South Park

Why are you reading this review, you BASTARD? You DILDO! Motherf**er! Oh, sorry. My impressionable mind has just been polluted with the profanity and obscenity that is South Park the game. Okay, to be honest, I love this sht. Sorry, I did it again. Anyway, if you are a fan of Comedy Central's South Parkshow, you will not be disappointed with the dialogue in South Park the game. It is really too bad that the dialogue only goes so far. The game leaves a bit to be desired.

I can't blame Acclaim for wanting to cash in on the South Parkname. Instead of spending the time coming up with a completely new game or concept, the developers decided to take the Turok 2 game engine and change the dark and menacing environments to the bright, cheery, profanity-laden town of South Park. See, it turns out that a meteor is heading towards Earth and it is up to you to save the town. You will be armed with everything from a snowball to a cow launcher, and your health is generated from Cheesy Poofs snacks. Four-player split-screen action is the one saving grace this game has to offer.

Gameplay

When I first heard that they were making a South Park game, I had mixed emotions. My emotions were mixed because I think the show is funny as hell, but the game was coming out on the N64. We all know what that means ... CENSORSHIP! Since the show is on cable, it is allowed a little more flexibility when it comes to the language that can be used, but we all know that the big N is famous for crushing anything that may be slightly controversial. I assumed that they would censor this game and it would end up just a boring game based on a license with no character at all. Well, I was half-right.

One of the best moves that I have seen from Nintendo in a long time was keeping its "big brother" hands out of this game. Acclaim worked with the writers from the show to create a great representation of the whole South Park environment. They basically followed the same guidelines that you will see on the television show. Mild profanity is allowed, but when one of the kids gets particularly pissed the beeps start flying, just like the show. I hope that this game helps to soften the stance of the child-friendly Nintendo execs.

As we all know, games based on a license usually suck. There is no denying this. The idea of turning this game into a first-person shooter was very appealing to me. I think that of all of the licensed games out there, first-person shooters have rarely been done. What is more, first-person shooters are always so depressing. You are usually chasing aliens of some sort and there is nothing that even slightly resembles humor in the games. Not any longer. This game has all the humor you will find in the show and more. They did a great job of making this feel like it could have been the lost episodes or something. This means that if you don't find the show funny, you will hate this game.

The other thing that this game does well is the different weapons you will find. You start off with just unlimited snowballs and will eventually find things like dodge balls, a toilet plunger launcher, the Terrance & Philip dolls, a sponge dart launcher, Dr. Mephesto's Warpo Ray, the super sniper chicken and a cow launcher. It was great to see something other than a plasma gun or rocket launcher to kill off baddies in a first-person shooter. I will never get tired of launching cows.

Now for the bad stuff. When you boot up the game, you will see a disclaimer about the characters being fictitious and the game containing profanity. The last thing it says (you have to read quick) is that the game should not be played by anyone. They were trying to be humorous, but they were pretty much telling the truth about the one-player game. The first level is entertaining just because it is so new to see a bright and cheery first-person shooter. Unfortunately, the game never rises above this and quickly turns into a boring exercise in repetition. Let me put it to you this way. Do you enjoy doing the exact same thing over and over again in a level and then starting over doing the same thing in the next level? If your answer is yes, then go right ahead. If you like a little bit of variety, you may be disappointed.

The other thing that really bothered me about the game was the complete lack of creativity of the enemies. Let me give you an example. In the first level, you go around throwing snowballs at wild turkeys. In the second level, you throw snowballs (maybe a new weapon is introduced) at the same turkeys, with bigger turkeys thrown in called Tanks. Then you play another level of turkeys and Tanks. Then you get to the boss and it is a giant turkey. There are no other enemies to fight. That is it. I got so sick of seeing those damn turkeys that I could not wait to get past the first level. Guess what? When I did get past, I found that level two did the exact same thing with clones of Big Gay Al. I am sorry, but I would like a little variety in my game.

One thing that I almost forgot to mention was the multiplayer portion of the game. I am not a big fan of split-screen games just because it cuts the screen in half and you can always see what the other player is doing. I will have to say that regardless, the multiplayer is a blast. It sucks that you have to play through the single-player game to open up new characters in the multiplayer, but sometimes you just do what you have to do. This is one of those cases.

