As an avid Stephen King follower that has read almost everything by the author, I have to begin this review by admitting that I find most of his modern output lives in the shadows cast by earlier, more horror-centric classics such as The Stand, Salem’s Lot and Christine. Don’t get me wrong though: I love the newer books and never fail to get into them proper but it’s rare that I can wax lyrical with the same praise that I had for the old stuff.
Joyland was an exception though. The book is short by Stephen King standards and – here in the UK at least – was published under the “Hard Case Crime” banner so it was a little different straight away. In fact, I’d somehow not heard of Joyland at all until I was given it as a Christmas gift back in 2013.
The story is short but powerful and contains a small splash of the supernatural but is largely grounded in reality and tells the story of Devin Jones, a young college student who takes a summer job at a carnival-style amusement park called Joyland. It is there that he meets new friends, has new experiences and tries to move on from the first girl to break his heart. There is a central plot strand running through Joyland that focuses on a series of unsolved, heartless murders – the last one occuring at Joyland – that Devin finds himself investigating but this isn’t really the main premise of the book.
Joyland is actually a story about love, being young and foolish and growing up. We’ve all been there at Devin’s age and through his eyes I was able to recall my own similar experiences, thoughts and heartache. I found that I really cared about the characters in this book – Devin especially – and wanted the best ending for them but as we know from real life, the ideal isn’t always possible and our naive, young selves have to learn these lessons along the road.
As I mentioned earlier, the book is short yet King still manages to squeeze a lot of emotion, vivid detailing and character development into such a limited space (283 pages). It packs a real punch without being a novel of three to four times the size and captured my interest so much more than many of his modern, bigger books. Most of all though, the story and characters are incredibly endearing and it was the kind of book that I genuinely didn’t want to finish because I simply couldn’t get enough of the world that Stephen King had created within the pages of Joyland.
Overall I would recommend Joyland to any Stephen King fan without hesitation but even if you aren’t familiar with his work then I would be just as firm with my recommendation because this is a great story with very relatable characters that anybody can enjoy without needing to be onboard with the horror/supernatural themes that often form the basis of King’s books.
In addition, this book has also brought the Hard Case Crime line of books to my attention so I now have a new avenue of reading to explore…
Note: This review is part of a series I am going to call “Resurrected Reviews”, essentially stuff that I wrote for previous (now deceased) blogs and review topics on various gaming forums over the years. I have dragged them kicking-and-a-screaming into the harsh light of the present day and revamped them where necessary. Some may say “Rehash” but I say “Recycling”.
If the back of the game’s box doesn’t make you question your life decisions i.e. buying this game then not much else will, I’m afraid to say.
If the recent coverage of relatively mainstream games on this blog has failed to ignite your interest then I sincerely hope that this review of Sprung: The Dating Game for the DS will go some way to making amends. To the gentleman sitting in the back corner of the room there: recoiling in horror was indeed the correct response. We’re heading a bit further off the beaten track this time and we may find ourselves in the tangled undergrowth where anything could be lying in wait; woeful software for handheld gaming devices for instance.
A few important side notes before we continue:
1. People handed over £25-£30 of their hard earned cash for this at the DS launch!
2. Some people out there (they won’t show their faces for the shame) would have bought this back in April 2005 instead of the likes of Mario 64 DS or Warioware Touched. Christ. I mean…I’m all about personal tastes and all that but still…Christ.
I’m not going to pull any punches here; this game is crap. However, I’m a reasonable chappie capable of spotting redeeming qualities in most games and I firmly believe that too many gamers these days rush to use the “worst game ever” judgement. In my experience, most disagreeable games are merely average or flawed with merit-worthy aspects. I’ve played hundreds of different games across many consoles and I can honestly say that I could count the truly awful ones on less than ten fingers. They simply don’t exist in the quantities that are made out. Unfortunately for Sprung, it easily manages to make it onto my Worst Games I’ve Ever Played roll-call.
You know what to do here. Get her [edited for obscenities] Without a doubt, this should be the undisputed worst game in the DS’ European launch line-up but it is spared that accolade due to the existence of Ping Pals, a title that was nothing more than a tarted up version of FREE software built into the DS from day one yet PP was expected to sell to customers for real money (lolz etc.).
Now I don’t have anything against dating games per se as there have been some really quirky and interesting examples produced in Japan (such as Konami’s Toki Meki Memorial series) that I’d love to play but the language barrier is a big problem. More recent examples have been a bit too much for our Western tastes which simply (and rightly so) do not gel with the concept of chatting up digital schoolgirls with obscenely voluminous water balloon knockers but there are alternatives that won’t have you checking the skies for black helicopters. If Sprung was intended to be the Western response to the Japanese games however then the developers failed and I’m going to explain why.
To start with, the story is a load of stereotypical rubbish about a group of college friends going off to a ski resort to have a good time. You can choose to play as either a boy or a girl and the entire game from there on in is literally just a series of conversations with other people on the mountain. Most of these exchanges involve you trying to chat somebody up in a park, club or bar but others are supposed to be humorous and some are just downright bizarre. ‘Gameplay’ boils down to choosing from a preset selection of lines on the touch screen and trying to say the right things to advance the conversation in the correct direction. Remember when you bought your shiny new DS for those revolutionary new ways of interacting with your games and all the innovative possibilities that the touch-screen might offer? Yeah – I do too.
Decisions, decisions…
There are so many problems with this basic game premise that it’s difficult to know where to start. First up, it’s a bit boring isn’t it? Sitting there and just tapping away at lines of wordzzzzz..zzzz…The boredom is also complimented by infuriating frustration as it quickly becomes apparent that the ‘right’ things to say to NPC characters are the things that you’d never expect and when most of the conversations are so bloody weird in the first place, selecting the correct options is a lottery. Additionally you can only get so far with making the wrong decisions before you fail the chapter and have to start all over again. ‘Miserable’ and ‘brain-rotting’ are apt descriptions for the typical mental state that Sprung will induce after just a short while with the game. You start to analyse this software a little too deeply i.e. is Sprung telling me that I should tell a woman whatever it is they want to hear in order to stop them slamming their legs shut? (protip: don’t use this game as any form of ‘training’)
There are also various items that you can use at key moments but you’d have more luck cracking a combination safe than deciphering when to use them and with which NPC. Just in case you needed an extra layer of cryptic obscurity of course. But the worst is still to come, oh yes it is.
The game throws you a lifeline by offering checkpoints which, on paper, is a great idea. Some of the chapters are very long so not having to re-do the entire thing over due to an inevitable error should be a relief but in practice these checkpoints have a downright sinister side. You see, saying the wrong thing sometimes means that certain text selections don’t pop up further on in the chapter. This is already bad enough because you will unwittingly play on, unaware that an earlier mistake has made it impossible to complete a chapter and so you proceed until its Game Over. Huzzah for checkpoints then eh? You wish…
Let’s be honest: this guy looks like a jerk without Becky having to say it.
