Disappointing Games: South Park (1998)

South Park for the N64 is extremely repetitive and tiresome to play. It's a FPS built with the Turok engine but it's simply ugly to look at even with bright cartoon visuals. The sound effects from your player and enemies becomes increasingly grating to the point of rage, there's only so many times one can hear an obnoxious South Park quote and produce a smile let alone emotion of any kind. As the game progresses there's a lot walking that feels slow and aimless, and even with mildy enjoyable quirky music it feels lifeless and boring. After killing a bunch of enemies the levels are entirely devoid of life except for power ups and collectibles, I'm almost positive the music was all that kept me trucking along for a better level or some game breaking glitch that would end my suffering.

The excessive fog coverage can not be understated as it blinds you from knowing where you're going and you'll just walk around guessing which direction to take and what areas are completed. Hoping a new game mechanic will emerge or something mildy interesting will be hiding behind a distant corner. Not to be.

The character you play appears to move by floating, this is accentuated by having no sound effects of any kind as you move or climb. It's just constant silence like the deadest of nights, you're a damned ghost drifting through a snow themed polygon demo with no personalty whatsoever, apart from your character of choice yelling catchphrase after catchphrase.

You have a choice of 4 main players to choose from including Cartman, Kyle, Kenny and Stan, but there's very little difference apart from which sound bytes you want to suffer though the most. Choosing Kenny will save your patience momentarily as you guess what's he's saying, probably something far funnier than what's actually being said. The weapons are the only redeeming quality of the game as they have the most creative design with a good variety to collect and choose from. I think if this game was a 2D platformer it may have been somewhat enjoyable and not have felt so dull and a chore to play, but as it's stands 'South Park: The Game' should be highly avoided.