Graphics

For those of you not familiar with South Park, it is a cartoon. When I say cartoon, I mean it in the traditional sense of the word. This is no feature-length animated Disney classic. It is a typically animated cartoon. With that said, I think they did a great job of recreating the feel of the show. What they did not do a good job of is controlling the fog and draw-in. I played with the 4 MB expansion pack and it was still terrible. There were times that I was almost in shock at how bad the fog was. I think they should have spent more time with the graphics and cleared this problem up, because it is inexcusable nowadays.

Bottom Line

To say that I was disappointed with this game is an understatement. Since it is based off a license, I never should have gotten my hopes up so high. The boring single-player game, mundane enemies and terrible fog made me struggle to continue playing. The only thing that kept me from turning it off was that I could not wait to hear what that son-of-a-bitch Cartman would say next. Sorry, it happened again!

THE FOUL-MOUTHED HEROES of TVs hit 'toon, South Park, have finally arrived on the N64--but when fens look past the license and actually play this lackluster first-person shooter, in the words of Eric Cartman, they're going to be so.. .pissed.. .off!

HANKY'S COMET?

Like any given episode, the game starts with a far-fetched premise: A comet is on a collision course with South Park, setting all manner of weird events into motion--I like giving the towns turkeys bloodlust or unleashing mutated clones into the streets. Its up to you--playing as Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny, all at once--to face each challenge with dodge balls, foam-dart guns, cow launchers, and other wacky weaponry.

Now if only the quest was fun. There are only three basic kinds of enemies, and most of the time you'll have to backtrack through the level chasing them down, which makes progress needlessly slow. However, finishing the levels is the only way to unlock the game's many multiplayer characters. There are no side quests and no puzzles to solve; its challenging, but unrewarding, game-play. You can shoot toilet plungers at waves of carboncopy enemies only for so long before you want to tell the creators to take their turkeys and stuff 'em.

Dude, That's Sick!

The game is full of appropriately lowbrow humor and some amazingly coarse language, including many dirty words never before heard on a Nintendo system. All the character dialogue was sampled by creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone, so it's authentic and hilarious.

The little runts look great in 3D; even the TV show hasn't offered us a three-dimensional view of Cartman's fat ass. The town looks good, too, when you can see it; there's a dreadful and inexcusable fog sitting just a few dozen feet in front of your character at all times. At least the controls are comfortable.

"Screw You Guys, I'm Going Home"

The four-player mode saves the games replay value, but is it too much to ask for an enjoyable single-player experience as well? Unnecessarily repetitive gameplay reduces South Park to yet another licensed cash-in.

Graphics

The construction-paper characters make the transition to polygonal models beautifully, but that doesn't excuse the shameful fog on the horizon. Come on where's all the horsepower from the Turok engine going, anyway?

Sound

The perfectly naughty character voices will singe a church lady's ears, while the gleefully inane doctors-office version of the South Park theme may actually cause brain damage.

Control

South Park comes loaded with preset controls that cater to the two big first-person shooters, GoldenEye and Turok. Both setups prove responsive, and it's easy to switch between them.

Fun Factor

While seeing--and blasting--all of the shows characters in 3D is cool, there's really nothing to do in South Park. This ones strictly for hardcore Mr. Hanky fans with low gameplay standards.

You bastards! You're going to kill Kenny! And Cartman, and Kyle, and Stan, and so on. South Park, the first-person shooter, is coming this holiday season-and it's on its raunchiest, worst behavior!

Follow Your Dreams

Think of South Park for the N64 asTurok with Tourette's syndrome. Those foul-mouthed grade-schoolers who put Comedy Central on the cable channel map now have their own first-person shooting game--and it looks like a lot of fun. The smooth control and fast action of theTurok engine really serves the game well as you blast through familiar South Park environments and blast away at characters who have wormed their way into the subconscious of the latter decade of the 20th century; Chef, Big Gay Al, Mr. Mackey the school counselor--and even a guest weapon appearance by Mr. Hanky. If none of these names ring a bell, don't bother reading on.

