Let’s go negative this week.  Reach back into the recesses of your mind where you store traumatic gaming experiences and share with us some of your worst encoutners with deranged video game physics.

Dave: Back in the Dreamcast days, my friends and I squeezed much mileage out of Vigilante 8: Second Offense.  This was a car combat game that gave you a bunch of conveyances to choose from, each with their own special moves with which to obliterate your opponents.

Not all were created equally.  There was a stunt motorcycle you could choose and this thing was a complete bastard to control.  I don’t use the word “broken” much to describe games, but this thing was just that.

The stunt cycle was supposedly so fast and agile it would have an edge on its foes but in reality the thing was impossible to steer.  The only saving grace was its the special weapon, the most powerful in the game–fireworks.  Yes, a torrent of fireworks would be lethal enough to destroy an armored garbage truck.

Ugh.

Jon: Earnest Evans.  From the very marrow of my soul, Earnest f’n Evans.  I myself didn’t own a Sega Genesis in my youth, until purchasing a Nomad at age 16.  Part of me is thankful that i was spared the Pharoah’s Curse of actually being a die hard Sega fanatic in the 1990s, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t made aware of all manner of digital tommyrot through friends that did own a Genesis.  Earnest Evans was one such title.

Excitement she wrote!

Remember those big bosses in the old 16-Bit action platformer days that seemed to be made of individual sprites that all animated seperately?  The Hydra in Super Castlevania IV comes to mind.  Wolfteam, the atomic brains behind Earnest Evans thought it would be clever to build the main character’s sprite in the same manner.  Instead of a game, what they fashioned was an Eldritch horror.  Earnest moved like he was either one of the Thunderbirds, or that he had found a way to sleep so that all of his limbs would lack feeling when he arose.

Where's Lady Penelope?

The entire game felt akin to trying to swim through Petroleum Jelly.  Actually no, it felt worse.  Words cannot accurately describe Earnest Evans’ phlegmatic physics.  At least not as accurately as embedded video.  Coke and a smile.

Steve: Yes, i know it was something like the first game to ever use Havok physics, the same system being touted for the upcoming behemoth that was Half Life 2, but there was always something about the physics in Max Payne 2 that felt really, really WRONG. Like absolutely everything in the game world weighed five pounds and was made out of jello.

Nuff said…