This is one of the worst games I have ever played in my life
By zanzibarbreeze 26 Comments
I did not finish V.I.P. It’s on the Game Boy Advance. It’s a very bad game. It’s slow, it has terrible control, and, quite frankly, it’s not worth my time. Take from that what you will, dear reader, because I know that some do not like it when a person talks critically about games that he has not completed. For what it’s worth, though, I think I’ve experienced enough in order to be able to talk informatively about V.I.P. this game is bad. It is, in all likelihood, the worst game I have played in the last three years. If you take nothing else from this, I beg of you: never play this game.
Design
Bad action
Boringly simple gameplay is equal to gameplay that’s not fun, and gameplay that’s not fun is not good. V.I.P.’s action is boring and not fun and not good. It consists of running left or right, and confronting enemies. It’s incredibly boring, and rather painful. Many side scrolling games suffer from this, but in V.I.P.’s case, slow firing weapons and lack of health makes it difficult to face the infinitely respawning enemies in later stages.Bad level design
Level design is constituted of several floors on each level, with the player always aiming to reach a door which will take him to the next area. Most irritatingly, each stage has multiple floors, and each floor has a foreground and background plane. It gets too convoluted for its own good. It’s not confusing; rather, it simply requires more effort than the player should be willing to exert.
Too many characters
Every stage players will get to play as at least three different characters (though the first stage only has two). Some stages feature up to five different characters. I suppose that this would be a big problem for character development, but I posit to you that the story is so vacuous in any case, it’s impossible to care about the characters. It is a major issue for gameplay, however. It is jarring, which is a big enough problem unto itself -- different weapons which do different damage and the like. The bigger issue is that only one of the six-or-so characters is actually worth playing as. Ironically, this character is the weakest, but he has the faster fire rate, something at least reasonable by most video game standards. Every other character takes approximately one second to fire a bullet. It’s quite unbearable.Bosses are poorly designed
There are two problems with the bosses. Firstly, they are SNK bosses, which is a short-hand term for boss characters that are unfairly overpowered and ludicrously difficult to defeat. There are several bosses whose attacks are unblockable, unavoidable, and no cover is provided to the player. I’m not quite sure how that’s supposed to work. My favorite (and here I am using “favorite” ironically) boss was a helicopter that players have to shoot in the air. Unfortunately it can only take damage in one minute area of the craft, and player characters can't shoot straight up in the air -- they can only shoot diagonally. The helicopter zooms across the screen as if it’s a jet (making it impossible to hit). Furthermore, the slugs it fires are nearly unavoidable, and two enemies spawn on the ground every few seconds. It was at this point I stopped playing because it was near impossible. Earlier boss battles were hard too, but I found a glitch to exploit. Here in lies the second problem (actually a saving grace for the player) -- bosses can only move around a limited part of the screen. This can only be a glitch. If the player moves so that the boss is off-screen, the boss won’t fire at the player but the player can still fire and hit the boss. Boss defeated, no health lost.Backtracking
V.I.P. features two types of backtracking. The first involves completing several levels repeatedly (Particularly the boat stage), which should be a crime for side scrolling platformers. The second type involves the multiple character the player is forced to play as, and the fact that players are forced to complete the same parts of each level, facing the same enemies and collecting the same pickups, two or three times over. This should be a crime for side scrolling platformers.Pickups are stupid
Pickups (all of which serve only as points for the total score the player accumulates) include desk calendars, sunglasses, and shoes, among other things. I lack the ability to understand why a desk calendar is a pickup in an action game.Graphics and animation
Mediocre graphics
The graphics aren’t exactly bad -- they’re functional -- but they’re low resolution, uninspired, and bland. The ship, for example, looks all the same; city streets all look identical; the interiors of buildings are cut from the same mold. It’s not something that especially bothers me, but it’s certainly indicative of a great lack of effort.Bad animations
There’s only one animation per action per character. They’re all clunky and robotic.Gameplay
The gameplay is slow
Movement is slow, as is jumping. It’s not slow as to be painful but it is slow enough to bother. Jumping especially is plagued by tired movement. Combine slow movement with the lack of sufficient health, and the byproduct is the player being unable to sufficiently defend himself. Firing weapons, for most of the characters, is also too labored. There are pickups which increase the rate of fire, but these are generally rare. V.I.P. is a grind, not in a level-up sense, but in the sense that the player will likely play through the same segments repeatedly until he eventually depletes all his credits, at which point the game ends. I suspect most players will not start anew.
Jumping is bad
Air control is bad because everything moves a bit too slowly. This, though, is not the worst fault; inexplicably, sometimes jumping does not work at all. For example, I found that if the character is pressed up against a wall it’s a crapshoot whether pressing the A button will trigger the character to execute a jump. It’s bizarre.Every enemy can be defeated by ducking and firing
It doesn’t take much to defeat the astonishingly stupid enemy AI -- all the player has to do is duck and shoot. Seriously.Enemies fire at you before you can see them
I’m willing to accept that this could be just me, but I think it’s unfair in side scrollers for so many enemies (on level plane with the player) to fire at the player before the player can hit the enemy with his own weapons. If nothing else, it’s certainly archaic game design. Against, it ultimately gets frustrating and completely unenjoyable.Story
Bad story
There’s not a whole lot going on in terms of narrative. The game starts the player looking for something, or someone. It’s never really made clear. All that is really necessary for you to know is that this game is based on an old TV show starring Pamela Anderson. Listen, it’s not good.
Please don’t play this game. It’s not good. The fact that the developers tried to use Pamela Anderson as a selling point should serve as a warning to you, friends. These kinds of games are insulting. They’re insulting to the player’s intelligence and they’re insulting to games as a whole. Most flash games are better than V.I.P. Don’t play this game. Don’t give the publisher the pleasure.
Here's a full list of my other blogs. Next time: Tomb Raider Underworld. I didn't finish that game either, because the game glitched and exploded on me.