In a heinous turn of events, making that critical mistake before a checkpoint means that you can return to that checkpoint as many times as you like but it will be impossible to correct said error and you will always be left with the same strand of dud responses post-checkpoint. You can’t backtrack because you are locked into restarting from the checkpoint and you can’t talk your way out of it because every available line will only lead to dating doom since the options you need won’t appear due to that mistake before the checkpoint. Did anybody test this bullshit? Clearly not.
Are there any positives? Well, the cartoon-like character art is pretty good but otherwise…no! The “gameplay” is about as inspiring as an empty void, the DS’ unique features are all wasted and the humour is as funny as a funeral on a rainy day. It all adds up to a nasty maelstrom of frustration and tedium that must be binned off with all haste to preserve one’s sanity. Sprung’s tag-line is “The game where everybody scores” but it seems to me that they forgot to add “an all-expenses paid trip to the sanatorium”. It must have not fitted on the box.
Why would anybody play this shit instead of doing the real thing? Who was it aimed at? At least Japanese dating sims have an anime charm and far eastern weirdness that makes them appealing for us Western gamers. Sprung on the other hand has literally nothing to offer apart from negative vibes and a guaranteed bad mood when you finally switch the console off (hopefully after no more than five minutes of suffering and even that would be showing the game some saintly generosity…). It may seem like I’ve barely described this game but that’s because there’s nothing to discuss. You click on lines of text and stare at character portraits hoping that something, anything else will happen but it never does.
If you see Sprung on the pre-owned shelves for a few quid and are curious then don’t be. They say that curiosity killed the cat and if you were to compare yourself to that proverbial cat then you’d be sprawled in an upsetting heap in some gutter after being hit by a bus at 50mph should you give in to curiosity. I paid five English pounds for this game to see what it was like and that was embarrassing enough but if I’d paid £25 on release? I would have killed myself as a bare minimum response to such epic masochism and stupidity.
Overall Thoughts
Playing Sprung is like taking a hot date to bed then discovering that you’ve contracted a multitude of STD’s. Heed this public service announcement and avoid, avoid, avoid.
I have a strange relationship with EA’s Need for Speed Underground games. Despite always being a big car person (or ‘petrolhead’), I looked down on these games when they were current because they tapped into a street racing subculture which appeared far more glamorous in Japan or the US while here in the UK, it was associated with ‘ricers’ or ‘chavs’ building ugly, thunderous monstrosities out of Citroen Saxos or Peugeot 206’s. I was busier playing my intellectual JRPG’s and skillful fighting games while the masses were buying NFSU in droves.
There was also a stigmata associated with EA during the PS2 era if you ran in certain gaming circles. It was the impression that they only slapped their name on yearly cash-cow updates, average licensed fare and software that they could sell via cynical marketing which tapped into what teenage boys of the mid 00’s wanted. So football, loud cars and tits then.
It probably didn’t help that I eventually played the original Underground and wasn’t that impressed. However, I have been heavily re-involved with cars and the ‘scene’ over the last 6-7 years and in an ironic twist of fate, I now actually MISS the days of The Fast & The Furious movies, street racing culture and magazines like Max Power with topless models draped over ridiculous cars. Most of this has evaporated and with the constant droning message about road users needing to be responsible as well as the ‘lads mags’ being killed off (because sexism…whatever), the world feels like a more sterilised and straight place.
So I was ready to give NFSU2 a chance after snagging a cheap copy in a bundle of PS2 games. It is after all, one of the better-regarded games in the series with a bit of a following.
Urban cityscape and a nitrous-fuelled motion blur: welcome back to the mid 00’s.
The first thing that hit me was how goodthe game still looked. ‘Jaggies’ and outdated textures are pretty minimal and the car models are fantastic. As a petrolhead, I can safely say that all of the cars in this game are modelled highly accurately with a nice level of detail down to the correct badges and original exterior equipment. This was a nice surprise because I admit I was expecting worse from an annual EA update, perhaps a mistaken presumption that the game would have been blasted out by the developers in time for its intended release with a lack of polish. But no, the visuals and those cars look a lot better than many other racers of the generation and hold up incredibly well today.
EA added in a free-roam structure to NFSU2 as well and this really elevated it above the first game. Simply speeding about the city to different race events is enjoyable and even though the ‘free’ aspect is obviously limited by being stuck inside a car, it’s much more preferable to selecting races from a menu. Most circuit and sprint events use sections of the city too so getting familiarised with the many corners and shortcuts while in free-roam mode definitely helps when it comes to the races.
Race events are varied with circuit and sprint events joined by drift challenges (score more points than opponents), drag races and the new ‘Street X’ event which consists of small, tight courses that take place in car parks or (for some reason) building sites. These are more about acceleration, handling and taking the best racing lines. Finally there are the Underground Racing League events. These are the biggies that take place on proper race tracks and progress the game’s career mode. You are able to use a dyno and test track(s) to custom tune your car for each event, settings that are auto-loaded upon entering each style of event which does at least offer a bit more depth.
You have to start somewhere with cars like Vauxhall’s Corsa.
Progressing the career mode also means meeting the requirements of various sponsors that sign up to your cause. These demands are pretty straightforward and involve winning a set amount of events as well as sponsor races which pay out a lot more cash. You also need to get your car featured on a set number of tuning magazine and DVD covers and this is achieved by raising the star rating of your ride’s visual appearance until the call comes in for you to hightail it to the photographer’s location.
The only crappy thing about this aspect in my personal opinion is that it forces you to go all in and fit every conceivable modification possible such as neon underlighting, carbon body panels and hydraulics. So if you’re like me and prefer minimalism or a stock appearance then it ain’t going to cut it with the sponsors. It also means paying for components then having to continually replace them with ‘better’ versions down the line as parts are gradually unlocked, an artificial method of extending the game’s life but completely expected. I kept a separate Nissan 240SX that received the visual mods purely for this side of things then spent the rest of my cash on performance upgrades for my other cars that I could then ‘tastefully’ modify on the outside.
Still, the magazine and DVD covers made me smile and took me back to that period in time that I talked about earlier. They might look ‘laddish’ and chauvinistic by 2018’s easily offended standards but I like ’em.
If you remember these types of magazines with a fondness then you will definitely appreciate NFSU2 and the culture it represents.
It’s a shame that the game’s AI didn’t make me smile as much. If you want to take the proper racing lines and overtake opponents cleanly as you would have to in real life then forget it. Towards the beginning of the game this is entirely possible but later on as things take a turn for the challenging, you’d best forget it. Rivals launch themselves up the inside of your car kamikaze-style in the corners and pile into the back of you for braking zones as if this is a Destruction Derby sequel, not Need For Speed. Worse still, they have no qualms about punting you off the track or even utilising the police-approved PIT maneuver to spin you out. Cheating bastards!
