The Luv Shack is closed
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 graphics in Chef's Luv Shack are especially bad because the characters are in 2D (emulating the show's artstyle), the characters move in a few frames per second and most character animations are bad and look like they're taken out of a flash game or an animated GIF.
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, South Park: Chef's Luv Shack is the best example of this which are only based on answering trivia and sometimes playing minigames.
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.
I will now discuss the second game, Chef's Luv Shack. This game was developed under company's new name, Acclaim Studios Austin. The PlayStation version of South Park was developed by Appaloosa Interactive. It features a wide variety of minigames and features all of the South Park cast of characters in one way or another, though you can only play as Eric Cartman, Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, or Kenny McCormick. The game also consists of answering trivia and earning points. In the PlayStation and Dreamcast versions of South Park: Chef's Luv Shack, the questions are read by Chef, while in the Nintendo 64 version, the reading was replaced with a ticking sound due to limited space on the cartridge. Also categories are automatically chosen in the PlayStation version, while in the Nintendo 64 and Dreamcast versions you can choose a category.
It looks and feels enough like South Park, complete with the game's graphics being on par with the show's animation style, to please fans of the original show, but the graphics are comparable to a flash game you would find online or a animated gif, animation is limited to perhaps six frames per character, and while the planning behind those half-dozen movements was well conceived to be minimalist and still clever, they're still not hardly enough and the backgrounds in trivia sections are overly saturated and poorly designed.
The replay value is low, as the dialogue/scripted events vary very little in each gaming session. There are only 20 mini-games, compared to 65 for Mario Party 2, released at the same time in North America as this. Even the first Mario Party game towers in mini-games, having over 50. Also, most of the mini-games themselves are of unoriginal gameplay genres; one example is Bad Kitty, which rips off Donkey Kong. Another is Asses in Space, which rips off Asteroids. In fact, the website and manual say that Asses in Space rips off Asteroids no joke!
The load times are brief, but they really break up what should be a fast-paced trivia game. Having to wait between questions and minigame rounds really has a noticeable effect on the overall flow of the game. Some questions are not really related to South Park, but rather pop culture or other questions that are not entirely related to South Park. I do not know why though, but still.
The voice acting from most of the characters is off, which was partially due to the limitations of the consoles it was on, despite having South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone doing vocal work in this game. But the voice performance from the late Isaac Hayes who reprises his role as Chef is really good. Even some of the jokes can be funny.
But my opinion still stands. If you enjoyed this game at least I am glad you have something based on South Park to enjoy which I don't, and I am glad I never played any of these games and I no longer am allowed to watch that show.
