December 2002 Archives

From its inception, this was supposed to be a different game. Rare unveiled Dinosaur Planet, which was a really compelling looking game, for the N64. Then the N64 began to decline (read: dropped like a hot potato) when the next gen consoles began making their debut, and the GameCube (aka Project Dolphin) really took the wind out of designer's sails. Somewhere between making the transition from N64 game to GC game, the Big N told Rare to make this a Starfox game.

I can see the poor toady who had to suck up this decision, throwing months of creative work into the crapper just to make the switch to Starfox. Starfox, which at best has recognizable characters, really didn't seem like a good pot to fish likeable 3D platformer characters out of. And indeed, it ain't. At least, not in this particular outing.

The plot: Times have gotten tough aboard the Great Fox, the main mothership of Team Starfox. Essentially, now that Andross has been defeated twice, there's no more villainy in the Lylat system to root out, meaning that nobody wants to pay mercenaries. Falco Lombardi even left the team to pursue other interests, leaving Fox McCloud, Slippy Toad, and Peppy Hare (who is not looking peppy these days, I'm thinking poor ol' Peppy might be due for that big hutch in the sky) to idly putter about in their ship. Suddenly, General Pepper calls, and says that there's work to do on Dinosaur Planet, a remote world that's threatening to blow up. Ordinarily, this would probably not be a major concern, but if this planet blew up, it might destabilize the other planets. Or some junk. General Pepper promises to pay the Starfox Team, and so, with that heroic aim, the main character arrives.

Oh, right, I forgot. Meanwhile on Dinosaur Planet, a blue vixen (female fox, look it up) on a pterodactyl squares off against a dinosaur named General Scales. She drops her staff in the fight, but manages to escape unharmed, promising that they'd fight again. She then goes to the Krazoa palace, which is sacred to the dinosaurs (except, I guess, for General Scales, because he raided the place), puts back one of the 7 guardian spirits, and is trapped in a sorta neat CGI sequence.. I mean, in some sort of energy field thing. That's the last you see of her for most of the game, so pretend as if it's not really that important, because it isn't. Obviously, she is your main love interest, being the only other female mammal on all of dinosaur planet, and conveniently of the same species. How 'bout them odds?

Back to Fox. He lands, is told by General Pepper that he can't bring along his blaster, but, surprise surprise, finds Krystal (the blue fox, sorry about that, forgot to introduce her)'s staff. Essentially, you're informed that General Scales has indeed defiled the Krazoa temple, so you need to find all of those and put them back, and get the four element stones back to the force point temples to keep the magical energy of Dinosaur Planet from tearing the place apart. There's also the matter of young Prince Tricky of the Earthwalker Tribe, who you need to rescue and then need to resist throwing into a meat grinder for the rest of the game.

The gameplay: Linear. Every thing, and I mean EVERYTHING in the game is a scripted line. Whenever you get to a place, Peppy tells you where to go. Whenever you pick up a new item, or learn a new move, it's simply to get you into an area you haven't been able to go. However, unlike in other platformers, you don't need these moves to get a few jiggies. Oh, no, you need these moves to advance the plot. At one point in the game, you return from a mission to see a mother stegosaur fretting that egg robbers are stealing her babies. If you ignore her, nothing happens, but you can't open the glowing doors which you are informed are important. So, you go back, and, surprise, she's still having egg robber problems. Once you wipe out all the little critters, she lets you into a staff upgrade cave that gives you, big shock, the open-doors power. You can't do ANYTHING out of sequence, because that's not how the game was designed. At best, this game should have been called "Starfox List of Things to do in Order" and not Starfox Adventure.

That's my biggest gripe with Starfox. There's nothing to it, and the 18 hours of game play are all because of the trudging you need to do. You're never stuck figuring out a puzzle, it's just an exersize in getting to the place you need to be. There's plenty to do along the way, but there's hardly any reason to care except for the fact that you can't progress unless you do whatever insulting task they want you to do. At one point, you return to the earthwalker tribe to find out that somebody has put out all their torches, and they're all afraid. "Well, that's too damn bad; if they want some light, I can get in my Arwing and shoot down a few trees," you think. But no, you have to help them. Incidently, you can now use the Fireweed Tree in the village square - hmmm, that's not suspiciously a CLUE or anything, is it? Once you solve the stupid problem, they give you a key so you can get to another new area. Why did they not give this to you earlier? What, was your goal of saving their whole damn planet not good enough? "Well, yeah, that's good and all.. but if you'd, like, light some torches and save some babies, that's like, really good, and we'll give you the key that lets you save the planet."

The only saving grace to all of this is that you can hit the earthwalkers with your staff over and over again, and they make a delightful groan and writhe convincingly. It hardly makes up for the indignity you suffer, but it helps.

