Junkman
Dec 13 2004, 05:14 AM
Game: Fantasy South Park
Creator: Beamer
Genre: Adventure/RPG
Description: Kenny is trapped into a totally different dimension! See if you can get him out of this jam by fighting lots of monsters and retrieve the elusive 1-UPs.

Rating: 57%

Review: Although Fantasy South Park wasn't the first Beamer game I've ever played (I think it was South Park Espionage 2), this was still amongst one of the first (and oldest) games I played from him back when I joined the SPG community. This ranks amongst Beamer's most early projects that he made, and it's surprisingly fun, yet. Even that early, you could figure out that Beamer had his own distinctive style when it came to make games, whether it came to the storyline or the gameplay devices. However, gameplay probably is where this title fails, though.

In Fantasy South Park, you play as Kenny, who's being sucked inside a TV show because he's done the horrible act of watching it. Hmmm, okay: so that means humanity is doomed to live without TV? AHHHHH! Well, let's move on. You're trapped into a series of fantastic worlds known as fantasies and your goal is to claim 2 1-UPs that are hidden in each fantasy in order to escape. Something which I find somehow funny is that everyone seems to know where you're coming from and what your motives are. Definitely not a great deal of story telling involved here: but since there's not a great deal of South Park games that have a decent storyline (not even I can affirm that I've made a game featuring a proper story yet tongue.gif) I'll let that pass. One of the game's strengths would be its use of humour. Many of the characters that you encounter in your journey do have humorous dialogue or simply humorous names (such as "Some Idiot Who Thinks He's Merlin" and "Yet Another Guy I'm Not Bothered To Name"), making the game's story more enjoyable. Even the battle ending screens have humour attached to them, so that's something.

However, the graphics are far from being a key feature to the game. The graphics are pretty simple since they mainly consist from one-coloured monsters with two eyes which are for the most part heavily pixelated and suffer from the dreaded resizing syndrom that plagued way too many games back in SPG's early days. Backgrounds don't fare much better and a lot of the game's environments are way too scarce, involving a long, stretched bare field with a house, cave or something alike which is infested by a herd of enemies zigzagging back and forth. Yet, there are some moments where the graphics are actually well suited and inspired, such as in the final fantasy of the game.

Speaking of enemies, this brings me to the gameplay aspect of the game: whilst the game's still enjoyable and quite fun to play; it's just way too basic and under-developed. I'm not expecting the impossible from such an early game, but it can get so repetitive at spots. You basically need to press two keys to win the game; Shift and Z. Once you have both magical powers handy, you are virtually unstoppable and you can win flawlessly every battle you get across by mashing the SHIFT and Z keys as fast as you can, moving whenever it's necessary. The battle element wouldn't have been a big issue if only there was some difference in the opponents you faced. But every enemy in the game behaves in the same way, thus rendering the battles boring later on in the game when you've discovered the trick to win every battle flawlessly. As with the graphics, there's some moments where it gets better, such as in the last battles that are somehow more challenging to beat and then there's the practice sessions and the mini-quest that occur halfway in the game where you need to seek a 1-UP in the bottom of a lake. Such moments help spicing up the gameplay and give a break from all the repetitive fighting.

Sound-wise, the game uses a mix from KNP's sound effects, the Windows 98 sound effects from the Robots sound set and from other sources. Nothing really special is being shown here and the sound effects sometimes gets annoying during the battles, but the sound work is ultimately bearable. Music work is quite minimal, repeating short musical numbers through key moments of the game such as in battles, boss battles, and other situations. Such music is courtesy “The Offspring" and VG Music, which are found guilty of having their music being used in countless other games. Not original, but appropriate and nonetheless pleasant to the ear.

This was definitely one of the better games that Beamer released back when he just started his SPG career (it definitely tops General Cartman in every possible way, but I'm still hoping that a sequel of this game shall arrive someday, don't ask me why biggrin.gif) There's many fine ideas story-wise shown here, the premise is original, funny and it's quite fun whilst it lasts, but it's far from being a thrill ride when it comes to playing it. It's incredibly linear and the battles are too straight-forward and unimaginative to offer a decent challenge in the end. It was still standing above a lot of other games back when it's being released, but it doesn't stand up as well today, especially since Beamer made a countless number of games after this one which all goes a lot further than this one did in almost every aspect. Yet, the premise of this game was something that wasn't present in many games and which eventually disappeared from Beamer's later output, there's something quite attractive with the game's wacky themes and structures: It would be pretty nice if another game of this sort was to be made eventually, but was designed in a non-linear kind of way and offered a better structured storyline. This would be interesting to see, I'd say. In the meanwhile, we're left with a game which is fun in its own right, but missed the chance to deliver something great in a lot of areas.