I tried to race fairly because I hate winning in racing games by abusing a lack of damage modelling to bash my way to the front but unfortunately, you have to lower your standards with this game and fight fire with fire sometimes, especially since the game’s AI has another crafty weapon up its sleeve: the dreaded rubber band effect. Opponents seem a lot less inconvenienced by collisions with civilian traffic (whereas a single smash can ruin YOUR entire race) and can somehow take tight corners at impossible speeds, sometimes while using nitrous. You can leave them several seconds behind by getting out in front and driving perfectly but the game allows them to catch right back up to you on the last lap as if they have been handed a secret performance boost. This sort of thing makes sense in a game like Mario Kart but in a proper racing game involving real cars that have real performance figures and capabilities…well, it just sucks.
It also blew my mind to witness heavy muscle cars like the Mustang and Pontiac GTO leaving me for dust on twisty, technical circuits that should never favour such vehicles. Losing drag races to Vauxhall Corsas and Ford Focuses somehow capable of reaching near-200mph speeds was another mind-boggling development.
The game can also strategically place a taxi or van around a blind bend and this is unbelievably frustrating after investing seven-or-so minutes into a race, successfully keeping those shady opponents at bay for three long laps only to lose it all and have to start again because there was a unavoidable crash around the final corner. I’ve even experienced a white van speeding over an intersection right into my path as if God himself decided that I wasn’t allowed to win the race. Whether this was EA’s subtle commentary on the infamous “White Van Man”, I can’t say but I swore quite a bit!
Overall Thoughts
There is a lot to like about Need For Speed Underground 2 and thankfully, the good bits just about outweigh the rotten AI-related elements. There was of course the added bonus of getting a far more polished game than I was expecting but it definitely helps if you consider the racing to be more of an arcade game than a serious sim. For me personally though, I really enjoyed being transported back to that era of street racing and the JDM craziness inspired by what was happening in Japan and the Fast & Furious movies. NFSU2 perfectly captures that subculture – just don’t expect gentlemanly conduct from the game’s AI.
Stephen King’s Cell is – in my opinion – the sort of book that becomes a bit more relevant with each passing year. The story’s post-apocalyptic world is nothing new (even coming from King himself) and the ‘journey’ format starring a group of survivors heading out into a new world full of danger has been done before by the same writer (see The Stand for one example) but the fact that mobile phones are the cause of doom and destruction? Well, that part seems more and more plausible with each passing year.
We do after all, live in a world where so many rely on their phone for so much. People are glued to them on buses, trains and even in social gatherings where they are supposed to be communicating with real people (remember those?). Drivers would rather risk crashing on the road if it means checking their messages or Facebook updates whilst crawling in traffic and there is of course, an app for everything.
So Cell’s concept of a brain-scrambling virus sent out across mobile networks to phones worldwide and wiping any trace of civilisation from their owner’s minds doesn’t seem so far-fetched as a form of cyber terrorism that could hit most of the world’s population in one fell swoop. The book doesn’t focus on who was responsible for this attack or where they orchestrated it from because that isn’t the point. Instead, Cell takes the reader on a journey with a group of survivors who are thrown together in the wake of this catastrophe because they were either fortunate enough to not have their phone with them or because they didn’t own one in the first place.
There is the typical rich yet unbloated detail that you’d expect to find in a Stephen King book, especially with regards to the primal, unfeeling violence that those affected by the cellular virus (known as ‘The Pulse’) dish out in the immediate aftermath. It all seems quite real and a fair image of what might actually happen should such an event hit a technology-reliant Western society in the real world. As with any Stephen King book, no punches are pulled when it comes to the description of the violence and gore and this helps make the situation feel even more vivid.
Once the initial impact of The Pulse has had time to ruin the world, Cell then focuses on the characters and how their mental state responds to suddenly being thrust into a world of madness and survival. The main character is an everyman up-and-coming artist named Clayton Riddell who just wants to get home and find his young son, hoping that he hasn’t switched his phone on and that he still lives. He soon meets with other survivors who have their own stories and they set out to get away from the city, work out what is happening and to try and find safety.
I really enjoyed Cell the first time I read it and re-reading it today in 2018, it was just as good. The characters are very likeable and relatable as ordinary, everyday people. The mental journey and character development that they go through also feels believable and you – the reader – do feel as if you are on this journey with them (albeit in the safer confines of the real world!) and the book becomes a page-turner like most of Stephen King’s output. I also really enjoyed the detail and descriptions of the violence and the state of the ruined world, all of which hit me as believable.
If I have any criticisms of Cell then they would be the inconclusive ending (which kind of leaves the reader to decide on what ultimately happens) and the fact that some new friends are introduced during the latter stages of the book yet there isn’t really the time to explore their characters and get to like them as anything other than a late-game support cast. I found that I was only there to see what happened to Clay and his original companions, not the new additions to the group.
Overall though, Cell is a great book and one of the better ones in Stephen King’s ‘modern’ lineup. I do tend to prefer the older, more horror/supernatural-orientated books but Cell still manages to feel a little like those past glories while also having the other foot planted in a more current era.
When Lumines first arrived for the PSP back in 2004 (2005 for Western territories), did the gaming landscape really need another puzzler based around clearing rows of blocks? Arguably not but somebody decided that we did and so a brand-new puzzle series kicked off in earnest.
Yes, the object is to clear the screen of blocks and yes, it’s game over if they reach the top of the play area but thankfully, Lumines is a bit more than “been there, done that, got the T-shirt”. Blocks always come in two different colours and are cleared in 2×2 squares (as opposed to complete rows as in Tetris) for starters. Not crazy enough? Formations of the same colour can be linked together to clear lots of blocks at the same time and there is also a special block that – when forming part of a 2×2 – clears every single block of the same colour that is linked to that 2×2. As you can imagine, there are some huge scores to be had by strategically filling half of the screen with carefully linked blocks and then deleting the whole lot in one go with the special block, leading to everything else crashing down and forming loads more links for even more clearance and mega points.
But even that sounds fairly pedestrian and I’d totally forgive you for asking why you should even care about any of this. Thankfully, Lumines has a secret weapon and it’s the power of music.
The Time Line is your best friend and – sometimes – also your greatest foe.
The game sports a soundtrack largely comprising of the House and Electronica styles of music and each stage (known as “skins” in Lumines) that you play on has its own unique track. Score enough points and the stage will transition into a new one with a new skin and a new track. This keeps things fresh and interesting but the music is much more than that in Lumines. The ‘Time Line’ bar constantly scrolling from left-to-right changes speed based on the tempo of the music and only blocks arranged ahead of the bar will be cleared once it reaches the other side of the screen. This can either lead to a race against time to get your combos set up before the Time Line gets there or, when the screen is perilously full on a more sedately-paced skin, you will be willing the bar to get a damn move on and clear some space before waiting blocks overload the play area.
