![]() But the way the supporting cast (except for Nick, mostly) treat the girl with the chainsaw. I can handle how broken it is, how there’s some definite Japanese-take-on-American-culture oddity. Then there’s the real problem with the game. Admittedly, some of these are cool – ever killed a drum-soloing zombie Viking helmsman before? – but they end up outstaying their welcome almost universally. The levels each have a horror-film tribute somewhere within, and the action is kept moving along with plenty of quips and “what the dick?” moments – yes, that’s one of Juliet’s catchphrases – and each ends with a multi-stage boss fight. (You can increase the length of your playtime by trying to get A+ rankings on each of the sixish levels, or by competing against other players to rise up the game’s leaderboards, but really I can’t imagine anything more tedious: this is not a game with hidden post-completion depths.) They come across as filler, which is not exactly something you want in a game this short. It’s nice to see the usual mechanics – there’s not a lot of them, I must admit – being used in some different places, but a lot of the minigames have weird difficulty spikes in places, and some are outright painful. Mostly they’re a bit of a breeze, but the baseball one can go fuck itself. Oh, and there’s minigames to pad out the experience. The camera wants to show you walls rather than enemies, the aiming system snaps to anything except what you want to kill, and you have to buy decent fighting combinations with coins generated by stylish fighting, and the use of Sparkle Hunting, which makes as much sense as you’d imagine. It starts off pretty well, until you realise that the battling isn’t particularly great. What plays out over the course of maybe six hours is something a little like an ’80s teen horror in the form of Buffy The Vampire Slayer fanfic. Tie’s still not gonna impress her father, dude. All because people aren’t nice to him, or won’t listen to his poetry or don’t appreciate his cravat or whatever. Which is lucky, really, as it turns out that Swan, some Marilyn Manson-aping guy – seriously, he has fucking pentagrams on his gloves – has decided to fuck up the school and your life by opening a portal to another world and releasing hordes of zombies (and super boss zombies) into what appears to be a pretty typical Valley Girl existence. Of course, you’re also a zombie-hunter, as is the rest of your family, including your greaser dad and your two sisters. You’re Juliet, a cheerleader, and it’s your birthday. So it’s perhaps not 100-proof Suda51, but it’s right up there. With this game, the creator had to share: James Gunn, responsible for scripts for Tromeo and Juliet and, uh, Scooby-Doo (yes, yes, and some Guardians of the Galaxy stuff) was involved. Most of the time he’s diverting, creating the sort of games that engender a shake of the head with an Oh, Japan! comment, because playing his stuff is like being stuck in an idiosyncratic Engrish nightmare. This page details some of the tropes he likes to use, though I must admit I was surprised that nobody in this thing was a luchador. He’s known for games that are either brilliant or terrible (or both at once) such as Killer 7 or No More Heroes, but he’s also… well… a guy with fetishes. The game’s a Suda51 game, which probably tells you all you need to know. So of course I picked the Japanese-designed game where you’re a cheerleader who fights zombies with the aid of her boyfriend’s decapitated head. I had just finished playing the three Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games on PS3 in an attempt to catch up with a franchise I’m about 200 entries behind in – TLDR: surprisingly short, still look good even on last-gen hardware, still kind of shocking and completely popcorn in a large set-piece YEAH MAN kind of way that I’m vaguely embarrassed about – and I figured I needed something short and sweet to break up the testosterone.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |