Musical acts and video games have had a rather interesting relationship over the years. Obviously, countless acts have licensed their music for play inside games in the past 20 or so years, but before that...the combinations were much more adventurous.
In the DOS and early Windows eras, it seemed like every band alive either made an Enhanced CD (with some of the worst compressed video ever seen) or had some sort of Interactive CD-ROM, sometimes with game elements (Prince: Interactive) to go along with a new album. There are a ton of them on EXoDOS and eXoWin31 that I intend to look at in due time.
Today's target is one I had never heard of until I saw the title in the eXoDOS list, despite having one of the biggest bands of all time tied to it, and released by one of the biggest companies in video gaming at the time. Let's take a look at Queen: The eYe released by Electronic Arts in 1997-98.
When I started reading up on this game, I was honestly pretty excited. I did read that it had "middling" reviews upon release. The eYe apparently spanned 5 CDs when it was released. It was released in the UK in 1997, and in the US in 1998. I did not read up much as to what type of game it was. At 5 CDs length, I was rather anticipating a sprawling adventure, rather in line with the other popular games of the day such as Myst and the 7th Guest. This is not that.
When you start the game, you are greeted with an ominous, post-Apocalyptic, "Big Brother is watching you" version of the future (as are 99% of all video games these days). It doesn't spell out much of the story in this opening movie, but what I've read is that an all-knowing computer (called...you guessed it...The eYe) controls everything, and has banned music and all forms of entertainment.
I will give the designers credit, they set up a solid dystopian vision for this game.
You play Dubroc ...
who (and the rest of this story is not explained in the game, thanks Wikipedia) is an agent for The eYe who stumbles across a secret cache of classic rock and roll music. The fact that you found this music displeases The eYe greatly.
So, logically, you are sentenced to death in The Arena, a televised deathmatch where you are facing off against The Watchers - a series of combat masters. The goal is simple: survive, and destroy The eYe while you're at it.
Fear me!
At this point, you get to the game, which is an action-adventure combat game, with some mild puzzling, mazes, and some of the most frustrating platforming in the history of gaming. The reasons for much of the frustration are two-fold. First, I need to talk about the controls. The controls are keyboard only. No mouse, no dual-stick analog, nothing. Running forward and backwards works fine, but if you need to rotate? Forget it, you move slower than a turtle and a sloth playing on a merry-go-round. This makes the combat extremely tough.
To add on frustration, the environment you are playing in is done in all pre-rendered environments. Which means that at any random time, your perspective (AND YOUR CONTROLS) can change. If you get caught in a katana fight right on the edge of two scene changes, you can get crazy flickering. Plus, sometimes your characters are so far back in the scenery, you can't tell at all what's going on.
Fortunately, the AI of most enemies (and especially The Watchers) is cartoonishly simple. If you ever get ganged up on? Just run around in circles until one of the enemies gets stuck on a background element, then take out the other enemy. Yes, this works on the level boss Watchers as well. (Actually, it works best on them).
Did I mention how dark a lot of it it is? Between the rendered backdrops and the sameness of many of the environments, it's tough to find your way around. In addition, you are supposed to pick up items strewn about the environment, but good luck finding the gray box of shotgun shells among all the gray crates and gray flooring.
Fear me too!
The last nail in the coffin for this game is the platforming. As I said before, you can't turn very fast, and you have a limited jump ability. This makes some of the platforming sections needlessly hard. UNLESS, it's the exact jump the designers intend you to make. In which case, Dubroc, gains a very glitchy-looking super long jump to just barely make the gap.
This hall of swords is hard only because the sense of depth near the back of the room gets all out of whack.
So, you have a game with terrible controls and frustrating graphics that actually hinder game play. What's left? The music. And that's where this game shines. I mean, it's Queen. The game spans 5 CDs which is convenient since there are 5 levels in the game. Each CD has a different theme to go with the music. According to the Wikipedia entry, most of the music in the game is instrumental (though I definitely heard a vocal mix of "I Want It All" while playing). It's not just a greatest hits collection, there are many deep cuts and alternate mixes of many tracks. The CDs can be played in regular CD players, though not all the tracks in the game can be played that way.
A death scene, you'll see this a lot.
As is rather usual with the blog. I watched some of a playthrough because I did not have the patience to play through the game myself, and found that if you take out the cutscenes, this game can be finished in under 2 hours, but it's a mighty boring and uninspiring 2 hours.
Generic story, poor controls, frustrating graphics, and just flat out boring game play... the music of Queen is not enough to save The eYe. Go out and get Queen's Greatest Hits, you'll have a better time.
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