The sound effects for blocks dropping into place and being cleared are also unique for each skin and team up with the music to form an ever-evolving audio experience for the ears. When you are really in the zone and nailing massive combo after massive combo while the music ramps up, then Lumines totally clicks and it comes into its own as a unique puzzle game.
Honestly, the only reason I can see somebody not enjoying Lumines to any degree would purely be down to the type of music involved not being to their tastes. I described it above as House and Electronica in style so if you aren’t a fan then you may struggle to ‘get’ it. Otherwise, it’s a very addictive puzzler that actually offers a decent challenge and I always have the itch for “one more go” to see if I can get further in the single-player challenge mode and see some new skins. Better still, the game was a launch title for the PSP and as such is common-as-muck and easy to pick up for a few pounds. Bargain!
Versus mode (against CPU or a friend) is interesting. Clearing blocks pushes the boundary towards the opponent and reduces their playing area, applying serious pressure.
Fast forward a few years and Lumines Pluswas released for the Playstation 2. Billed as an expanded version of the original, the game is already on the back foot purely for not being on a handheld. Lumines was a perfect fit for the PSP and on-the-move gaming…not so much for a home system. It might sound lazy but let’s face it, waiting for the disc to load up on the PS2 and then being tied to your sofa with a wired pad in hand doesn’t feel as “right”. Still, it doesn’t affect the quality of the original game and having a bigger display and (depending on your set-up) more capable speakers is an advantage for the Plus edition.
The main selling point of the PS2 version was the inclusion of a handful of new skins so in theory, Lumines Plusshould be a definitive edition of the original game. Unfortunately, I noticed a few small niggles when moving from the PSP version to Plus. Firstly, there seems to be a brief two-three second pause during the transition of skins which leaves you in silence and interrupts the flow. Not ideal for a music-based game! Also – for whatever reason – the cool robotic voice that announces the name of the track as the music switches over, is completely missing from this version. Otherwise the game is a straight port with extremely minimal differences which I found to be a bit of a letdown. Even the menus and front end are indentical.
Ultimately though it’s the lack of portability that scuppers the Plus edition. If you don’t have access to a PSP then Lumines Plus for the PS2 is perfectly serviceable and still a great puzzle game. Otherwise, I don’t consider the additional skins to be a worthwhile trade-off for not having Lumines in its more fitting, handheld environment. Owning both versions is completely unnecessary and I only do so because I am some sort of batshit weird hoarder/magpie.
Overall Thoughts…
If you enjoy puzzle games (especially of the falling tile/block persuasion) or games with a heavy infusion of music then Lumines is a no-brainer. For the pitiful amount of currency that a used copy trades hands for these days, the risk to your wallet barely registers. Only bother with the Plus edition for PS2 if you don’t have a PSP or if you absolutely HAVE to play it on the big screen but you know, that’s kind of what those PSP-TV cables were designed for?
Ever since the decline of the arcades and 16-bit home console era, there have been quests to find worthwhile modern examples of the genres that were driven close to exctinction by the arrival of cinematic, story-driven games. The beat ’em up is one such genre that flourished in the late 80’s and early 90’s but quickly became irrelevant to the mainstream. Developers attempted to take advantage of polygons and update their classic franchises but the results were a mixed bag to say the very least. After all, the likes of Fighting Force can hardly be discussed in the same breath as Final Fight…not by anybody with any taste anyway!
The PS2/Xbox/GC era was a particular low point as far as beat ’em ups go and there genuinely aren’t many decent ones to speak of. When they did appear, they weren’t quite the same as their 2D forerunners. I’ve already reviewed Final Fight Streetwise here but that game – along with Beatdown: Fists of Vengeance – included semi-free roaming gameplay as well as other features such as stat upgrades, side missions and cutscenes. The core beat ’em up objective (to smash the crap out of thugs and hoods) was still there but the purity of the arcade classics was lost.
One game that frequently gets brought up when gamers are questing for a good beat ’em up from the new millenium is Namco’s Urban Reign for the PS2. Like its rivals however, Urban Reign isn’t quite the game you might expect and simply expecting it to be a straightforward beat ’em up actually invites disappointment as I recently discovered.
A Misunderstanding…
I was expecting Urban Reign to be a 3D version of the old-school arcade beat ’em ups. You would have thought I’d have learnt by now that this just isn’t enough to sell a game in the modern era but even so, I popped the disc in and was prepping myself for perhaps ten to fifteen stages of ‘scrolling’ through streets and alleyways, punching thugs and making my way towards a boss at the end of each level. Bloody hell…get with the times old man! That shit was so 1992.
Instead, there is a brief cinematic introduction to the main character (Brad Hawk) who is apparently the new hard-arse in a town ruled by crime and violence. Brad starts working for Chinese crime boss, Shun Ying Lee, a female swordswoman equipped for the Playstation 2 generation of videogame marketing with a low-cut jumpsuit and an eye-popping B-W-H ratio that doesn’t exactly reflect a typical East Asian woman. The plot is henceforth communicated via narrated text boxes before each mission and is your standard guff about rival gangs, turf warfare and all that stuff so nothing new to see here. I was expecting cut-scenes perhaps but almost thirty missions in (yes, I’ll get to that in a moment), it was still just text explaining why Brad needed to go and beat up a rival gang boss or why Brad had to survive an alleyway encounter with a mob of gang members. Pretty soon I was skim-reading the ‘plot’ and just skipping it all. Wuthering Heights this wasn’t.
Hit the streets and go toe-to-toe with thugs sporting ridiculous names. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
This was beginning to look bad. Urban Reign didn’t sell very well by all accounts and it isn’t difficult to see why. The main character looks bland, the cover for the game is boring and the usual mid-2000’s videogame tropes are all correct and present: female character with huge tits and highly impractical outfit? Check. Generic homie ‘gangsta’ enemies? Check again. Unnecessary plot that tries to hard? Big fat ol’ check. The other probable reason that Urban Reign underperformed at retail (aside from barely being marketed at all by Namco) is because the gameplay itself was likely not what punters expected. Perhaps gamers made the same mistake I did and expected a modern take on the classic beat ’em up style with the same game structure. It’s difficult to know for sure but what you actually get is something a bit different.
Instead of long, roaming stages that trap you with groups of enemies before allowing you to move forwards, Urban Reign serves up bite-sized missions that can be cleared quite quickly. The player is enclosed within a confined, limited arena-like space (be it a street, alleyway, bar etc.) with objective of simply beating all of the enemies. Sometimes you have to take down a more challenging foe in a one-on-one scenario and sometimes there are extra conditions such as defeating opponents within a time limit but the basics are the same. It feels like a series of small challenges and the game more than makes up for the lack of a complex structure with the sheer amount of these self-contained missions.
