With a recent, successful movie, the timing seems ideal for a new South Park game. Oddly, Acclaim’s PlayStation South Park is not a new game at all, but a port of the almost year-old title on Nintendo 64. Despite its unoriginal FPS gameplay, South Park on N64 won fans with its four-player mode and atmosphere. Now on PlayStation, the four-player mode doesn’t exist, the graphics look worse, and the gameplay is still unoriginal.
Just like the Nintendo game, the boys must save South Park from alien invaders. Unlike many FPS games, the levels lack a variety of enemies. Instead, one type of creature tends to dominate each level, with only size differences for any variation. The larger enemy characters reproduce the smaller ones, which leads to a highly monotonous game. Even when the characters do change between levels, they all tend to use the same method of attack: run blindly up to the boys and try to swarm them.
Rather than stick to the show’s Parappa-like 2D characters, Acclaim decided to create polygonal models instead. And just like the show’s characters, the 3D models look quite rough and rudimentary. Items display visibly jagged edges, and polygon break-up often occurs as well. Additionally, South Park competes with games such as Superman on N64 for the “thickest fog” award. While some fog might look natural in a cold place such as South Park, the gross amount of white fog and white snow blends together to create essentially one huge blind spot that hides enemies. Fog also lurks indoors and in caves as well.
As South Park’s popularity does not arise from its artistic touch, rough graphics would work just fine as long as the game ran smoothly. Unfortunately, the game not only looks awful, but also suffers from some of the choppiest movement of any PlayStation game. The game visibly pauses at times between frames, which results in imprecise, frustrating control. The even worse split-screen also prevents the two-player game from lending any value to the title.
In spite of the game’s awful overall quality, the South Park humor does provide a few laughs. Weapons like Terrance and Phillip gas grenades, as well as authentic voices, offer the gamer one positive feature. However, the small amount of humor cannot save the game from its many flaws, and as such, South Park ultimately disappoints fans of the show. Save the money to buy the newer and much funnier movie instead.
-- Rachel Lewis
