365//365: Day 135 – The Crow: City of Angels (PSX)

Throughout the last week, we have witnessed bad games of unspeakable horrors. From a Jedi that takes a minute straight to take down an abominable snowman, to a time traveling title that’s stuck in the past, to a Shaquille O’Neal game that had no balls. Most of this weeks titles have been a bit offbeat in terms of what one would select as a short list of some of the worst pieces of gaming filth ever. Partially because games such as Bubsy 3D, Simpsons Wrestling, MK Mythologies: Sub Zero and Spawn: The Eternal were all done previous to this week long list of failures. Partially since a few titles are a bit too cliche to have on such a list (Superman 64, E.T. 2600, most Nintendo Wii games). There’s one more title that doesn’t get enough recognition as the toilet stopper of the gaming universe. A game that is known for being a travesty, but not celebrated as such. We close out Worst Games Ever week with quite possibly THE worst game man has ever witnessed….

Not as widely know for its failure as such games as Shaq Fu and E.T. 2600, The Crow: City of Angels is actually one of the most massive train wrecks of a video game that humanity has ever seen. This is a game that James Rolfe of the Angry Video Game Nerd fame, will never review, because even he cannot fathom how obscenely broken and brilliantly bad it is. So what is it about The Crow: City of Angels that makes you wish the crows turned into vultures, and slowly pecked you to death? How about EVERYTHING ABOUT IT!

The audio is….it’s….it’s worse than sitting through a William Hung CD playing with your headphones graphed onto your ears and head, with the volume on full blast. At least with his CD, the music doesn’t loop the same painful parts every ten seconds. Not only that, but the music suffers from random slowdown without any reason as to why it would happen. It’s doubtful that the AWESOME visual presentation has anything to do with it. The sound effects are recycled throughout the game as well, with kicks, punches, knife attacks, stick attacks, blocking and mostly everything in between sharing the same exact sound. There’s more audio diversity in silence than there is in City of Angels.

This is the first screen of the game. The first screen of the game, and no one can tell what the hell is going on here!

Developers Gray Matter Interactive really went overboard with the dark overtones that the movie had, and infused the visuals with an overly dark, muddy and overall depressing look. Character models look a lot like unfinished alpha stick figure models, with nearly no detail on them, outside some poorly constructed facial features. The backgrounds are an absolute mess, mixing poorly animated and poorly structured 3D characters models with static backgrounds. Most of the enemies look like each other as well, further pushing the notion that these were just alpha stage character dummies that they passed off as enemies. The lighting? If you consider one round beam of light reflecting off the floor every 28 steps as lighting, then you’re in for a treat! Otherwise everything else is so poorly lit, you’ll wonder why they bothered.

But you see, the A/V portion of City of Angels isn’t the main reason why it’s such a massive failure of biblical proportions. It’s the actual gameplay that’s the main culprit. Simply put — the game is universally broken. The controls are THE absolute worst that have ever been programed into a video game. If you thought Bubsy 3D had some major mechanical malfunctions, you ain’t seen nothing until you TRY to get out of the very first screen. It’s literal rocket science just to move to where you want to move, face the direction you want to face, attack the enemy you’d like to attack and actually hit the enemy you were aiming for. It’s not just a matter of slight input delays that breaks the game, but the fact that not only are you slower than a snail underwater, but a simple act, such as attacking an enemy, just doesn’t work.

What....the....

You have a small handful of attacks spread out between button presses in conjunction with controller direction presses. If you want to perform a roundhouse kick, you’ll often turn quite a bit before the kick comes out, since the delay in your actions is staggering. Collision detection couldn’t even detect if you were snapping this CD in half. Oftentimes, you can kick clearly through the face of an enemy, and the hit will not register. However, if you block a full second before an enemy attacks you from two steps away, they can hit you. To make matters worse, because you move so friggin’ slow, it literally takes several seconds to turn 90 degrees to face an enemy that is flanking you. No matter how you approach the gameplay of City of Angels, it’s and unbearable and thoroughly broken mess. There’s even a load screen for every single room transition you encounter, even if the room is 10′ x 10′.

This is it. This is THE game that defines total and utter failure. The Crow: City of Angels is the absolute worst video game that has ever been released. There is absolutely no saving grace to be found in this game whatsoever. The controls are busted, the gameplay is busted, the music is on a busted loop, and the graphics looks like one busted black eye. You cannot create anything this bad by accident. It’s as if Gray Matter Interactive wanted to use this game as a vessel to help blow out the gray matter from our heads after playing it. Thank goodness that it’s not an easy game to find, but that fact that this crap exists, will make me cry myself to sleep for the next several weeks.

This brick wall symbolizes several things: 1) It looks better than City of Angels. 2) Running head first into it will produce better sound than City of Angels. 3) Rapidly headbutting it will move the wall faster than you can move your character in City of Angels.

Rating: – 2.5