Beyond Good & Evil

Platform: Playstation 2
Developer: Ubisoft
Released: 2003
Genre: Action Adventure

The Game
Things are looking down for the mining planet of Hillys. Its population is under attack by an alien menace known as the DomZ, which is snatching folks up into space for undoubtedly nefarious purposes. The citizenry is nominally protected by the Alpha Sections, an elite army task force that holds Hillys under the grip of martial law. When freelance photographer Jade takes on a job in order to pay the shield energy bill for her lighthouse home, she ends up involved with an underground resistance intent on exposing both sides for what they really are and taking them down once and for all.

Beyond Good & Evil is the creation of Michel Ancret, the mind behind the popular Rayman games as well as a number of more obscure titles. For a time, it seemed that BG&E would also languish in obscurity as its initial sales run was very poor despite receiving many high reviews from critics. It has since gained something of a cult following, however, and it has been announced that a sequel is in the works. Whether this will further develop into the full trilogy that Mr. Ancret originally envisioned or not is yet to be seen.

The Characters
Jade is our main character, an intrepid freelance journalist who lives in a huge lighthouse with her "Uncle" Pey'j and a whole bunch of li'l rugrats, orphans of DomZ attacks that she and Pey'j have taken in. She - as with many of the human characters in the game - has a very interesting look about her in that she doesn't have a specific ethnicity. I originally pegged her as Asian, but she seems to be a futuristic mix of all sortsa folk-types. Lineage aside, her gender is definite . . . she's a fine, foxy lady!

Past her appearances, however, beats the heart of a strong, caring person. She watches over the children that live with her as if they were her very own kids, and her bond with Pey'j is as strong as any familial tie. She's also quite the butt-kicker as well, being a tough martial artist that specializes in staff fighting. Her reporting skills are top notch as well, from all indications. She's kind of like Superman, only a hot lady in the future.

Pey'j is one of a number of humanoid animals running around the game, in his case an anthropomorphic pig. He's a short but boisterous old fellah who is nominally Jade's uncle but acts more like a father to her much of the time. He acts as a general handyman, mechanic, and tinker around the lighthouse, but proof gets dropped every once in a while that he's actually way more brilliant than he lets on.

Double H is Jade's partner in the resistance for the latter half of the game. She rescues him as he's undergoing brainwashing in a DomZ controlled facility, and as a result he's kind of loopy for a while. And for the rest of the game, for that matter, but it's eventually revealed that his regular personality is that of the big tough guy with a heart of gold and a strict code of honor (the Carlson and Peeters Handbook, to be precise). And he definitely is a big tough guy, the premiere agent of the resistance before Jade comes along and forever clad in Hillys militia armor.

The DomZ (pronounced "doms", as in multiple dominatrixes) are the primary antagonists in the game, and it is them or their agents that Jade has to face off against throughout. Very little is explained about them, even at the very end, but that's really to be expected considering this is supposed to be part one of three parts overall. There isn't any cohesive appearance to the DomZ other than a certain Giger-esque aesthetic, and they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. About the only thing most if not all of them share is an orb-shaped part of their body which often turns into a pearl after they are defeated, signifying some sort of connection between them and the pearls you collect to buy certain items with.

The Alpha Sections are a military faction that have basically taken over the government and declared martial law on Hillys in response to the DomZ attacks. Right from the beginning, however, it becomes apparent that not all is as it seems with them, and Jade is hired by the resistance to seek out what their true motives are. The Alphas are the stock enemies of the game, particularly in the first half.

Secundo is . . . eugh. I'm just gonna go ahead and say it. I don't really like this guy. He's the artificial intelligence in Jade's SAC (a mini-computer that doubles as a "bag" that holds items by digitalizing them and then later reconstructing them), and he's . . . well, I don't want to say "useless", but he's close to it. He gets a short scene near the beginning of the game where he jabbers on in his bizarre almost-French almost-Spanish almost-Italian accent, then doesn't show up again until almost the very end of the game to pull off a big deus ex machina maneuver. He does pop in on occasion with various "Way to go!" voice overs when Jade picks up a new item, but he has no actual presence in the main game whatsoever. He doesn't even act as a tutorial for the game (mostly because one isn't needed), and if he were cut out completely, I doubt anyone would have really noticed. I almost hope that his existence is justified by having a larger part in the upcoming sequel(s), but then I remember how difficult it is to even understand what they guy is saying most of the time and all hope is lost.