Repetition – in terms of both the gameplay and the reasons the game gives you for having to fight the next assortment of undesirables – set in with me quite quickly but after clearing thirty missions, something amazing happened.
There’s actually MORE to this game?
So I beat the thirtieth mission and FINALLY a cutscene and some form of plot progression! By this point, I was seriously not expecting it at all but here it was. More importantly, the game gives you a selection of partners that you can take along with you into battle (a roster that gradually increases as you beat key enemies and they join your cause) and this brings special team-up style attacks to the mix. You can also issue directions to your buddy and get them to take out certain enemies or initiate special team-up moves.
It’s a shame that it takes so long for the game to introduce everything it has to offer.
Before I get into discussing the actual game mechanics, I need to take a moment to really look at this late introduction of the rest of Urban Reign‘s features. For it to take thirty missions for the game’s plot to wake up and decide to continue is crazy, even more so when you consider that Urban Reign is not a walkover. I played the the game on the default difficulty setting and many of those first thirty missions were incredibly challenging (for reasons I will discuss when talking about the actual gameplay in a moment) and took a lot of retakes and patience to beat. It’s not hard to imagine gamers getting frustrated by the challenge with (seemingly) no game development being dangled in front of them like a carrot to keep them pushing forwards. That and the fact that it takes this long for the partners to become available. It’s almost as if you have been playing a massive tutorial for all this time except the road certainly isn’t your standard tutorial difficulty.
So with that mini rant out of the way, let’s have a look at the actual gameplay itself because it’s reasonably interesting for a beat ’em up. The most surprising thing for a three dimensional beat ’em up is that there is NO block/guard button. Instead, the whole fighting system is based around countering. Pushing the square button at the precise moment will allow you to avoid a strike or grapple. However, to really do damage and beat the tougher enemies, you also need to get countering and you can either do this by responding immediately with a combo or by pushing the analogue stick left/right while dodging which shifts your character behind the opponent, opening them up for difficult to avoid counter strikes or grapples.
It’s an easy-to-grasp, tough-to-master mechanic and you can get away with not being good at it for the easier missions but many bosses will simply not hit the deck unless you can consistently counter their attacks and punish them with follow-up combos and throws. What this system does in general is force you to either stand your ground and learn to counter or run away and find space but enemies in Urban Reign will catch up to you very quickly so the second option isn’t exactly reliable. It’s a case of getting good…or else!
(Analogue) Stick it to ’em
As far as the offensive combat goes, the analogue stick pays a crucial part. Mashing the attack button will unleash a character’s basic combo string but attacking in conjunction with pushing the analogue stick up or down allows to target their upper and lower body regions with the latter usually being some kind of sweep that can provide crucial seconds to breathe when under pressure. You can also attack downed characters by pushing down on the stick when next to them.
Strongman Glenn is one of my favourite available characters.
Grapples work in the same way, allowing you target specific parts of an enemy and deal greater damage when it comes to “destroying” one of three body zones, allowing for bigger damage when targeting said zone with further attacks. Perhaps it goes without saying but there are different holds and throws available depending on whether you are in front or behind an enemy. Sprinting takes a bit of getting used to because instead of double-tapping the analogue stick or holding a button whilst moving (as in many other 3D action games), you press the X button once and your character begins running automatically, only stopping once you go for another input. You can slide-tackle enemies or even run up walls and leap off to attack enemies from above.
There’s a reasonable amount going on but the real fun comes when experimenting with creating big combos of strikes and grapples. This being made by Namco, there is Tekken-style juggling and wall-bouncing which is both a help and hindrance. On one hand, you can use it to your advantage to extend combos and even grab enemies mid-air for context-exclusive grapples. The downside is that you can get destroyed very quickly by enemies when being smashed against a wall over and over or trapped in mid-air, being comboed by multiple foes. In a sense, losing feels extremely cheap when the CPU goes apeshit on you like this but the counter system does work mid-combo and in mid-air albeit with strict timing so it isn’t entirely unfair. It simply forces you to get good at the game rather than rely on button-mashing and it’s this that sets Urban Reign apart from old-school 2D beat ’em ups. There is some depth to combat here and if you want a better visual demonstration, check the game out on Youtube where there are videos from players doing an amazing job of utterly schooling the toughest enemies on the most savage difficulty.
One issue which I can’t really forgive is the fact that it doesn’t take much to stun your character and render them momentarily dizzy, leaving you unable to respond to attacks with dodges or counters. An SPA (Special Arts) move will immediately snap you out of this state but it consumes precious meter which you are (obviously) trying to conserve to go on the offensive.
Final Thoughts
There are a hundred missions in Urban Reign‘s story mode to clear and once those are polished off, there are some more interesting things to have a play with. Multiplayer for instance gives you more of a fighting chance when an actual person is controlling your partner (though the AI is actually quite solid in this respect and often wins the missions for you). There is also a Challenge mode (think ‘Survival’ against individual foes) and a Free Play mode which allows you to replay all of the story mode’s missions for a rank. This last mode is of greatest interest as you are no longer restricted to using Brad Hawk and can roll with a tag team of any two characters providing they have been unlocked. All of the main allies from story mode are present but you can also unlock the random enemies/thugs as well as brand-new characters including guest stars Paul Phoenix and Marshall Law from Tekken!
Paul is pretty epic in Urban Reign and beating down thugs with his signature moves is worth unlocking him for.
But should you persevere with the main game and go to the lengths of unlocking characters? I would say “yes” because Urban Reign might not be what most people are expecting i.e. a mindless (not meant in a derogatory way) button-mashing beat ’em up that harks back to the 2D days but the game is great in it’s own way. The combat is very satisfying once you have gotten to grips with the counter system and learnt some combos and there is genuine challenge on offer. So many missions made me think “Damn, this is impossible; how are you expected to win here?!?” but you keep coming back and trying again, slowly getting better and better at the game until you get that perfect run on a mission. True, you sometimes have to rely on flukes, CPU slip-ups or cheap tactics to win but for the most part, you feel like you have earnt that victory and it is SO satisfying to finally overcome an against-the-odds mission.
The major downside is the amount of time that Urban Reign needs to get going. Without trying to sound impatient, it takes far too long for any story progression and – more importantly – too long for partners, weapons and all of the special moves to become available. Gradually developing a character’s skills and unlocking stuff in games is nothing new but the issue here is that it DOES take too long and the game does a poor job of communicating your actual progression and end goals. This combined with the often ruthless difficulty will be off-putting to many – especially if they expected a different kind of game structure – but if you can stick with it and learn the mechanics then there is a really enjoyable beat ’em up experience here and certainly one of the best of its generation.