Let's talk about moves. Fox doesn't learn any. Not a one. He does get staff upgrades, however, and these, plus Tricky, are how he does most of his stuff. The staff upgrades aren't useful for anything but solving puzzles; you can use your staff to shoot at bad guys, but most of the time, you'll be shooting switches with it. Tricky is useful only to solve puzzles; he can dig, breathe fire, and stand on switches, so that's pretty much all he'll ever do for you. Fox gets new items throughout the game, but unlike, say, the useful items in Majora's Mask, these items, you guessed it, have specific uses to solve puzzles. Moon seeds? Puzzle. Bomb spores? Puzzle. Mammoth horn? Puzzle. There's not a SINGLE item in the game that doesn't have an obvious "Use this here" spot. You can't even use them if you're not in the right spot. Why they even bother letting you assign them to a button is beyond me; if it's just an exersize in having Fox do something once he gets to a specific area, just have him automatically do it. Don't waste my time.

I've mentioned that Fox doesn't get to use his gun. Yet there are enemies for Fox to fight. So what does he do? He beats him with his staff (tee hee!). A lot. A crazy lot. You can do combos with the staff, but it's really not that important; once you land the first hit (which can be really hard, monsters block a lot, and it's pretty much a matter of timing that first hit to smack them when they drop their guard to attack), you can automatically land another one, and so you simply rapid fire out staff beatings until they drop, then beat them while they're on the ground some more. The result is a festival of beatings that make me think that Fox still has some serious issues with the loss of his dad. Two things take away from this honest, simple fun: It's boring, and it's too damn simple.

The latter I'll mention first. Starfox Adventures cribs Z-targeting completely from Zelda. That's fine, it worked then, but in Zelda, monsters will attack you even if you've not targeted them. This is not the case with Starfox; monsters will very patiently wait their turn until you kill their buddies and focus on them. If you linger for like 10 seconds next to a stray monster, it will hit you, but I think that's mostly out of impatience rather than any aggression towards you. "Please, Mr. McCloud, if you're not in too much of a hurry, I have theater tickets at 7, and I do need to get on to the business of being bludgeoned by you painfully." So you literally have time to spare while killing monsters. Add into this your shield - Fox can, at any time and for however long he likes, make a force shield around himself with Krystal's staff. So you can just sit there and ignore damage. You can, if you like, roll around and avoid attacks, but why bother?

Combat got so boring that I was regularly putting the staff away so as not to Z-target the nearest monster, which makes running by them very difficult. Since, barring the occasional door which won't open until you kill everything in a room, there's no reason to get into fights, so I didn't. Enemies were varied enough in Zelda that it was worth killing them, and they dropped stuff you could use. The only thing, barring one monster type which only drops one item of its own, monsters drop upon death is healing nuts, which you don't need because they're in EVERY DAMN CRATE IN THE GAME! AND THE CRATES RESPAWN!

Starfox Adventures also hosts the most godawful puzzles in the genre. What kind of puzzles do you not like? Box stacking? Check, but those aren't that bad. Box pushing? Big check there, but they're simply boring. Races? Check, and I'm sorry to say that they're one of the more fun puzzles. No, my friend, this offense against puzzle kind should send chills down your spine worse than any of those. I am talking about button mashing. Yes, twice in the game, you are forced to whale on your A button as fast as you can. You also have to do that for the final boss fight, but that's a different story. Get a turbo controller if you entertain any idea of playing this game. Trust me, you're not missing out at all by not sitting there like a monkey on ritalin, slapping your thumb meat raw onto your controller. An equally mindless - but well done - puzzle was the Test of Fear, where you have to jerk the controller left and right and keep a slider within a narrow box; it was difficult, annoying, and frustrating, but the effect was good.

The aesthetics: There's not a scene in the game that isn't lushly designed. Dinosaur Planet is a tropical paradise, except for those parts that are either snowy or lava-y, so expect lots of plants. Fox himself is really nicely done, and Rare outdid themselves with facial expressions here; Fox really yaps his muzzle off, and the sheer amount of contempt he shows on his face sums up perfectly most of the crap he gets handed to do. So that's very nice, and Rare did well on that score.

The voice acting is over the top, and generally, that's a good thing. Fox, however, sounds like a whiny teenager, which is in itself amusing, but hardly the dashing furry captain who avenged his father's death ten years ago. So it's a funny voice, and his whiny attitude is fairly Luke-esque (Luke from Star Wars), but unbelievable for the character. By far, my favorite voice is from the shop keeper. Her (?) barely restrained rage when you pick up something you can't afford is priceless. "Put that DOWN! You haven't got enough SCARABS!" complete with claws clenched into fists.

