Introduction

This game review is different from my earlier ones: it's ten short reviews rather than a single in-depth review.

For two reasons, I generally only write reviews of games that I've played all the way through to the end. First, I think it's only fair to review the whole experience intended by the designers. Second, I've read far too many game reviews that are clearly based on a reviewer's relatively brief exposure to the game, where they've quit before problems or innovations became apparent. If you come into a game with a bias, and only play for a few minutes, you can usually decide that the game fits your expectations.

Although I usually prefer to discuss good games, it's useful to also know about some games that fell short of success. The following ten short reviews are of console games that I've given up on, having played to the point where I couldn't bear to play any more. Since this a collection of not-so-good games, I won't provide in-depth reviews, but mostly point out where they went wrong. Note that many of these games have redeeming qualities, but they weren't enough to overcome the problems. Many of these games seal their own doom with one or more fatal flaws, and I'll point those out explicitly. Bad camera control seems to be the most frequent cause of trouble. Here are the games in this review, along with their final scores out of a possible 100.

Sonic Adventure 2 Battle (20)
Conker's Bad Fur Day (10)
Super Monkey Ball (15)
PaRappa the Rapper 2 (20)
Halo (15)
Giants: Citizen Kabudo (5)
Crash Bandicoot:The Wrath of Cortex (10)
The Simpsons Road Rage (20)
Cel Damage (20)
Project Gotham Racing (15)

Sonic Adventure 2 Battle
Published by Sega for Nintendo GameCube
Score: 20/100

You play a half-dozen different characters running through a variety of levels, collecting rings and blowing up bad guys. The art and music are both so-so. The sound mix is awful and the sound cues are sometimes confusing.

Fatal Flaw #1: The camera control is unforgivably bad and makes the game sometimes unplayable. You can move the camera when you're standing still, but as soon as you start to move it snaps back to where it wants to be, which means much of the time you're moving blind. When you're surrounded by unprotected ledges to fall off of, and bad guys shooting at you, this is intolerable.

Fatal Flaw #2: Some game skills are learned only when you are deep into a level. If you get a new skill and don't execute it perfectly the first time, you usually die, and then you have to repeat the level to reach that same point to try again, and repeat this retracing of your steps over and over until you succeed. That's an abuse of the player's time.

Conker's Bad Fur Day
Published by Nintendo for Nintendo 64
Score: 10/100

This game's claim to fame is that although it is filled with cute, big-eyed talking animals, they spend most of their time talking about adult themes like sex and alcohol. Once the novelty wears off, this single joke wears thin pretty quickly.

Fatal Flaw #1: The game is unpleasant to learn. Learning how make Conker the Squirrel jump is an important skill, so early on you are put in a situation where you must execute a series of jumps along the face of a cliff. But if you don't execute those jumps perfectly, you pay a big cost. Missing a jump causes you to fall off the cliff and land in a lake, from which you must tediously swim, swim, swim to shore, then climb, climb, climb the cliff, then walk, walk, walk back to the jump point, and then try again. Fail again, you have to go through the whole long sequence again. Remember that this isn't during the real gameplay, but during the training phase where mistakes should have zero cost. After the third trudge back up the cliff I was ready to throw the cartridge across the room.

Fatal Flaw #2: Once in the game, you often don't know when you've achieved a goal. For example, objects you've collected re-appear, so you're left wondering whether you really have them or not.

Fatal Flaw #3: The camera sometimes swings around unpredictably while you're running, and if you don't instantly adjust your direction you'll fall to your doom.

Super Monkey Ball
Published by Sega for Nintendo Gamecube
Score: 15/100

Remember those toys where you steer a metal ball through a maze mounted in a box with a knob on each of two sides? Turning one knob rotated the platform of the maze left/right, and the other knob rotated it forward/back. The maze also had ridges to rest on, and holes to fall through, and the goal was to get the ball from the start to the end without falling through the holes. That's Super Monkey Ball, except there's a monkey inside the ball, the mazes are more fanciful and complex, there are bananas along the way, and there's a time limit to each round.

Fatal Flaw: The camera won't let you see where you want to go, but points where it wants. So if you want to move any way other than forward, you're maneuvering blindly back into the camera, trying to creep along a narrow twisty path so you don't fall off, burning up time, and then you usually fall off anyway.