Now that I have your attention with that outrageous title, I guess I will need to justify making such a statement and with good reason. Whenever the topics of worst videogame reboots and worst modern updates of classic franchises get brought up, you can bet a fat wedge of your hard-earned money that Final Fight Streetwise will make it onto that list. It’s easy to see why too: the game was released in that awkward mid-noughties period when publishers seemed to believe that what their cherished franchises needed to succeed on the PS2 and Xbox was grittiness, tits and gratuitous profanities. Many series’ fell foul of this notion (an entire topic in itself) including Capcom’s much-loved Final Fight beat ’em up series.
Eternally a sucker for the more obscure stuff that lies at the dusty side of this well-travelled road we call “Gaming”, I decided that it was high time I played the game for myself to see if Streetwise was really deserving of its poor rep.
Even bad games increase in value due to their notoriety. The going rate for Streetwise in 2018 is £7-£10.
The shocking thing was that I found myself enjoying the game! After hearing nothing but hatred for Final Fight Streetwise over the years, this was a big surprise. It certainly goes to show that popular internet opinion isn’t always correct and that you should always try a game out for yourself before joining in the chorus of condemnation based on what you have heard/read or seen in video footage.
That’s not to say that the game is a classic or anything approaching that because there ARE many things that are wrong with it. The big elephant in the room is of course the ‘Final Fight’ name on the box and the depiction of the likes of Cody, Guy and Haggar in this game. A lot of the scorn for Streetwise stems from the fact that this game is part of the Final Fight saga and fans of the older games were (understandably) pissed that their beloved franchise and characters were radically different this time around. If Streetwise had traded the Final Fight connections for new, original characters then it probably wouldn’t have invited such a critical pasting and would have simply been another 3D beat ’em up for the PS2 generation. Unfortunately, Capcom decided it was safer (ironically) to trade on an established name, a move that sealed Streetwise‘s fate from the beginning. The irony continues however when considering that Capcom also developed an original 3D beat ’em up title for the PS2 called Beatdown: Fists of Vengeance. This game was objectively better than Final Fight Streetwise in several respects but still no classic yet a lack of connection to an established, much-loved series counted in its favour.
Gritty urban surroundings and guns? The Final Fight resemblance was a bit thin.
To describe the gameplay, I’ve taken to billing Streetwise as a crap version of Sega’s Yakuza. That’s to say that there is a free-roaming nature to the game (albeit confined to a much more limited, less interactive game world) with 3D combat, the use of weapons and an upgradable set of moves/combos. Different areas of Metro City are gradually unlocked as the game progresses and there are a variety of side missions as well as a series of pit fights against opponents that stand out from the general street thugs and gangstas. All of this considered, it’s easy to make the comparisons between Metro City and Kamurocho but if Sega’s highly detailed crime saga can be likened to a Ferrari then Streetwise would probably be a Ssangyong or a Dacia by comparison.
And as a I mentioned earlier, the game fell into the trap of pandering to the teenage boy audience that every publisher was trying to sell games to in the mid-2000’s. Metro City is a gloomy, miserable urban environment this time around with a look of extreme decay and social rot about it. F-bombs and all manner of other swearing are casually tossed about, blood flies during brawls and hookers hang around on street corners, trying to sell the main character their wares. Fortunately, Streetwise doesn’t let you go any further with the latter and the dilapidated city’s porn theatre is conveniently never able to serve you due to the “register being down”. A soundtrack of gangsta beats from obscure artists serves as backing noise (and I really do consider it to be “noise”) and completes the transformation of the once colourful, cartoon-like beat ’em ups from the arcade and Super Nintendo.
Darker and more ghetto than before.
You play as Kyle Travers, brother to Final Fight‘s Cody Travers and an up-and-coming fight club brawler. Many years have passed since the events of Final Fight and Cody is now older with knackered knees that can’t take the abuse of fighting anymore so he puts his time into coaching his brother instead. Cody still feels the burning desire to fight however and finds himself mixed up with shady underworld types and a dangerous new drug called “Glow” that can turn the average man into a superhuman machine at the eventual cost of the user’s mind and humanity. A dangerous gang crashes a drinking sesh at the local bar and kidnaps Cody with the gang’s leader – known as The Stiff – knocking Kyle unconscious at the conclusion of the brawl. This is where the game kicks off properly, with Kyle’s aim being to track down his brother and save him from Metro City’s underworld and the lethal Glow drug. Final Fight has certainly grown up since the old days eh?
Along the way, Kyle runs into strong man Haggar (angrier and swearier than before) and Guy who has now become a gang boss himself, heading up the Japantown district of Metro City. There aren’t really any more links to the Final Fight lineage other than these characters and a few references to their past exploits. The only classic Final Fight enemy to make a return is Andore as an optional pit opponent. Concept art for the game showed Poison and Sodom but neither made it into the final game.
Thus far, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Final Fight Streetwise is a load of nonsense, trying to be cool and hardcore while re-writing the likes of Cody and Haggar to be grittier, more ‘realistic’ characters e.g. exactly what nobody asked for. Gangsta music, a drug-related plot and the more violent nature of combat certainly suggest this so you may be wondering why I’m saying that Streetwise is not actually a bad game?
You say bad, I say so bad it’s brilliant.
Well, the “bad” stuff is often so bad that I found it entertaining with so many crappy aspects of Streetwise lending the game a unique sort of charm. The awful NPC dialogue and quotes for example are just brilliant. Metro City appears to have a large population of flamboyant men making overly saucy remarks to Kyle in passing, (one such comment even referencing a “package”…whatever that means…) while hookers come out with such brazen lines as “Fancy a shag?” or “Wanna have a poke?”…in laughably posh British accents which obviously make the world of sense in an urban, American city.
Side missions often take the form of mini games which are a stark contrast to the game’s moody, violent vibe. One standout distraction is a card shuffling game where you must keep an eye on the winning card as it is shuffled with two others. You play this game by speaking to a suited businessman who just happens to be hanging around in a bad part of town, briefcase of playing cards at his side. Other amusing mini games include (literally) stamping out a cockroach infestation in the diner, smashing up a car that has enraged a local resident by being parked in their way (a nice throwback to the car-smashing interludes in the arcade game) and…blasting rubber ducks in an alleyway shooting gallery to win cash? Yep, that happens. The novelty of these side events does wear off once they begin to repeat over and over but there’s no denying that they are – initially – quirky and unexpected in a game where you expect to simply be fighting.
I’ll be honest, as interesting as this was, I still didn’t bemoan a lack of G-Con2 support.