There's no way you'd enjoy hearing from Prince Tricky as much as you have to, so any voice would have worked for him. Essentially, he talks way too much, and it's always inappropriate. Every time you kill something, it's "Oooo" and "Yeah!", which gets tireseome really quickly. Tricky is otherwise an okay little sidekick, but there should be a "mute" command for him. Talking a lot doesn't give him any personality.

The music is inherently forgettable, and I can't remember any of the tunes. Sound effects are good, although you hear "whop" so much from hitting dinosaurs that I wonder if they could have done better with any other weapon, instead. Nothing particularly notable from the sound department, except for the Krazoa spirits themselves, who all sound nice and ethereal.

I can't leave this out: Who the hell thought it was a neat idea to have "dinosaur language" be nothing but scrambled english? And then not scramble proper nouns? The opening dialogue was just awful! "Oo oo ahh ahh pahoy hoy walla bing bang Dinosaur Planet?" "Fnord poit egad narf General Scales!" I kid you not, it's really that bad. It would be one thing if it was just written down, but the poor voice actors really had to say all that. Thankfully, they retire the effect VERY soon into the game as if almost to say, "we're sorry," but then they included the instructions on how to speak this way in the manual. Hey, parents, if your children are simpering idiots who have nothing better to do than learn how to speak a language more stupid than pig Latin, please take them out and get them neutered or spayed.

And yes, dinosaurs do call their planet Dinosaur Planet. From now on, I live on Human Planet. Suck it, bacteria, you've had this place for the last 3.8 billion years, but now we're taking over! I wonder if anybody told the dinosaurs that earth used to have those, too, but not so much anymore. Are we Former Dinosaur Planet? Less Dinosaurs Then Advertised Planet? Fossil Dinosaur Planet?

Major Beef: I have two major beefs, one's a spoiler, and one's not, so I'll put them in order of non-spoiler to spoiler.

Non-spoiler: Now, I realize that this was never intended to have Fox in it. So I will forgive them certain howling problems like Fox's blaster. I mean, sure, he's a starfighter pilot, a rogue ace mercenary, what have you; he's still out representing.. well, whatever group General Pepper is the general of. But after the first dinosaur twice your size bites your furry ass, I'd call Pepper back and say, "Hey, bowser, look. Look at the big hunk of me-meat that T-rex bit out of me. Now, I don't know what you're being taught in Starfleet or whatever the hell group you're a part of, but I'm thinking about screwing the Prime Directive and going and bagging me some wall hangings."

What I can't forgive is the gross misuse of the Arwing. Essentially, having the Arwing is just an annoyance; the only use out of it is going into space, flying through gold hoops and landing somewhere new. Now, I realize that Starfox has always been about flying through gold hoops and shooting down space ships and what not, and certainly such elements belonged here. However, Fox has to fly through these gold rings to land on Dinosaur Planet. Why? What difference would it make if he didn't? Furthermore, how did all these gold rings and spaceships get up into space to begin with? Did the dinosaurs put them up there? Folks, these dinosaurs haven't even discovered workable underroos yet, let alone build spaceships just to put gold rings in space for you to fly through. Yet, every time you fly to a new location, you have to fly through gold rings.

Now, couple that with the fact that Fox clearly forgets about the Arwing in later missions. At one point, you have to rescue a bunch of dinosaur prisoners, and for NO DAMN REASON, suicide bomber droids hurl themselves at you and your giant sized dino buddy. Now, Fox, let's think a moment, shall we? You fly a what now? And that thing you fly, what is it armed with? Would you say that the thing that you fly, with all of its weapons is better, or worse equipped to shoot down swarms of robots than you and your staff are? Yet, the Arwing sits, gently parked, with no orders to shoot at anything. It comes up several times in the game; you have to learn a new move to take down some giant T-rexes (Oh, sorry, "Red-Eyes"), you have to learn a new move to climb your way up to the tops of locations - hey, here's an idea, why not FLY OVER THINGS AND SHOOT THEM? Answer: Because the designers never intended you to have an Arwing, and clearly had no intention of implementing it once Fox was added into the cast.

Spoiler (but hardly one at that): The final boss is Andross. Oh, gasp, no, I've spoiled it! Except that it's always been Andross. Beyond Wario and Wart, the only enemies Mario has ever had have been Donkey Kong and Bowser, and Kong seems to be on good terms with Mario these days. So me telling you that the final boss is Andross should come as no big surprise� except that General Scales has been advertised as the nemesis the whole damn time.

