Crap game of the day: Resident Evil - Gun Survivor

It seems ragingly appropriate to me that, seeing as how Resident Evil is one of my favourite ever games, that I'd get my knife out for this one. Not only am I getting my knife out, but I'm murdering this game in the senate house and leaving it to bleed to death. Gun Survivor is one of the most painful piles of crap I have ever been forced to play. Everything about this game is horrible; the graphics, the enemies, the gameplay, the story, the acting, the characters…there is nothing redeeming in this game. It’s just horrible. Lott and Lilly Klein, the token children-that-need-protecting of the piece, should both be shot and ground into powder. Ark Thompson, the guy you play, has the natural appeal of a shop mannequin with body odour problems. His voice sucks too. The shock is the way Ark Thompson is crowbarred into the story; Capcom never give us a dull or unimaginative story in Resident Evil, and yet in this game they relied on the awful cliché of the Secret Agent type waking up with no memory of his surroundings or who he was. Controlling the game is clunky and difficult, fighting off anything that moves faster than a slow motion athlete is challenging and your enemies are just really badly used. You get attacked by different Tyrants (boss characters from the previous Resident Evils, for those who don’t know) approximately every thirteen seconds, and dogs are painfully awkward to shoot. Oh yes, and the canny ‘auto aim’ boasted by the game only starts working when the enemy is right on top of you, which is really amazingly useful. Also, deaths are just crap. There’s an explosion of red which does not visibly damage them at all and they just drop to the ground before fading away. In most screen-shooters there is a sense of achievement; zombies explode beautifully in the House of the Deads, and in Time Crisis the physics is just insane, enemies flying off balconies and the like. Yet in Gun Survivor we drag our really fucking slow moving arses through each area, picking up ammo bonuses and extra health. Ammunition is one of the best contradictions of Gun Survivor; they put microscopic amounts of shotgun shells, bazooka ammo and other special types scarcely around the level, but because this is Gun Survivor and not any of the other games, the designers give you unlimited Beretta bullets to make the contradiction complete. The game also tries to do a full length Resi story, which I suppose is laudable, but you can’t do a story that long or complex in a game that gives you one life and which also happens to be a lightgun game, games in which it is somewhat easier to be constantly attacked in. A glowing review I read of it said it forces you to adapt to your surroundings, which is a ‘clever trick’. It certainly is a clever trick. Such a device forces you to work out where the enemies are going to be in ten minutes time, so you can start turning around in preparation for their arrival.

This guy enjoyed this game as much as I did, apparently

Yet, in the words of General C. H Melchett, the crowning turd in the waterpipe is not the insipid characters, the boring combat or the tedious controls. It is the non-existent save system which the manual enigmatically claims is ‘in the options screen’ but blatantly fucking isn’t. So yes, if you die later on in the game, you have to start the whole sodding game again – and you can’t skip the cut-scenes. So as well as being badly plotted the game is just not worth playing. There’s only one mode, and no co-op. Probably a good thing actually, since the poor bastard who would get lumbered with trying to play this game with the PSone controller would probably kill you for it.
Gun Survivor is bad, bad, bad. It is not surprising that in the lovely glossy Resident Evil ‘Umbrella Archives’ book, this particular Resident Evil adventure does not exist despite its supposed story contributions to the canon, ignored for inclusion just like Gaiden. The game remains what it is, an embarrassing failure for Capcom, and no amount of time passing has improved it any. Avoid.

The Top 10 Worst and Most Pointless Weapons in any FPS

1. Landmines (Dark Forces I & II)

The fundamental flaw of this otherwise great sounding weapon is that it explodes as soon as you put it down, making it less of a cunning tactical device and more a m

ethod of instant suicide. You may at this point wonder why a weapon such as this found its way into the brilliant Dark Forces II?

Presumably because they needed a shitty explosive weapon to headline alongside the really good railgun, and therefore ‘bring balance’ to the weapon list. Well, that’s my guess anyway.

2. GesBio Rifle (Unreal/Unreal Tournament)

   

You can forgive Unreal the Ripsaw and its chain-gun, since they underwent excellent modification for UT. However, a weapon standing at a consistent level of crapness throughout is the GesBio rifle, a launcher that fires globs of toxic waste at your foe. It damages you regardless of how you use it. If you use it while moving? Damage. If you hit someone at close-medium range? Damage. Long range? Well, if you can hit something from long range with what is essentially a glorified jelly launcher then I’d give you kudos.

3. Knife (Soldier of Fortune I & II)

A weapon that you will never use, basically. It does the job it is supposed to, but there is simply never any call to use the damned thing. The pistol does all the work you need to in the opening levels, and after that you just stick with the other various weapons o’ destruction. The knife is always supplied, but rarely used. Rather like the knife in Wolfenstein 3D, but with marginally better physics.

