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Thunder Alley By: Haricot Vert "Playtime is over. Time for the worst of the worst." After a couple warm up rounds of reviews, I am finally prepared to discard the remainder of my mental fortitude and play a truly despicable game.
Game Specs
Considering myself sufficiently well-rested after the previous review, I felt obligated to move on to a game that was not based on well-established licensed material. I believed I was prepared from the two earlier excursions into "torture gaming" to finally take on what is considered (at least by one major review aggregator) to be the worst Gameboy Advance game ever made. Although I did ultimately survive this review, I did not make it through without major internal hemmorhaging. Complicating this review was a distinct lack of history and promotional literature. A glance at the publisher's website reveals no reviews, no description, no statistics - just a title, and that it is "Now Available." The effect this has on any perceptive individual is approximately the same as an air-raid siren blaring the alarm of immininent nuclear doom. Speaking of radioactive catastrophes, the Chernobyl disaster was better covered up than the critical reception of this game - with similar results.
The game's promotional description is quoted thusly:
Woo-woo! Bullshit detector overload! They have two sentences to sell the game to a customer and this is what they come up with? First, the use of the word "realistic" - pardon me, but I don't recall the Gameboy Advance being the platform of "realistic" gameplay. Try Crysis on a projector if you want to even begin to approach realism. Secondly, "characters from the hit games Ten Pin Alley and Ten Pin Alley 2"? Wow, way to alienate 99% of your prospective buyers who have never heard of your previous shit-eating games! Plus, you get the added benefit of reminding the remaining 1% that they will never purchase your games ever again! Taking characters from a bowling game and shoehorning them into a completely unrelated genre smacks of "Pokemon Pinball"-syndrome, but subtracting the requisite popularity to pull such a stunt. If Ten Pin Alley had won multiple Game of the Year awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Peace Prize, the Iditarod, and was endorsed by the United Nations - then fine, you may have a legitimate reason to milk that franchise for all it is worth.
From the start screen, you can either play a "Practice Race" or "Tournament Race." There is no reason to play the Practice Race ever, unless you have some sadistic desire to replay a track you can't pass in Tournament mode. Granted, you are given infinite restarts/retries on all tracks in Tournament mode anyhow, so the Practice Race was clearly added for no other reason than to give the game an appearance of polished execution. For that matter, anyone who had a hand in making this game deserves an execution of their own. Bah-dum-KSH!
It takes about 3 seconds of in-game driving to immediately come to the conclusion that this game should never have seen the light of day. Here was my thought processes during those initial 3 seconds:
At this point, the judgment on the game's quality came out as an endless stream of profanity, and any effort to understand its "physics" (or lack thereof) were abandoned as utter futility. As is apparent from the above screenshot, turning your car in the slightest automatically slows you down. No, you are not pushing either of the 'brake' buttons. In fact, there is no point to this game having brake buttons at all. The game automatically slows you down whenever you go into a turn of any kind. And you have no choice on what kind of turn you can perform - every turn will put you into a powerslide whether you like it or not. The more you turn, the more you skid, and the more your speed decreases. The solution? You turn as little as possible the entire game.
Once you understand the bass-ackwards "realism" of the game, the race plays out just like a round of Mario Kart, minus the fun, useful items, dynamic visuals, distinct characters, necessary braking/drifting, and varied tracks. While that might make sense for a game based on quarter-mile drag strip racing, Thunder Alley's pointlessly long tracks (or slow cars?) further exacerbate what can only be described as intentional mundanity. Throw in ruthless AI opponents that seem to never suffer the same physical slowdowns as yourself and you begin to wonder how 0s and 1s could be arranged in such a cruel and oppresive way.
Like any "realistic" driving sim, Thunder Alley implements what everyone already knows: running over symbolic objects in the middle of the roadway will improve your car's performance! Power-ups in the form of a steering wheel, N2O canister, or a wrench are scattered around each track. You can probably figure out what each one does. The problem is that they are consumed the instant you drive over them - getting that nitro boost right in the middle of a turn will ram you into the wall; grabbing a steering wheel forces you to temporarily re-learn everything you have taught yourself about your car's turning physics. The game would have been more playable without these additions. Once you complete the Tournament Mode (if you haven't "accidentally" run a magnet over the cartridge yet), you are treated with an unlockable game mode! I CAN'T WAIT!
There is a lot more to say about Thunder Alley, but all are dwarfed by the abominable core gameplay to begin with. As mentioned above, the game has a composite ratio of about 23% on Gameratio.com, but I am fairly sure that is because many publications are unable to give "0 out of 5" ratings - the minimum many rating systems can go is 1.0 (an automatic ratio of 20%). If one was able to give less than 1.0, the score would be something more like the one I give below. The remainder of my life is worse off for playing this game. After forcing myself to complete Tournament Race and also beat the single level of Demolition Derby available (this does not take more than 2 hours, tops), I felt incredibly unclean. I had just been eye-molested (skull-fucked?) by a portable console game. I had the sudden urge to run to the nearest adult and hug their legs while weeping softly. The game's borrowed engine even viciously harassed me as I failed to please its insatiable pedophilia:
Do not buy this game. Do not play this game. If you want to play a racing game, get Mario Kart. Get F-Zero. Get Burnout. Get Project Gotham. Get Need for Speed. Get fucking Barbie Horse Adventures: Triple Crown Edition. Get anything besides Thunder Alley. You are guaranteed to have a better experience. Final Arbitrary Quantification -Haricot Vert |
