Another month, another batch of crappy American movie games.
Hook (Painting By Numbers/Sony)
Yet another movie platformer. These always find some weirdly unique way to be bad, and in this case it’s that you have moon physics on all your jumps and that your only attack is a little dagger stab that extends about half the width of your player sprite in front of you. It’s certainly one of the shortest range attacks I’ve ever seen, but it’s also completely useless in this first area since it doesn’t seem to be able to hit the ghosts. It has nice enough graphics and the background music sounded possibly decent. I can’t say that confidently because it was hard to hear it over the horrible looping noise the ghosts make.
It averaged a 70% from critics, for some reason. Most scores stayed pretty close to that mark. I guess everyone knew to expect a baseline level of crap from these games by now.
Rating: 1.
Paperboy 2 (Eastridge/Mindscape)
I don’t think anyone was asking for a sequel to Paperboy, but we got one. It introduces turns in your route, so you’re not just going in a straight line, allows you to play as Papergirl, and apparently has some actions you can take to get your picture in the next day’s paper. Beyond that, it’s pretty much the same. It’s a port of a 1991 DOS game and I have no idea how innovative it was for PCs, but it does have the honor of being the first Game Boy game with generation seeds. You can pick a number from 0000 to 9999 to get different, admittedly minor, variations on the levels you play.
Critical reception was quite poor, with MobyGames tracking a 52% average. User reviews are not much better on other platforms, although the Game Boy version seems to be by far the least remembered. Most people played this on console or PC.
Rating: 1
Super Hunchback (Ocean)
I assumed this game was tied to the movie when I saw it coming up in my list, but Disney didn’t actually make that until 1996. This game, with a name you absolutely could not have today, is actually a sequel to a 1983 game for arcades and a bunch of UK-only computers no one remembers. It’s not clear why Ocean came back to the idea a decade later considering that the original was poorly reviewed, but whatever the reason, it’s a boring platformer that may as well be a movie license. Also, the opening theme has a section that’s clearly “Istanbul (not Constantinople)”, which led to me learning that They Might be Giants only covered it in 1990 and the original was performed by Canadian quartet The Four Lads in 1953. Who knew?
Reviews were actually somewhat positive, adding up to a 74% average and a place just inside the top 150 Game Boy games. Nobody had particularly high praise for it, but no one hated it either. Most reviewers seemed impressed by the humor and secrets. I still think it’s boring.
Rating: 1
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