The Writing
Not bad! Well, if you don't mind the open-ended nature of it. Not a lot is explained, and even when revelation seems to be coming fast and furious at the end, we're left hanging with several unanswered questions. What are the DomZ, really? What's the full nature of the connection they seem to have with Jade and Pey'j? Why does Peeters of Carlson and Peeters spell his name with an extra E?

An unfortunate side-effect of this and the shortness of the game is that it only scratches the surface of the true plot. There are definitely hints of hidden depth, but for the most part we are only allowed to see the shallows up until the very end. For the most part, it's a pretty basic and predictable story of conspiracies and revolution.

But for all of that (not that any of that is actually bad of course), it's still well constructed and presented. Predictability be damned, each and every plot twist was still brilliant and intensely moving, especially the very ending. The dialogue and characterization is quite vibrant and clever, making me feel very comfortable with these people in this world. Pey'j and Double H are especially good in this aspect, between the one making various pork product jokes at his own expense ("Thanks, Jade! I'd've ended up on a silver platter with an apple in my mouth if it wasn't for you!") and the other constantly quoting cheesy lines from his special agent handbook ("D.B.U.T.T.! Don't Break Up The Team!").

The Gameplay
As is usual with action adventure games, there's a lot of running around, smacking things around, and moving stuff around. It's all very simple, and everything you really need to know about controlling Jade takes about two minutes total to learn in the game itself, so I won't bother getting into it here.

These controls, however, are deceptively simple, I think. Unlike some action games that will give their characters a million and one abilities, 90% of which players never actually use under any circumstances (including the circumstances they were put in specifically to deal with), BG&E actually gets a great deal of use out of its limited repertoire. The solutions for all the puzzles in the game may only utilize the same four or five abilities over and over again, but they'll each use those same abilities in unique ways or combinations. It makes for tight yet varied gameplay that I rather enjoyed.

And even though you change modes of transportation every once in a while (by foot, by hovercraft, and by spaceship, to be specific), most of the basic controls remain the same for each. R2 makes you run/fly faster, X makes you attack with your staff/blaster, square makes you jump, circle activates an item, and so on. Hoping into a vehicle, therefore, doesn't make it feel like you suddenly hopped into an entirely different game as well, allowing for a smooth transition without having to learn a whole new control scheme.

Along with the action and the adventure elements are the stealth sections. These . . . are interesting.

Normally, I despise stealth games and anything to do with them. I'm not going to say they were my favorite thing here, either, but I will say that I despised these stealth elements the least of any game I've played so far. Just like the rest of the gameplay, the sneaking around here is very simple. Instead of having it take over huge swaths of the game, each section that requires stealth is usually contained to just a single room. Even if there's a series of several such rooms one after the other, once you get through one of those rooms, you don't have to worry about it again just because you fail in the next room. Failure is not rewarded by snatching away your previous successes. Which is nice. You usually only have to deal with one to three guards as well, and escaping is as easy as running into another room. The Alphas and the DomZ are apparently of the "out of sight, out of mind" mentality and don't spend more than a couple of seconds searching for you before resetting to their regular guard behavior.

And in the end, there are only a few sections where stealth is absolutely mandatory. Most of the time, if you either run out of patience or have an overabundance of bravery, you can run right on out and try to have a go with the guards face to face. It some ways it much more difficult than sneaking past (them guards is tough dudes), but in others it's pretty satisfying almost to the point of being cathartic. So the game typically doesn't punish you for wanting to play it as a straight action adventure game. Which is also nice.

The Challenge
Eeeeeeaaaaasyyyyyyyyy.

There were only a very few parts that felt more than a little challenging, and most of those were only tough until I figured out whatever simple trick there was to it. Most of the enemies pose little problem, falling quickly under Jade's whirling staff. The stealth sections never reach anything even close to thinking about possibly approaching Metal Gear level. The races - racing being something I hate even more than sneaking games, by the way - are laughably easy to beat. Even the extra special bonus stuff is no big thing. I collected all of the animals and pearls in the game as well as all of the Mdisks save one without even really trying hard. Well, for the most part, anyway. The last couple of animals gave me a short-lived fit, but it only took a few minutes to figure it out in the end.

