Planet Alcatraz

The storyline, as far as I've been able to tell, is that of a prison planet, where the guys in charge are suspecting the prisoners on it of building a shuttle to escape. Surprise? Not really, if you dump a bunch of convicts on a planet I'd be surprised if they didn't try to escape. You play Boar, a member of Vampire Squad, and you're sent down with a bunch of other guys (the rest of Vampire Squad, perhaps? It's never really explained) under cover of you being a new prisoner. Of course, pretty much everyone else is killed on the crash-landing of your drop pod, and the survivors are quickly taken prisoner by the government, or whatever it is that exists on Planet Alcatraz. You have to, of course, escape and foil the prisoners' plans of trying to escape.

How do you accomplish this? Through some poorly-translated dialogue and awkward combat segments. To give an example of the glacial pace at which combat unfolds, at one point I fought a mutant animal, and took five minutes to kill said animal. My tactics during this battle were to make sure I was still attacking the animal, since it seemed at times like I had just stopped attacking it, and healing myself when my health got too low. Thrilling.

Planet Alcatraz is not a very good game, but for some reason I am still compelled to give it a try. Perhaps it's the laughably bad voice acting, which ranges from disinterested to ludicrously over the top. When a character says he's so impressed he "doesn't even want to swear!", what can I say? I want to hear more of that ridiculous dialogue.

Also, the game is racist. At least, I consider describing a man as "An elderly but brisk Jew with a typical Jewish experience" to be racist. You probably should too, honestly.

I will probably continue playing the game despite all this weirdness, because all the weirdness compels me to keep playing. It's a catch-22 of a sort, where I want to stop playing the game because it's so broken and weird, but it's the same reason that I want to continue.

The storyline, as far as I've been able to tell, is that of a prison planet, where the guys in charge are suspecting the prisoners on it of building a shuttle to escape. Surprise? Not really, if you dump a bunch of convicts on a planet I'd be surprised if they didn't try to escape. You play Boar, a member of Vampire Squad, and you're sent down with a bunch of other guys (the rest of Vampire Squad, perhaps? It's never really explained) under cover of you being a new prisoner. Of course, pretty much everyone else is killed on the crash-landing of your drop pod, and the survivors are quickly taken prisoner by the government, or whatever it is that exists on Planet Alcatraz. You have to, of course, escape and foil the prisoners' plans of trying to escape.

How do you accomplish this? Through some poorly-translated dialogue and awkward combat segments. To give an example of the glacial pace at which combat unfolds, at one point I fought a mutant animal, and took five minutes to kill said animal. My tactics during this battle were to make sure I was still attacking the animal, since it seemed at times like I had just stopped attacking it, and healing myself when my health got too low. Thrilling.

Planet Alcatraz is not a very good game, but for some reason I am still compelled to give it a try. Perhaps it's the laughably bad voice acting, which ranges from disinterested to ludicrously over the top. When a character says he's so impressed he "doesn't even want to swear!", what can I say? I want to hear more of that ridiculous dialogue.

Also, the game is racist. At least, I consider describing a man as "An elderly but brisk Jew with a typical Jewish experience" to be racist. You probably should too, honestly.

I will probably continue playing the game despite all this weirdness, because all the weirdness compels me to keep playing. It's a catch-22 of a sort, where I want to stop playing the game because it's so broken and weird, but it's the same reason that I want to continue.

But of course I'm still going to complain.