Chock Full of Hoot, Just a Little Bit of Nanny

Welcome back to another From The Vault review, where I recognize older games from my collection that you may not be aware of, and may want to pick up if you ever come across them.

I think we can agree that most movie to game adaptations are not very good, or just outright terrible. For every Ghostbusters: The Video Game or X-Men Origins: Wolverine, we have to wade through steaming piles like Catwoman, Batman Forever, or if you’re the Angry Video Game Nerd, the entire catalogue of LJN’s releases on the NES.

TV to game adaptations – and for the sake of consistency I’m only discussing live-action tv shows – haven’t seen as much activity but what’s there is a really mixed bag as well. You’ve got great games like Telltale’s The Walking Dead, but also hot steaming piles of garbage like Dark Angel, Sopranos: Road to Respect, and 24: The Game.

That brings me to today’s pick from my vault of fun, Buffy The Vampire Slayer on the original Xbox. Published in 2002 by an Electronic Arts that hadn’t yet turned to the dark side and inundated its customers with half-made games, DLC packs and virtual currency, it’s a beat ’em up game with some light platforming and puzzle solving that takes place within the Buffyverse. It’s actually one of two releases that came out on the Xbox, with Chaos Bleeds being the other, which that one was also released on the PS2 and Gamecube.

I’m of the belief that the story takes place around the 3rd season of the show as all the scoobies are here except for Oz, who Willow says is away on a gig. Also a dead giveaway is that they’re still, you know, *in* a high school that Buffy hasn’t blown up yet. Xander and Cordelia are still sneaking away to smooch in broom closets and Cordelia and Angel haven’t moved to Los Angeles to fight monsters and evil lawyers. You also get references to Principal Snyder claiming the vamps are gang members on PCP, and the characters will also reference previous episodes. For hardcore fans of the show, it’s really fun to hear them do this as the game really does feel like an episode of the show.

The cast is almost all here as well, with everybody returning to voice their characters except Sarah Michelle Gellar, which according to my research declined because they wouldn’t let her see a copy of the script beforehand. Which honestly…can’t really blame her if she wants to know what she’s reading before she agrees to a commitment in writing. But everybody else is on board and most of the voice acting is great. Anthony Stewart Head and Charisma Carpenter sound particularly comfortable voicing their characters and their delivery really isn’t any different than watching them on tv.

So as the story goes, The Master has teamed up with a demon called Lybach to utilize 3 demons called The Dreamers to basically alter reality and build a bridge from a demon dimension to earth and lead a demon army to take over the world. Also mixed up in this mess is Spike, who’s regrouped the Order of Aurelius. For all of you who aren’t giant Buffy nerds, that’s the Master’s old gang. Spike is forced to help as Lybach has possessed Drusilla, so he’s forced to help in order to get her back. But, as anybody familiar with the show knows, Spike’s a bit of a wildcard and that will play into the story. As a side note, James Marsters in particular is reliably great in his role as Spike – the guy’s just as comfortable voice acting as he is in live-action. Also I’ve met him in real life and the guy could not be friendlier and after chatting with him, he really enjoys what he does.

As you progress through the game you’ll get new weapons from Xander, new abilities from Giles, and Willow expands your health bar and slayer power meter with crystals you find along the way. It’s a really fun way to still get everybody involved and make it feel like a group effort.

So if you’re wondering what the action is like, it’s really just a simple beat em up. You get combos and specials to use and beat the crap out of everybody, but you’re not really fighting more than 1 to 3 guys at the most. As you progress through the game you’ll get new weapons from Xander, new abilities from Giles, and Willow expands your health bar and slayer power meter with crystals you find along the way. It’s a really fun way to still get everybody involved and make it feel like a group effort. Cordelia mostly talks hilarious trash and is as sassy as you’d expect, and Angel is the same tough looking vamp that gets the crap beat out of him and needs Buffy’s help.

So one aspect of the combat that I loved in this, is that when you whittle a vamp’s health down to zero, you almost always have to stake them to take them out. In order to do that, you have the ability to break chairs or tables or use other wooden items and break them down into stakes. It’s really fun and feels perfectly natural. There’s a section of the game that takes place in Angel’s mansion where you’re also able to knock the vampires into sunlight and catch them on fire, which not only felt great but also reminded me a lot of Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. And if you haven’t played THAT game, you are SO missing out because it’s a classic.

The levels take you all over Sunnydale, from the high school, the bronze, Angel’s mansion, the sunken church, and some other places you won’t expect. There’s some light puzzle solving as I mentioned and it’s mostly, “find this key and go to activate this thing” or something similar. Buffy’s jumping is a little hard to control because the girl apparently does 1000 calf raises a day and can leap really far, but that’s about as bad as the controls get.

So if you’ve got an OG Xbox and want to build your collection, find this game and pick it up. That and Amped snowboarding were the only reasons I bought an Xbox at first, at least until I discovered pistol sniping in Halo multiplayer, but it was a risk I took and it totally paid off because I loved it. It’d be great to see a remaster of this where the colors and graphics were cleaned up, but if not, I’m 100% happy coming back to this one occasionally to hang with the Scoobies again. At least until Hollywood reboots it and completely ruins it for me. Not that they ever do that.