BG&E definitely strikes me as something for the casual gamer, difficulty-wise. In fact, with all the other good things going for it, it would make an excellent introduction to the video gaming scene for people who had never picked up a controller before.

The Sights
Based on the name and the way people seem to salivate ever so slightly over this game, I've long held this image in my head of this massive, epic game with impressively stark settings and tough looking characters showing how gritty they are by having grimacing contests in seedy bars.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I plop the game into my PS2 and find that it's basically a action adventure Saturday morning cartoon. Main character Jade herself is at least somewhat realistically portrayed, but almost everyone else in the game has the exaggerated proportions of a cartoon character and/or is an anthropomorphic animal. Much of the setting is beautiful European-style architecture, and even the grimmest and grittiest parts of the game are pretty brightly lit.

Not that this is bad! No no no, perish the thought. The story itself was also lighter than I expected, and the imagery suits it quite well. BG&E is very visually appealing, and its aesthetic of bright and vibrant with just an undercurrent of darkness fits perfectly. The characters are all well designed and memorable. Even if their personalities hadn't been as well defined as they were, I would have been able to easily tell them apart and tell who was who based on their looks alone.

This is a very pretty game packed with a great amount of detail, and it's great that the main character carries a camera around, 'cause you'll be wanting to take pictures of every damn thing in the game. Heck, even the in-game password system has a delightful design, both functionally and graphically.

The Sounds
I started grooving the second the music started and continued to groove all the way to the end of the credits. The music in this game is, in one word, phenomenal. The rest of BG&E be damned, if there's any one reason to go out and buy your own copy, it's the soundtrack. I guarantee I will have "Propaganda" at the very least stuck in my head for the next week solid.

The voice acting is top notch as well. Half of what makes Pey'j and Double H such great sidekicks is not just their dialogue, but the way in which that dialogue is delivered with such absolute gusto. Secundo's weirdness aside, everyone did an exemplary job.

The Bottom Line
As I mentioned before, BG&E has something of a cult following, and the latest announcement of BG&E2 being on its way has sent quite a few folks into a frantic fervor. While I am not exactly frothing at the mouth or anything, I do find myself greatly looking forward to the sequel. If it's even half as good as this game, it will be well worth picking up.

And ladies and gentlemen, Beyond Good & Evil is indeed beyond good. It has a few black marks (too easy, Secundo needs to go away-o), but those are more than made up for by tight gameplay, beautiful graphics, wonderful characters, the beginnings of what looks to be a stellar story, and an absolutely rocking soundtrack. This is a great game, and I highly recommend it.

Fun: College Humor Mario

My game controller is on the blink at the moment and there's not much going on in old school gaming news that I'm aware of, so y'all get some more entertaining videos. Hooray!

Fun stuff website College Humor has been doing a series of Mario-related videos as of late, all of them more or less hilarious. The above is just a sample . . . check out Bowser's Minions, Sonic and Mario's Awkward Reunion, Mario and Princess Sex Tape, Luigi Finally Snaps, and The Problem with Warp Whistles for the full Mario awesomeness.

Fun: We Never Get the Cool Ads Over Here

And they defeated Ganon with the power of DANCE!

Fun: We Are Not Time Travelers

But what if we were? Sure, we could go back and kill Hitler or become our own grandparents, but those are pretty pedestrian paradoxes with little in the way of personal profit. So what would graphics designer Alex Varanese do with the awesome power of temporal displacement?

Well, perhaps you'd better just see for yourself.

WARNING: May be more awesome than you can handle.

Night Trap

Platform: Sega CD
Developer: Digital Pictures
Released: 1992
Genre: Interactive Movie

The Game
Something strange is going on at the Martins' residence. There have been reports of people going missing, including five young girls who were staying at the Martins' overnight. In response to the disappearances, the - oh, brother - Sega Control Attack Team, or - aw, come on - "SCAT" for short, has been sent in to figure out what's going on. And what's going on is that there's these weird ass blood-drinking mutant things called "augers" that are kidnapping people and draining their blood with these devices that look kind of like pesticide sprayers hooked up to the crappy (if amusing) robot claw toys moms buy their kids to shut 'em up. As a member of - ugh - SCAT, your job is to monitor the house through hidden cameras and activate traps to capture augers and save the latest batch of girly girls the Martins have lured.

