Video Games Suck - Total Overdose

Burrito Boring! Mucho Siesta! Fucking crap! No matter how you say it, Total Overdose belongs in the bin. Possibly right next to Need For Speed: Most Wanted.

SCi's never exactly been very original in the past - and after roughly a million 'carmageddon' sequels and ports (each a bit shitter than the last), they've finally sunk to lamer levels than before. With the assistance of nameless and thankfully soon-to-be-forgotten shitty game developer Deadline Games, SCi has released a perfect example of the "Terribly executed GTA clone" genre. Worse still, they haven't even tried to wrap it up into a farcical shell like in GUN, preferring to be as derivitive, dry, and shitty as possible.

Story:

You play as Tacomuncher McJockstrap, a metrosexual wielding one-liners and insults that the 1960's would laugh at. As part of the storyline (which I skipped, since it's obviously total shit), you're sent to mexico - the land of stinking shitty shanties, food poisoning, and veneral diseases. SCi really dodged a bullet here - but setting the game in a place that looks like shit in real life, it's not so bad that the game and it's 1995 graphics engine look like shit too.

Gameplay:

The gameplay is in the traditional unplayable repitive shitty action game mold - wander around aimlessly, get attacked by smelly mexicans, shoot the mexicans and then start crying at the way the guy at Gamestop convinced you to buy this instead of GTA: San Andreas. While most games of this mold are shitty, being an SCi game and a GTA clone that blows ass, Total Overdose is Notably Shitty..

While GUN fucked up the action elements and the long playtime and replayability of GTA, Total Overdose seemingly fucked up every single little bit that makes GTA good - and even some parts that make GTA bad.

Tacomuncher, your hero ('cause he sure isn't mine), walks around like the herpes-infested man-whore that he is - with the grace and speed of a similarily herpes-infested hippopotamus. While they were obviously attemping to copy the playstyle of Max Payne in Total Overdose, they succesfully replaced Max Payne's fluid and simple yet effective style with a clunky, shitty interface that relies on auto-aim and lockons to play. They weren't any good in GUN, they aren't any good in Total Overdose. auto-aim shouldn't even be an OPTION anymore now that we have these things called "mice". Heard of those, game developers? I think they were invented in 1982 and became common about TEN YEARS AGO. Even Duke Nukem 3D had mouselook support!

TO's cars and other vehicles behave a little like, I guess, SHADOW WARRIOR vehicles, with practically no notion of physics to speak of. The cars can also circle strafe. Damn, it's such a life saver when i'm trying to get to work in the morning and I circle-strafe my car out of my driveway before pulling a strafejump past the lights.

The game is obviously intended to let the player string together action movie-like attacks, but it fails horribly. For one, your character is a blatant homosexual. This enough is reason to make it not work, but the mechanics fail too. Like I said, combat relies on auto-aim, so basically you have no real control over what you're doing, as the game just designates targets which you then automatically shoot at. The clunky movement makes stylish attacks impossible, and the shitty sound and graphics make audiovisual feedback nonexistant.

Graphics:

Apparently SCi and Deadline developed this game during the frosts of '93, because the graphics engine used in Total Overdose is ancient. Apparently too incompetant to add any graphical features introduced post DirectX3, there's no bump mapping, no reflection mapping, no multitexturing - and barely even polygons. As with Gunz, SCi hired blind retarded midgets with cataracts to design the models and textures in this game, and resultingly the graphics are about as high-quality as those vector-shaded dungeons outta Ultima 4.

Sound:

Deadline Games' sweatshop game production studio members aren't exactly hot on the skills of coding, but where they lack in coding skill.... they also lack even more in audio recording skills. I've seen bassier thumps emitting from the faggot in that punto that drives past my house at 3 PM every day, and the explosions sound like popcorn.

I quit playing this game and uninstalled faster than a bunch of kids running outta Neverland Ranch after michael jackson injected himself with 3 gallons of Viagra.

Score: -43/10