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Viewtiful Joe: Red Hot Rumble By: PoisonRamune, the Apathetic Lizardman Game Specs I’ve once read that a sign of maturity is being able to admit when you’re wrong. I’ll admit that I made a really big mistake last summer. I had heard about the awesomeness that is Viewtiful Joe from Josh and friends around the internet. However, for whatever reason, I never got around to buying it. All that had changed one buzzed Saturday afternoon; I saw Viewtiful Joe on sale for $5 on the Gamestop website and decided to get it. The game came in one of those generic used game cases with the Gamestop logo and the name of the game in sharpie on the cover. I rushed home and popped the game in my Wii; however, after playing for awhile I noticed something was terribly wrong. This game was not at all as people described it.
To my disappointment, I found that I didn’t get the cel-shaded beat ‘em up with platforming elements; I got the mediocre spin-off that tries to be the next Super Smash Bros. Viewtiful Joe: Red Hot Rumble is a terrible joke. It’s another one of those games that’s so convoluted and confusing that you’re forced to believe it was made by a crack addict. The game plays as a nightmarish mix of: Viewtiful Joe’s game engine, Super Smash Bros party fighter mechanic, and WarioWare’s randomness. Though it’s a mix of elements from 3 really well made franchises, the game seems to turn these all into negatives. The Viewtiful Joe beat ‘em up style that promotes planning your attacks out, simply doesn’t work in a frantic party game. The randomness is so random that it nearly breaks the game; the objectives unclear (with stay alive and collect the most diamonds as the only ones I really understand) and many times I’ve been the highest ranked player by just jump kicking aimlessly in order to keep the random objects that the game incessantly spams away from me. Even worse than the inappropriate fighting system and the randomness which rivals that of a homeless drunk is how arbitrary scoring is in this game. I’ve beaten the 1 player “story mode” in this game, since I really did think this was the original Viewtiful Joe (read: I was drunk out of my mind) and I’m not really sure how I did it. I mean, I know I accumulated more points than the other 3 characters throughout the 5 levels; I just have no clue as to why I had more points at the end. Allow me to explain, during one “scene” or level you earn a few thousand points: kicking the ass out of Captain Blue, collecting diamonds, staying alive, etc. However, at the end of each scene your final score is WAY different than the score you’ve counted up in your head (and I played with Josh and Sherlan while semi-sober and the same math anomaly happened to all of us). This really pissed me off because I was never sure as to what my real standings were, until the final tally. In the end I felt like a defeated Winston Smith at the feet of a sadistic Viewtiful Joe: O’ Brien’s Red Hot Rumble woefully admitting that 2+2=5.
Another tidbit of arbitrariness is the mini-games. Occasionally this stupid blue orb that looks like a prototype smash ball goes flying around the screen for some player to grab. As soon as a player collects the orb, a stupid mini-game begins. Most of the time, it’s a pretty straight forward game that seemed to come out of Kirby Super Star or a Mario Party (ie: hit the A button faster than your opponent, copy a 4 button sequence faster than your opponent, or beat everyone at Simon Says). These are all fun and great; however, there are another 2 that seem to make no sense whatsoever. One being a giant strength tester that I can never seem to get past 50% power (I’ve tried hitting the designated button with “good timing” and trying to rapidly press it, both yielded nothing less than a thorough handing of my ass by the CPU). The other bad mini-game was so traumatizing, my therapist has advised me never to mention it again as part of the healing process.
I’ll admit that this would probably be a decent game, if it actually made sense once in awhile. Though I can see the draw of random games, since they’re sometimes fun to just laugh at during a beer filled evening; Viewtiful Joe: Red Hot Rumble is random in an annoying and distracting way. Playing the game is like talking to an ADHD relative while drunk: you don’t know what they’re trying to say, you don’t care, and you don’t even know how you got yourself into that mess to begin with.
Instead of a clever percentage score like Haricot Vert gives or my normal X/5 score, I’m going tell you something horrid that I’d rather do/have done to me over playing this game again. I’d rather: get kicked in the nuts with a steel toed boot and hit my head on a coffee table while falling down than play this stupid game.
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