Night Trap is one of the earliest games in a very short-lived genre sometimes known as "trap 'em up", as well as one of the first console games to include live-action video footage. It's main claim to fame, however, was its involvement in the series of congressional hearings at the time regarding video game violence that led to the creation of the ESRB. Like most such hearings, the jabs against Night Trap were largely overreactions, misinterpretations, taken out of context, or simply invented from whole cloth.

Though I didn't remember the name of the game itself, the big "damning" scene where a girl wearing a nighty is dragged away by augers as their hook thing drains her blood was one that I saw on the news when they were reporting the hearings, and it was the big reason I decided to try the game out. I'm a sucker for controversy.

And for girls in short night gowns getting dragged off by bloodthirsty monsters. Hubba hubba.

The Characters
You are the main character of the game, the voiceless, faceless member of SCAT who gets to stare at video feeds all night in the vain hope of catching some augers off guard so you can pummel them into submission with the many booby traps littering the Martin homestead. Rather than give you a name or any kind of characterization, all of the characters in the game just call you "Control".

The leader of SCAT is Lieutenant Simms, a mean man who yelled at me a lot and broke my controller on multiple occasions. He said it had something to do with me not being up for the job, but I think he was really just disappointed that I wasn't an omniscient and omnipresent god among mortals, capable of seeing the future and thus living up to his impossibly high standards of what a real man is supposed to be.

Kelly (or Kelli, or Keli, depending on which version of the game you're playing, apparently) is an undercover agent of SCAT played by the late Diff'rent Strokes actress Dana Plato. She infiltrates the Martins' residence by posing as one of the girls that were invited to stay for the weekend (or night, or whatever . . . honestly, I'm not sure how long they were supposed to be there or even why) and runs around the house looking for clues while you get to do all the real work.

There's the Martins themselves, a pack of vampires who deliver blood to the local community of augers as part of their "charity work", getting said blood from locals and transients they lure into their home. It was they who set up all the traps in the house in order to catch those unwary victims more easily. To give you the short rundown of each family member, there's the father Victor (wannabe French/Italian/whatever douchebag), mother Sheila (MILF straight out of a daytime soap opera), daughter Sarah (creepy bad actress with enormous gums), son Jeff (whiny teeth brusher), and cousin Tony (wooden lump).

All of the Martins are bad actors with poorly written lines and motivations, but Tony really takes the blood cake. He has the exact personality of a fence post, which I guess is his attempt to seem like a "bad dude" with a "rude 'tude", but all he really manages is to come off looking like he forgot his lines but he doesn't want anybody to know. He just sort of stands there with the same expression through the whole game no matter what he's doing, from talking about how they should change the security code on the traps to talking about how he's going to zap the shit out of Kelly with his vampiric lightning powers (I'm not making this up) and then suck all her blood.

He's the only member of the Martin family that seems to have a character arc, but it doesn't make any damn sense whatsoever. He's just as ready as the rest of the bunch to suck and/or drain the blood out of every last college-aged girl that comes into the house, but he starts to have doubts because one of the girls just happens to look 100% exactly like some other girl. Who this other girl is exactly is never clearly defined. Or even muddily defined. His long-dead girlfriend? His long-dead sister? His long-dead hairstylist? You got me.

Anyway, he tries to warn the girls away toward the end of the game, and then almost just as quickly tries the zap-and-snack on Kelly I mentioned. As he's slowly coming after her up the stairs, Kelly yells at control to trap him, and inexplicably Tony smirks (the only other facial expression he has, it seems) and says something to the effect of, "You really think they're gonna do it?" I'm pretty sure that the people who made Night Trap fully expected the player at this point to actually yell out, "HELL YAH I'M GONNA DO IT! YOU'RE TRAPPED, SUCKAH!" I didn't say that, however. I said, "Uh . . . why wouldn't I do it?" I dunno, did Tony try to bribe me in some deleted scene that I didn't see? I hate the guy. Not because he's an evil vampire or whatever, but because he's a horrible actor, and it would have given me nothing but the greatest pleasure to have sent him spiraling into each and every trap in that house over and over and over again.

