Scatfest 2008

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Ever seen a rack of suspiciously cheap games you've never heard of? These are the impulse purchases of the console world, the two-for-one bargains that seem almost too good to be true, and are rarely - if ever - covered in the specialist gaming press.

So we thought we'd round up some of our favourites this summer, and keep them away from the normal reviews section where they might not fare so well. Instead, we bid you welcome to Scatfest 2008, a celebration of all things shonky and cheap.

Bear in mind that if you didn't manage to get a ticket for the Reading Festival this year, you could use the money you saved to buy all of the games featured in these pages, brand new. We wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but you could.

Jumper

When the police tomorrow stumble onto our cold dead bodies splattered all over the pavement at the base of NGamer Towers and begin to ponder what happened, tell them this: it was Billy Elliot, with the bowie knife, in the Colosseum.

Brash's adaptation of Doug Liman's lacklustre action movie will make jumpers of us all.

Small mercies first. Hayden Christensen, the film's lead and the acting equivalent of bark, has been swapped out for the slightly more charismatic Jamie Bell, albeit a Jamie Bell beaten with the digital rendering ugly stick.

The rest of it? Shows no mercy. Environments that would make the N64 gag are populated by cel-shaded digital puppets that quiver and glitch like one of the meat-based horrors from Silent Hill.

Combat revolves around the 'jumping' ability - warping to an enemy's side and sticking them in the guts with a ruddy great hunting knife. Forget the Manhunt 2 furore, this is the Wii's true execution sim: hammer A or B and Billy Elliot warps in for another stabbing.

It's as close as you'll get to a 'press to win' button, only here, winning means another goon brutally knifed to death. It's grimy, horrible stuff dressed up as popcorn fun, and we were left feeling just a touch sullied by it.

You could systematically tap the button for the two hours it takes to complete Jumper, but there are plenty of more worthwhile things to push your finger against. Rusty thumb tacks, for example.

Cruis'n

Popping in Cruis'n for a spin, you'd be forgiven for thinking you'd accidentally selected your VC download of Cruis'n USA from the Wii menu. That's 1998's Cruis'n USA for the N64.

Everything, from the boxy cars to the horrific harem of digitised start grid 'babes', looks like it was curled out many moons ago, given time to crust over and intensify in its stomach-turning awfulness.

Cruis'n has always been naff, but unlike, say, Target Terror, it doesn't choose to revel in its inherent badness, but soldiers on po-faced, resulting in a game that is just very, very dull.

Courses have an aversion to corners, seemingly drawn against a ruler, and are entirely beatable by simply holding accelerate and closing your eyes - although this does mean you don't have to suffer the texturing mess that Midway equates with graphics.

The option to instantly change the music tracks is a nice touch - if you hammer the 'switch tune' button the brief load between each song will overlap and you won't have to hear any of them.

Actually, scratch that and mute the whole thing or suffer the pained roar of an engine more like a hoover being molested than any form of recognisable mechanical sound.

That we had the time to have a good ol' ponder about each of the individual aesthetic elements is a testament to the core gameplay's absolute inability to hold our attention. Cruis'n for a bruis'n, it deserves everything it gets.

Orbs of Doom

Had some clever chaps from Tokyo never invented Monkey Ball, then Orbs Of Doom would never have existed.

So you can thank Sega, in a roundabout way, for this jerky, frustrating, phenomenally difficult and, dare we say it, barely playable take on the balls/abstract mazes theme.
Here the emphasis is most definitely on balls, as in 'load of old'.

The slightest tilt of the remote makes the screen judder and flicker while the ball goes speeding off towards the nearest ledge. Simply preventing it lurching into the void is challenge enough, without the fiddly mazes that just seem to go on forever.

It's a test of patience that we plainly failed when we tore the disc out of the Wii and flung it across the room in a fit of temper. Chalk one up for Orbs Of Doom.

You can choose from loads of different characters, all of which seem to play the same, and there are 20 times more courses than our limited endurance let us see.

If this was an animal it would be a stray dog that runs into your house when the back door is open and, before you can shoo it away, wipes its wormy bunghole all over your living room carpet.

Kawasaki Jet Ski

Nintendo must have thought they were being pretty clever when they decided there was no urgent need for Wave Race on Wii. Nobody else has ever managed to do that water racing thing properly, they might have reasoned, therefore we can make it in our own good time, because nobody will ever beat us to it.

Well, they're probably still every bit as confident after slapping their seal of approval on this one, even though Kawasaki Jet Ski does something that Wave Race could never do - make water seem like hot Tarmac.

It's a bizarre effect. The jet skis sort of float on an undulating transparent skin that looks like it might just be liquid but instead has the physical properties of a slightly molten road surface.

The wooden rider grinds through this strange treacle, stopping dead when you let go of the accelerator, turning jerkily and erratically when you tilt the controller.

The courses are dull, the animation is stiff and the graphics make the N64 version of Wave Race seem state of the art. Impressively uninspiring, although there are worse racers out there...

Monster Trux Arenas

Next time you see a colour selection chart in the paint department of a DIY shop, look out for a shade called 'Monster Trux Arenas' - it's the brownest brown there is.

Pick from a selection of comedy vehicles, including a lorry decked out like a dinosaur skeleton, and trundle around rusty racetracks, trying to peer through the gloom to see which way the next bend might be going.

It's like driving behind a slurry tanker that's steadily expelling its load all over your windscreen.

Actually, it's probably the pick of the racing games in this range of titles, thanks to handling that doesn't send you flying off to the side as soon as you move the remote.

Like all of its siblings, it shares the same menus, game structure and the sideways control system, but it's nowhere near as twitchy.

This might be because it's so slow, thanks to a grainy sort of mud effect that seems to make it move at a lower framerate than it might otherwise do. But it's most welcome here.

While we have no desire ever to play Monster Trux Arenas again, since most other truck games are better, it's certainly not as bad as we feared when we saw the box art.

Action Girlz Racing

The only racing game designed by girls, for girls, proclaims the back of the box, although the credits list suggests it's pretty much the same core team that made Kawasaki Jet Ski, Monster Trux and the Myth Makers games, and none of the names sound particularly girly.

Anyway, it's very pink and the characters on the front look a bit like Bratz, if you squint a bit, so there's no doubt who this is aimed at - girls blissfully unaware they could have got Mario Kart for their fifth birthday instead. The poor mites.

It's a real minger, from the ultra-low-res graphics to the shonky handling, and it boasts awful, awful course design that obscures parts of the track behind giant cardboard bushes and walls.

Added to all those joys, it's often nigh on impossible to tell which way you're supposed to turn next, and when you tilt the remote your kart just veers off into a wall, where it becomes firmly stuck until you lose your patience and give up.

The button we used most was the one to reset the kart back on the track after getting it wedged behind some muddied and indistinguishable texture, closely followed by our personal favourite - the 'off' button.

Myth Makers Super Kart GP

Myth Makers are the characters that appeared in Orbs Of Doom, and somebody is pleased enough with them to have plastered every mention of the name with the proprietorial of corporate pride.

Shame they didn't show quite as much enthusiasm for the nitty-gritty of making a racing game starring their prized collection of cartoon bunny-girl, pumpkin-head, snowman, witch and other ones (we can't tell what some of them are meant to be) because this is basically a re-skinned Action Girlz Racing.

Whichever one came first, there's little difference in the way they play. The plus point (and we had to dig deep to find one) is that Myth Makers has superior track design - so at least you can see where you're going - and considerably better graphics.

In some places, where they've gone for a bolder cartoony look, the track textures wouldn't seem out of place in Mario Kart.

However, it shares the Action Girlz problems of twitchy controls and robotic opponents that appear to trundle along their fixed paths regardless of what you're doing. A complete waste of time.

Kidz Sports Ice Hockey

Because ice hockey games on consoles are so often reliably enjoyable, we half expected this to be a decent effort.

But of course it's finished with the slapdash brush of bodgery that completely ruins any chance it had of being any good at all.

It's a three-on-three affair, with a side-on view and big-headed characters that all look the same. Pick the two teams with similar colours and you'll have trouble telling them apart.

It plays a little like a slower Mario Strikers, and the best chance of scoring is to charge up a power shot that knocks the goalie on his back.

There might be some gameplay worth uncovering in here but the controls make a pig's ear of everything. You have to swing the nunchuk to make a pass, and point the remote at the floor then flick it up to do a shot.

It rarely registers the actions at the time you want to do them, and the whole game is reduced to a chase for the puck and a lot of waggling of the remote in the hope you can make it take a shot before you're tackled.

A little quality assurance, or perhaps just some normal button controls, could have gone a long way with this one.

NGamer Staff