Think about it: General Scales caused all the trouble. He's the one who let out all the Krazoa spirits, he's the one who took all the Force Stones, he's the one who kidnapped all the Earthwalker tribe (or, at least the ones with half a brain), he imprisoned the Cloudrunner queen, he beat you up, he's your big fear in the Test of Fear, and he's the only bad guy even mentioned in the damn game. So, logically, you'd expect, oh, I dunno, to fight him. Even maybe a little? Perhaps a sharp rap on the knuckles and a scolding? Nothing. Andross just kills him. There's a little death door in the room with General Scales, and once he's done talking to you, he flops over and the death door opens up. Meaning that you don't even get to hit the guy once or twice, which is a real shame, because it's what you're geared up to do.

The only power up you pick up that helps you at all in space are the number of hearts you have, and you get those for free every time you beat a boss. So all the staff upgrades, all the collectibles, all the everything have no bearing in space. The boss fights, up until Andross, were neat AND you fought them on land. However, for the final boss, you have to go into space and shoot rocks until Andross dies. This isn't an ending, this is a cop out!

For those of you who I spoiled the ending for, I'm sorry. However, for those of you who were looking for an actual ending, and not some, "Well, it fits the liscence, so let's cram Andross in there somehow" kludge job, I'm HONESTLY sorry. You get no satisfaction in shooting up Andross because he's just a goofy boss. Incidently, why would Andross, who needed the Krazoa spirits to revive himself, want General Scales to mess with those same Krazoa spirits, thereby preventing Andross from joining them and using their power? Wouldn't it have been much better to leave the Krozoa in their palace and just glom onto them? Essentially, Andross has to get a minion to break the planet to the point where Fox has to come back and fix the planet, and in the process, revive Andross. So our villain subcontracted a villain and at the same time requires the service of a hero. For shame, Andross. I can see the big bodiless monkey head sitting in Video Game Bad Guy Hell, being openly laughed at:

Dr. Robotnik: Zo, it's zee big, bad Andross. Nice work on Dinozaur Planet, you got your revenge, for what, thirty, fourty seconds, topz?
Andross: Shut up! It's not like that! I had to get all the mystical energy into place before I made my triumphant return, that's all!
Dr. Wily: Tell me about your grand plan of making sure Krystal wouldn't be the one who rescued all the Krazoa spirits, thus ensuring that Fox was there, with his star ship, at the very moment of your ressurection.
Andross: Oh, yeah, like you're so hot, you keep giving Mega Man all the powers he needs to defeat you.
Dr. Wily: Perhaps, but at least I make sure that I keep my vulnerable ass as far away from Mega Man as possible when I announce my grand plan of world domination, instead of floating there like a pinata right in his crosshairs.
Bowser: I'm waaay too good to be in this crowd, any minute now, I'll just be called up to do another Mario game. Bots, Wily, catch you next time, alright? Monkey-face, next time I'm here, I don't even want to see you. Just pack up your giant space head and slink off.
Andross: (muttering to himself) I'm a cool floating space monkey head, I don't need them. I'll so totally suck rocks in and spit them out, it's not even funny. Plus, I can do that eating thing... next time, Fox, I'm going to come up with a different sub-bad guy and so totally whomp on you.

Incidently, I'm very glad that General Scales was promoted up the ranks of the Dinosaur Army. Private Scales sounds like a STD.

Final thoughts: Rent. It's a beautiful game, and you'll probably enjoy it ONE time. That is if you're not annoyed by the Test of Strength, Test of Fear, dull combat, tepid plot and easy puzzles to the point where you quit before getting the pathetic ending. If you want a game that can show you what the GameCube is capable of, definitely check it out; the fur modeling on Fox is really nicely done. If, however, you want a game that can show you what Rare is capable of, or indeed, what platformers are capable of, avoid this. Get Banjo-Kazooie or Rocket: Robot on Wheels for the N64.

Rocket: Robot on Wheels is a really innovative gimmick platformer. Rocket, the robot, has two things going for it that all other platformers after it have yet to duplicate � it can pick up nearly every object in the game (including enemies) and manipulate them, and Rocket is on a single wheel. The former makes puzzles a lot of fun, because they're more innovative than "Go here, touch that sprite, come back and drop off the sprite" (standard fare in most of Rare's games) � you literally have to carry the sprite, throw it over obstacles if need be, and dodge enemies which will steal the item you're carrying. The latter is fun because, being a wheeled character, you don't exactly stop when you stop pushing the control stick. Rocket gradually rolls to a halt, and if he's on a slope, it takes a lot longer. This takes getting used to, much the same way that the generic ice levels that all platformers since Super Mario Bros. 2 have invoked, except it's a lot more subtle than "Snow makes things slippery."

