South Park Rally

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. Also the objects in South Park Rally are mostly useless with absurd concepts that only serve as comic relief.

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.

The third game, South Park Rally, is a kart racing video game that features many characters from South Park, and locations such as the city itself and Big Gay Al's home. The objective of the races can vary from race to race; sometimes a player is required to obtain an item/series of items and at other times the player is required to beat the other players. The design of South Park Rally (levels, items, etc.) differs depending on what version you play. The characters and items are all from Seasons 1-2. Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone had little to do with the development of South Park Rally (as well as the two other Acclaim releases), although they did contribute a number of original lines of voice acting for it, as they do most of the voices on the show. The Dreamcast version has an exclusive carnival level. The PC version has mod support.

First of all, false advertising: On the cover, Kyle's car is blue and the license plate reads "SWEET" but in the actual game, it is red and the license plate reads "SUCC ASS". Also, Cop Cartman is featured prominently as if he were a default character but he is an unlockable character in-game. Lastly, Kenny's front bumper is purple on the cover, but blue in-game.

The PlayStation version has poor graphics, with somewhat ugly designs little worked and polygonal, besides the scenarios are made in a mediocre way and are unattractive with cubic and polygonal shapes, besides that most cars are small and look rare in characters, there are only a few that look normal, the other versions look slightly better. Looking at these makes you want to strike home your eyes with a knife. Also, the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 versions have frame rate issues, while the Dreamcast and Windows versions do not, which becomes somewhat problematic in some areas and the vehicles don't really move that fast, which makes the races last longer. The game's frame rate stays fairly consistent in the Dreamcast and Windows versions, even when you're playing with four friends in the split-screen multiplayer mode. With the exception of the PlayStation version, on the other hand the other versions look a little better and the character graphics closely resemble the program.

There's a large selection of characters from the show (lots of them come as unlockables). The game starts out with a limited number of characters to choose from and only one track to race on. Although with every race that you complete, more and more characters and tracks open up for selection in the multiplayer mode. You can save these unlocked tracks to a memory pack, though unfortunately you can't save your progress. Instead, every time you start the game you have to go through all of the levels you've already played.

While the music and sound effects are mostly quite decent or regular, most songs and sound effects are generic and some are really very easy to forget or with very annoying tones, plus most songs are very repetitive. Most phrases are repeated a lot during the game, at first it can be hilarious for the characters to say things and there are good one-liners too, but after a short time it becomes very annoying and repetitive, plus these phrases are only like comedy, but in case they are almost not hilarious compared to the show, also, even though the voice acting is done by the actors on the show, it's pretty poor and, as stated above, the characters repeat the same phrases quite a lot, which can be very annoying after a short time.

The game does try to be a bit innovative by straying away from the standard "race around the track in circles" formula by making each area open and fully explorable. But while the idea that you can go anywhere to get ahead in the race is a good one (and the bonus "missions" you have to complete instead of basic lap completion are intriguing), its falls. The non-linear course structure creates an air of pure chaos, with each car going every which way but loose in a jumbled mess of confusion due to the labyrinthine design of the tracks.

The controls are stiff which makes the driving hard to control, even when you use the hand brake to try to make a tighter turn, the results are often unpredictable, this has a lot to do with the floaty physics of the game, which let the cars flip over way more than they should, running at maximum speed is extremely sensitive due to the physics of the tracks, braking is akin to pot-luck with any thoughts of drifting gone, you’ll find yourself slamming into walls more often than other racing games because of the controls.

The camera is locked behind you at all times, even if you're moving backwards, so you can't move it at any time. This makes it difficult to see where the opponents and the objects are, especially ones that you have already passed, which also becomes a problem when you hit a wall or when you back up.

You are forced to get first place in every race. If you get second place or lower, you have to try again, which is severely difficult due to rigid controls and labyrinthine designs of tracks. If your character gets knocked into the air, there is a possibility of them landing on their heads and getting stuck there until they are warped back to normal, getting back to normal is very slow and can cause you to lose the first place if you get knocked normally. The computer opponents recover from your attacks easily and carry on around the track with unstoppable resolve; most of the time the CPU can easily dodge your attacks and therefore they don't take any damage, besides they're slightly more agile and faster than you and sometimes they take a lot of advantage of you and they can drive more easily.

Most of the power-ups are utterly worthless and bad aside from their comic value; some work like landmines, which you must drop blindly, as you have no rearview mirror, let alone any onscreen indication that a rival car is coming up from behind. Some of the other power-ups are much too inaccurate to be of any real use, which is useless if you need an object to attack an opponent.

The races themselves get repetitive real quickly. Instead of simply running laps around a track, each race instead involves passing through checkpoints (1-2-3-4 to complete a lap), grabbing a specific item, and so on. This can be very frustrating at times since the stages themselves are not well designed and have a confusing design, if you miss a checkpoint, you will have to do backtracking, which makes you waste a lot of time due to poor controls that make difficult drift, which will make you lose in a pretty ridiculous way. In addition the arrow system that tells you where is a checkpoint it sometimes doesn't work very well and in others it's very vague.

Some are mission-based events that call for you to pick up a specific item such as a trophy and take it to different locations on the track. For instance, on Valentine's Day everyone assembles at Big Gay Al's place for a Valentine's Day shoot-out. The objective in this mission is to find Cupid's bow and arrow and then shoot all of the other racers with it. The catch is that all your opponents have to do to take it from you is to ram your vehicle. Many of the events are set up like this, where you're either being chased by a mob of racers or you're one of the members of the mob chasing down someone else. In any event, the game's poor control, sloppy physics, and poor track design keep it from ever being truly fun, not to mention hard to play.

Over time, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have publicly criticized Acclaim and the quality of the games as well. After the release of this game, they had mentioned how they didn't like the extremely friendly direction Acclaim Entertainment had placed when creating and publishing all the previous South Park video games. Parker and Stone went on to explain how they wanted to make an R-rated game in the first place, as it fit with the original show and would proceed to do so once they gave the South Park license to another video game publisher, Ubisoft (and I hate that publisher much more than Electronic Arts).

Just find yourself another racing/driving game for your enjoyment. This is so fugly and terrible.