Developer: Radical Entertainment
Publisher: THQ
Release Date: November 1993
Okay so this game is great, UNTRUE! It’s a classic, TOTAL LIE! Am I remembering that gag correctly? It’s been a while. So I played yet another horrible THQ game and wasn’t going to write about it just yet, but it is already leaving my brain so it’s nor or never. I really don’t want to play through it again so here it goes. I started writing about bad John Hughes movies, and I could probably make another section about bad Mike Meyers games, because there are quite a few for a guy who hasn’t starred in a movie in fifteen years. Wayne’s World is probably the most infamous, and with good reason. It’s one of those “bad in just the way you would expect” kind of games. It has a familiar setup which makes it easy to pick up and play, and it is fully functional from start to finish. However it’s so poorly made that nobody would want to play it. For once I can see why this super rare game is so rare. Nobody was fooled even back then.
THQ fell into the classic licensed trap with this one. They made a game out of something that had no business being a game. Sure Wayne’s World is a fun movie, but it’s not filled with logical video game levels. Because of this they have to cheat and change the story from “the boys get exploited and fight to get their show back” to “the boys wander around killing ninjas and giant inanimate objects until the writers give up and it ends.” The game shares a few of the locations, but very little of the story and only contains about fifteen minutes of gameplay. It’s a very surreal experience where nothing connects logically and story completely falls apart by the end. This is quite an accomplishment for a game with probably twenty lines of text outside of top 10 jokes. I am not even sure what was accomplished because the ending screen is simply Wayne giving a thumbs-up and saying excellent. Yeah this game is excellent, OPPOSITE!
Of course a game this poorly put together can’t have very good gameplay. I sure hope you like tiny and ineffective sprites. You alternate between Wayne and Garth, but they are both control poorly. Garth only has a weak gun and Wayne only kicks. Garth is obviously better with his projectile weapon, but I still met my fair share of cheap deaths. Enemies are often badly placed, and environments are hard to distinguish. Sometimes you have to jump but can’t really tell what’s safe and what isn’t. Graphically the worst part has to be the bonus levels. It has one of the guys collecting donuts that look like roller skate wheels from giant shelves that look like they belong in an antique shop. Either those donuts are stacked up twenty feet high, or Wayne and Garth are tiny. Whatever they were going for it’s just one of the thousand tiny cuts that ruins the game.
I am really trying to get the dregs out of the way early, so I might continue on with THQ and see if there are any worthwhile game. I think there are a couple, but only time will tell. There is also another completely different Wayne’s World game on Super Nintendo which I will also have to rank at some point. It plays a little better but is possibly an even bigger mess than the NES version. Maybe I should do another Zelda or Mario game. My sanity might not be able to take so much shovelware in a row. Wayne’s World is my new #59 which puts it right in the middle of the bottom ten.
NES Quality Percentage: 10/19 or 52.63%
The bottom ten:
1. Birthday Mania
2. Bad Street Brawler
3. Burly Men at Sea
4. Wayne’s World
5. WeakWood Throne
6. X-Men (HyperScan)
7. My Name is Mayo
8. Marvel Heroes
9. The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends
10. Ben 10
No comments:
Post a Comment