Kick The Baby

Acclaim has decided to keep the flavor of South Park at its peak by allowing some of the foulest language ever to grace a video game. Everything allowed on the show will be in the game, including the bleeps where the language runs coarser than Chef's hair. And you'll be aided by some of the weirdest weapons out there, including a Cow Launcher, an Auto Egger, and the Christmas Poo, Mr. Hanky. Howdy ho! Fans of the show will also revel in the many other supporting characters from the series, including Mr. Garrison, Mr. Hat,Terence and Philip, and others.

Kiss My #$$, You Pig#%$'#e

While the regular Doom-clone game will keep fans entertained, the multiplayer games--Capture the Flag, Grudge Match, and Kick the Baby--are definitely the stars of the cart That's where you actually get to kill Kenny, slaughter Stan, cream Kyle, and kick Cartman's fat ass. It's wild, hilarious, out-of-control fun.You'll have to be a huge fan of the show to get it and, apparently, at least 17 years old to buy it South Park, in all its raunchy glory, will definitely be awarded a Mature rating.

Howdy-ho! South Park is being readied for its video game debut with most of the hilarious (mature) language and adult content intact.

KICK THE BABY?!

While the one-player levels sound cool, it's the multiplayer games and funny sound bites that should keep fans of the show coming back for reruns. South Park features five multiplayer modes, including Capture the Flag, Grudge Match, and Kick the Baby. You'll hear the voices from classic episodes as well as hundreds of new phrases that are being recorded by the series' creators specifically for the game. Acclaim is hoping to deliver South Park by Christmas, but it's still a bit early in development to be sure.

THEY KLLED KENNY!

Kyle's mom is a big fat.. .but it's Cartman's mom who's been kidnapped by aliens--and that's the least of the boys' worries. A comet is about to crash into town, Skuzzlebutt's son is in a rage, and even the turkeys are revolting: It's up to you, playing as Kyle, Stan, Cartman, or Kenny, to restore peace in South Park. The one-player game features six episode-based adventures in a 3D world. Throughout each level, you pick up a number of gadgets, such as a Cow Launcher and an Auto Egger--complete with a live sniper chicken--which you'll use to blast aliens and everyone else in town, including series' regulars Mephisto, Big Gay Al, and Chef. You can even throw Mr. Hanky!

South Park is here! Does it kick ass... or suck ass?

When you've got a TV show that has turned out to be a surprise commercial and critical hit, what do you do with it? You licence it to hell as fast as possible, of course! South Park, the deliberately cheap-looking adult cartoon from American cable channel Comedy Central, has already shifted millions of dollars of t-shirts, videos and cuddly toys, so a videogame was obviously on the cards. The big surprise is that it appeared first on the N64.

Nintendo is known (and sometimes cursed) worldwide for its family-friendly attitudes, which have on occasion resulted in blatant censorship. Remember the Super NES version of Mortal Kombat? The one with sweat instead of blood? Yeah, that did well, didn't it?

Although Nintendo has relaxed its Mary Whitehousian attitudes of late, many people were dubious about South Park on the N64. A fair part of the show's appeal is, after all, its gleeful disregard for political correctness, the realistically foul mouths of its junior protagonists, its willingness to throw in fart, pee and nob jokes at the drop of a hat and the fact that every week, an eight-year-old boy is brutally killed for laughs. Mario's happy land of cakes and ice cream it ain't.

Bleeps

The good news for fans of South Park is that anything that appears on the TV show is also in the game. The language is uncut (as in the show, the 'F and 'S' words are treated to the world's shortest bleep, but everything else gets through) and the bottom-quacking gags and talking turds are all present and correct. Kenny even meets his doom for your amusement.

South Park's entire vocal cast has been roped in to provide speech for the game - no dodgy soundalikes like in Rogue Squadron here. Even Isaac Hayes ("Who's the black private dick who's a sex machine to all the chicks?") has been brought on board to give voice to Chef, who pops up every so often to give the kids helpful hints and speed the plot along. Character voices range from the familiar 6o-a-day rasp of Cartman to the fart-obsessed squawks of Terrance and Philip and the moos of the Visitors.