Anyway, there's some other characters running around, but frankly, just thinking about them is depressing me. The short version is there's an extremely strange neighbor appropriately named Weird Eddie who built ray guns and inexplicably disappears about halfway through the game, a bunch of idiotic, ineffectual, and borderline offensive members of SCAT who all bungle things to almost epic proportions, the five girls who are staying at the house, and Danny, younger brother to one of the girls. He's the first to spot the augers, and he gets a ray gun from Eddie and his final scene is just a copy/paste job of one of his earlier scenes in which he screams and runs out the back door while being chased by augers.

The only one of these mostly-forgettable people that held my interest even momentarily was Megan, played by Christy Ford in apparently her only acting role ever. She was one of the few actors in the game that didn't seem to be taking the whole thing seriously in the slightest, which really worked. Her performance was over the top crazy and I felt she brought more personality to the show than all the rest of the actors combined.

It's just a shame that she couldn't also make up for all the rest of the actors combined. That much outpouring of over-the-topness would have caused even the sturdiest individual to explode.

The Writing
MY BRAINS

THEY ARE LEAKING OUT OF MY HEAD

SEND HELP

Night Trap is by no means an A-list movie. It's not a B movie. Nor a C, a D, or any other letter. The script for this terrible, rotten, no-good piece of crap shot straight past Z grade and just kept on tunneling. I don't know if I can even talk about it. I'm starting to dry heave just thinking of the tortured dialogue, the unfunny "jokes", the nonsensical storyline, and the gaping plotholes.

But I'll try to pick out a few especially horrific parts.

Sega Control Attack what the fuck ever. I've read that they changed this first word to "Special" for ports to other systems, but that doesn't change the fact that for this version it was SEGA CONTROL ATTAAARRRGH. That damn Lt. Simms even held up a Sega Genesis controller from time to time! And it said "Sega Genesis" right on it, just like a real controller! Why would they do something so completely and utterly stupid?! What happened here, Sega?! I used to think you were cool!

And as bad as that is, regardless of what the S stood for, the abbreviation is "SCAT" either way. I mean look, guys, I understand that you probably meant it as the "shoo, go on, get out of here" kind of "scat" and as a wordplay on SWAT, but if you're going to be making a shitty game, then you probably don't want to have an organization with a name that is also another word for "shit".

The vampires have lightning powers.

Tony wears sunglasses throughout the entire thing. This, I think we're led to believe, is because his eyes glow. But the thing is, all of the vampires have glowing eyes. And just like them, Tony's eyes don't glow all the time. So why does he continuously wear the sunglasses and act like it's important that he keeps them on?

The vampires have teleporting powers, yet somehow the traps are able to hold them and they aren't able to catch up with a normal bunch of girls running away from them. They also have lightning powers.

After characters have served their purpose, they just seem to run off into the wilderness and disappear forever. While in some cases that's not such a big deal, in at least three it makes even less sense: Lisa (who shimmies out a window, completely deserting her little brother), Danny (who ditches out in the aforementioned copy/past of an earlier scene, despite the fact that as far as he knows he's deserting his big sister, and even though before that he was totally gung ho about taking on the augers), and Weird Eddie (who goes downstairs with a ray gun and an auger disguise, but then is never heard from again).

Sheila gets knocked over onto a bed by one of the traps and then has time to have a conversation with Victor about it before the bed lifts up and catapults her out of the house or wherever. Thank goodness she couldn't have just, I don't know, stood up from the bed she was merely sitting on or anything in the five or six seconds in between!

THE VAMPIRES HAVE LIGHTNING POWERS. And they don't even use them! Tony and Jeff just kinda shoot lightning out of their hands a couple of times. Why? Just because they can, I guess, because they never actually hit anything, and most of the time they aren't even aiming it at anyone!

And I'm really wondering whether Victor's line of "THE WALL TRAP! AAAAAAAAAH!!!" was actually scripted, or just an imaginative ad lib on the part of the actor. Either way, it was terrible and both he and the writers should be ashamed of themselves.

Oh yah, and the vampires have lightning powers.