Speaking of the fighting, it’s actually not that bad. Yes, Final Fight Streetwise had contemparies that arguably did combat better (Urban Reign, Spikeout: Battle Street) but Streetwise is still more than serviceable. There are the standard light and strong attacks to create combos as well as the obligatory throw command. In addition, there is also an “Instinct” meter below the health bar. This energy can be used to enhance the power of moves (by holding down one of the shoulder buttons while attacking) or to fuel the use of stronger special moves such as the drop kick or suplex. Kyle can also counter an opponent’s attack if the player presses the block/guard button at precisely the right moment, sending the game into a brief slow-mo sequence where they can input various commands to evade damage and knock the enemy back. New moves and extensions to the health and instinct meters are purchased from the game’s various gyms, giving the player a reason to collect as much cash as possible from side events and enemy drops.
It’s nothing special but it works and there is a reasonable level of satisfaction to be gleaned from the combat, especially when consistently countering like a boss and sending enemies flying with an elbow smash, nose-breaker or hurricane kick.
Other sweet touches are a cameo fight against Street Fighter‘s Cammy (as a big fan of Cammy, I loved this) and a bonus arcade mode whereby you select Kyle, Cody, Guy or Haggar and attempt to fight your way through hoardes of enemies as in the old-school arcade games. Arcade mode takes on a strange 2.5d perspective with a fixed route and a much simplified moveset including a removal of the Instinct system (so no counters either) and many special moves. It’s an interesting sideshow but good luck beating it on your own without a second player because it’s absolutely brutal. Finally, you can unlock the original 1989 arcade game and play it from Streetwise‘s main menu but in all honesty, I can’t recommend the port as it feels sluggish with a poor resolution. Stick to the Capcom collections on the PS2 or PSP if you want to play classic Final Fight. Or the superb Final Fight One for the GBA.
I wish this costume for Cammy had made it into one of the Street Fighter games as an alternate outfit but I imagine Capcom are keen to forget Streetwise ever happened.
Overall, I have to say that Final Fight Streetwise is not the absolute trainwreck that I was waiting to experience when I popped the disc into my PS2 after all these years of reading negative horror stories. Yes it is a flawed game and no, it isn’t an essential gem in the PS2 (or original Xbox’s) library. There are better 3D beat ’em ups available from this generation of gaming – without question – but I do feel that Streetwise receives a lot of flack for being a bad Final Fight game rather than a bad game in general. Strip away that famous name and you have a serviceable beat ’em up with some interesting quirks. It isn’t a bad game at all; it simply failed to live up to the Final Fight name but that was always going to be the case.
The one major complaint I personally have is that the save system is terrible. You can only save by quitting the game (not explained in-game or in the manual) and loading a saved game puts you back at your last checkpoint (also not explained in-game or in the manual) meaning that until you realise this, you can lose a lot of side-mission progress by believing that you have saved the game at your current point when you haven’t. Other small niggles are repetitive mini games, some fiddly bosses and the final few chapters feeling more like Resident Evil with zombie-like enemies and mutated bosses.
But Streetwise still isn’t a bad game. I couldn’t exactly recommend it but I COULD recommend that you open your mind a little, forget the Final Fight name and give the game a chance because it’s alright.
Usually, there’s only so far back that I will go when it comes to my consumption of movies. The 80’s and 90’s host the majority of my favourites and the 70’s sometimes gets a look-in as well but rarely will I watch something as old as Queen of Blood from 1966. It’s not for ignorance, more that the style of filmmaking, quality of sets and such from this period simply doesn’t captivate me as readily. I do want to try and address that though since I’m aware of many classics from the 60’s and previous. Back on-topic, I’m not sure that Queen of Blood should be classified as a B-Movie since I’m honestly not aware of how mainstream a release it was back in ’66 but for the theme and general sci-fi/horror premise, I’ve decided to cover it here in this particular series of reviews.
Like a lot of movies from the period, the above poster is very creative with its visual advertisement of the film. Queen of Blood is far less dramatic and not as “hideous” in reality. In fact, I was pretty unimpressed with the slow, plodding pace of the movie in general and how long it took for anything to happen. I’d say that the first three quarters of the film were all very sci-fi with a lot of scene setting and plot revolving around space exploration and breakthrough contact with an extraterrestrial race. It was more suspenseful than anything, keeping me wondering when the first disaster or mishap would occur as is inevitably the case with sci-fi movies when mankind explores space or meddles in the unknown. It wasn’t until the latter stages of the movie when the horror element kicked in and I finally got to see what I was expecting to see.
To give a basic outline of Queen of Blood‘s plot, a small crew of astronauts are sent on a rescue mission from Earth’s forward base on the moon to find the craft of the extraterrestrials they have made contact with since their new friends have ran into trouble and crash-landed (apparently). The scientists see it as their responsibility to show mankind’s hospitality by rescuing these unknowns from their predicament. Unfortunately for the crew of the rescue mission, the sole-surviving female-shaped alien turns out to be more of a plant-like vampiric creature that sustains itself by consuming blood.
The creature itself is actually quite unnerving and memorably creepy when she uses her hypnotic powers.
The film – in my mind at least – commentates on scientists and their desire to pursue knowledge and results above the safety of those they employ to do the dangerous work for them. Even as the crew is gradually killed off, the head of the project back at base (played by Basil Rathbone) remains calm and understanding of the situation but is ultimately more concerned with getting the specimen back in one piece to be studied. Even at the film’s conclusion when John Saxon’s character is adamant that the creature’s eggs (stealthily hidden around the ship without the crew’s knowledge) should be destroyed in the interests of Earth’s safety, Rathbone’s scientist ignores his main man’s warnings, choosing instead to have the eggs taken away at once for analysis. There’s a definite undercurrent of out-of-control science with the ends justifying the means and research taking priority over sense, something we can relate to when looking at many real-life inventions and current scientific/technological pursuits.
There are also numerous parallels with Ridley Scott’s Alien from the basic premise of a crew returning home with a killer creature from outer space aboard to those not on the frontline ordering that a dangerous species is successfully brought back even if it comes at the expense of the crew. Then there are the more obvious parallels such as the crew being killed off one at a time (despite their efforts to ensure that nobody else dies) and horror of the unknown from outer space. Some have speculated that Ridley Scott must have taken some sort of inspiration from Queen of Blood when working on Alien and even if we will never know, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this was the case.
Seductive or evil? Any horror fan should be able to put their money on the creature’s true intentions.
The green-skinned alien herself (played by Florence Marly) is actually one of the highlights of the film despite the simplistic costume and make-up which don’t make her appear very monstrous or otherworldly at all. Fortunately, it doesn’t really matter because her sinister aura is born of the fact that she doesn’t appear to be evil at all to begin with, just unable to communicate with words. Close-ups of her eyes and seductive smile don’t necessarily signal any sort of malicious intent but at the same time, viewers will know that there’s something else behind the innocent, child-like personality that the creature projects.