The soundbites are sometimes quite funny, and are varied enough to prevent Cl-cl-cl-clayfighter syndrome, where the same sample is repeated over and over until you want to put your head in the microwave. The strangest thing is that Kenny actually says more in the course of the game than he has in two entire seasons of South Park on telly!

That's the good news. The bad news is that it hasn't guaranteed a good game.

Pure Evil

The story in South Park is that a meteor made of pure evil is about to crash onto the crummy Colorado mountain town of the title, and as it gets closer it is causing all kinds of bizarre things to happen. Bizarre for anywhere else, at least. In South Park, it takes a 200 foot tall mechanical Barbara Streisand trampling the town before anyone even looks up from their breakfast. As usual in a community where the mayor is a corrupt publicity seeker and the only law enforcer an illiterate tool of the New World Order, it's up to a group of eight-year-olds to save the world!

At the start of the game, you pick whether to play as Stan, Kyle, Cartman or Kenny. You stay as that character throughout the game, occasionally switching kids to use a particular weapon (or if You Know Who dies). There are five levels, each broken into stages - the last stage of each is a boss that has to be pummelled with whatever the kids have to hand in order to take it down. Whether they're giant mutant turkeys, space aliens or killer toys, the troublemakers must be destroyed!

Two For The Price Of One

Having spent so much time and money developing Turok 2, Acclaim apparently decided that they should amortise their investment by regurgitating it as fast as possible. Ifs instantly clear that South Park is based on the Turok 2 engine. " Obvious visual differences aside, the two are all but identical. In a blatant example of lazy programming, Turok 2's omnipresent fog is still there in South Park, despite the much more simplistic environments - in fact, it actually seems worse. Maybe this is because of South Park's predominantly outdoor/pale sky scenery, but when you're trundling down a flat, shallow canyon in which absolutely nothing is happening, you expect to be able to see more than rocks popping into view 20 feet ahead.

Visual shortcomings shouldn4 really affect the game, though - after all, it is based on a show that in terms of animation makes Bod look like The Uon King. The real problem comes from the slack gameplay.

Most of the time, South Paries one-player game follows a standard (and very; very boring) routine. You move forward through the level until a gang of enemies (robots, clones, whatever) attacks, forcing you to backtrack as you take them out one by one. When the/re all dead, you go forward a bit further, until the next gang attacks. Repeat until bored. Which won't take long.

Attack Of The Dots

By the time you get to the fourth level, even the wimpiest of enemies takes multiple hits to kill, and since they attack in gangs you're usually forced right back to the start of the stage before you can kill them all. Conserving special weapons in later stages is a pain, since you need to save them all for the insanely hard-to-kill bosses. That is, unless you enjoy spending half an hour strafing back and forth to hit a single tiny weak spot.

South Park biggest problem in the one-player game is that it just isn't very exciting. The enemies never do anything other than run straight at you on sight (even Turok 2's moronic bad guys occasionally made an effort to dodge your shots) and in between waves of attackers, all there is to do is trundle through the bland, fogged-up landscape until the next bunch of dots appears on your radar. Opportunities for exploration are limited; once in a while a side passage or ladder will lead to an extra weapon or a box of Snacky Cakes, but on the whole South Park is even more linear than Turok 2.

Like Turok 2, South Park has a couple of sections that are different enough to re-ignite interest, but not nearly enough. One section, battling to board and infiltrate the alien mothership, is oddly tense and creepy. If not for the fact that you're taking down the aliens by hitting them with eggs as a turd in a Santa hat dances around you, it could have made an effective X Flies kind of game in itself. Sneaking around the captive townsfolk's stasis jars and dodging behind dissected cows on slabs as you pick off the aliens one by one is strangely nerve wracking. It's a pity that as soon as you've vanquished the aliens, the game goes back to its usual tedious routine.

Turok Too

Since South Park is basically Turok 2 in a parka, you could still hope that the multiplayer game would save the day. Having television's favourite delinquents battling each other and shrieking abuse must be good for a laugh, surely? Yes, it is... for a while. In a rather perverse bit of irony, the characters in the game are better animated than on TV, which must be a first for a videogame.

