GregHowley.com

Recently, it just seems that I've been buying a lot of really bad games. Granted, Orange Box and Phantom Hourglass are amazingly good games, but others not so much. Allow me to elaborate.

Duck Amuck sounded like a fabulous idea. Most people in their 30s are going to remember that fantastic Looney Tunes episode with Daffy Duck and the disembodied artist who kept erasing his head and painting him different colors just to screw with him. Sounds a the perfect fit for the Nintendo DS. I figured it would give you options to do really innovative things and give Daffy a few dozen randomized responses for each action you could take. There was a lot of opportunity here.

Sadly, the game is just badly designed, and includes about a half-dozen badly implemented minigames. Whereas I imagined that the game would be geared towards the thirty-somethings that would remember the source material, it turns out to be geared towards 7-year-olds if the gameplay is any indication. It's repetitive and boring. Anyone want to buy my copy?

The second bad decision in game purchases that I made is my purchase of Overlord. From reading the description, it sounded like a new version of Dungeon Keeper, a game I loved. So I bought it over Steam. First of all, the graphics look great, which means that even on low settings, it runs like crap on my machine. Once I get to playing, it turns out that you play the Overload in a third-person perspective not unlike Oblivion, just clunkier. And you've got to attack with the spacebar, since the mouse buttons are already used by minion-controlling functions. And before you can do that you've got to lock on with SHIFT. Clunky controls, bad framerate, it just seems like a badly designed game. Oh well. I think I'll just reinstall Dungeon Keeper.

Lastly, The Simpsons Game seemed like it had a lot of promise - I've been looking forward to it for a long time. But after playing through the first level and a half, I became quite disillusioned.

The first level was single-player only, which stunk since one of the main reasons I got the game was to play through with Linda. Thankfully, it was short. But what immediately caught my attention was the horrible camera control. I've complained about the camera control in games like Shadow of the Colossus before, but the camera in Simpsons makes SotC look like a masterpiece of camera precision. It's oversensitive in the extreme, and a quick tap can rotate your view 90°. And if there's a wall behind you, forget it. Many times I found my screen filled with the clipped inside edge of a wall. The camera really needs an analog stick, and the code behind the viewpoint needed a lot more fine-tuning.

Once we got to the second level and started multiplayer, we found that the left/right splitscreen made the camera even more difficult to work with, since you now only have half the screen real estate that you did before. A top/bottom split screen would have worked so much better. When I was climbing a wall as Bart, I knew I'd have to climb up, then across, then drop down onto a platform. But there was absolutely no way to see that platform, since my view was only of the wall directly in front of me. So I dropped down and completely missed the platform 3 or 4 times before finally getting it.

In multiplayer, it also turns out that one of the two players does all the fun stuff while the other player has to sit there and watch. I can't even count the number of design flaws in this game. Yes, the writing and humor are excellent, but that all means nothing if the gameplay isn't there. And the gameplay isn't there.

There are a number of other games I'm planning on trying before the end of the year, but I may start trying more demos first, so as to avoid getting stuck with bad games.