YEAH SOUTH PARK

Ever since Acclaim Entertainment was able to get its grubby hands on the South Park license, the company has been producing nothing but below average titles. Acclaim is squeezing all the juice that it can out of South Park, and their third effort is in the form of a racing game: South Park Rally. When the game was first announced, it seemed like Acclaim might actually be serious about creating a decent license-based title, but the end result with South Park Rally is disappointing rip off of Mario Kart that leaves much to be desired in the gameplay department.
Taking a cue from Nintendo's highly popular Mario Kart series, South Park Rally is a combination of pure racing and an assortment of races that involve completing certain objectives, not simply maneuvering your racer around a certain track. Depending on the race, what you must accomplish could range from having to pick up two items, combine them and then attack the other racers with it, to picking up a designated item and holding onto it for a specified amount of time. The sheer variety and amount of different types of gameplay are a nice touch, and it's evident from playing the game that the developers were aiming to give the player a unique experience with each new level to keep them interested. Everything is not as happy as it would seem in South Park, however.

Although the gameplay hasn't been up to the standards that some were expecting, all of the South Park titles, including South Park Rally, have decent enough graphics. This is not at all surprising, though, given the fact that moving the flat and simple 2D characters of the TV show into a polygonal form does not seem to be all that much of a monumental task. In spite of the fact that the visuals are relatively simple, South Park Rally holds up with some unique environmental backgrounds, nicely rendered characters and a solid frame rate that never missed a step during the time that I had with the game. Looking beneath the fitting surface of South Park Rally, I found that the actual game itself leaves a little bit to be desired in almost all other places.

South Park is known for its oddball and off-the-wall humor, and would have worked perfectly with the offensive and defensive weapons that can be picked up on the South Park Rally tracks had there been more attention paid to their design. Like the game's gameplay, there is an enormous amount of variety in the arsenal littered about the track, but I found that only a couple of them were actually of any use during the race. As expected, the turbo boost (used in this game as farts - har har!) and generic projectile (chocolate salty balls) are useful during racing, but items like "Herpes", which only adds a few speckled spots to the opposing player's screen, and Spooky-Vision (Saddam Hussein appears on your screen with flashing colors) are utterly useless. All they do is provide an annoyance and I was always just getting rid of those types of particular items instead of using them toward my advantage. A little more tweaking with the weapons, and creating a smaller batch of really good weapons instead of a large amount of useless ones would have been preferred.

Whilst diversity seems to be the name of the game with South Park Rally, it falls short, but not quite so much in the characters department. There are tons and tons of secret characters that can be unlocked as time goes along, though there honestly is no huge difference between them all other than pure cosmetics. That is not so much a problem, though, since just being able to ride around as your favorite South Park friends is fun as is.

As mentioned before, South Park Rally features a conglomeration of gameplay modes that vary from level to level. At first I thought this was a great idea on the developer's part; sometimes straight racing can become a bit boring and the feeling of being overdone can occur. Unfortunately, the ideas and difficulty seems to not have been taken into account as heavily as everything else. For instance, in "Rally Days" the player has to pass through designated checkpoints in a numerical order, and in "Valentine's Day" you have to nab both a bow and arrow and use them against the other characters in the stage. Each of the stages have their own set of problems, but in my opinion, the most glaring, and annoying, takes place in Rally Days. With Rally Days, the main quirk is with the checkpoints themselves. In my experience, when I happen to accidentally miss a checkpoint a game will usually tell me so in some way or another, but South Park Rally does none of that. More often than not, I was racing along gleefully, thinking I was in first place, but found I was accidentally in last, seeing as how I had missed the last checkpoint and didn't know it.

Next up are the smaller, yet still glaring, things. The game runs on a coin based system, meaning that if you are unable to complete the game in around six tries then it is back to square one. There are bonus coins that can be collected, but chances are you won't have time to search for them. Spending a good hour to make it half way through the game and have to start all over again had me pulling my hair out time and time again. Sure, it is possible to practice in the arcade mode, but that can only help so much. Lastly, with Internet gaming becoming so popular on the PC you would think that South Park Rally would work well with the possibility. Once again, the game disappoints by only providing LAN support. The thought of getting enough people together to play a decent Internet game is hard enough, but I certainly can't foresee anyone going the lengths to put together a LAN party just to play against other live opponents.

For the third time, Acclaim has brought down our expectations for their ability to create a decent license-based title. Chances are we will be seeing another South Park game sometime down the line, and hopefully Acclaim will take the time to do it right this time around.