Incidently, and this is a pet peeve of mine, why is it that every platformer makes the mistake in snow levels that jumping around is more effective than running on ice? Have you ever tried to jump on ice? I did that once, and landed squarely on my ass. Ever since Mario, jumping around on ice has been the main thing that keeps you from falling off of the sheer cliffs that ice levels always seem to hang out around.

There's probably a very good reason you've never heard of Rocket. He's one of the most flavorless mascots around. He doesn't talk, he's not particularly cute (basically, he's a football helmet, a torso, and a wheel), and he doesn't have any real hope for a spin off racing title, golf game, tetris clone, or the like (no, I'm not a Mario hate-ah, I'm just a little tired of spin-offitis, and Mario's the biggest whore of those). In fact, barring this review, I doubt you'll ever hear of him again, unless you pick up the cart, which I imagine is a cheap endeavor by now.

The plot: Rocket is the robot assistant of some sci-fi Walt Disney, who is opening a walrus-mascot theme park tomorrow. "Wally World" and its lazy, slob of a walrus, is apparently all the rage. However, the walrus has a sidekick named Jojo the Racoon, who is jealous of Wally, and as soon as the professor leaves, Jojo clonks Rocket on the head, steals Wally, and attempts to recreate Wallyworld into Jojoworld. Your job, fix the place and stop Jojo before the professor returns.

Ok, yeah, that's a pretty lame plot. It's also a bit of a problem for Rocket. You see, he's not the mascot. He's not even the mascot's sidekick. Rocket is the fixit droid for the guy who made the mascot's theme park. Luigi is the mascot's sidekick. Tails is the mascot's sidekick. Both Luigi and Tails have some small bit of notariety because they're at least the poor, underused flunky that the mascot can call on. But poor Rocket is so far out of the pecking order, I'd be surprised if, barring this Jojo incident, he'd even be allowed out in public at the grand opening of Wally World tomorrow. So you can understand why Rocket would jump at the task to take on a greater role. He's the Toad of Wally World, forever doomed in a supporting role, forever hoping for the spotlight. No more will he be satisfied with, "Thank you for rescuing me! But our princess is in another castle!"

Wally World, of course, is the hub area, and you can more or less travel all over it from the beginning of the game. You can't get into the rides (aka, the "lands") until you collect enough tickets for the repair guy (I forgot his name, but it's really not that important) to open up the ride for you. So really, it's a matter of collecting tickets, opening up new areas, and collecting more tickets � pretty standard platform stuff.

The gameplay: Rocket only ever gets a few abilities in the game, and so once you get used to him, there's no major shifts to how he behaves (he never learns how to fly, he never transforms himself into a battlemech, etc. etc.), just marginal improvements to what he's already got. Samus never got really big improvements either; Rocket is much the same way. He learns a double jump, gets a longer grapple beam, get a short range ice ray, and learns how to slam whatever he's carrying into the ground, which is the only way you can defeat enemies. So clearly, the game is not about turning Rocket into an enemy thrashing hellspawn.

Actually, that's really the main difference between Rocket and any other platformer I've encountered. There's only a very few enemies in the entire game, and you can pretty much kill all of them without any trouble. The game is not about fighting, its more about using what you've got and figuring out puzzles. You get no reward for fighting (there are no tickets guarded by bosses) beyond energy, which you lose when they hit you only if it's a type of monster that can even cause you harm. Some enemies simply block you or interfere with your efforts, but otherwise have no offensive capabilities. That takes about as much getting used to as Rocket's movement. Let me stress this point: There are no boss fights. No cinematics where the boss taunts you, no bombastic fight music, no glorious death sequence for your defeated foe. None of the stages have a boss at all.

Of course, the game does have to adhere to some platformer standards. Rocket has to pick up tickets to open new worlds, and repair tokens to learn new abilities. You also get a ticket for getting all the repair tokens per world. Think of them as stars and coins, and you'll get the gist perfectly. Rocket also has to find parts of the main level theme, something that Jojo broke. Once you get all the parts together, a portion of the level is activated, and you get a ticket. The tickets are awarded to you for performing various tasks, and this is where the game really outshines the competition � you generally have to think your way through puzzles more than you have to jump and race for them (not to say that there aren't jumping and racing puzzles, but they're the minority). Let me give you two examples.

