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[gamesweforgot]

I Regret To Inform You That I Now Stan Crazy Frog Racer

Y’all remember the Crazy Frog? That most cursed of millennial touchstones, the Annoying Thing himself. Well, they gave him a videogame. Two, to be precise. I’m still waiting on a delivery of the second. In 2005 developer Neko Entertainment graced the world with this gift, released on Playstation 2, PC, Gameboy Advance, and Nintendo DS. Bear in mind this year also gave those platforms such games as The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, Resident Evil 4, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2, Tekken 5, Timesplitters: Future Perfect, God of War, Jade Empire, and Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga, amongst others. Crazy Frog Racer is a kart racer, a la Mario Kart. That is the kindest thruthful statement about the game I can make. The game does indeed star the Crazy Frog, riding an invisible motorbike, though none of his songs are present on the soundtrack, instead relying on generic techno songs. Filling out the roster are half a dozen original characters, including a generic robot, a cow, and the token woman, Ellie. Apparently “girl” was enough of a gimmick for her. The game boasts three Cups with four tracks apiece, as well as a fourth cup that’s just the other three back to back, and a couple other perfunctory modes. All of these tracks are generic cityscapes made of floating ribbons of highway, with the odd background or track element sprinkled in at a weak attempt at theming. By the time you reach the ninth race track, you’ll notice that they’re building them out of bolted together segments of previous tracks. Yup, the developers couldn’t even stretch to designing 12 original tracks. To be fair, they were probably given a tiny development cycle, team, and budget to pull this together with. The thing is though...it kinda works??? The actual driving is fast and responsive, and surprisingly fun to play.  There are powerups of dubious usefulness, albiet ones that work a little differently to your standard kart racer. Instead of collecting items directly, you collect coins that are used to purchase the item you want from an ever-present list on the left hand side of the hub. None of them feel as good as lining up your shot with a Green Shell perfectly, or even the quiet satisfaction of picking up a Mushroom when you’re in 6th place. Speaking of speed boosts... The main racing gimmick of Crazy Frog Racer is that when you go too fast over certain segments of track, you’ll be launched into the air. If you manage to land back safely on the track, you’ll have effectively skipped a small portion of the track, but if you don’t, then you’ll fall off and be reset lakitu style to before the jump. Some of these jumps are simple. Others snake off and require you to remember how the track bends in order to pull off successfully. This is a fine gimmick, honestly, but it loses a lot of its bite when you see the same blind jump come up in four different tracks. So with all those (and more) flaws, why am I so fond of Crazy Frog Racer? Isn’t this just another cheap, bad piece of shovelware? Honestly, it’s a strange mix. The basics of driving, item management, and track layout are almost good enough to make for an enjoyable game. And where they fall down, you have such joys as the wonky collision detection, blatantly reused track sections, and the overall cheapness of the final product to give you a laugh. This isn’t quite a “so bad it’s good” game, it’s more of a “good in spite of being bad” game.

[gamesweforgot]

