South Park

South Park is an American animated sitcom created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and developed by Brian Graden for Comedy Central. Unfortunately for me, I strongly dislike this show.

Okay. I mean, I tried watching it. I tried to like it. I really tried. I have nothing against adult cartoons (in fact, I like lots of them, much like I like all other cartoons) but unfortunately I found South Park to be rather awful. Mostly because the characters from this show are uninteresting and unlikeable and pretty annoying (not to mention the fact that most of them seem to be annoying clichés) but also because the humor from this show is so bland, dull, forgettable, and, even worse, it was made with the sole intention of becoming the most offensive thing to ever air on TV. You do know that there are many good cartoons for teenage and adult audiences to enjoy for a long time like The Simpsons, Futurama, King of the Hill, etc. But South Park is unfortunately not one of them.

Honestly, this has to be one of the most boring and rather offensive cartoons ever made: the jokes are lame, the plots are generic, it is hard to feel any kind of sympathy towards the unlikeable characters, and the "satire" parts are tedious...In what concerns to the animation, the designs are hideous and unappealing, while the overall quality of it left too much to be desired, being mediocre at best. But even the bad quality of the animation of this series (which is pretty much worse than other similarly animated series that were done in the previous years) could be forgiven, if, at least, the stories were good, or the characters were likable. Sadly, this is not the case.

Even my friends at school didn't like this show, even my mom, my dad, and my sister suddenly hated this show. In fact, every time it was on TV, my dad told me to turn it off or change the channel else there is nothing on to watch. I used to argue the case but I am thankful I listened. It was even annoying that one of my classmates who kept on getting told off in middle school was on the Comedy Central/South Park website every day and constantly played clips of this show on repeat and getting bad influenced by it. It badly influenced me, too, come to think of it.

South Park fails spectacularly at every single level. Seriously, just seeing the awful intro and everything else awful from this show lowered my expectations. And even without very much hopes put on this, South Park managed to disappoint me. South Park is not the worst cartoon that I've seen in my life but it is one of the most boring TV shows that I've seen in my life. It is flat, dull and forgettable at best, without any redeeming quality.

Some time later, not too long after the show premiered in the summer of 1996, a video game publisher, Acclaim Entertainment, purchased a license from Comedy Central to release several games based on the show. These games are pretty much aware of how bad they are if anything, making them seemingly worse than the show. There was going to be the Game Boy Color version, which was supposed to be a puzzle-platform game, but because South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone didn't like the idea of putting an adult oriented game on a console marketed towards children, it was cancelled and later reworked into three other family-friendly games. Recently in August 2018, the ROM image of the Game Boy Color version was leaked on the Internet.

The graphics of these games in general look extremely poor even by the standards of the 90's, the graphics are especially bad in comparison to most other games from the times they were released, and these games lack of many details and lighting effects with too many cubic and polygonal shapes that make maps and characters look ugly and the maps lack some details, to the point that these games resembles more of a PlayStation launch game.

The gameplay of this games is excruciatingly boring which try to copy formulas of successful game types in those times, though it fails, with painfully simple rules or bad rules that are ruined by level design, and in the worst case, almost non-existent.

The humor, even for the times between the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s, is not funny at all. It is based solely on toilet jokes and rudeness that are more disgusting than funny. The phrases and insults that the characters say at first are decently funny, but they get a little annoying because there aren't much variety of phrases.

Although these games have an M for mature rating, they really have nothing that's just for mature audiences; the only thing that can be considered for mature audiences only is the inappropriate language, the rude humor and some other elements taken of the show, so a clearer rating would be T for teens. It's not even close to being rated AO. In the intro screen, the games said that they were bad and shouldn't be played, just implying they even knew how bad they were.

So I will talk about the first of the games, a first-person shooter, released at the end of 1998. The game's single player mode places the player in control of one of four characters: Cartman, Kyle, Stan, or Kenny. The player must defeat a variety of enemies using the various weapons found throughout each stage. The player has a total of 100 health, whenever they are attacked by an enemy then lose some health, losing all health causes a Game Over and a high score screen to appear if the player has many points, the player can gain health by finding Cheesy Poofs boxes littered around the stages, there are also Snacky Cakes boxes which fully restore health but are rare to find, there are also Beef Cake cans which grant invisibility, finally, there is armor in the form of football pads, which protect the player and instead deduct armor points instead of health points. Innocent creatures are spread around the levels of story mode. Killing an innocent creature costs the player a hefty amount of points.

A spiritual sequel in the style of a sandbox action-adventure game was in development for the PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube, and Xbox, but was not finished. Little was known about the game until a build was found on an Xbox development kit, but only video footage of the beta build has been released to the public. The footage appears to showcase the PlayStation 2 version, due to the visual button displays used in the game. The cutscene from the game was even leaked on YouTube showing Cartman in a mental hospital. A South Park port was also being developed for Dreamcast, but it was cancelled for unknown reasons.

