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Your Weekly Kusoge
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The full index of Your Weekly Kusoge entries |
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Universal Studios Theme Park Adventure - GameCube (2001) |
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Universal Studios Theme Park Adventure |
Universal Studios Theme Park Adventure |
"NOTICE: The game is not a true representation of Universal Studios Theme Parks, but an interactive game based on Universal Studios Theme Parks, and some of the characters featured are not associated with the parks." And thank God for that. If any of the real Universal Studios Theme Parks were anything like the one created here in this GameCube title, it'd be the sort of place that you'd take your kids in order to shatter their hopes and dreams, filling their little souls with hate and cynicism. At the beginning, you choose from a handful of little kids. For the purpose of this kusoge entry, we will pick the most ridiculous one, this one being a black child with an unsettling grin, wearing pink striped socks.
The friendliest face you come across at the entrance is Woody Woodpecker who, in a terribly creepy and off-putting voice, informs you of one of the most exciting things a kid can hear - there's a stamp collection contest going on! The goal is to visit all of the rides in the park and master them, so you can get stamps to fill up your card. There are also additional quests, including finding tiny letters to complete the Universal Studios logo and shaking hands with randomly generated patrons dressed as famous Universal movie monsters. The other major subquest involves picking up garbage. The points gained from these dreadful tasks can be used to purchase hats. The visuals are comprised of polygonal characters over pre-rendered backgrounds. You can find a map at the beginning, but it seems to bend to the unreality of the game world, where exits aren't really exits and perfectly traversible looking roads appear to be just painted on. Providing you can stumble your way to one of the rides, you will play a mini-game. The Wild, Wild, Wild West game (not based on any movie in particular) involves a shooting gallery where you compete against a full grown adult, who will gladly lord his victory over an eight year old child if you lose. The rest of the games are based on E.T., Jurassic Park, Jaws, Back to the Future, a general Animation Studio one, and Backdraft. And also Waterworld, because despite the game being published in 2001, apparently they didn't realize the movie had been considered a massive joke for over half a decade. Regardless, you might not be able to play these games anyway, because "the lines are too long", purposefully recreating the worst parts of an actual amusement park experience. Instead, you're supposed to track down the sexy lady version of Woody Woodpecker (such a character does exist), who quizzes you on Universal Studios movies. For a game obviously developed for little kids, these questions are way, way too difficult, and some are even pretty obscure for adults. How much does anyone remember about Dragonheart, really? If you actually manage to win these quizzes, then more minigames unlock.  The worst part of the game? There is an entrance to the generic Universal Studios theme park, but there is no exit. The kid you choose at the beginning is stuck inside its unhallowed walls, forever doomed to wander around aimlessly, bump into walls, and get sexually harassed by cartoon woodpeckers. |
Universal Studios Theme Park Adventure
Universal Studios Theme Park Adventure
Universal Studios Theme Park Adventure |
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Virtual Lab - Virtual Boy (1995) |
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Virtual Lab |
Virtual Lab |
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The Virtual Boy is well known as one of Nintendo's more prominent failures; it was a failure internationally, compared to something such as the 64DD which was released only in Japan. Only 22 games were released in the VB's short life, and several were real stinkers (such as Waterworld). Of its back catalogue, Virtual Lab is by far the worst offender, failing on a technical, graphical, audio, mechanical and even packaging level. Everything about it is broken. Given that it's a puzzle game where you join up piece of what appears to be colon segments in a state of peristalsis, its entry as Kusoge is wholly appropriate. Starting the game you're presented with speeds for Low, Med and Hi, except they're all pretty much the same slow speed and - thanks to a coding error - the medium speed is faster than the high speed option. Playing the game you're presented with a screen containing random bowel pieces, the task being to remove all of them - think Tetris meets Pipedream. Further pieces fall from the sky and need to be placed alongside others. They come in five varieties: a phallic-shaped end piece; a straight piece with two openings; an L-shaped piece with two openings; a T-shaped piece; and a cross-shaped piece with four openings. Segments disappear when you create a whole intestine with no openings. If an opening is pressed against the edge of the screen it counts as closed, but it's still "open" if it folds in on itself. The entire premise is flawed, because success isn't based on clearing a certain number of segments, but rather removing all of them before the next piece arrives. It's quite possible to drop pieces in such a way that they turn into themselves, thereby making it impossible to remove that segment. A good puzzle game should allow you to recover from a mistake or two, and still succeed. In Virtual Lab one mistake means Game Over, or it would had the developers not implemented a crude workaround. If you clear a segment 10+ pieces long, or set-up a chain which clears 10+ pieces, an angel appears on the bottom of the screen, pausing the action to fly along removing the lower line of pieces. It doesn't always fix the problem, but if you do screw up it is sort of possible to recover. Annoyingly, even if you have no other pieces on the screen, thereby clearing the level, the angel will still appear and perform her long-winded animation. Whatever way you cut it the basic gameplay is poorly designed and illogical. The game doesn't speed up and there's little differentiation between the levels, which carry on up to level 100 before it loops. The controls are over-sensitive and it's only possible to rotate the puzzle piece clockwise, not anti-clockwise. The graphics are basic, the backgrounds repetitive, and there's barely any 3D - only some of the parallax scrolling and the female character's boobs use it (according to Nintendo Life). There were three other puzzlers for the VB, Panic Bomber, plus two variations of Tetris, and all are infinitely more enjoyable and considerably cheaper than this poor offering. Bizarrely, after completing a level, you're given a 7-digit number, which appears totally unrelated to the 6-digit score in the upper right corner. Websites such as PlanetVB say it's a password, but also explain there's no password screen to input it, thereby making them totally useless. This seems like a mistake on the part of various websites, since there's almost no differentiation between levels. Why would the developer have considered a password function? The more likely answer is that it's some kind of strange secondary scoring system... Maybe. Whatever your preferred explanation, neither makes any sense! By far our favourite blunder though is the misspelling of Nintendo as "Nintenndo" on the box and as "Ninntenndo" on the cartridge, showing that not only did they not care, but they couldn't even be consistent. Released at the end of the VB's life, and only in Japan, Nintendo Life claims it was rushed out by developer J-Wing after they discovered Nintendo was abandoning the hardware. It doesn't sound far fetched! |
Virtual Lab
Virtual Lab
Cartridge spelling mistake |
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Chester Cheetah: Too Cool To Fool - SNES / Genesis (1992) |
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Chester Cheetah: Too Cool To Fool |
Chester Cheetah: Too Cool To Fool |
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Chester Cheetah, the Cheetos-loving cool cat, was something of a product of the nineties. Cool shades? Attitude? You got it! His presence in video games made total sense at the time, in Chester Cheetah: Too Cool To Fool, for the SNES and Genesis. As expected, it's a slapped together 2D platformer, made by people with little grasp on how such diabolical creations actually function. It was developed by Kaneko, also known for the infamously porny Gals Panic arcade games. The story fills in some much needed backstory to the blight of Chester Cheetah, as his motorbike has been stolen by Mean Eugune, a manaical zoo keeper. Eugene's plan is for Chester to never escape his zoo confinements, so it's off to find each of the five hidden pieces, usually hidden poorly in each stage. Sounds simple enough, but standing in your way are boxing kangaroos, endless mines, helicopters, and for some reason, sentient springs. Much of the game consists of walking forward, dashing, and jumping over things, a tried-and-true mechanic that nonetheless feels frustrating and tedious due to the crappy hit detection. You only have a single life and three continues, though you can take five hits before you expire. It's not entirely dreadful in the way that, say, Awesome Possum is, but the game clearly has no better ambition than letting children live out their fantasy of playing a food commercial. His life meter even consists of cheese paws, which were a product that were actually sold, at one point. To be fair, the graphics actually are quite colorful and have a bit of personality, even though Chester himself is awkwardly shaped.
