Every once in a while, I get into weird gaming moods. For instance, a lot of people maybe only play RPGs and once every two years buy an old school shooter like Gradius. Maybe you're only a sports gamer but you break down and pick up a Resident Evil game? Well, for me, it seems that I feel the need to play a complete shit game every so often to make me appreciate what the industry has done for me over my 23+ years of gaming. Enter Universal Studios for the Nintendo Game Cube. I just finished my first run through of the wonderful Eternal Darkness when I found myself in Blockbuster, ready to rent a game. I thought it would be funny to review a bad game, however, I'm not sure if the emotional scars I now have are worth it.

I popped the disc into my diminutive Game Cube and fired it up. I should have just set it on fire. It began with a cheesy enough video (which was grainy and poorly rendered) of Woody Woodpecker flying in the DeLorean from Back to the Future through the pre rendered park. That was probably the best part of the game. I could stop now since that was the best experience I had with this title.

Where do we start with this one? I'll just run through the technical stuff first and then get to the really disturbing shit. Graphically speaking, this game has no excuse for looking as bad as it does. I've heard people exaggerate about Eternal Darkness, for example, when they said it looked like an N64 or PSX game. That's obviously bullshit, however, this game really does look like an N64 game. Sure, there might be a few more polys than the good old N64 can push, but the blurry textures and smeary "vaseline-vision" are all in place. The character models are boring, low polygon models with no real texturing, just a little shading for good measure. The mini-games all feature minimal graphics at best, and outright white knuckle rage inducing poor attempts at anything. The Jaws 'game' just has the worst of anything you've ever seen. The water will not win any awards anywhere, the shark looks as fake as the ride in the real park and you just pray that he can actually eat the kid in a carnal bloody display. No such luck.

The sound was even more frustrating to me. The game starts off with Woody Woodpecker talking to you. I know it has been a few years since I've sat down and watched Woody Woodpecker, but he's NEVER sounded anywhere NEAR the voice they have in the game. They didn't even remotely try to get someone to sound like him. It made me want to jam a pen in my ear canal to make it stop. Then, with all of the movies in the game, you'd think there would be more licensed music. There is real music, usually in 10 second clips, with generic crap filler in between. I honestly believe in my heart that I could have funded this whole project with the change I received from my Wendy's dinner tonight. The rest of the sounds I suppose did what they had to do. There just wasn't anything worth talking about in a positive light.

How about we move onto the 'game,' if you can really call it that. The title is considered a "simulation" officially which makes me think this is some government funded project to kill brain cells in people. As your choice of kid, you get to wander about the park, going to 'rides' which are mini-games as well playing a movie trivia game and watching the 10 second piss poor rendered video for the Waterworld 'attraction.' The park is pre-rendered, and the camera attacks each scene from a different angle. In other games that have used this technique, it hasn't really been a problem. However, they found a way to ruin it here. With a live crowd of people, it's easy to either not see where you start off on a screen or see where you are running to on some of boards. You can find a map early on in the game, however, with no way to orient yourself to the map, it's completely useless. I can't imagine that the designers of the game didn't intend this to be the most frustrating gaming experience of all time.

The things you have to do in the game just make no fucking sense at all. For instance, early on, you can stumble upon a side quest of finding some woman's cell phone that she had lost. It makes you think that they littered the game with little sub quests, but no such luck, and don't worry, it's a good thing. The 'annoying ungrateful bitch' mini-quest involves you finding the phone and going on a wild goose chase to find the woman who doesn't seem to really give a shit about her phone or the fact that you're wasting a lot of time tracking her down. As soon as you find the phone and return it to where she was supposed to be, it miraculously rings, and you answer it for some odd reason. Of course, it's Annoying Bitch and she decided to move to the opposite end of the park... good luck meandering your way around to her. If any game desperately needed wanton violence, it was this game.

An overall 'quest' in Universal Studios is trash pickup. Yes... you need to pick up trash throughout the game in order to earn money. The park apparently is such a shit hole that they need to make some kid clean up the park all by his lonesome as you see clean up staff stand next to a trash receptacle throughout the whole game. You also get the lowest points possible in the game for picking up a piece of garbage and throwing it in the trash can: 10 points. You need an average of 3000 plus points for the needed hats you need to buy, so this is a REALLY tedious and annoying task.

What 'hats' you ask? Oh... just the hats you need to buy in order to actually get into the attractions. That's right, the park is mostly closed to you early on in the game until you either play the trivia game over and over again or clean up the whole damn park 50 times. If you don't have a hat, you look at the five people in line as Fake-Woody tells you there are too many people there. However, if you have a hat, you can get right in. Disney's Easy Pass? Fuck that... all you have to do here is carry around or wear six dumb ass hats.

Then there are the 'attractions.' We'll start with Waterworld. As if the movie wasn't bad enough, this attraction insults gamers even further by making you sit through a 10 second long "special effects demo" from the movie of the same name. The demo is actually a grainy, poorly rendered CGI clip of a plane landing in water with lame incendiary effects. You can gain easy money with this one at least, although you have to sit through the movie over and over again. At least you have a choice of FIVE different angles to view this shit from. I'm still in shock about this one. I really can't find the words to express just how damn useless this part of the game is.