The first world you get to is a Boardwalk Carnival world. There's a beach, which has a sand buggy race on it, and the boardwalk itself, which has midway games (mostly tests of your throwing skill) and a few carnival like attractions (the very bizarre house of bees and a robot dinosaur). However, the most fun puzzle in the level is designing your own roller coaster. You have to build a roller coaster which will carry Rocket through 5 checkpoints. If you get them all, you get the ticket for that puzzle. Like any roller coaster, you have some options whether to build up, down, make a speed up corkscrew or a plain flat track, and the previous pieces have a lot of bearing on the next piece. Corkscrews are longer than flat tracks, and typically force you to build down after you place one, but you need to place these in order to reach checkpoints that are otherwise unaccessible. It's very clever, and it's quite enjoyable to ride around in, plus, you were actually encouraged to add something to the stage, as opposed to just blowing through, picking up the goodies you need to take, and leaving the rest of the world as the designer saw fit to make it for you.

The other example I have for you is from the Roman World. Yes, part of Wally World is set in ancient Rome, complete with plaster Centurion Wally statues. You even get to ride in a hover chariot. Most of the stages in Rocket have some sort of vehicle associated with it; the Hover Chariot is by far the most amusing because it can throw paint. So you can fly around the stage and paint all the Wally statues whatever color you like. There are several puzzles associated with this ability, but by far and large, the most fun is painting the stage random colors. The most intricate puzzle on the stage is painting yourself. One of the tickets is guarded by a centurion robot who has an orange shirt and a green kilt. In order to get past him, he has to think you're one of his legion. There are pools of paint nearby, and you can either wade in the entire way, or just soak your bottom half. In order to solve the puzzle, Rocket has to paint himself matching colors from the blue, yellow, red, and green pools. Notice how I didn't say orange. Also, you can't just paint your top half, you have to paint yourself entirely or just the bottom half. You can clean the paint off of yourself from another pool. I won't spoil the rest of it, just realize that the puzzle is one of experimentation. Plus, if you like, after you solve the puzzle, you can paint Rocket whatever color you like and run around like that for the rest of the stage.

Rocket has some of the most cleverly themed stages, and it's all in large part due to the fact that, being a theme park, the stages can be entirely unreal. I've mentioned the Boardwalk and Roman world; there's a mine shaft, a horror candy-land, an Arabian magic carpet setting, a cloud world, and a few others. You don't get any generic grasslands or deserts here.

If the game has a weakness, it's in Rocket's handling. The tasks themselves would be clever but simple if Mario was doing them, but Mario is far more agile than Rocket. Rocket's sort of gimpy. He's got a rather poor jump, he accelerates too fast to negotiate the tight corners he sometimes has to, and the rolling can really be frustrating when you've spent so much effort to get Rocket to where he needs to be, just to have him clumsily slip off thanks to gravity. It's not a fatal flaw; it was purposefully designed into Rocket, but if you find yourself screaming at Mario for being a clumsy dumbass, be warned, Rocket is a lot harder on you to control.

Using Rocket's grapple beam is also a little touchy; there are several times where you have to grab on to floating pegs and swing to the next peg. Mercifully, Rocket automatically orients in the direction of the next hand hold, so you'll never miss the direction that Rocket needs to swing in. What you will miss is the button that lets go of the previous peg and catches on to the next � Rocket's grapple beam has a recharge time, and if you let go too late, you won't be able to grab the next page before you fly past it. If you let go too early, you won't have enough momentum to carry you close enough to the next page to grab it. It's frustrating, and I can't beat the last stage of the game because it relies on these abilities entirely too much, and it's often the only thing that gets poor Rocket killed.

The aesthetics: A weakness of the game that probably drove most people away from it are its graphics. Rocket himself is fairly well done, and the worlds are nice, but the graphics are generally flat. Boulders look like rough hewn polygons, even though they move very realistically, and tumble against each other convincingly enough. The worlds are bright and eye-pleasing enough, but if you soil yourself over gorgeous water ripples and shadowing effects, you're in for a bitter disappointment; this game hardly bothers with special effects. Essentially, the graphics are serviceable, but not impressive.

The sound is, more or less, the same way. The ham and eggs keyboard synth gets a little overused, and the music, while peppy enough, becomes white noise because there's so little variety in it. Rocket makes enough noise, and his "Yeowch!" sound effect sounds convincing enough when he gets nailed by something, but nobody else in the game makes a lot of noise. Jojo just has a cackling chitter, the repair robot that gives Rocket new abilities simply says, "Hmm?" and the professor type guy has a "Hmm!" of his own. Rocket doesn't otherwise interact with anybody else in the game. By the time you're done with a level, you're more or less done looking at and listening to it as much as you are done picking up all the tickets.