The Mummy Returns for PS2 is not good and you should play it

Being bisexual, I naturally love the first two Mummy films starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. Being a kid who spent too much time playing videogames in the 90′s and 00′s, I also remember seeing previews for a tie-in game to The Mummy Returns and always finding it intruiging. The ability to play as Rick and Imhotep, blending gunplay and magic? Sold! Except I was a poor teenager and didn’t have, y’know, money. Now I do. As the title of this piece may have tipped you off, this is a bad game. A game that 14 year old me would have tried and utterly failed to love. But with age comes wisdom, the ability to laugh more freely at the things you love, and the ability to buy The Mummy Returns for PS2 for £1 instead of however much second hand retailers wanted for it back in the halcyon days of the mid 2000′s. I started my first playthrough is Imhotep, which is the better choice if you’re looking for a game that is “fun”, or “passable”. You know you’re in for a good time when the first thing you’re told to do after being revived is set out on a fetch quest. Exploring Imhotep’s first level, the British Museum, you’re tasked with finding four items to give as offerings to the god statues you’re sharing a basement with, as well as being told to look out for collectible Canopic jars that will expand your health meter. So you run around, punching out security guards and Medjay as you go. The melee combat here doesn’t feel precise or impactful or, y’know, good, but enemies have the decency to die pretty quickly, and you awaken with the magical power to restore your health by absorbing the souls of weakened humans through a technique I insist on referring to as “soulvore”. This level shows some promise. The environment isn’t huge, and the game doesn’t look great, but there’s a decent amount of unique assets and the level is easily navigable. This is largely the case for Imhotep’s story. While you can gain a new spell on each level, anything that isn’t soulvore is basically never useful outside of the two times you’re forced to use the resurrection spell in the museum. Instead you’ll just punch dudes a lot and maybe use a sword? Idk it’s your afterlife. Oh, Imhotep’s third level is hilarious by the way. Remember that temple he stops off at with Alex and his henchfolk? Yeah, you turn up there, pick up a “spirit sword” from a corpse, kill a couple of ghosts and that’s it, you win the level. Rick, on the other hand, has a much worse game, but a much funnier one. Rick O’Connell has no magical soulvore. Rick O’Connell lives in a vore-free zone. Instead, he relies on good old-fashioned firearms to get the job done. Each level gives Rick dual pistols and either a shotgun or tommy gun, plus a starting pool of ammo. As for health, you’ll be forced to find and ration out the limited health packs in each level. However, Rick’s enemies are so spongey that a regular dude will take eight pistol shots to kill. Your starting pistol ammo is 32. And Rick’s punches may as well be gentle subtweets for all the good they do. Rick’s limited abilities to stay alive and defend himself aren’t the only thing that make the levels more tricky than Imhotep’s, but we’ll get to that. From the first cutscene, you’re in for a treat. Evy, Rick, and Jonathan all suffer from some pretty terrible voice acting and honestly it’s the only thing worth playing Rick’s story for. His first level is that temple from the beginning where he, Evy and Alex find the magic bracelet, where you’re tasked with...finding four items to open a door! Luckily, ammo and health are pretty plentiful in this level, even if you’re like me and don’t discover that you can loot the corpses of gunwielders until the third level. The only real problems here is the confusing maze that two of the trinkets you need are found in and the unmotivated shooting of brown people. But then we start getting onto the rest of the game’s levels, the ones Rick shares with Imhotep. When Imhotep goes to Cairo, all he has to do is find the hotel room the heroes are staying in, then go down to the train station and fight Ardeth a bit. Sure, the place is a confusing maze, but you’re unlikely to die. When Rick goes there, you have to bribe your way past the guards at the docks to reach the train station. They will only accept 5 golden coins. So maybe you have to do some platforming for them, or even a series of tedious fetch quests? Nope, you have to kill random, otherwise peaceful brown people. Specifically, you have to kill the armed men walking around town, who might drop a gold coin if you’re lucky, but will mostly just drain your ammo.  After this, you (somehow) find your way back to the docks and see Alex giving Anck Su Namun the Benny Hill treatment before you teleport back to the hotel so Ardeth can go with you to free Alex. This is more difficult than it sounds, as the wandering townsfolk have been replaced by zombies that don’t drop ammo, and can do some nasty damage if they latch onto you. You then follow this up with a gauntlet of cultists at the docks/train station. Really though, so long as you’re careful and save/reload often enough to avoid catastrophe, this level is just tedious. Rick’s trip to the jungle is where things get real fucky. This is another two parter. The first half is essentially identical to Imhotep’s, with Rick doing some basic platforming and light puzzle solving while trying to avoid the wildlife, except you get a slightly different path to the level exit! Huzzah! But the treetops...oh the treetops. You may remember the army of mummified pygmies from the movies. When Imhotep passes through here, they’re fighting Medjay that 1) distract them 2) let you soulvore back any lost health. When Rick comes through here, there’s no cultists for the pygmies to fight, meaning you get the full brunt of their attacks. I assume the final level and fight against the Scorpion King is the same for both of them, I stopped playing after running across a rope bridge cost my half my health bar in unstoppable damage. It’s not all awful though, and I do think this game had potential. Imhotep’s kinda fun to play is, even if his useless magic reduces him to a repetitive punch machine. There are some neat touches, like Imhotep withering as he gets hurt, or Rick’s two pistols actually being visibly stored on his model. Oh, and the cats in Cairo will actually drain Imhotep’s health if he’s around them. Graphical fidelity and audio quality aside, this game would be pretty disappointing even as a PS1 title. But its bad voice acting, janky animations, and amatuerish level design can make for some “so bad it’s good times”. I definitely got my quid’s worth out of it. This seems to have been exactly the sort of d-tier entry the developer, Blitz Games, specialised in. Their other titles include Barbie Horse Adventures: Wild Horse Rescue, a videogame adaptation of Reservoir Dogs, infamous Burger King advergame Sneak King, Bratz:The Movie (the videogame), and The Fairly OddParents: Breakin' da Rules . These games are all noted to have “mixed reception”.