As you've probably come to expect by now, the deathmatch game is exactly the same as in Turok 2. Even many of the weapons have been transplanted with nothing more than a lick of paint -arrows are replaced with toilet plungers, the Charge Dart Rifle is transmogrified into the Alien Dancing Gizmo and you don't have to be Einstein to work out that the Cow Launcher is nothing more than the Cerebral Bore with a rectum.

Since the deathmatch game was easily the best part of Turok 2, though, this shouldn't really matter... except that South Park's deathmatch wears thin very quickly. Promised sub-games like 'Kick The Bab/ failed to materialise, so what you get is a no-frills, no-options runaround in some surprisingly sprawling levels. There isn't even an equivalent of Turok 2's instantly lethal head shots - despite killing Kenny every week, South Park's creators were oddly reticent to let anything fatal happen to the rest of their characters - so it can take ages to knock another player down.

The Jerk

Turok 2 got stick in some quarters for the amount of slowdown in the deathmatch game, a problem that didn't bother us that much. It bothered us a lot more in South Park. Even though it's effectively the same game, South Park feels slower and more clumsy than Turok 2, and the screen often goes into Jerk-O-Vision when there's nothing particularly exciting going on.

The acid test was when Paragon's huge cadre of South Park fans were eagerly let loose on the deathmatch game. After laughing at the speech, and marvelling at the characters' move into 3-D, the crowd didn't take long to start thinning out with moans of "God, it's really jerky, isn't it?", "Why's there so much bloody fog?" and - from a true hardcore Parkie - "This is rubbish. Put Goldeneye on." Well, he didn't actually say 'rubbish'. It was two words that in the game would have been given very short bleeps.

Cheesy Poofs

Even hardcore South Park fans will be disappointed by this lazy, fast-buck cash-in. The massive amount of speech and Colorado quippery will keep them interested for a while, but ultimately the game behind it is too lacklustre to hold the attention. There's no incentive to return to the one-player game once it's been completed, because it's so repetitive and annoying. The multiplayer game, drained of the gleeful brutality that made Turok 2 so refreshing, quickly loses its appeal, especially once you've heard all the soundbites.

Exchange South Park for Springfield and this could have been a Simpsons game. Or Beavis And Butt-Head, or Duckman, or Rugrats, or Dexter's Laboratory, or... well, just about anything, really. Different graphics, same game... all run-of-the-mill. There's nothing necessarily wrong with developers reusing a successful game engine (it's doubtful anyone will criticise Rare for using Goldeneye as the basis for Perfect Dark) - as long as the specifics of the game are suitably altered. But South Park is, for all intents and purposes, Turok 2 in the snow, and all the faults of that game are magnified here and made even more obvious.

The driving force behind South Park was not to give something new and exciting to gamers, but to shovel a game out as quickly and cheaply as possible and wring some bucks from a hot property before it fades. Oh my god, commercial opportunism killed Kenny. You bastard!

2nd rating opinion

Oh my god, Acclaim killed South Park}. Well... okay, perhaps it's not quite as bad as all that. However, it has to be said that once you get past all the jokes and the familiar characters what you're left with is basically a rather dull Turok 2 clone. Shame.

Dirty Talk

After we suggested last month that hell would freeze over long before South Park's swear-tastic voice sampies would ever heard emanating from a Nintendo machine, it appears that Acclaim are going to give the game a specially recorded sweartrack regardless of any reservations the Big N might have.

In fact, there will be so much speech in the game that even with the same compression technology used to make Turok 2 and NFL Quarterback Club 99 so talkative, around half of the 128Mbit cart will be filled with sound samples. All of the familiar catchphrases from the cartoon show will be included, along with hundreds of brand new lines from a script prepared by the game's design team at Iguana. As on TV, anything excessively offensive will be bleeped out just enough to please the censors, while still managing to etch deep furrows on parental brows.

As well as being the cussingesl title on the N64. South Park: Deeply Impacted has some unusual gameplay. The one-player game's six missions basically involve protecting the town from marauding aliens, zombies, turkeys and the like. The town is at one end of the map. the enemies spawn from the other, and Cartman and co have to wipe them out before the place becomes totally infested. Each of the four characters has different weapons and abilities, and it's essential to find them all and switch between them to complete the missions. Fail to rescue any of the brats and you'll miss out on such delights as the cow launcher, the dancing ray, and, best of all, yellow 'snow' balls.