The Gameplay
You, as Control, have access to the series of hidden cameras and traps strewn throughout the house. You can switch the camera feed between the various rooms, but you can only look in on one room at a time. When nothing is going on in that room, the feed is a static picture display. When something is going on, the something is typically split into two different types: plot relevant scenes and auger capturing scenes. In the plot scenes, the various people in the house are moving around, going about their business, giving exposition, or just having some fun or doing work. Sometimes these are just transitive scenes as people walk from one room to the other on their way somewhere specific.

The other scene type is the meat of the game. The augers occasionally get into the house and lurk around, looking for tender morsels to capture and drain, and from time to time one or two of these monsters will step in the range of a trap. A trap meter resides on your control console, running from green to yellow to red, telling you when to strike. If you hit the trap button when the meter is in the red, then you've caught yourself an auger and are treated to a quick scene of them getting sucked into the trap. If you don't, they continue on their despicable way.

On rare occasion, you can capture good guys in the traps. Doing this gets you an immediate game over as Lt. Simms appears, bitches you out, and breaks your controller. He'll also snap it like a Slim Jim if too many augers get away from you.

Some few scenes close to the midpoint of the game and more often toward the end are combination plot and capture scenes in which one of the girls is threatened by augers. If you don't manage to capture one or two of the augers, allowing the girl to escape, then the girl is instead captured and drilled for precious, delicious blood, and then Simms pops up to tear into your shit again.

To operate any of these traps, you have to have the proper security code, which is one of a set of colors. The game always starts set at Blue, and then during preset times the code is changed to a different randomly selected color. If you don't switch your access to the new color, then none of the traps will work no matter how hard or often you press that button.

The changing color code is the first problem I'll be addressing in the cavalcade of horrors that is Night Trap's system. The code change happens during specific plot scenes, and if you don't get to the right room at the right time to listen in on the conversation regarding which color it's been set to, you're just shit out of luck. You have to randomly change your access code, try to find some augers, and try it out. If it works, hooray, you guessed right! If it doesn't, oh well, better luck with the next color. And you better hope you get it figured out before they change the code again, too many augers slip through your grasp, or one of the girls gets dragged off by the foul beasties.

So how do you know when the code is being changed? Well, that's the thing . . . unless you've happened across the scene in a previous playthrough and written down the time and place it was changed, you don't. It's entirely trial and error, restarting the game every time you learn of a new change time. And since the code change is randomly determined, you have to be sure you get to the scene in time, because you can't just write down a list of specific color changes.

This problem is endemic of the entire game, unfortunately. You never know exactly when a plot scene is going to be popping up unless you happened across it in an earlier playthrough and made a note of it. The only indication that an auger is near a trap is a popping noise accompanied by the count of possible captures on your console bumping up a notch or two. This does not, however, tell you where the augers are, so once again unless you already know from a previous playthrough, you have to search through all the rooms and hope you luck upon the correct one before the augers can slink away. And since your window of opportunity to capture them is mere seconds at most after you hear the pops, slinking away unharmed is usually what they do.

Also problematic is that plot relevant scenes will often play simultaneously not only with the auger capture scenes but with each other as well. This starts from the very beginning and continues virtually unabated throughout the entire game. A plot scene involving Sarah Martin starts playing right from time 00:00, starting in the bedroom and ending in the bathroom at time 00:24. At 00:02, two freaking seconds after the plot starts, an auger capture sequence starts in another room. And another one starts at 00:20 in the bedroom just as Sarah leaves. So if you try to pay attention to the capture scenes, you miss the plot scenes. If you try to pay attention to the plot scenes, you miss the capture scenes.

Now in this case, the plot scene isn't really all that important. It shows there's something not quite right with Sarah and that there are secret doors and passages in the house, but both of those points are shown many times over throughout the game, so you can catch onto it pretty quick. But it does the same thing over and over and over again after that during plot scenes that are important if you're to follow exactly what's going on. And capturing augers is definitely the more important of the two scene types since you get a game over if you don't capture enough of them, leading the player to miss tons of exposition and action elsewhere in the house.