You can run into Woody's girlfriend who will ask you movie trivia. Sounds easy enough, right? Well... they fucked this up too. First of all, they ask questions about movies that people didn't (or shouldn't have) give a shit about. There was WAY too many questions from Dragonheart. Even if this title was geared towards kids, the obscure questions about Meet Joe Black certainly put it out of reach for the youngins. Your penalty for not answering questions properly? Woody's slut tells you that you need to watch more movies. This is incredibly grating when you are pretty much a movie geek as it is.

What next... hmmm... how about JAWS? How bad could that be? First, they leave out the most recognizable part of the music. Smooth move Ex-Lax. Then, there is the lousy gameplay and incredibly bad graphics as well. It's really a complete package of craptitude! The water is actually a really blocky texture tile that is repeated at least 30 times to cover the screen. There's just no reason for graphics this bad in a game released this year on a next gen system. You run around a boat that is divided into sections on a radar that is displayed on the upper right hand corner of the screen. The radar is, of course, badly oriented, making it unnecessarily difficult to position yourself. Jaws then attacks a section of the boat, but you can hurl boxes, barrels, bombs, etc. at the great while shark, scaring him off. It's terrible and you can't even get the kid eaten by the shark. You can't even get him to drown. It's like watching those damn Cobra pilots and their parachutes on old GI Joe cartoons when you KNOW they just took a missile up their ass. It's JUST NOT RIGHT!!!

Back to the Future sucked, and this one had the most initial promise. It's basically a mix of Chase HQ and Wipeout, featuring none of the speed, gameplay, graphics or fun. Biff (played by Keanu Reeves generic surfer character) steals a DeLorean and Woody says you are their only hope. You start off hovering through a city which leads you to the familiar clock tower. From there your journey through time to the um... Ice Level, which I think was in the 2nd Back to the Future movie. From there you jump to the Lava Level which was obviously from the 3rd film. The whole time you're fighting the sloppy controls and listening to Keanu say crap like "Are you ok?" and "What are you doing?" Oddly enough, the sound clips do actually get old after hearing them 50 times during the course of the 'game.'

The ET game is basically what you get when you completely remove the balls from a BMX racing game. There's really nothing much I can say about this game other than it fits in with the rest of the crowd. It's graphically boring, gameplay barren and just a bit more fun that jamming shards of bamboo under your fingernails.

In between running around the park, I found the most disturbing part of this whole craptastic experience: meeting the park characters. It really should have been an easy enough thing not to screw up... and it sure as hell shouldn't have caused trauma, but there was no way around it. The first one I met was Wolfman. I walked up to him, pressed the action button and it asked me if I wanted to 'Shake Wolfman's Hand'. Sure... how bad could that be? Well, it's bad, really bad. Very wrong bad. Basically, the animation of a character "shaking your hand", curiously looks like he is cupping your ass and groping your body. Their hands actually cup, and from certain angles, it looks even worse. I haven't been this disturbed since I watched Pikachu dry hump a Super Scope in Super Smash Bros.: Melee. What do you get for this abuse? A free 1000 points. That's right boys and girls. Cleaning up trash, 10 points, hush money for not NARCing on the park perverts, 1000. Makes sense, right? It's even worse from the smaller characters like Chilly Willy and "Knothead" the little Pecker. They lean in with their little outstretched arms on level with your crotch. That's right, shake hands with Chilly Willy at the wrong camera angle and you've just gotten head from a penguin. If that doesn't put people into therapy, nothing will.

If you can shake off the trauma, you can try hammering through the Jurassic Park ride. This is simply a ripoff of Sega's Panzer Dragoon shooters. This actually made me happy at first, since I like those games, however, they messed it up. In a shooting game, it is key to be able to actually shoot the targets. Apparently, this is actually a secondary objective in this game. I haven't figured out the first. The collision detection is shoddy at best, while the lock on system tends to fail more often than work right for whatever reason. I'm not sure what was so complicated about the Panzer Dragoon control scheme, but they managed to decimate an easy, elegant setup into a pulp of frustratingly bad gameplay mechanics.

The Wild West shootout is a point and click style shooting game that you would find on a simple internet Flash game site. You're squaring off against another cowboy, trying to get more points than him by shooting more or higher point targets. I know it sounds like it's assloads of fun, but, surprise, it isn't. It's pretty much the most boring game in there, so boring that many reviews forgot to even mention it.

The best game on the disc, and that's not really an honor, is Backdraft. Basically, you are a fire fighter taking on flames and saving lives. Pretty simple stuff, but you have to deal with spreading flames as well as explosions and homing fireballs. Put out the flames using your hose backpack in a game that preceded Super Mario Sunshine by nearly a year or by a powerful blast from a fire extinguisher which only lasts a couple shots. You can also duck and cover from explosions and debris that falls from everywhere. It's almost fun, except for the fact that they added in a neat little control quirk. Like the rest of the game, the rooms in the Backdraft game area all pre-rendered. When you enter a new room, if you are holding the analog stick in the same direction, the controls are still 'locked' to the previous room's rules. This basically means that you need to center the analog stick in each screen to reset the control for the room you just entered. How fun is THAT?!?!?!

Bottom line, I can't believe I went through with the rental, I can't believe this game made it to market, I can't believe that I played it enough to review it, and I can't believe some people actually bought this shit. Executives at Kemco should have committed Seppuku over this one.