PaRappa the Rapper 2
Published by Sony Computer Entertainment for PlayStation 2
Score: 20/100

This is a cute little game. Emphasis on cute. Emphasis on little. The game's graphics appear to have been designed by a 7th grader and modeled and animated by a high school freshman. It's charming in an earnest kind of way. In each of 8 stages a "master rapper" performs a rap song, accompanied by a pattern of button presses arranged in time that more-or-less correspond to the emphasized syllables in the rap, though often it seems arbitrary. Once the "master" has rapped the phrase, you repeat it back by watching a time marker scroll and trying to time your button presses to match what's on the screen. If you like this kind of thing, the PlayStation game "Dance Dance Revolution" is a much better choice.

Halo
Published by Bungie for Xbox
Score: 15/100

Halo is the latest in a long line of imaginatively impoverished Doom knockoffs, though as always there are some technical improvements. The game takes place indoors and outdoors, and you can drive a car. But in general, you wander around, find weapons and ammo, and shoot shoot shoot. You don't shoot absolutely everything that moves, because you don't want to kill your own guys: that's the high point of the game's subtlety. There's only the slightest reason given for this bloodletting. The game is pointless, repetitive, and dull.

Giants: Citizen Kabuto
Published by Digital Mayhem for PlayStation 2
Score: 5/100

The game gets off to a nice start: you've crash-landed on a planet filled with some quirky and intriguing characters.

Fatal Flaw: Automatic camera control that makes you lose. For example, in one of the very early levels you need to skillfully fly up in the air to rescue some characters, and then land on one of the small rocky platforms that are placed here and there in the water below. But you can't tilt the camera down while you're flying, so you can't see where the platforms are located, so you usually crash into the water instead and get instantly eaten by the carnivorous fish. Even if you survive the first half-dozen landings, the next one can still be fatal. Las Vegas gives you better odds, and their games are fun.

Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex
Published by Universal for PlayStation 2
Score: 10/100

You play a variety of characters as they run though a series of levels, collecting fruit and avoiding (or killing) bad guys. The art direction is a bit above average. The control is nicely responsive.

Fatal Flaw: Intolerable load times. Each time you enter or re-enter a level, the game must load the level from the CD. This takes forever, far longer than any other console game I've played in years: 40 seconds is not unusual. When you start spending ten to twenty percent of your game time sitting and waiting and staring at the word "Loading" on the screen, you start wanting to do other things. First among them: turning off the game console.

The Simpsons: Road Rage
Published by Electronic Arts for Xbox
Score: 20/100

It's kind of fun to hear the Simpsons voices come out of a video game. That's where the fun ends. The design is not good: for example, Lisa Simpson's eyebrows look like black pieces of black rebar plunged into her eye sockets. The game is a stripped-down version of the arcade game Crazy Taxi: you drive around an environment, pick up passengers, and drive like mad to their destinations. There are no subtleties or tricks - you just accelerate and steer. The environments are surprisingly sparse and constrained: you can't even drive around the back of most houses. So you drive on the roads from one place to another. After a while, it gets dull. Very dull. Then utterly dull. Then you turn it off.

Cel Damage
Published by Pseudo Interactive for Xbox
Score: 20/100

This is a demolition derby where you drive around and try to eliminate other drivers. You have a changing variety of weapons at your disposal. The gimmick is that the game uses a "toon shader", so that it looks something like a conventional 2D cartoon. To play off that, the game physics are like cartoon physics (e.g. cars lean up on two wheels when taking a tight turn), and the weapons are silly (e.g. a giant hammer and a chainsaw). The environments are surprisingly small and sparse. Once the gimmick wears off, it becomes purely drive drive drive, shoot shoot shoot.

Project Gotham Racing
Published by Microsoft for Xbox
Score: 15/100

This is a traditional car-racing game. The graphics are in the middle of the range for the Xbox. The controls handle moderately well.

Fatal Flaw: You must play perfectly, and even then the computer can steal your victory. Most races are many laps. If you ever fall behind, you can't catch up, and might as well reset the race and start over. So you must practice over and over to become near-perfect. But even if you've raced ideally, when coming into the final turn of the final lap one of the computer's cars can still come up from nowhere and clip you from behind, which causes you to lose control and finish in last place. The only satisfaction resulting from this infuriating behavior is when you eject the disk for what you know will be the last time.