This is one thing that I DO appreciate about older cinema: the fact that simple camera-work and clever close-ups as well as good quality acting can carry a movie with an otherwise straightforward plot. The creature in Queen of Blood is fairly one-dimensional and would be no more primal in nature than the Alien or any other murderous monster from the world of horror if she weren’t human-shaped yet Florence Marly’s facial expressions and the eery calmness about her lend the titular Queen some character. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t consider the Queen to be one of cinema’s iconic horror villains but the scenes involving her hypnotic gaze are genuinely creepy and there is legitimate suspense in waiting for that moment when the human charade will be dropped and a sci-fi film becomes more of a horror.
Sadly this never really happens. You don’t get to see the kills themselves and the film ends all too soon. That said, Queen of Blood is a pre-slasher era film from a time when evil concepts and grim implications were enough to chill their audiences. Once the graphic, excessively gory horror films came along in their masses, the slow build-ups and focus on suspense over outright terror were no longer enough. Queen of Blood certainly deserves recognition for creating an atmosphere and starring a sinister, unfeeling alien lifeform. Then there are the subtextual questions it asks about the morality of scientists and whether other races of creatures can be blamed for their behaviour when they don’t live amongst human society. The cast is mostly pretty decent and includes some good names such as the aforementioned John Saxon and also Dennis Hopper so there’s that too.
Overall, Queen of Blood is pretty much a film of its time but even so, I have to be critical and point out the fact that it takes so long for things to get moving (an issue with a lot of older horror, fantasy and sci-fi movies in fairness). It wasn’t really for me but I can appreciate what it brings to the table as a suspenseful sci-fi/horror.
The TV critics are currently raving about the new Mamma Mia! movie at the present but I don’t ‘do’ those sorts of films and couldn’t be less interested if I had a gun held against my head. Most of the time, I don’t even do regular box office hit movies but I DO enjoy niche B-Movies so to get away from the mainstream media’s insistence on shoving Abba songs down my throat, I decided last night to watch Psycho Cop, a 1989 horror/slasher film that I’d not previously viewed.
Now I wasn’t around in the 1980’s (I just missed out being born in ’90) but I can imagine that a film like Psycho Cop must have felt outdated even then, at the end of the decade when it was released. All of the slasher cliches are correct and present from cars refusing to start to false jump scares and the most stupid assemblage of victims that must wander off alone to investigate strange sounds. As a fan of these sorts of movies, I expect all of that (it’s part of the charm after all) but Psycho Cop fails to deliver even a competent, braindead slasher flick for several reasons.
The plot is as basic as you like and follows a group of six teenagers heading to secluded woodland and a luxurious house that they’ve scored for the weekend thanks to two of the characters (Zack and Eric) having unlikely success with some stocks. I say “unlikely” because when I saw how stupid these characters turned out to be, I had to wonder how they’d even heard of the stock market. Anyway, a rogue satan-worshipping cop named Vickers (played by Robert R. Shafer) has decided to follow the kiddies to their weekend getaway with the not-so-subtle intention of observing and then murdering this particular movie’s axe/knife/bludgeon fodder. The only other main character is the house’s unnamed caretaker who bites the dust first after making the silly mistake of heading into the woods alone in pursuit of his stolen axe. With that sort of decision-making, he kind of deserves his fate, wouldn’t you say?
Shafer’s titular cop is the only redeeming factor of the movie.
The main problem with Psycho Cop isn’t the bare-bones plot itself but the lifeless, wooden feel to the movie. The characters are all one-dimensional and spend the entire time going around in circles. Doug and Laura won’t shut up about the caretaker and his sudden disappearance while the others weary of what they perceive to be their friends’ paranoia over nothing. Zack is a stereotypical beer-slugging cool kid with a cool haircut but no brains, Julie is the high-maintenance, stroppy blonde obsessed with her hairbrush and Eric is her beer-swigging boyfriend who just wants to get her into the woods alone. They spend the majority of the film arguing about whether something is actually going on around them or not, the group finding relief in what they believe are misunderstandings or Laura/Doug’s paranoia after investigating a noise or personal possession going missing. The cycle repeats itself several times before any of the core six characters actually die at Vickers’ hands.
There are also FOUR separate occasions where one of the charaters has misplaced something and elects to go off alone to find it. The most far-fetched of these is possibly Julie going into the woods to look for her hairbrush which she couldn’t possibly have dropped in amongst the trees when she’d clearly not moved from pool up until that point. Then there’s Eric scouring the patio outside in the dark…for a toothbrush. It certainly felt like the film’s scripters were clutching at teeny-tiny straws when it came to writing feasible reasons for the characters to end up alone in places where Vickers might be able to get at them.
The acting is pretty poor too and makes Psycho Cop even more difficult to watch when the characters have no real personality and are impossible to invest in. The only cast members who appear to have gone on to bigger and better things are Cindy Guyer (Julie) and Robert R. Shafer himself, both of which had subsquent movie and TV appearances with Cindy Guyer finding further fame as a cover model for hundreds of romance novels.
Most of the group soon lose interest in the fact that somebody has constructed crucifix-like crosses in the woods…
All of this might have been forgiveable if the horror and action was up to par because let’s face it, a LOT of horror films have vacuous plots and questionable acting. Sadly, this is another major area in which Psycho Cop manages to disappoint. It takes far too long for Vickers to begin picking the group off and by the time the killing did start, I was bored of all the false scares and glimpses of Vickers’ hand or foot as he hid out of sight. The film is also surprisingly tame with a little gore and some brutal kills but nothing outrageous or particularly graphic compared to the likes of Nightmare on Elm Street for example. Swearing is at a minimum and there’s no nudity or sexy stuff to speak of which is also odd for an 80’s slasher film so if you’re looking for redemption in the form of boobs then prepare to be disappointed.
The star of the show and one redeeming factor is Robert R. Shafer’s titular cop himself. Robotic and sporting a wide-eyed, manic expression of glee when cornering a victim, he comes out with some awesome one-liners which are fantastic in their awfulness. He adds some much needed humour and a little presence to an otherwise extremely flat film. I’m not sure that Psycho Cop is worth watching for Shafer alone but the character of Vickers’ is entertaining nonetheless. It’s just a shame that the movie takes ages to get going and that Vickers has so little screen time next to a group of dumb teens who are not enjoyable to watch.
To conclude, I could only recommend Psycho Cop to a hardcore B-Movie fan who would watch anything within the genre, no matter how trashy or low budget. For everybody with not so wide-encompassing tolerances, I’d say don’t bother. There are no shortage of superior alternatives that were produced either side of 1989 and I’d include even the very worst and most far-fetched of the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th sequels (you know the ones) in that. Still preferable to Mamma Mia! though…