Now given what I've already said about the story being just absolutely putrid, this might seem like a good thing. But really, even though they totally sucked at writing the story and acting it out, they did still take the time to write it and film it. One of the big boasts on the box art itself was that the game contained around one and a half hours worth of video. We the players might be glad to be spared all the lifeless acting, terrible dialogue, and weak action/horror, but why in the world would the people who made the damn game go to lengths to make sure almost all of their hard work would slide by unseen? What sort of sadistic bastards would make it virtually impossible to sort out their already nearly incomprehensible plot in even multiple playthroughs? It's like they're standing there going, "Ooooh, you want to watch this movie, don't you? But oh, dear, I'm sorry, we're only going to let you have a few glimpses now again because right now you need to sort out all of these rusty, handle-less knives right over here without any hand protection. Maybe when you've finished doing that, we'll let you have a peek!" And then when you do get your peek, what little you do understand about what's going on is complete shit!

So, in order to play the game, you're more or less forced to sit down and write up a list of all the different things that are happening around the house and when they occur. You then use this list to progress through the game until you get to a new section, then start listing the events that happen there as well. You have to play through the same beginning sections over and over and over again, watching each room one by one and writing down what happens until you finally get shut down by Lt. Sucks. In other games, your continued progression is generally based on getting better at the game, becoming more skilled at controlling your character and directing your attacks. In this game, skill has nothing to do with it whatsoever, unless you count "pressing a button when the game tells you to" as a skill. Instead, your character is pretty much just using a time machine to go back to the past with the knowledge they have gained in the future to proceed.

And even when you've got all the events listed, you still have to do multiple playthroughs in order to see all the different plot scenes that are happening simultaneously, then even further, in order to see the actual ending of the game, you have to do a perfect game, capturing every auger and vampire in the game and saving every girl without fail. This means that in order to see the real end of the story, you have to ignore almost all the other story scenes before it!

Who does this sort of thing?! Who?! And why would they do it?! Do they just hate us?! Did the people at Digital Pictures simply decide they hated video game players and then created the most awkward, idiotic, counter-intuitive gameplay mechanics ever devised just to make us suffer?!

WHY?!

The Challenge
I eventually decided to pull up a walkthrough for Night Trap so I could play through a perfect game. Even with the list telling me exactly where to be and when, I got a game over because my nose started to itch just as the second girl-threatened-by-augers scene popped up and I thought, "Surely I'm fast enough to scratch and be back at the trap button in time to save this hot, nubile young lady!"

No, I wasn't, and all the work I'd put into the perfect game was gone in a flash.

Even if the gameplay section above doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the bullshit challenge presented by Night Trap, just remember that I had a walkthrough for the perfect game, and I still utterly failed just because I wasn't fast enough to press the trap button in the half-second window provided by the game. All because my nose started itching.

The Sights
I vaguely remember hearing that Sega CD games had a reputation for being a little on the ugly side, and I really should have been prepared from the choppy graphics I'd already seen on the Saturn years back, but dah-yumn this game is uuuuuuh-glee!!! In order to compress the game down to where all the video would fit on the CD, it looks like they just beat it with an ugly stick until enough pieces were smashed off, allowing them to crowbar in what was left. So on top of having a story that starts off barely coherent and gameplay that ensures you barely get to see anything of relevance to the plot, you've got an impenetrable fog of video that would make Zapruder blush with shame.

Night Trap's big claim to fame is the controversy started over a scene where a girl in a somewhat revealing nighty gets attacked by some augers before getting dragged off to be drained of her blood good and proper. To be honest, this was the only reason that I decided to give this game a chance, 'cause if there's anyone willing and ready to watch a scantily clad girl get dragged off by monsters, it's me. But when I finally got to the scene, it was not only compressed down to the point where I had trouble figuring out which unsightly blob of color was supposed to be the hot chick, it was also plumb damn ridiculous.

The nightgown isn't really all that revealing, and was even slightly less so than some of the regular outfits the other girls were wearing. And not to hurt the poor actress' feelings or anything, but she was the one that I would have least wanted to see in a nighty. Not to say she wasn't attractive (she was, in an 80's richy bitch sort of way), but still, comparatively.

Also, the augers are just guys wearing black full-body clothing, their blood draining devices look like toys, and the most menacing thing they do is kind of hop around like idiot monkeys. Further, there's the Z-grade acting and shoestring budget "traps" that wouldn't be able to capture a . . . well, an anything, much less those weirdo vampire wannabes. All put together, it was like trying to watch a scrambled porn channel, and it isn't even good porn.

