365//365: Day 017 – South Park (N64)

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South Park has experienced a continued success that you rarely see anymore. From Comedy Central, to the movie, to clothing, to video games, it’s nearly impossible for anyone not to have heard of the series. The quality of the media related tie ins have ranged from stellar, to absolutely terrible. One of the first video games on a home console to feature the series, simply titled South Park, featured the gang in a first person shooter world that takes place in and around their fictional town located in Colorado. How will South Park fare in a genre that’s mostly revolved around gun violence and lots of blood?

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How the kids can retain that much fluid for unlimited supplies of yellow snowballs, no one knows. More over, no one wants to know!

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Lets address that issue right now. Naturally, the kids won’t be running around with uzi’s and RPG’s, but Iguana Entertainment managed to use quite a bit of creativity with the selection of weapons. Gone are the handguns with infinite ammo, replaced with snowballs. Every other weapon classification and variety is replaced with something of a comparable stature, but without the bloodshed and violence. Your grenades of sorts come in the form of Terrance & Phillip “fart dolls”, which explode in a huge poof of green gas. A Sponge Dart Gun takes the place of a machine gun, shooting out little sponge bullets at your enemies. The Super Sniper Chicken is your sniper rifle of sorts, where you use a chicken, butt out forward, with “zoom in” capabilities, and fire out sniper egg shots. Most weapons have a secondary fire. Snowballs can be….urinated on, Phillip fart dolls are proximity mines, and so on. I’m sure this all sounds pretty ridiculous, but the weapons add in a charm and authenticity to South Park. If anything, it’s a memorable line up of weaponry.

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Controlling all the aspects of South Park has a couple of minor snags. Jumping feels useless and so limited in height that you wonder why it’s even available. Moving the kids around and aiming your weapons feel a bit loose for my liking, but its not a significant problem. Everything is fully functional, with no severe game breaking issues going on.

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Terrance fart dolls explode on impact. Phillip fart dolls act as proximity mines.

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A lot was done to make this South Park game feel as faithful to the television series as possible. While the story is as silly and pointless as most South park episodes, Iguana Entertainment gave enough of an authentic feel to make it seem like you’re playing an episode of South Park….or at least one that’s in 3D. Most anything you hear is custom made for the game. The towns, characters and most environments look commendable in their 3D transition, and for the most part, feels like a proper 3D rendition of the TV series.

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However, the visuals hold the beginnings of a small, but punishing list of faults in South Park. The draw distance is woefully limited. While South Park, Colorado is a snow covered town, it’s hard to excuse the lack of visibility. Also, since everything looks like a 3D version of the show, detail is severely lacking. While it helps that the lack of detail means more enemies on the screen, there’s almost no variation between enemies. Every level has what seems like a theme of enemies. Level one and its sub levels have tons of turkeys and about nothing else. Level two has a lot of big headed clones of Big Gay Al and other townsfolk, reminiscent of when Stan had a clone of him made.

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The 3D renditions of the world of South Park look clean and simple, almost to a fault.

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Thanks to the lack of variation with the enemies, you don’t feel at all compelled to play past the third stage, especially when there’s only five stages. The weapons are cool, as well as imaginative, and I feel like they could have been put in a better use, rather than fighting the same character models in each stage. The final battle is against Voltron’s bastard son, who’s probably the hardest thing in this game by far. But most people will just give up out of boredom before then.

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It’s not that South Park is a bad game, it’s that it lacks any variation in its enemies, and makes you almost want to not bother playing more than several minutes at a time. A great arsenal of weaponry and great use of custom speech just for the game can’t save it from its thick layer of monotony. Not the best Nintendo 64 game ever, but it’s definitely not the worst.

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Oh my God! They killed Kenny!

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Rating: 6.0