A Turkey Of A Game

Happy Thanksgiving everybody and welcome to another review from my personal vault of games – my name’s Ed and I’m your chauffer on this limo ride to 64 bit hell today.

If you’re one of the 10 people that aren’t friends or family who watch my From The Vault reviews, I normally take a look back at games from yesteryear that I remember fondly and go over what I liked and why they were notable. Being that this is 2020 and everything is severly jacked up, I decided to go the opposite direction and not just feature a game that has turkeys in it, but is itself a turkey. So gobble gobble, clubmembers, because today I’m reviewing the one and only South Park on Nintendo 64. While I go over the, uh, “finer” points to this afterbirth of a game, keep in mind that this one is actually considered superior to the Playstation 1 version. Like it actually gets worse than this.

To nobody’s surprise it was supposed to be called South Park: Deeply Impacted but then the name just got shortened to South Park. On the DVD commentary of the Starvin’ Marvin episode, Trey Parker himself had called it the “crappiest video game” and that he was bummed out about it. Because of that, they haven’t agreed to very many South Park games since. That short list includes Chef’s Luv Shack and South Park Rally in 1999, and then we wouldn’t see another game again until 2009 with the release of South Park Let’s Go Tower Defense Play! and then Tenorman’s Revenge in 2012 before The Stick of Truth and The Fractured Butt Whole years later.

The game was not well received when it was first released back in December of 1998, which was right around the start of its 2nd season. The big gaming websites mostly hated it – Gamespot gave it a 1.4/10 and at the time, IGN’s one compliment in their review was that the game was “just as funny as the Comedy Central series.” Let’s all take a moment to recognize that there was a time where IGN not only actually said this, but also a time where they did something other than shill for large publishers and virtue signal.

So if you haven’t played the game – which is sorta like saying you’ve never had chlamydia – you might be wondering what’s so bad about it? Well, after playing through all I could stand of the game, the biggest thing I can say is that it’s just a badly made game from the ground up. It’s a first person shooter – which in my opinion just doesn’t fit with a setting like this – and on a technical level it has so many things working against it that you’re just stuck with something that I just don’t see is enjoyable to anybody.

Let’s start at the beginning and just work our way in. When you fire the game up, you’re treated to what’s basically a shot for shot version of the show’s opening except in crummy 3D graphics – which even at the time I remember thinking they weren’t very good. You can mess around with the options once you hit start, but if you take too long, you’ll actually get timed out and the game will restart. Now, I’m just going to focus on single player in this review because I honestly couldn’t get anybody in my house to play multiplayer with me. That’s how unappealing this looked. For what it’s worth you get access to a ton of characters from the show and they’ve all got dialogue that they’ll chatter with, which is charming at first but repetitive after awhile. It’s got 4 player splitscreen, so if you’re crafty you can trick 3 of your friends to be miserable with you.

The draw distance in the game is probably the shortest I’ve ever seen. Like I thought the game was still loading when I started the first level. So you feel like you’re always in a fog and can’t really see what’s ahead of you. Thankfully there’s radar to help you with that, otherwise it’d be completely unplayable.

Each episode is dedicated to 1 type of enemy, and you will kill tons of them before moving onto the next level. At best the gameplay is boring, at worst it is stupidly difficult due to the controls and draw distance.

The controls are very limited. You have 2 types of controls – one they call too-rock and the other called brown-eye, named after Turok’s and Goldeneye 64’s controls, respectively. Both have inverted aiming. After over 20 years of my friends making fun of me for playing games with the Y axis inverted and silently loathing me for having to change the controls every time we’d switch off, I finally trained myself off of that. To see it again here made aiming really difficult, and the aiming snaps back to the center if you’re playing with too-rock controls. So when you’re playing a boss level later where you have to aim for a robot turkey’s butthole and shoot at it while it’s running around you, it’s really, really hard to do. Like if I have to throw snowballs at someone’s butthole in real life to defeat them, I think that may actually be easier.

And that brings me to the levels themselves. The game takes place over 5 episodes, with 3 levels each, and each one lasts waaaaay too long. Each episode is dedicated to 1 type of enemy, and you will kill tons of them before moving onto the next level. At best the gameplay is boring, at worst it is stupidly difficult due to the controls and draw distance.

In Episode 1 itself, you’ll fight wave after wave of turkeys, and then you’ll fight big robot turkeys, then you’ll fight one really big robot turkey. There’s nobody in the entire town other than the other 3 south park kids you have to pick up in order to carry more weapons. Weapons, which by the way, consist of things like a snowball with pee on it, a dodge ball, terrance and phillip dolls, and even a cow launcher. The ammo is usually plentiful but the aiming is so poor in this that you might as well stick with the snowballs since you’ve got an unlimited amount of them.

Other levels are a cow-themed level, a retard clone level, robots, and for some reason a killer toy level. Most of the enemies will rush you, and only a few actually shoot. Some of the toys toward the end of the game go all Linda Blair and spray barf, which is poison and will kill you really quickly. Doesn’t help that the hit detection isn’t great and you can stand reasonably far away from the poison and you’ll still get hurt from it.

As far as the music and sound – it’s really limited and other than the opening sequence, the game plays one song on a loop in every level. Everybody has dialogue, however as I mentioned earlier, it’s repeated pretty often and gets old pretty quickly. The enemies are probably the worst, especially the turkeys and cows. These things do not stop gobbling or mooing and while you won’t see them on the screen for awhile because of the draw distance, you’ll hear them long before they appear.

Perhaps the olive on top of this turd sandwich is that you’d think a game like this would have a ton of bugs in it, but other than the game resetting at the main menu, I only encountered one other and that was toward the beginning when you need to kill all the turkeys to advance to a new area, and one turkey got stuck in a wall and didn’t appear, so I had to restart the game.

So all of that added together makes for a pretty miserable game to play, at Thanksgiving or otherwise. Even at 17 years old when it released I didn’t think the game was necessary, because I don’t feel that South Park was ever really meant to be a toy commercial and I don’t think any of the games did the series justice until The Stick of Truth and The Fractured Butt Whole, and that’s because Matt and Trey wrote those themselves, basically making them an extension of the show. I still love South Park after all these years and will be sad when it’s gone because it’s provocative humor hits everyone and it’s one of the last shows to still do that and not just cater to one audience.