Blast Corps is really about one thing - driving vehicles through cities and suburbs, and laying waste to them. Obstensibly, it all has a purpose, but forget all that for right now. You drive vehicles into buildings until they fall over, then do it some more. The entire game is about that. Big explosions? Check. Sound effects of things crunching? Check. If you're a guy, and I know I am, this should appeal to the lizard part of your brain. You know, the part that likes jokes about testicles and laughs whenever you see a cat falling off of something on America's Funniest Home Videos? It's been scientifically determined, and by that, I mean I just made this up, that the lizard part of your brain hails back to our puniest brained ancestors, who, when they first started walking on land, liked exploding stuff. Today, modern man must struggle to suppress these urges and build up a utopian society, all the while wondering exactly how cool it'd be if all the stuff in the world blew up with lots of fire. This is probably the reason that we don't have peace in our time, and it's probably the reason Blast Corps got made.

The plot: A transporter truck carrying a bunch of nukes goes haywire, and just starts driving around randomly. Apparently, these things aren't manned, so if you see a truck carrying nukes passing down your street, just jump right into the driver's seat and direct it wherever you want it to go. Failing that, you should get a bulldozer and crush everything around it, just to make sure that the truck, with its precious cargo, doesn't bump into a trailer park and detonate. This, apparently, is such a high profile duty that a freelance organization of professional drivers-into-things was hired to crush everything in the nuke truck's path. You do that. A lot.

Silly? Yes. Glaring holes in the plot? No doubt. And yet, there it is, the plot of Blast Corps. Your mission is to get into different vehicles, of increasing difficulty to use, and crush crap before the nuke truck hits them. If the truck hits anything at all, it goes kaboom. If you hit the truck, it goes kaboom. If, in the later stages, you don't make sure the truck has a track to drive on, it goes kaboom. Think of it like tetris. If too much stuff gets in the way, you lose. Except that you get to gratuitously crush the blocks, not just dump other wimpy blocks nearby it until they all blink into nonexistence.

Along the way, you acquire new vehicles, unlock tracks, and find 6 scientists stashed in the levels. Once you beat all the levels AND find all the scientists, the truck can safely be lured to an unpopulated area and be blown up. Of course, fat lot of good that does, considering all the cities you had to level just to let the truck drive to the middle of some desolate salt flats and go kaboom. You should have just let it kill everybody around the first farm it got to and call it an acceptable loss. You literally do trillions of dollars worth of damage (there's even a $ total of stuff broken) in your noble quest to let a small nuclear payload kill less people. And you know what? I couldn't be more happy with that.

The gameplay: Do you need another reminder? You drive vehicles. Into buildings. Thereby crushing them. Sheesh, people, what do you want? The game plays exactly like that. Let you think that would get boring, each level (there are several) varies both in the toughness of the buildings, the vehicles you are allowed to use, and the speed of the nuke truck. The main levels supply all the vehicles you get access to; the first levels let you use the bulldozer, which is the most straightforward (read: effective) vehicle in the game. Later, you get a dump truck, a gigantic flying mech, a small acrobatic mech, a mech with a giant metal fist, a tricycle that shoots missiles, a transport truck with extendable side panels, a dune buggy with a turbo boost, and lots of normal cars to do the race tracks with. With the exception of the flying mech, the other vehicles range from "tough to control" to "dear God, why can't they just me use the damn bulldozer" - which is the whole part of the fun.

The game is one of strategy and skill; you need to crush the buildings in the most effective way possible, but each vehicle takes a lot of skill (read: steep learning curve) to use efficiently. The dump truck, which is the plague of your later missions, only crushes buildings when you skid turn your truck into it. Basically, you have to skid yourself so that the sides of your vehicle hit the building; if you hit it with the front, you'll do very minimal damage. The acrobat mech only damages buildings when you execute a somersault into them; if you hit a building before you start flipping and tumbling, you'll be knocked out of your flip and have to do it again from futher away. The tricycle shoots more accurately if you hold perfectly still, but the tracks its required on are often the most time-sensitive, meaning you'll never have the time to sit around and line up your shots. And the dune buggy only damages things if it lands on them, meaning you have to leap off of cliffs and ruts to get airborne.

To make the game even more difficult, there are very often puzzles that go with the wrecking of stuff. In some tracks, you need to park your vehicle on a crane, get out, go to the crane controls, move the vehicle over something, get out of the crane, walk your guy over a footpath, get into your vehicle, and go crush stuff before the truck hits them. The timing of the truck is very tight; if you dally too long figuring out what it is you need to do, you'll often never be able to make up for lost time. Fortunately, replaying missions is both satisfying and simple to do, even if the solution is not simple at all.

