Two Slashes

It’s been three months since I last reviewed a game for my BGS “series” (I put it in quotes because you can’t really call something a series if you’ve neglected to do it for a quarter of a year).  Oops.

Anyway, I found Snapshot Adventures:  Secret of Bird Island at Big Lots and decided that, with a price tag of just $4, it would be something reasonable to review and then set aside, and that I really wouldn’t be wasting anything in doing so.  When I posted a picture of the game box to Twitter, the responses I got (all two of them) were mixed.

When I finally opened and installed the game, I was expecting something along the lines of a Pokémon Snap game.  I wasn’t disappointed in that respect from a concept standpoint, though the implementation is far from fun.

The game itself is rather wacky in that it only runs at an 800×600 resolution, which caused a few problems for me with the game being weirdly cropped (until I managed to come across a “widescreen” option in the options menu; this is the first time I’ve seen a game get cropped rather than scaled) and blank screens happening from time to time.  Despite the fact that I’m running a PC that can churn through Team Fortress 2 without breaking a sweat, I was also a little concerned that the game startup took much longer despite the game itself being tiny and designed to run on the PCs of yester-decade.

The back-story the game provides is as perplexing as why I thought this would be a good game in the first place.  The game asks you for your name, then quickly tries to lure you in by saying that your grandfather died and that you eventually happen across his old camera and a mysterious journal entry that you (well, the “you” in the game) want to investigate.

She looks thoroughly convinced that I'm a great photographer, doesn't she?

In order to solve the mystery, you have to take pictures for some of your grandfather’s friends that all seem to end up on the covers of regional ornithology journals.  For someone who happened upon the camera only a few minutes ago, that’s quite a feat.

Of course, the game also takes a draw from Ian Fleming’s James Bond series and coughs up random gadgets for you along the way, including “magic” bird seed, a model airplane that seems to cause birds to fly, and (my favorite) the “electronic satellite-based bird identification system” (which simply tells you what bird you’re about to take a picture of, even though the game will tell you what to look for in the corner of the screen).

To go along with the questionable story (which I left halfway through because I couldn’t tolerate it) and the overuse of Comic Sans is the create-a-bird mode, which the game won’t even let you check out until after you’ve played through some of the story.  I was confused as to the presence of create-a-bird mode, especially the fact that you can upload your designs to the Internet (and download others, obviously), as the game seems quite adept at making what you design look more like a winged fish than a bird.

If birdwatching is one of your interests and you would love nothing better than to spend all day “taking pictures” of birds, I suggest you go find yourself a cheap digital camera and actually go out and do it.  This game is a poor substitute for anything, including entertainment, and I highly suggest mass burnings (of the fire kind, not the CD-R kind) of this game.

Now to go find a cure for my boredom…

When people think back to all the time they spent playing video games as a kid, they think back to all the time they wasted trying to rescue the princess in Super Mario Bros. or how many times they defeated the Covenant in Halo.  There have to be a few games they considered crap and played only briefly, though, right?  Those games they thought sounded interesting, but were perhaps too good to be true, or picked up from a bargain bin in hopes of getting a cheap thrill, then sold right back to the used game store of their choice?  Why don’t they mention those?

In an effort to share that side of my life as a non-gamer with you, as well as these horrible excuses for entertainment, I’ve decided that I’m going to try and review old and lame games once in a while throughout the summer as a semi-regular feature.  (Of course, I have many to choose from thanks to my siblings, but I’d rather review games you had an interest in, so feel free to leave suggestions in the comments or my e-mail inbox.)

Seriously, doesn't this read as Speedball Tournament 2?

This week’s game is Speedball 2 Tournament, Speedball Tournament 2, or something of the sort, and it comes from November of 2007.  (Alright, so it’s hardly old, but I doubt you’d heard of it until just now.)  I really can’t figure the name out, because the logo clearly reads Speedball Tournament (to me at least), but Wikipedia, Steam, and most other sites seem to agree on the first version.  To avoid having to worry about that, I’m just going to refer to it as Speedball.

I wouldn’t have even known about the existence of this game if a friend of mine hadn’t found an online magazine giving away CD keys (and informed me that the game was on Steam, which means this game will be following me to the grave).  I can’t say it’s a bad thing, because I can’t argue with free stuff, but I’m sure they could have picked a better game to give away.  Obviously, this also means that I have never played the original.

If I had to sum this game up in as few words as possible, I would call it the older-teen equivalent to the Backyard series for little kids.  Essentially, it’s the same thing as a game of soccer, except made to be all futuristic, the characters carry the ball rather than kicking it up the field, and there’s definitely some language I wouldn’t expect to find in a kids game going on in here.  There are even little power-ups all over the field.  And, just to take the name into consideration (as well as the opening video and all of the violence), you could similarly compare the game to Unreal Tournament with a metal ball instead of Redeemers and a closed-in pit rather than Morpheus.

Speaking of fields, there are four (at least, four that are unlocked when you start the game, and I’m not expecting there to be any more) for you to play on.  They call come complete with a cute little animated crowd cheering you (or the other team, you don’t really know, do you?) on and booing and cheering as appropriate.  There’s not much to them, because, little things like the general shape of the outer stadium (which you won’t see) aside, there isn’t that much difference between the four of them.

The controls aren’t that hard to pick up, though you’re probably going to resort to what I did and just start clicking buttons and pounding on the spacebar in hopes of watching the little animated characters do something.  It won me a match or two, but it probably isn’t what the developers were intending for you to do.

The difficulty levels are definitely labeled appropriately.  Easy made it seem like the AI wasn’t even on half the time, but step it up to advanced and suddenly you won’t have to worry about who’s carrying the ball, because it most certainly won’t be you.  Unfortunately, it’s a little disheartening to watch the computer score so easily against you in so little time (or maybe I just play a poor defense), which is another reason to put it down rather quickly.

Given that I couldn’t even beat the computer AI, I didn’t want to bother spending the time checking out the multiplayer aspect of the game.  Given that the game’s rated so poorly on MetaCritic (and it’s not hard for me to see why), there probably aren’t that many people sticking around waiting for someone to play.  Of course, there’s some law that states that there’s that one devoted fan signed in and waiting for someone to play against, but he or she will have to keep on waiting, because that most certainly won’t be me.

If there’s one redeeming quality to the game, it’s the music.  It’s of a techno-rock variety, and it’s not that bad to listen to (or perhaps it’s just me). It reminds me more than a little of the older Need for Speed games (think Porsche Unleashed or older).  I may actually go through the effort of ripping it out at some point just to have something more to listen to while I’m doing homework or coding.  But we’ll see.

Would I play this game again?  Maybe.  But I’d probably rather play Half-Life 2, or at least something with a little more polish.  For the little time I’ve actually bothered to play this game, I’d probably give it somewhere around a 5 out of 10.  (Note to self:  Come up with witty grade chart for next review.)

If you’re interested in getting a copy of Speedball for yourself, you can pick a copy up on Steam for $20.