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I remember staying up until the wee hours of the morning to watch the USA channel, and their “Night Flight” program. “Night Flight” featured a number of different, poorly translated movies from Japan and China. The movies that I remember so fondly however, were the ones starring a giant lizard who would attack various parts of Japan every Friday at midnight pacific standard time. Now I have a chance to reenact these cherished memories of mine thanks to game developer Pipeworks Software and publishing conglomerate, Infogrames. For those that have played SNK’s King of the Monsters series, Godzilla: Destroy all Monsters Melee will feel like an old familiar shoe. Graphically, Godzilla is extremely sharp, with fully destroyable landscapes in faithfully recreated real-life cities. My hometown, Seattle, is one of the cities that you can cause unimaginable amounts of damage in, and the attention to the finer details of the Seattle landscape is truly amazing. Not only are the big name Seattle area monuments in the game, (Space Needle, the Columbia Tower, and Interstate 5) but also, many of the little buildings that only someone who has spent a considerable amount of time in the city would recognize. The monsters also look extraordinary, somehow Pipeworks stayed true to the feel of the cheesy rubbery suit monster look, while at the same time breathing life into the monsters, making them move and interact with the city in an eerie realistic fashion. The sound in Godzilla: Destroy all Monsters Melee, was also pulled right out of the old rubbery suit movies, from Godzilla’s signature cry to Mothra’s death-ray, the sounds of the monsters will bring you back to the golden days of the Godzilla movies.
The gameplay of Godzilla: Destroy all Monsters Melee is really quite simple. The control stick or pad moves your monster around in the map, the A button punches, the B button kicks, X allows you to unleash special fierce attacks upon your opponents, Y blocks, and the Z button gives you the ability to use your projectile attack. Of course you can duck, run, jump, and throw your adversaries as well. The simplistic nature of Godzilla’s control scheme gives this game almost no learning curve at all, making it no problem to pick up and play from the get go. The single player experience is really nothing to write home about. Picking your favorite monster, you advance through the game by battling a number of different foes until the final battle with none other than MechaGodzilla, who is over the top brutal even on the easiest mode. However the real lasting appeal of Godzilla is the multiplayer mode, four- player insane brawling in 3D in real cities with giant 400 foot tall monsters, now that’s a party! With 11 monsters to brawl with and 8 locations to smash up, Godzilla: Destroy all Monsters Melee is an overly addicting and extremely fun game, once you add human players to the mix. One of the most fantastic things about the multiplayer mode is the complete absence of any slowdown, even when things are getting insanely wild with all four players and the military mixing it up on the screen. One of my major gripes with Godzilla (besides the fact that you cannot play as Mothra) is if you are going to make a four-player game, why only have three playable monsters available in the beginning? Making you play through the single player game to unlock all of the monsters is some kind of a cruel hoax. Playing Godzilla alone is nearly the equivalent of buying Mario Party 4 to play all by your lonesome. With that in mind I can tell you that if you are looking for a game to play with your buddies or loved ones, then Godzilla has to be a game worth considering.
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