EA Sports Supercross 2000
No sooner does Ubisoft's godawful Dukes of Hazzard take the crown of worst racing game so far, than it gets seriously challenged by the normally-respectable EA Sports with this frustrating mess.
Bip into your opponents to fell them and end their misery.
Superdross 2000 sells itself as the definitive supercross gaming experience, which it has to be said is an accolade that probably isn't too taxing to achieve, given the competition will have been something like Jeremy McGrath's Supercross 98 and that's about it. It comes with all the usual EA Sports splendour, with licenced competitors and vehicles, could-be-much-worse commentary. bike customisation options, and a playlist of late 90s punk skater jams.
The load times are excruciating.
It's when the race actually starts that it all falls apart. The bike controls are so atrocious as to almost render the game unplayable. Turning is a total lottery and a manoeuvre performed by holding down the left/right button and whispering a little prayer. Sometimes your bike will swing around the corner, but the rest of the time it will move on a slight forward arc into the wall, where then it is another lottery as to whether you will get to slowly bump your way around the corner or simply get stuck on the geometry and have to press the 'reset your bike' button before too many of your racing competitors zip past, free of such human limitations.
Make a fool of yourself in front of an audience of tens of thousands.
Given the courses are tightly-compacted rabbit runs with hairpin turn after hairpin turn, it makes for a thoroughly annoying experience. There are numerous gulleys and jumps, which simply serve to make it more of a pain to negotiate yourself around the track. Alternatively, there is the 'freestyle' mode, where you nip around the supercross equivalent of a skating half-pipe, using the circle button to pull off stunts and gain points. It's only really a sideshow, and if you wanted that done properly, you could play Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX instead, and feel at peace with yourself in the knowledge that you're doing your bit for Net Zero.
Kept my attention for: Half an hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 3/10
Earthworm Jim 2
An acid trip of a game. I only spent an hour or so with Earthworm Jim before getting somewhat stuck and too frustrated to carry on, but it was certainly not the sort of thing I had in mind when I loaded it up. I expected a 2D platformer with one of those Money Island-style ironic slants. What I got was the gaming equivalent of a sequence of unexplained hallucinations.
Level 2 has you shoot holes in the walls in order to climb on top of the debris to progress. Pretty novel actually.
It's mostly a platform game, and you mostly run around shooting enemies and jumping on things as expected. But even that stuff will suddenly present you with obstacles in the vein of riding a stairlift while trying to avoid tumbling grannies, like a lost level in Donkey Kong. It's chaotic. Enemies constantly pile into you from every direction, which presumably explains why health is shown as a percentage rather than giving you a fixed number of hits to tank before a game over. You’re not expected to avoid damage so much as accept that you will be repeatedly battered and hope there’s still something left by the end.
Bounce puppies on a cushion to guide them into a waiting funnel.
Then the game gets bored and turns into something else entirely. Levels introduce completely different rules with virtually no warning. Level 3 has you guiding a blind cave salamander through an intestinal tract whilst you try and avoid the villi-covered walls a la Flappy Bird (I mean, I guess). Half way through, you are dumped into a quiz show. It's like playing through Family Guy cutaway gags, except just the gags and without the actual primary plotline. The closest comparison I can think of is Bishi Bashi Special, if somebody took the same thinking behind its collection of deranged minigames and stretched it across a single-player platformer.
Oh, and the quiz show is nonsensical.
At the end of each level, a cow gives you a "Well done". By that point, it’s reassuring that somebody understands what has happened.
Kept my attention for: An evening
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 6/10
Echo Night
After slogging through at least ten uninspiring games in a row (and having played nothing truly good since Dino Crisis), I was running out of steam a bit. Along comes a strange, hitherto unknown game called Echo Night to make it all better again.
You can't fight off the spooks - all you can do is run.
Made by the same folks who put together King's Field (or if that doesn't ring any bells, Dark Souls), it's a first-person-view puzzle-slash-horror game that is a bit of a slow burner. Much like King's Field, everything is rendered in 3D. This is a sprite-free zone. It makes for an aesthetic that might have felt a bit shoddy at the time, but today, a bit like looking at the 50s-era Buicks trundling around Cuba, there's something attractive about it. Whenever some buff bod with knack for Blender makes a 'demake' clip for Youtube, it looks like Echo Night.
Ah, no problem then.
The game can be a bit difficult to follow. The opening FMV tells you about the mysterious final voyage of a cruise liner in the early 20th century, leading you to believe it's going to be like a bit of a paranormal Diver's Dream, but the game opens with you in the present day, being driven to your father's recently burned-down house by the cops. A poke around the debris suddenly transports you via an old book onto the ghost ship itself. You'll never return until the ending (if you're lucky).
A random 35-star USA flag. This was only used for a very short period in the mid-19th century. But the game is set in the early 1900s..? Possible, I suppose. Thank you for tuning in to today's vexillology podcast.
