1. Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions
Imagine a world where all of the characters look like they are modeled on an N64, so they are perfectly polygonal. Imagine that one of these characters is eating Jello out of a martini glass, and she drops the glass, and a perfectly polygonal, sharp-edged object that is understood to be Jello spills out. Then you start playing the actual game, where you are driving around in a car, racing to catch up with, as your boss tells you, 'the Yakuza cars.' You also learn that you work for a secret anti-Yakuza car-driving team knows as 'The Flying Dragons.' If you fail the mission, your car comes to a halt and your characters says "oh noooooooooooe! we lawwwwwwwwst!" because your character is a whiny-voiced girl. Then is where I turned off the 'Cube and cursed myself for paying to rent this worthless game.
2. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
What does heavy metal have to do with ancient Egypt? If you ask this game's developers, probably a lot of stuff, because that's all you hear when you play. I would have rather had my fingers crushed with a hammer by Islamic terrorists, like what happened to Leo DiCaprio in 'Body of Lies' (avoid that movie too).
3. The Scorpion King: Rise of the Akkadian
The graphics were awful, the cutscenes were all pre-rendered CGI, so they looked infinitely better than the actual game. The voice acting sounded like the producer had gotten The Rock, et al into a darkened room and threatened to not turn the lights on if they didn't record their lines.
(The Rock and a Mysterious Old Man walk up to the exit of the evil dungeon where Rock just killed a giant water serpent. They look off into the distance.)
The Rock: I'm going home now.
Old Man: Eeeehhh, Akkadian... (imagine the most stereotypical old man voice possible)
The Rock: No. It can't be.
Old Man: I'm afraid so, Akkadian. Akkad is in flames. Someone has attacked it.
The Rock: I must go.
Fun fact: if you walked over a save point in the third or fourth level with a broad sword equipped, the game would crash.
Fun fact #2: Mark Hamill does the voice of one of the bosses. I'll give you a hint as to who that voice really belongs to. It starts with 'J' and rhymes with 'toker.' Yep.
This game's mediocrity should have prevented me from playing it, but I beat it several times over, because once you beat the game, you start over from the beginning with all of your upgraded abilities, while the enemies remain in their 'easy mode' state. This makes the game incredibly easy to beat and a laugh-fest at that. Go to Amazon and pay $.53 plus shipping if you want to play one of the most repetitive, uninspired games in all of Creation.
4. Enter The Matrix
This game should have been mind-blowingly awesome. Instead it was buggy, and the combat sucked, and those driving levels were some of the most painful experiences that a human being could ever have, aside from having their limbs removed with a can opener and having to watch 'Mio In The Land Of Faraway.' The story was pretty interesting, seeing as you'd be really confused if you watched The Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions without playing the game first, because it explains the backstory of Niobe and Ghost and everything that they do while Reloaded is happening. But you have to play the entire frickin' game in order to discover the whole story, and you just might drop your controller and say that it isn't worth it, and you'll read it on Wikipedia instead.
If more time and effort had been put into the game, it might not have been as bad as it is. And it has its redeeming qualities. The bullet time is awesome, as usual, and some of the combat moves were really cool, especially since using bullet time (Focus, in the game) changed the moves into jaw-dropping moments of arse-kickery. Prime example: if you walk up behind a guard and press the Action button, you'll clamp your hands over his mouth and strangle him. If you press the Action button and then press the Focus button, you'll snap his neck so hard that his head is turned around 180 degrees, so when he lands facing down, his face will be looking up at you. How awesome is that?
One of the other great things about this otherwise-awful game is that if Hollywood and the game industry did partnerships with this level of detail and cooperation, movie-based games might not suck as bad as they do. That, and the hacking mini-game was spectacularly well done. That by itself might justify buying it for a very small amount of money.
Otherwise, the game falls flat. There are numerous bugs within the game, and a lot of graphic-related issues that made the game really hard to enjoy for me. Yeah, I played it a lot, because I was bored at the time, back in 2003, and couldn't afford to buy a whole lot of games.
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