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DEVELOPER
Iguana Entertainment
PUBLISHER
Acclaim
AVAILABLE
Now
MEDIUM
Cartridge
PLAYERS
1-4
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ow, an M rated game on the Nintendo 64. Who’d have thought this could ever happen? I guess even the almighty Nintendo had to concede to the thousands of South Park fans that would have cried foul had they forced the game to be edited heavily enough to meet the E rating. Good for Acclaim, there’s precious little to like about them, but getting South Park through while retaining the authenticity of the show is no mean feat.
But the fact remains, how do you make a good game out of a show like South Park? Years ago it would have made sense to do a side scrolling platformer, but as FPS shooters are the current “flavour of the month,” it was a no-brainer to take the characters from the Comedy Central hit and throw them into the arena for some shooting action. Unfortunately, I don’t think it worked all that well.
Of course, like I said before, Iguana has done a great job of  retaining the look and feel of South Park. In fact, the look of the show translated almost flawlessly to the N64, as a lot of complex textures weren’t needed at all to portray the original paper cutout art used on television. The result is a somewhat basic looking title that really needs to be kept in context in order to be appreciated.
The characters all look excellent, besides the four kids you’ll find everyone from Chef to Big Gay Al to Uncle Jimbo, an unbelievable amount of characters can be unlocked for the death match mode. None of them have much of an advantage, though the shorter characters get harder to hit if you play as an adult.
 The sound has to be the best part of South Park, hell; sometimes it’s the only reason I play. All of the original voices have been used to create the sound files for the game, and the only editing that’s been done to any of it is to beep out the harshest expletives, exactly what is done on Comedy Central. The most impressive part has to be that Iguana squeezed the entire intro onto the cartridge, as well as a fairly lengthy narrative to set up the story.
But the bottom line is that the single player game really isn’t worth playing in South Park. The enemies repeat way too much, and although some of the weapons are funny, the novelty wears off really quickly. However, if you can stand the screen split four ways, grab a cheat code off the net, unlock all the players in the game and you’ve got a pretty hilarious deathmatch going on. Definitely rent before you buy.
-- Greg Sewart
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