One of my all time favorite games
is a first-person shooter on the PC called "Blood." I played it back in like
1996 when the whole FPS genre thing was really coming into fruition. I won’t
get into its details but, to me, Blood was a memorable game that will always
hold a special place in my heart, and, I kid you not, I honestly considered
naming my son after the game’s anti-hero. That being said, I have thought
about booting it up and playing it again for old times sake, but always stop
just shy of doing so. Why? Because with how much games have advanced in the
past 12 years, I would probably be embarrassed and those fond memories would
become tarnished.
Sooooo, that brings me to today’s
Xbox live title, Discs of Tron (DoT). In 1984 I spent pretty much any and all
money at the local arcade, "Aladdin’s Castle." There, Discs of Tron stood
defiantly with its cool electric blue facade and cleverly hidden black lights
that illuminated your t-shirt graphic and multi colored shoe strings. It was a
magical time that made me furious because I could never beat that dang game
and it ate so many of my quarters I could have probably bought that machine
six times over. So when I had the opportunity to play this frustrating title,
my mouth watered knowing I could probably beat it now that I wasn’t spending
enough money to feed the starving children in Botswana. Well, that little bit
I described above about fond memories, it came back and bit me … hard.
"The year was 1983, I had no chest hair."
For those of you who do not know,
Tron was every young boys’ dream of a movie; a stud video-game player gets
sucked into a game and is forced to do battle in an exciting venue of events
including the "not-featured-long-enough frisbee battles." And that is what DoT
is all about, you, playing as Tron (one of the movie’s heroes) engage in a
series of electrified disc battles while jumping around on bigger platforms
(discs) floating in the air. When the game starts, you are only on one
floating disc, but as the game continues, additional platforms appear and you
must jump from platform to platform to dodge attacks. Then soon obstacles get
put in the middle and then other things are thrown your way like moving walls,
and solid walls that split, all in order to frustrate you, and that not even
including platforms that move up and down requiring you to move your target up
and down.
So let me say this, the game has
not aged well, this is a direct port of the original and that includes the
grainy, pixelated graphics and three color schemes. It would have been nice
had the good people at Xbox Live given this title some spit and polish and
tried to make things a bit more visually friendly. The discs, when thrown look
kinda cool and when they bounce off the walls and when they sear through
either you or your nemesis Sark (he’s in the movie). But it is far too little
to really make the game anything more than a gimmick really.
This same quality of porting a
game that is 25 years old is that they also failed to update the sound effects
and voice work – if you could call it that. There is a couple of sentences
that either Sark or the Master Control (the movie’s other villain) say in
between rounds, but you can’t tell what the heck they are saying because it’s
that weirdo computer speak where the programmers linked several sounds
together so they kind of make a word and then a sentence. Whatever it is, it
really sounds bad. This also includes the original music accompaniment that
also predates the wooly mammoth.
The game also has a multiplayer
mode that truly horrifies and frustrates. There is some what of a glimmer of
hope in the form of online multiplayer gaming, but that gets snuffed out after
you realize that this is a poorly conceived idea. Since the online mode
sputters and has connectivity issues with a game that is so dated and then
placed onto a modern cutting edge server, there is bound to be problems.
|
|
Gameplay: 3.0
The control of the targeting
reticule is not smooth and can be cumbersome.
Graphics: 3.0
While initially cool, because
those of you who grew up playing this game will go, sweet, and then a half a
breath later you realize that his isn’t sweet at all, it’s tart.
Sound: 2.7
This is honestly a really bad
sounding title.
Difficulty: Medium/Hard
The game starts off pretty easy
and gets hard really fast. Including one accomplishment that requires you to
get to 60,000 points without losing a single guy, it’s pretty impossible.
Concept: 5.8
This was a really original game in its day, and there really isn’t
anything quite like it in modern video games, they need to redo it with modern
technology.
Multiplayer: 2.0
It’s really bad.
Overall: 2.9
The game is 800 Microsoft points, and it is really something that
they should just give away. Bad graphics, controls, sound and multiplayer
means a bad game and it should not have been.
