Back To The Noughties
It’s August 2003 and Nick’s found himself in a very poor month for games
In the good old Playstation days, Lara Croft was a reliable sort of lass. She’d turn up to star in a new Tomb Raider game every November, and inevitably the press would love it. Tomb Raider:
The Angel Of Darkness broke both of those traditions. The game came in for a critical drubbing, despite heavy delays to fix its issues. “That this review is being written just days before the release of the game speaks volumes,” said Edge, concluding its 4/10 review. “The lack of tight AI and the abundance of minor glitches suggests that Core could have done with another couple of months for fine tuning.” In a 5/10 review, games™ complained that “twitchy controls mean that instant death is just the flick of the analog stick away”, and that the game consisted of “plodding around uninspiring passageways and around dingy exterior areas”. Even Play, which gave the game a more positive 71% score, felt that the game’s new additions “don’t make the experience any more enjoyable”.
If PS2 owners wanted to play something good this month, they’d need to take a look in rather less obvious places. Fans of intriguing concepts could look into Eyetoy:
Play, a minigame compilation taking advantage of Sony’s new peripheral – a small camera that allowed for various types of motion-sensing games. Edge gave the game 8/10 and praised its accessibility, hailing the arrival of a multiplayer game that “doesn’t just work among people who know how to hold a joypad”, though it did feel that “three minutes per game is too long for this kind of activity”. Play scored the game 83%, selecting Kung Foo, Mirror Time and Keep Ups as highlights of the package.
If you were so fortunate as to have access to import games, you could also consider a pair of 2D arcade blasters. SNK’S run-and-gun Metal Slug 3 scored 8/10 in games™, with the reviewer commenting that “the quality and amount of animation remains unmatched even now”, though noting that it was “more than just a little unfair” at times. In Play, Cave’s vertical scroller Dodonpachi Dai-ou-jou scored 82%, with the reviewer claiming that it was “the cream of the new breed of Japanese shoot-’em-ups”. What does this new breed have to offer? “Rather than destroy every wave that comes under your sights, you will have to focus on
dodging the swirling fields of enemy flak,” we’re told – essentially ‘bullet hell’, before the term would have been widely known.
Beyond that, the month’s fare largely consisted of multiplatform efforts that were reasonable, but hardly spectacular. Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter (7/10 Edge, 69% Play) offered a blend of first-person shooting and space combat, but Play felt it would have been better if “the developers had the nerve to try out some fresh ideas”. Speed Kings (6/10 XBM, 6.7/10 Cube) was called out for “failing to do anything special that separates it from the crowd” in Cube, and Play felt that the stealth sections in The Hulk (69% Play, 6.4/10 Cube) “spoil an otherwise competent and playable game”.
Of course, there wasn’t a great deal going on with Sony’s rivals, either. Gamecube owners could pick up a rather good but somewhat belated port of Hitman 2: Silent Assassin (8/10 games™, 7.9/10 Cube), while Xbox fans had Midtown Madness 3 to pick up. The open-world racer scored 8/10 in XBM, which enjoyed the ability to “take outrageous shortcuts through the Arc De Triomphe and underneath the Eiffel Tower”, as well as the fact that the game didn’t take itself particularly seriously. However, it did have a couple of reservations, particularly when it came to collisions. Innocent bystanders could flee but wouldn’t be harmed if they failed to make it out of your way in time, and trees were bizarrely non-solid, with the reviewer complaining that, “If you’re going fast enough, as with the pedestrians, you go straight through them with little or no impediment.”
PC owners didn’t fare much better. The clear highlight of the month was Day Of Defeat, which scored 8/10 in games™. This World War Ii-themed Half-life mod had been picked up and packaged as a standalone game, as “the idea of Counter-strike being played out in the ultimate theatre of war proved too much of a potentially lucrative concept for publisher Activision to ignore.” Though its graphics were dated and it had no single-player component, the reviewer opined that the game’s “level designs shine above so many other team-based shooters”. Also on PC, Activision’s Star Trek: Elite Force II received 6/10 in Edge, with the game described as a “reasonably impressive, if wholly conventional” FPS that suffered from “tedious, sudden-death platforming sections”. Ghost Master seemed to be taking on The Sims, but Edge felt that it shared more in common with Dungeon Keeper due to its design that had players “using a team of ghouls to scare humans, thus boosting supernatural resources, which can in turn be spent on further scare tactics”. Unfortunately, the reviewer felt that “the lack of structure makes an unholy pact with that lack of obvious action and reaction, draining the game of any tension or real thrills”.
Join us again next month – F-zero GX is coming, honest!