Tuesday, September 05, 2006

"The Incredibles" game on PS2

Well, I rented this the other day because my 10-year-old niece and 5-year-old nephew were over, and all my games are a bit old for them. I didn't know it was Teen rated (just had my sister pick it up). I also didn't know about how many places there would be to get stuck. I assumed it would be a very smooth experience, since it's a movie game, and would be squarely aimed at everyone except hardcore gamers.

Well, Colette had some fun with it, but wanted to go back to playing Amplitude after about 15 minutes. Her problem was that it was too hard to aim Mr. Incredible's punches, so she got pummeled a lot.

Mom was interested in trying it, so I played it a bit to see what she could expect. After getting stuck in the first Elastigirl scene due to some trouble finding where to go next, then having a hard time with Dash's first level, I decided she'd be better off spending her time trying Guitar Hero.

I ran into some serious design flaws. The camera is an inverted X-axis camera, with no option to change it. I am resolutely a left-is-left camera person, and a down-is-up aim-and-camera person. Some of you call down-is-up inverted Y-axis, but Metroid Prime calls down-is-down the inverted system, and that game is correct about it. :P

I didn't like it that the Dash's first level said I had to get to school by 8:00 am, then didn't reset the timer every time I ran into a car. So I'd fail over and over by running into a car, then run out of time, and fail, then have the timer reset. But I continued where I left off. So what was the point of the time limit in the first place? The only challenge was to get to the end with an infinite amount of attempts and 5 checkpoints.

The first Elastigirl level as confusing in places due to the weirdness of the way the lockon system interacts with the camera system.

I didn't expect to personally like the game, since I expected a rather simple platform game with movie characters. But I would not recommend it even for casual gamers, since the design has too many rough edges; in the end, it just isn't fun.

Rating: 1.5 stars out of 5.
Not recommended.