Does a bad game get better if you play it alongside others who know it's a bad game?
It does, but there's a definite curve to it. Unlike MST3K - which is funny in two hours - a bad video game has potentially hours upon hours of agonizing gameplay... so if you want to play a bad game on purpose, you need to watch for the inevitable late-night burnout and schedule a follow-up night to keep the sarcastic excitement high.
You know, who has time for this. If you're going to get together with pals and play stuff, you want to get right to the good games. Especially once everybody moves off the dorm floor and you need a third party arbitrator to all make it to the same party again. So you stick with your Smash Bros and Soul Caliburs and Mario Parties and Halos and you play what you know will be a hit. Even Mike and I - and we're together quite a bit - rarely get into something that we fully expect to be hilariously awful. Aside from all-night jags into mediocre-yet-pleasantly-thoughtless games like Trapt or the last two LOTR button mashers, the closest we've come to playing a genuinely ridiculous game was when I finished Disaster Report and then told him he had to play it too.
But when a copy of 24: The Game, floated into our office one bright spring day, Tony, Josh and I agreed that we had to schedule a joint session. How could this game possibly be any good? Moreover, none of us are big 24 fans, so being able to ruthlessly examine the game/show's watered-down international espionage and assassination storyline also struck us as a good time.
We began the evening by playing Trapt, a happily crappy game that proves that great gameplay doesn't necessarily require great visuals. This was the most fun to be had all night. Then we started 24 around 9:30pm. TICK. TOCK. Here's how our Mega 24 Session went:
Hour 1 (These are game hours, not real-world hours, by the way.)
Josh kicked off the game in grand style, taking Jack Bauer deep into the tutorial level. The first mission has Jack leading a team of CTU nobodies into a ship, where some random group of bad guys are guarding a BOMB. Holy crap, Jack! A bomb!
I always feel bad for games like this. They're trying. The game has a super-serious storyline it wants to tell you, but 98% of all the jerks who play this game are going to spend the first level running around like an idiot, shooting Jack's team, and killing hostages. So much for drama.
Initial impressions: walking, shooting, aiming, turning around, and sprinting are fucked up.
Then we encountered the first weird puzzle mini-game, the Defuse A Bomb game. It was stupid-easy. Maybe they'll get harder later.
Hour 2
Tony took the Dual Shock for this level, which introduced us to Someone Who Was Not Jack. You also get to drive a car here. There's also a cutscene with some important bad guys who you have to kill five minutes later. So they're not important at all. But it is still mainly a walk-and-shoot mission, since you're indoors and the jeep you hijack blows up rather easily.
Hour 3
Now it was my turn. I had to chase some dude into a building and capture him. Again, more fun with the game's wonky shooting system... which we determined was probably designed under the instructions "rip off Metal Gear, but make it sucky. And also include Half-Life's healing stations." I encountered another puzzle mini-game, the Decrypt A Door Password game, which was vaguely Panel de Pon-ish. When you find the jerk to be captured, you cap him a couple of times and then use the R2 button to shout at him. The shouting encourages him to surrender, because otherwise, he intends to kill you. Keifer Sutherland's dreamy voice has this effect on people.
Hour 4
Capturing Whats-His-Face gets you into a special ! Tony pulled the short straw on this one, since Josh got a phone call.
Interrogating is another weirdo mini-game, this time requiring you to use three buttons options (Aggression, Coax and Calm) to get the guy's heart rate into a specific part on a changing scale. Hit it right, and he talks. Interesting idea, and, as we have now come to expect with 24: The Game, unintentionally hilarious. It went something like this:
game suggests hitting coax button...
Jack: "I need to know about the plan to kill the vice president."
Dude: "I don't know anything, man!"
game suggests hitting calm button...
Jack: "I'll get you medical help as soon as you tell me about the snipers."
Dude: "I don't know how many there are, I swear!"
game suggests hitting aggression button...
Jack: "TELL ME WHAT I NEED TO KNOW NOW!"
Dude: "Wah wah blah blah bleeding out wah."
game suggests hitting calm button...
Jack: "Hey, I'll help you if you help me. How about them snipers, eh smooky?"
Dude: "They're on the roofs along the parade route."
game suggests hitting aggression button...
