very, very crap. There ought to be some sort of moral, but there isn't. Deal with it.
Covnersing with a friend of mine on this matter, he started going on about some new street racing game called SRS, but when I pointed out the developer last worked on Max Power Racing it seemed to shut him up a bit. Max Power Racing was possibly the most crap thing ever. It also held the dubious honour of being the only game ever to have a target market of charves. The sort of vehicular selection was along the lines of lowered Nissan Micras, and if you got really far, possibly a Renault Clio with a rear wing! The 'ultimate' car in the game was a Cossie which somehow had several thousand horsepower and did a few hundred MPH. Coming to my point, it was one of those games you play loads multiplayer simply because it's so bad. Take Syphon Filter 2, where you have to be a metre away from someone facing in the opposite direction to hit them with a knife. It's possibly still one of the funniest multiplayer games I've played.
Imagine this: a game contains, hidden in every level, a magical weapon with shiatloads™ of ammo, an almost limitless range, killing with a single shot, and each shot causing a giant explosion which kills anything within a 10-metre radius, including the user. This was the Syphon Filter M79. Most multiplayer games were a scramble to get to it first, pausing only to shoot the other person in the head, chest or torso with your pistol for an instant kill at any range, or to fumble with the controls and fall to your death in one of many unexplained bottomless pits lying around these inner-city locations. Once you did have the M79, the only way you could be stopped is for the other player to somehow get within 10 metres of you without you spotting them on your omnicognisant personal radar, so that when you shot them you would also be destroyed in the ensuing meltdown. Then, with both players dead, there would be a manic sprint for the dropped weapon, with the aforementioned diversions again. When everyone would arrive on the scene and find it vanished because they were too slow, back to the M79 spawn they would go. The only weapon that could compare to the M79 was the equally rare K3G4. This fired some sort of magic bullet which dissolved armour with a single shot and of course killed with single shots to an unprotected fleshy body. It also held several hundred rounds, and fired a shot approximately every 1/10000th of a second. Unfortunately, this weapon could normally only be procured from weapon boxes. These innocent-looking grey cuboids required the player to stand next to and stare at them for several seconds before they were intimidated enough to reveal their contents in white text over the light grey background. Then, if you chose to take the chance of procuring the weapon from inside, you had to remain completely idle and hold triangle for a moment or two, until you were locked into a lengthy unabortable ritual during which you managed to prize open the block and slowly lift your exalted price from its greyer interior, all while remaining totally vulnerable to enemy gunfire. Thus your enemy, on spotting you battling with the box for the superweapon of doom, simply had to stroll over to your location and calmly shoot you in the testicles as you were bent over struggling with the load. This would cause a catastrophic failure in the fabric of the universe. As you keeled over, manhood in tatters and life extinguished, the weapon would be flung from your arms and land on the ground nearby, allowing the opponent to amble past and nab it from your dying grasp. After that, they would generally camp where they wouldn't be spotted and obliterate you as you passed. Yes, the simple weapon box, the most dangerous thing yet discovered by man in any game.
Note I commented that your enemy would shoot your in the testicular glands, rather than knife you. This is because of the wonderfully illogical, unpredictable and totally awful behaviour of the Syphon Filter knife. A general knife fight would follow these lines: enemy player spots player standing forlornly in an open space. Enemy sprints, sorry, lollops over behind the player and swings his hefty knife, causing him to become totally immobile for several seconds from the intense physical stress caused my tearing a knife through the resisting air. Despite visually passing through the player half a dozen times on its jittery journey, the knife would nevertheless not touch them in the slightest. As the enemy struggles to regain consciousness after the massive energy loss of moving his arms, the player simply steps forward, never once looking anywhere near the enemy, and waves his blade vaguely in a random direction. The arteries in the enemy's neck spontaneously explode, and he slides to the ground in a fountain of blood, his game is over. After a few minutes of immobility, the player finally recalls how to move and bobs off in search of an M79. In reality, it was never this simple. Both players would be running round in circles like headless llamas trying desperately to stay in the enemy's view so as to remain invincible to the metal flashing through the air, while simultaneously attempting to make the blood supply to their brain rupture itself by waving at trees with a dagger.
Yes. It was funny, but it was also very, very crap. There ought to be some sort of moral, but there isn't. Deal with it.
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