As I said, the graphics are very poor, while fitting for the show and even for the time it was released. The PlayStation version however is the most noticeable with cubic and polygonal shapes, fugly character models (Cartman's model in the character select screen looks especially very fugly) and maps with polygonal and poorly detailed graphics. The draw distance is also bad, which makes you not able to see what's following you on the map until you get close, which also includes enemies. The N64 version could've used the expansion pak to at least make the draw distance better, but instead it only lets you increase either the video resolution or the framerate. The PC version at least has a better draw distance on modern PC's.

The game's storyline is at least pretty true to the early seasons of the show (it was released near the end of the second season), which were based more around random humor and parodies of classic movies, rather than the topical jokes and political satire the show eventually became known for, but the first-person style gameplay doesn't really fit the tone of the South Park. It runs on the same engine as Turok 2: Seeds of Evil, pretty much making it a reskin. There's no difference in playstyle between the four main characters, so the option to play with different characters is just as a skin, the characters also don't have differences in weapons or abilities. All you do is shoot, shoot and shoot... and nothing else. There is no strategy whatsoever, except in multiplayer mode where you have to have some practice with weapons.

The music is terrible, with the exception of the South Park theme song, of course. Even the composer admitted that the game's music was a rush job that he hurriedly put together after finishing work on Turok 2: Seeds of Evil. Also, the sound effects are very annoying and get repetitive easily, like the turkeys. Even though the voice acting is done by the actors on the show, it's pretty poor and the characters repeat the same phrases quite a lot, which I also find very annoying after a short time. It doesn't even help that when you want to choose a character before playing the game, you have to wait until they have finished what they are saying, similar to picking a command in Plumbers Don't Wear Ties. Otherwise some jokes and phrases in the game are at least decently funny.

The level design it's really quite bad, you'll spend a good portion of your time in extremely large, open areas, such as the middle of the street, large fields, and similars. This leads to a very close horizon, complete with loads of enemies. Plus, since the ground and fog are both white, you'll eventually spend some time staring at a completely white screen, hoping that you're actually moving and not just bumping up against a wall of snow. Sure, it's a cold, snowy town, but it still gets in the way of the gameplay. So with the fog as bad as it is, you're forced to stare at your radar almost constantly.

The weapons are pretty ridiculous with absurd concepts, even for South Park standards. Some examples of weapons are a toilet plunger gun and a dart gun. What also doesn't help is that the game does a poor job giving you new ammo if you run out. There is roughly half a second delay from when you push the trigger, until the snowball hits your target, making aiming extremely hard. While you can enable it in the settings, the crosshair is by default turned off, so are subtitles.

Enemies do little more than spawn and then home in on your position. The artificial intelligence of the enemies chickens is terrible, mostly because the enemies will almost never try to take cover or flank you to take you out because they move a little slow and a little fast, instead, they just run to your address in the middle of the shooting waiting for you to kill them. Although AI can be especially frustrating if a large horde of enemies start attacking you and you can't defend yourself.

It takes too long for you to die because the life bar has a big health, although as noted above, if a large horde of enemies starts attacking you it takes too much life away from you and you can hardly defend yourself if you don't have enough ammo. One other thing: if you fail to kill a tank enemy, you are forced to kill them in a sudden death round. If you fail to kill it in time, it's an instant game over.

A multiplayer mode is made available for the player and other friends to play, access to multiplayer cannot be granted unless there are two controllers connected to the console. For the PC version, multiplayer was changed to be online. While multiplayer mode is pretty decent with large maps and weapons scattered around the levels and you must have some practice with weapons, there is a lack of playing abilities in Multiplayer mode and the weapons (dodge balls, dart guns, etc.), level design (way too big), and player movement (eternally sluggish) really don't lend themselves very well to the multiplayer game, not to mention the stages aren't even named in the PlayStation version.

The N64 version (which was the first version) of the game is fairly decent and passable in comparison to later released versions, but while the controls are already bad on the N64 port, you cannot even adjust your sensitivity. It's even worse in the PC version, as the enemies and bosses have double the amount of health they have in the PS1 and N64 versions. But the PlayStation version is considered the worst because it has several issues that are not in the other versions: awful cutscene quality due to the cutscenes being in an FMV format, the draw distance is noticeably worse in this version, where the town looks like it's covered in fog, and horrible audio quality where it sounds all muffled, despite being on a CD-based console, which is really inexcusable, especially since the N64 version (which was cartridge-based) has less muffled audio.

A fan-made remake of this game was developed by Marshmallow Studios, titled South Park 64 Remake (or South Park: Deeply Re-Impacted), which is similar to Nightdive Studios' Turok and Shadow Man remasters, it added more characters, more weapons, new enemies, and new game modes, with a better arsenal, more enemies to kill, updated visuals, and gameplay, gamepad and keyboard support, with supporting many other resolutions and visual features such as widescreen support, but it was cancelled due to the game will no longer be worked or developed on.

No one, absolutely no one, not even a single soul, should be allowed to play this game.