Jack: "SNIPERS ON ROOFS? OMFG!!?! I'LL KILL YOU RIGHT HERE AND NOW! GIVE ME NAMES!"
Dude: "Habba ba ba baaaa, wah wah help wah."
To sum up, Jack Bauer is totally schizo.
After that wonderful scene, Tony got to do a Find The Snipers mini-game where he had to scan through the blueprints of nearby buildings to find likely sniper suspects. It was just as weird as it sounds, and completely implausible. Then Josh did a Kill The Snipers portion that was nothing but Silent Scope without the bit where you zoom in on bikini girls for a health refill.
Hour 5
This hour begins with yet another absurd mini-game... based on defragmenting a hard drive. Boy, how many times did I watch Norton Speed Disk click by and wish I had a game based on it. Josh sailed through this one (have I mentioned yet that almost every level is timed?) and then had to do another decryption mini-game.
The next bit takes you (as Not Jack) to Korea Town, where you have to talk a hapless store clerk stereotype through an embarrassing dialogue tree. This isn't an , it's just bargain basement RPG speaks. But it gets better, because the suspect bolts and you have to chase him through some alleyways... which is hilarious because the sprint action makes you careen wildly off of nearby walls like a ping pong ball. And the guy you're chasing keeps pulling lighter-than-air dumpsters and boxes and ladders into your way.
Seems kind of unlikely that all of that would take an hour, doesn't it?
Hour 6
Now I got to drive Not Jack across town. Driving is miserable. So many games get driving so right, that when a game falls short, it is highly obvious. This is not Burnout or Ridge Racer. This isn't even GTA. It's pushing an octopus through mud.
The driving scene took two minutes, so I got to do the next mission as well... back to running and shooting. By this time, I felt more or less okay with the gimpy control scheme. It is possible to hide behind a wall, pop out and shoot dudes, and remain relatively safe. It's just not very smooth. And as soon as you get surrounded, forget it. I captured the guy. Hooray.
Hour 7
Tony did another super short driving mission, then a mission inside a subway station. You have to find yet another guy - which ends up stupid because you just walk into a room (after killing hundreds of lowlies) and he just stands there. At the conclusion of this mission, the CTU headquarters are taken over by terrorists! The subway scare was just a distraction! F'ing hell!
Hour 8
Josh's turn again: Now you get to play as Michelle, who you always see in the promos leaning over a computer and talking urgently into a headpiece. So that we can rip off Resident Evil 4 (or Fatal Frame 2, or Ico, or Oddworld, or any other game where you have to lead around a helpless secondary character), Michelle is saddled with Kim... who happens to be Jack's trouble-magnet daughter. You can tell her to Follow! or Wait!, but you don't really need to. I don't recall Kim taking much damage at all.
Michelle does really well, whacking baddies and stashing Kim into a panic room, until the cutscene at the conclusion of the level, when she gets kidnapped or something. Tony was playing this part; I looked away for a second and missed it.
After Jack and Not Jack meet up and do some hand-wringing, it is agreed that Kim should get her own level. I think we all took a shot at this one, because it is easy to take Kim in over her head. To complete the Metal Gear riff, you spend a lot of time crawling through massive air ducts in the first person.
Hour 9
Tony took Jack through another walk/sneak/shoot/babysit the camera mission, which ends on a boss fight! Whoo! Against a helicopter! Double whoo! I got to take out the chopper with a machine gun... which is exactly how I would do it in real life. Hell, in Disaster Report, you have to use a fire hose, so this was a piece of cake.
Now a driving mission that we all suffered through, because this was the final mission of the night. It's 1:00am by now, and we've all pretty much hit the wall. The idea is that you're playing as the REAL bad guys (I think), who are making their getaway with Kim as a hostage, who has dramatically offered herself in exchange for saving the rest of the kidnapped CTU folks (except for the one poor tech jerk who gets shot in the back of the head.)
You have to get to a certain spot on the map, but without any cops following you. Hi, GTA! We found this distressingly difficult. The cops are six-star aggressive, ramming you and chasing you without fail. After we all failed to ditch the police and park the car under the time limit, we called an ignominious end to 24: The Evening.
Time will tell if we do it again. That car mission really pissed us off.