It's an awful looking game with stupid looking traps and moronic looking bad guys in idiotic looking costumes with pathetic looking equipment.

The Sounds
Fortunately the audio isn't quite as compressed as the video, but it still ain't really pretty. The popping noise that warns of auger incursion is repetitive and annoying. And having to listen to the "acting" is enough to make anyone's ears bleed.

The Night Trap song played during the party scene is kinda catchy, however.

The Bottom Line
Since I didn't actually finish the game (not even with the walkthrough) and had almost nothing positive to say about Night Trap, I had originally planned to relegate it to a spot in one of my Short 'n' Sour triple reviews. But as I started to write, I found that while everything I had to say was sour, it was in no way short. So I did some more research, started compiling my thoughts on the game more thoroughly, and decided to go with the full hate-a-thon you just read. This is hands down the worst game that I've reviewed so far, I honestly think it may be the worst game I've ever played, and I earnestly believe it may be the worst game ever devised by anyone anywhere ever, and I just had to share my pain with the rest of the world.

But strangely, one of the reasons it's so bad is because I want it to be good. I think that there may have been a real possibility for a good game here, it's just that Digital Pictures went about making it in the most ham-fisted and wrong-headed way possible. The fixes for their broken system would mostly be quite simple to implement, even on the primitive Sega CD system. Having already played Double Switch, which is another, later Digital Pictures game with the same setup, I've seen that they'd come up with one or two of those fixes on their own (such as alerting you to what rooms exactly are being broken into), but it still left a lot of other stuff broken. And that's one of the most infuriating things about all of this . . . DP just seemed to have absolutely no idea what to do with the very genre of games that they helped create and mold.

Sadly, whatever good ideas Night Trap may have contained were all buried under huge piles of manure, never again to see the light of day. And then the Senate hearings regarding video game violence as well as the awful, horrible quality of the games in the trap 'em up genre overall pretty much made sure those ideas would remain buried forever, only cropping up every once in a while as crappy DVD games in the extras section of kid's movies.

If you ever get the chance to play this game, don't take it. Just drop the disks, smash them if you can, and then run far, far away. You may think you want to play it just to see how bad it could possibly be, but I assure you, you don't want to do that. If you've just gotta see how bad the acting, writing, and traps are at least, then I'd suggest just checking it out on YouTube. Besides the obvious upside of not having to actually play the game, it's also composited from the PC version and the second edition of the Sega CD version, both of which looked way better than the original. But be warned, I wouldn't recommend watching that, either. The picture quality might be better, but the quality of everything else is just as terrible. It's not even worth watching to make fun of, and I love making fun of bad movies.

Seriously, this game is the devil. I find it offensive on almost all levels except the ones the US Senate was up in arms about. Avoid at all costs.

Fun: One of the Seven Legendary Videos

You ever play one of those games where you can't rummage through people's houses without them getting all indignant, calling the cops on you, or trying to shoot you themselves? Man, what's up with those games? Don't they know who I am?

I'M THE CHOSEN ONE, BITCH!

Blog: Things Of All Sorts

I know I only have maybe five or six readers, and I'm not even sure all of them are really paying any attention anymore, but I'm still gonna go ahead and apologize for not posting anything for Sunday. I promised I'd try to get at least one something up every day, and I failed all (five or six) of you miserably. But to be fair, I did have my reasons! One of those reasons is actually a pretty funny story, and the punchline is . . . veeerrrry drunk.

The other reason is that I'm thinking about taking weekends off from the blog. I've got other things in my life, y'know! And one of those things is actually playing the games that I intend to review for YOTGR. Another is trying to get a new job (horrors!), and yet another is just staring at the wall, contemplating the abyss. Oh, right, and I usually go visit my parents on most Saturdays.

Still, weekdays I'll be keeping up with YOTGR a bit, and as it's Monday, I'll be getting on posting something entertaining here in a bit.

But speaking of YOTGR, I'm thinking about changing the name. "Ye Olde-Timey Games Review" was something I just came up with after a few moments of thought when I decided to do this, and while I still kinda like it, it's a bit unwieldy. I think the place needs a punchier sorta name. I'm not sure exactly what kind of punchier sorta name just yet, but I'll hopefully figure something out soon enough.