4. Absolutely everything (Ken's Labyrinth)

   

An obscure entry, I will agree, but I don't recall ever playing an FPS with such a painfully useless arsenal. Your main weapon was a tomato thing (pictured above) that had a range of...ooohh...six feet at least. Other than being horrifyingly bad, this game also presented its players with a huge selection of crappy weapons. Fortunately I was not able to play the game much because I hated it so much, but its weapons were dull, lifeless and should never be replicated.

5. M.U.L.E Launcher (Gunman Chronicles)

‘It has’ the developers gushed when they were marketing their new Half Life engine based game, and came to talk about the MULE ‘Over 30 different configurations! It can fire proximity, heat-seeker or dumb-fire, you can choose its range, impact and number of rockets release, and many more!’ It sounded great at E3. Which makes it something of a surprise that this ‘wonder launcher’ is utterly hopeless in combat. Realistically, can you be bothered to take the time to test more than two different combinations? Or go through the six or seven status screens to set up your perfect config when you’re in the heat of battle? No, you can’t. The MULE is therefore an utterly pointless weapon in that it completely fails to make its use easy and essential. It doesn’t help that the thing looks like a hammerhead shark that has been repeatedly banged against the wall.

6. Riot Gun (System Shock)

This cheerfully useless weapon is often celebrated in System Shock communities because of the extremely low level of damage it inflicts, juxtaposed with its rather confounding location - near the end of the game. The concept of accumulating a huge and powerful arsenal and defeating increasingly tough bad guys before you find the videogame equivalent of an inflatable hammer waiting for you on the floor is a staggeringly funny one to behold.

7. Lightning Gun (Unreal Tournament 2K3+4)

I am unable to explain the decision of Epic Games to replace the fantastic sniper rifle with the lightning gun in Unreal Tournament 2003, but suffice to say they reintegrated the sniper rifle in the 2004 edition when they realised just how horrifyingly bad the lightning gun is as a sniping weapon. It has a zoom, yes – but that doesn’t matter. No, because its technology is so far ahead of its time, it doesn’t have to worry about those trifling little things such as ‘accuracy’. The reason the sniper rifle was good was because it required skill to hit, and when it did hit, it was deadly accurate. The lightning gun sort of fires vaguely in the direction of who it is you aimed at. It’s blindingly unsatisfying to use and its fire rate is extremely erratic, as if the gun keeps running out of batteries or something. I’ve had more fun games when all you have are GesBio rifles. Come to think of it, I think there are more fun tracheotomy operations than there are Lightning Gun games. A truly horrendous weapon.

8. Nuclear Fusion Cannon (Turok: Dinosaur Hunter)

‘But this weapon is amazing!’ I hear you cry ‘It’s so destructive!’ Indeed it is destructive - and then bloody some. The concept of a weapon that fires a nuclear blast is a brilliant, but immediately impractical one. The weapon takes maybe ten seconds of charge time before it fires a glowing red projectile into your chosen target. The resulting explosion decimates everything in its path, and that does include the person who fired it. The problem with such a weapon is that firing in an enclosed or reduced space means an instant fiery death for the user of the weapon. Therefore this means in order to get one satisfying shot out of the gun, you have to have an open area of map roughly the same size as Woking. I think my point is made.

9. Pepper Spray (Deus Ex)

In a game where there are high-tech mercenaries with infra-red, heat-detecting, night-vision visors, gas masks and huge automated gun platforms walk around the streets looking for trouble, you also have large quantities of pepper spray available to you. Yes, the same stuff teenage girls are given to spray in the eyes of molesters. Maybe it will have use with a few civilians, but the result of a soldier with his crowd-dispersing assault rifle aiming to shoot at your fragile skull while you charge him with your can of pepper spray is a somewhat predictable one.

10. Cow Launcher (South Park: The Game)

This heinous weapon is just appalling on every level. It breaks every rule of shooter weaponry and not in a good way; it is hideously powerful and extremely easy to hit your target, it is based on a joke that is funny for about thirty seconds, but which ends up being repeated four hundred billion times for the rest of the match and you can pretty much use it on anyone anywhere on the map with no effort. It completely obliterates the need for any of the other weapons in deathmatch. The only reason it cannot always be used in single-player is that the endlessly re-spawning chickens cannot be attacked that frequently with it. The premise of the weapon is that it launches a cow, which lands on you with your head up its arse. It reduces your health quickly, and then you die. It sounds amusing for a while, but I’m fairly certain that cannibalism is also amusing for a while. Frenetic death-match games with such a weapon suck beyond every definition of the word. A weapon that frankly should never have been invented. Like the game, in that regard.

Just a welcome...

The least impressive thing you've ever seen - me in the flesh


Here's where I write stuff about games I think or just enjoy writing about. That's pretty much my intro, really. This is where I'll post random retro reviews, Top 10s for fun and just stuff I enjoy writing about that largely relates to games. So this is my beginning. Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

And trust me, my posts will be funnier than this one.