anonymous
Mar 17 2005, 08:37 PM
Game: 007 Golden Eye
Creator: Michael Paton
Genre: Action
Description: Shoot here and shoot there while dodging enemy bullets in automatic scrolling levels

Rating: 10%

Review:

As South Park gaming grew, many people became attracted and wanted to make their own games. What followed was a time which seen the release of many uninspired crap games that I refer to as the "Evolution Era" of SPG smile.gif. Many of these games tried to make a South Park version of the most popular first person shooter at that time ("Golden Eye" for the Nintendo 64). OK this seems to be Michael Paton's first game, but still he could have kept his first gaming project away from the daylight.

The presentation is as simple as it can get with a click program. Every background is mono-colored and the buttons aren't aligned half of the time. You get one-sentence messages without any animations or pictures except for once.

This game uses altered versions of Subwoofer's sprites, but why did he alter them? When you change something you try to make it better. The sprite showing to the front looks normal, as it was maybe the easiest to rip, but everything else looks messed up. When your character faces to any side, his eye shrinks to 10% as opposed to the size it has when you see him from the front rolleyes.gif. Kyle's clothes have a black color, this would be no problem if you could at least see what parts the torso from the limbs. You ride a tank in a later level which is smaller then the Cartman foes you have to face; Cartman is a fat-ass but not Mount Everest. Level details are rare if any at all.

Sound is the best part of the game but only because this is an aspect which can't be created or edited that easily by newbie game creators. The songs are a selection of some popular songs, like the 007 themes as far as I remember and "Smooth Criminal" by Michael Jackson, the latter which doesn't fit to the game at all. Guns have their usual bang sounds. Enemy lines are repeated every time you gun them down which gets annoying really fast. Enemies in the first few levels have the same voice like the main character which gets even odder when you realise that you are battling Russians. tongue.gif

Let's talk about the gameplay: You are on one side of the screen and only able to move from side to side, the game does the rest for you. You shoot at your opponents, who shoot at you between long intervals, with a gun but the bullet seems to come out of the other end of it laugh.gif; in fact the bullet is created at the 0;0 coordinate of the sprite (so all game creators certainly know what he forgot to set here *cough* action point *cough*). In certain levels you die when you run out of bullets, I never knew that bullets were vital in real life tongue.gif. The tank level seems to be different gameplay-wise at first but it's the same only in another direction. In a later stage you are warned in the beginning of soldiers that have machine guns. I was like "hell yeah finally some challenge" ohmy.gif but was disappointed when there was only one guy with a machine gun and was able to slalom through his bullets that would've even make Neo from the Matrix jealous. The final level, the boss fight (the first, only and last one), is even easier then the rest of the game combined. You shoot at your enemy and gain life for it! huh.gif James Bond has to be a highlander, a vampire or something similar. That's the whole game, nothing more nothing less, way too easy and boring also.

In the end you get a "master cheat" which lets you play all levels to any given time. I only used that so I could replay and make this review. For no other reason in the world I voluntarily play this game again, even if someone points a gun to my head, but that doesn't bother me because the bullet would come out from the other end of the weapon and I would dodge it in a spiffy acrobatic Matrix move anyway.

What's my conclusion? Can't these rookie game creators stop releasing such games? (That's a rhetoric question by the way) They will do them and me a big favor. This guy obviously didn't know what hot spots or action points were and hasn't taken much time to make the graphics more pleasant. Still it was released and shows how big SPG was back in the day as many people, which went to become nobodies in the scene tongue.gif, contributed to it. Still this is a garbage gem of game.