Operation Creature Feature

Nothing interesting came out this week in terms of video game releases and, as a result, I decided to dig through the bowels of my collection to find something horrible to play. I’m not a masochist by any stretch of the imagination, but I figured that reviewing a bad game would be humorous for anyone who frequently reads my reviews. Therefore, I fished out my PlayStation Eye, a camera peripheral for the PlayStation 3, and began playing a game called Operation Creature Feature. I quickly regretted my decision, yet I persisted to further fan my flames of hatred for the game.

Back in the day, I bought a PlayStation Eye for two reasons: Eye of Judgment, an ambitious card game, and Burnout Paradise, a wonderful crash-centric racing game. At the time, support for the camera was lacking, so I hastily purchased a number of cheap games from Sony’s PlayStation Store to justify the presence of another peripheral. Operation Creature Feature was one of those games and, since it was sold for only five dollars, I wasn’t anticipating much. My expectations were pretty much met; this game isn’t worth much.

I usually write a paragraph about a game’s premise or story, but Operation Creature Feature doesn’t have one that’s noteworthy. The setup is, “In an alternate universe, creatures known as ‘Blurbs’ have been enslaved to work in mines. As an agent of the Alien Liberation Front, it is your mission to enter the mines and guide the Blurbs out.” The premise was so uninteresting that my will to play the game disappeared before I even started. I honestly haven’t been more motivated to sit around and do nothing since the last time my high school history teacher gave me homework.

The story may be bad, but the gameplay takes a turn for the worse. My exaggerated claim is that I probably would have had more fun lighting my five-dollar bill on fire than spending it on this. The use of the PlayStation Eye’s technology sounds good in the theory, but it absolutely fails in execution. The camera’s ability to track my movements is an amazing step forward; I just wish the detection worked more than half the time I was playing. Instead, I was forced to flail my arms around like an idiot with hopes that my roommate wouldn’t walk in at the wrong time.

The game consists of five missions, each containing six levels. In each level, there are Blurbs that need rescuing and the objective is to move them from the starting point to the exit. To do that, I had to use my body, which is actively watched by the camera and projected to the background of the level. It seems simple enough, but the game randomly lost track of my movements and moved the Blurbs places I didn’t want them to. In addition, the Blurbs do nothing to help; they just lie around helplessly, hoping that my guiding hand will magically save them from their oppression.

Speaking of the Blurbs, they look like rejects from Spore. I guess someone could gather a hint of cuteness beneath their googly-eyes, but they’d have to have an utterly absurd definition of the word “cute”. Moreover, it doesn’t help that the entire game’s art assets look like they were ripped from a movie theatre’s photo booth. If anything, my narcissistic self will say that the graphics were complimented my sexy person constantly being in the background. But, that’s just me.

Miraculously, I made it through all the missions by using irregular hand motions and salutes that would make certain World War II dictators proud (not that I’d want to). As much as I love staring at myself for two hours in a row, Operation Creature Feature isn’t even worth the paltry price point.