The game does have a noteable obsession/fetish with sunglasses. Everything (sans Eugene and his dog) are wearing them. Even the rocks in the background have them, and by all rights, they shouldn't even have eyes. There's even a sunglasses power-up, which is remarkably redundant, seeing how Chester already has a pair on. Instead of causing our hero to stumble aroud in darkness caused by wearing two pair of sunglasses, it causes hidden items to appear. Throughout the levels you'll see coin-like paw icons. These icons don't grant any real rewards beyond giving you extra post-level points. The requisite invincibility item is an electric guitar, with one major snag - you can't actually control your character when invincible. Instead Chester does a "totally wicked guitar solo" while prancing and dancing around, forwards and backwards before returning to the original spot. What an outrageous dude! There is, of course, one guitar precariously positioned by a ledge, which will send dear Chester rocking and partying to his doom. At the end, there's another commercial of sorts. No, not for Cheetos, because that's obviously the whole game. Instead, Eugene gets away and sets up the sequel, which, regrettably, exists. Chester Cheetah: Wild Wild Quest was released not long after, and really isn't any better. |
Chester Cheetah: Too Cool To Fool
Chester Cheetah: Too Cool To Fool
Chester Cheetah: Too Cool To Fool |
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Dexter's Laboratory: Mandark's Lab - PlayStation (2002) |
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Dexter's Laboratory (PlayStation) |
Dexter's Laboratory (PlayStation) |
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For those who enjoyed the original Dexter's Laboratory on Cartoon Network, the New episodes which ran from 2001 to 2003 were most likely a disappointment, with cruder animation, pointless storylines and a change to the voice acting cast, with Christine Cavanaugh replaced by Candi Milo who tries, but just doesn't get it right. Many fans would have rightly felt alienated. Then, right in the middle of all that, comes this game. It starts with an animated cut-scene which is just repurposed footage from the show - from the original series to be exact. This is painfully obvious when you have Candi Milo's voice coming out of classic Dexter's mouth, in clips from episodes you've already seen, with the lip flap almost never matching. Worse still, the cut-scenes have the tendency to repeat static or barely moving characters and superimpose them onto different backgrounds, emphasising the laziness. A certain shot of Mandark is used at least three times, which is especially noticeable given the short length of the game. After the cut-scene ends you are assailed by the second biggest punch in the face - the horrible CGI. The graphics, for a post-mortem PS1 game, are just plain embarrassing, and actually pale in comparison to those of Jumping Flash, a game released in 1995, a full seven years prior, on the same platform. Not only did Flash's graphics not look ugly, simply more polygonal, it had huge sprawling environments where the player was completely free to go explore in any direction. Mandark's Lab has neither nice polygonal models, nor sprawling environments. And yet I had some expectations for the game, at least from the simple fact of being able to walk around Dexter's house freely. Sadly, this is not fully utilised, as you can't access the kitchen at any point, and worst of all the game doesn't even feature Dexter's parents in any way, highlighting the true cash-in nature of the title. The game consists of a small series of mini-games (in total eight) you have to play through to win, while the overworld serves as a simple, bare bones corridor from one minigame to the next. And they couldn't even be bothered to actually think up eight distinct mini-games, so you have two nearly identical DDR segments, only differing thanks to the different CGI animation in the background. The first DDR segment (no I'm not going to make that pun) really shows just how little time was put into this game. The mini-games in order are: Dee Dee's (DDR) Dance off, which plays as you'd expect; Cootie Call, which is a simplistic rail shooter where you spray 2D Cootie sprites; What's Buggin Dexter, which involves chasing after a computer bug and swatting it; Up N' Atom, which is a flying shooter); Dodge Ball, which is as uncreative as you'd expect; Soapbox Derby, a racing game; Molecular Mix off, also known as Dance Off version two; and Sub Zero Hero, which is basically shuffle puck. All of these are extremely basic, and the idea to re-use classic episodes as levels is poorly executed, with only two of them featuring. The Dodge Ball minigame doesn't even provide any kind of decent action, as you're glued in place and can only turn about 130 degrees in total. The game itself can be beaten in about 30-40 minutes, including the cut-scenes, and outside of trying to beat your high score there isn't much point in replaying it ever again once you finish it. The irony is, instead of wasting money on this game, you'd have more enjoyment just watching a few of the older Dexter episodes on TV. |
Dexter's Laboratory (PlayStation)
Dexter's Laboratory (PlayStation)
Dexter's Laboratory (PlayStation) |
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