There is no combat in Echo Night. The aim of the game is simply to try and figure out what the hell is going on, and in the process meet and assist various shade-like apparitions on the ship move on into their eternal rest. You yourself are haunted throughout the game by a sequence of malevolent spirits who have a habit of appearing without warning and doing you some damage. In first-person, at night, in the tight confines of a deserted ship with no ambient sound beyond your footsteps and whatever machinery might be grinding along nearby, this can be quite spooky. The only way to scare them off is to switch on the lights, which makes for a mad dash every time you enter a new room to find where the light switch is and flip it. As the game goes on, it jacks up the fear by sometimes cutting the power so the switches don't work, or making them stuck in place, leaving you too scared to even turn the camera around to face what you know is behind you.
Look left and right in a panic for one of these in every new area.
The puzzling comes from working out what is keeping the friendly (or at least docile) apparitions tied to the ship, then piecing together items and clues in order to get them what they want. If you save them all, you get a choice of a few different endings. As all this is happening, the game drip feeds you clues as to how all this came to be by engaging in a bit of ghostly teleportation to different times and spaces to solve further puzzles and get to the bottom of a (rather cliche) familial spat involving control of some demonic crystals or whatever. The heat slowly gets turned up as you come to realise that the 'interactive visions' you think you were having were actually changing things back on the boat. Insert ghostly 'woooh' noise here.
Most ghosts go about their daily business until you free them somehow.
It gets pretty hard without a guide, and there is virtually no replay value - once you've done it, there is no point going again unless you want to get a different ending (it's basically a choice at the very end). But it's a good game that doesn't get talked about. File with Azure Dreams in the 'good games nobody has heard of' folder.
Kept my attention for: An few days
Did I finish it?: Yes
Overall: 7/10
ECW Anarchy Rulz
There's a little more going on than immediately meets the eye with this one. For starters, ECW Hardcore Revolution (next alphabetically) actually precedes Anarchy Rulz...but by a mere matter of months - Hardcore Revolution was released in March 2000, and Anarchy Rulz was on shelves less than 6 months later in September. Games were turned around more quickly in those days, but there is no way you were managing much new in that sort of time frame.
Reminder that many people still actually weren't sure if this was real or not in the 90s.
The other thing is that anyone who had also played one of the other men-in-speedos-pretend-to-hit-each-other simulators of the time - in particular WWF War Zone or WWF Attitude - would notice things looking strikingly similar. All four games were developed by Acclaim. Do I smell what the Rock is - er, I mean do I smell a cheap cash-in?
There are ring entry sequences, but they are universally rubbish.
Yes, I do. It seems that after the hugely successful WWF Attitude, the WWF cut ties with Acclaim and went on to tee up WWF Smackdown with THQ (Who, funnily enough, had until now been behind the licenced games for arch-rival WCW. A true wrestling storyline, this). Acclaim were left carrying the bag and had to team up with lesser-known ECW to try and squeeze a bit more juice out of their War Zone engine.
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If you fight for long enough, you can build up a fair amount of blood and guts.
So it means that Anarchy Rulz (and Hardcore Revolution) is basically just a rebadged WWF Attitude. I played the hell out of War Zone back in the day and this whole rabbit hole dive started simply because I spotted that the main menu of Anarchy Rulz rang too many bells. Everything is there - career mode, exhibition, tag teams, and the highly powerful 'create a wrestler' mode that would suck up many a childhood hour knocking together extremely obese joke wrestlers complete with surgical mask, rubber gloves and a mohawk.
Some might call the Create a Wrestler mode the whole point of the game.
The thing is, Attitude was only ever an 'okay' game, and the War Zone model was a few years old by this point. The wrestlers sway in place waving their arms around bizarrely, and the game is played in the style of a three-dimensional fighting game which swaps fast combinations for a rather dull grappling system. Opponents don't have a 'health bar' per se, but something more of a fatigue bar where the lower it is, the more likely it will be to secure a pin. It takes a bloody long time to get to that point, though. The only element which differs to Attitude is the addition of blood and other injuries that occur as the game goes on. It probably didn't look that great at the time, either. Below average. The game plays in full 480p, though.
Kept my attention for: An afternoon
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10
ECW Hardcore Revolution
I knew that Hardcore Revolution would be the same game as Anarchy Rulz, particularly given they were released within months of each other, but it really is just a carbon copy. The only thing I could work out that was different was the simple look-and-feel bitmaps that make up the menus. The roster is the same, the game modes are the same, the 'career mode' is the same, the music is the same. I even managed to 'create' more or less the same guy in the create-a-wrestler mode.
Spot the difference?
Something I noticed in Anarchy Rulz but didn't properly think about until here is how damn quiet it all is. Extreme Championship Wrestling? You compete in arenas with a handful of people on the crowd, and 'fight' in more or less total silence. With the loss of the WWF licence, I guess they could no longer get hold of Jim Ross and Vince McMahon to do the in-game commentary, so they subbed in two guys who might say one or two lines a match.
Spot the difference.
The crowd never make much of a noise, and when you do win, the bell rings and the camera holds on the winner standing there awkwardly while nobody says anything and then you're taken back to the main menu. Acclaim had properly stopped bothering.
Kept my attention for: An evening
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10