The graphics engine from Turok 2 is used to great effect, throwing the simplistic shaded characters around at a super smooth frame rate, even when four players are hard at work whacking each other over the head with Mr Hankey.

Overview

Okay kids, repeat after me: "Making cartoons into video games is bad, m'kay?"

There is no way around this: South Park (the video game) stinks. Whereas South Park (the cartoon) is a take-no-prisoners send up of all that is adult, sane, or G-rated, South Park (the video game) is a mind-numbing shooting gallery of a game, with little humor, little plot, and a whole lot of pointless running around throwing snowballs and plungers and such at the enemy du jour.

You get to pick your favorite South Park kid and then you're off, playing a quick game of tag with your friends before heading off to throw snowballs at a pack of mad turkeys and cows. And that's it -- that's all there is to the game. Level after level of new enemies (and some recycled ones) and an occasional new South Park-style weapon, but as for any real new ideas; clever use of the expanded, 3-D version of the town; or the cutting, gross-out, in-your-face humor that makes the cartoon such fun -- you won't find it here.

And that's too bad, because going in, Acclaim had a lot to work with. After all, the show gets by with 2-D construction paper cutouts and all of about three vocal talents. The video game has a great 3-D engine, tons more time/space to work with than a 20-minute cartoon, and conceivably a lot more license to push the limits of humor and/or good taste than a TV show would. Yet Acclaim took advantage of none of this. In fact, but for the tie-in with the cartoon, this game would have been the laughingstock of the video gaming world. It may end up being that anyway, but it will get substantially more latitude from many reviewers and gamers than it deserves simply because so many people really want to like it in spite of itself. In the end, though, you just won't.

Gameplay, Controls, Interface

South Park is your basic first-person shooter. You grab your mouse, use a couple of arrow keys to run around, and click frantically to chuck snowballs at the onslaught of rabid turkeys. There's little to learn (although the game does start out with the controls set to hyperspeed, which leaves your character bouncing off the walls until you figure out how to slow him down) and little to do, other than shoot and then shoot some more.

Graphics

The graphics in South Park are quite good -- it's odd to see Cartman, Kyle and the rest of the gang in 3-D, and it's pretty cool to actually be able to walk around the town of South Park, but I was disappointed they didn't make more of this ability to showcase the things you never see in the cartoon -- to make some comic insights into what Jimbo keeps in his garage, or what Mr. Garrison has to hide in his attic. It seems like they were satisfied just to get Kenny blown up in 3-D and left it at that.

Again, it seems like such opportunity was squandered. Think of how funny a game like this could have been to spoof the likes of Myst or 7th Guest, but with a Bride of Frankenstein outlook on the world ... or even -- dare I say it -- to be as funny as the ill-fated Beavis and Butthead games?

Audio

Aside from the really annoying intro and the twangy music that plays throughout (or until you turn it off; perhaps it quits on its own after a while, but I didn't leave it going long enough to find out -- it would have made me homicidal by then), the audio is fine. All the voices from the show are there, and most of the show's secondary characters (Chef, Big Gay Al, Mr. Garrison, etc.) make level-introduction cameos to set the backdrop against which you will shoot stuff.

System Requirements

Pentium II-266 (or PII-200 with 3-D accelerator), 32 MB RAM, 95 MB hard disk space, 4X CD-ROM drive, Windows 95/98, DirectX-compatible sound card. Supports all DirectInput compatible controllers. Multiplayer via Internet or Network

Bottom Line

South Park as a video game is fun for all of about three minutes. It isn't fun, isn't funny, misses on all cylinders, and generally just woefully fails to live up to its namesake. I tried, repeatedly, to see what I was missing, and finally came to the realization that this game was nothing more than a quick attempt to get people to buy a lame game because of its association with a much funnier, livelier and more entertaining TV show.

Oh my god! They've killed Kenny. And Cartman. And Kyle. And Stan. And all the fun of South Park. You bastards!