Once you've played the mission successfully, the truck is gone, but you can go back and level the rest of the town. You know, for good measure, in case the truck decides to come back. This is both the most satisfying part of the game, and the most pointless. You get a gold medal for completing the mission, hoorah, hoorah. You also get a second medal for completely wiping out an area. Essentially, this is the first hint of things to come from Rare; you need to do EVERYTHING on a level to get that second gold medal. Crushing the buildings is fun, and apart from a few of 'em in hiding, you get that done relatively quickly and with a lot of enjoyment. Rescuing the civvies is easily done; if you batter down part of a building, and it has people in it, they scamper out and yell, "Help help!" until a chopper comes by and picks them up. Of course, when you do this AFTER the nuclear truck problem has already been solved, then perhaps they're running from the rampage that YOU are creating. Given that the civvies tend to run and yell "Help help!" whenever you approach them, I'm thinking that you're a bigger menace than the stupid truck.

The weakness from this are the RDUs - Radiation Dispersal Units. Essentially, they're little beacons that light up and go "Whom" when you drive close enough to them. There's a hundred in every level, and in almost every level, the hardest part is finding which one you missed in a field of ones you've already hit, and driving over it. There's no real reason why you should bother except that you don't get the second gold medal unless you hit all the RDUs, too, and you'll need that to get to the harder difficulty of the game. The RDUs are the main glaring weakness of the entire game.

As a side thing to do, there are little sub areas off of the main levels; you get these for bumping into a satellite beacon. Most of the sub areas are races, where you get to use your vehicles, typically (but not always) the civilian vehicles you "confiscate" during your raids. You get a General Lee, although it's one of the worst vehicles, a police cruiser with a working siren, a purple van, and a few others. Generally speaking, the races are more or less driving practice, although there's a few that require you to "cheat" - to get the best time and its gold medal, you have to drive off the track and find a hidden shortcut. Clever, really; it makes the races more a test of skill rather than simply speed, although none of the races are particularly fun.

As I hinted at, you'll need the gold medals to advance the difficulty - once you get a gold in everything, all the levels reset (i.e., your friend the truck comes back) and you have to repeat both the main tracks and the special events to get another gold medal, this time for a quicker time than the previous gold. If you've already qualified for that time, you don't need to repeat the stage, which was a nice consideration on Rare's part. Do that again, and you get to do the space missions, which are mostly a fun excuse to blow crap up on a place with much less gravity, so you behave awfully oddly up there. Complete those, and you can go for platinum medals, but those are so damn hard to get that I never bothered. I'm not sure that anybody has ever gotten all the platinum medals to see what it earns you. Probably just a black screen with "Congratulations!" printed on it in white block letters. At least I'd like to think that.

The aesthetics: For its time, and even to some degree still, Blast Corps was a gorgeous game. The main purpose, that of wrecking everything, requires fairly realistic graphics to be convincing, and Blast Corps delivers on that, so much so that there's even a hint of slowdown when a really big building explodes. The chrome on the two mechs, particularly the flying mech, are very well done, and it makes the robots look really cool - the fact that they aren't dull yellow bulldozers doesn't hurt either. The chrome effect is a little over used on the mysterious chrome orbs that you often have to hunt down and destroy in some of the levels, but its obvious the designers liked the effect.

Still, the game is mostly about crushing crap, not looking at it, and the explosions are gratifying. They sound a little tinny, but the crunching is satisfying nonetheless, and you feel generally good for doing it. The nuke truck is unnerving, it makes a threatening reactor hum whenever you're near it, and particularly when you're running around as the little bejumpsuited guy next to it, you really have to worry about whether or not you need a dental smock to protect your precious organs.

The sound quality really takes a hit from the goofy ass level music. There's no real way to avoid this: The music is often times incredibly dorky. The first level even has a Jew's Harp twanging away in the background. This is NOT the soundtrack you want to hear while leveling a farm so that a nuclear truck doesn't irradiate the food supply of an entire nation! Screaming death metal would be appropriate. Goofy Jew's Harp and fiddle solos are not. The level music goes away entirely when the truck is too close to an obstacle, you get a fairly urgent "WARNING" booming alert, and the music becomes somewhat of a warning siren. It's actually quite stressful, and because it is so very different from the level music, it becomes distracting. I quite like the warning-tune; too bad there's no real way to have it play more often then leaving a lot of debris in the way of the truck, and doing that too much will get you killed.

A nice aesthetic touch comes from your team mates, who, as far as I can tell, have nothing better to do than offer unhelpful advice. There's supposed to be more of them, according to the manual, but all you ever see is a rather attractive female sprite, and a paunchy, bearded construction worker in a little pop up window at the bottom right of the screen. Neither of them are anywhere near as bad as Navi, but they're not real strong in the advice department, either. The number of times you hear, "Try something else" or "Is this really working?!?" is frustrating, particularly when you're desperately trying to get whatever cantankerous vehicle it is you're stuck with to push over that last pebble of building before the truck hits either it or you. It's a nice effect, but in practice, it's bothersome.