TOP OF THE FLOPS 2

Hello viewers, and welcome back to the second and final part of our run-down (in every sense of the word) of the Most Deserved Flops Of 2001.

Last week we loudly cheered the disastrous sales failures of the rubbish trilogy of football-based titles comprising David Beckham Soccer, Championship Manager Quiz and Sky Sports Football Quiz. This week we’ve actually got some non-football-based games (not always an easy task, given how many footy games get released in an average year and how rubbish most of them are), which managed to eclipse even those low standards of quality, and astoundingly managed to be even bigger flops.

3. SOLDIER OF FORTUNE
(Dreamcast, Crave)

The Dreamcast didn’t have much luck with first-person shooting games. Despite a superb version of Quake 3, the much-delayed Half-Life was finally cancelled altogether, and Unreal Tournament arrived in Europe bereft of the online functions the rest of the world enjoyed. But that was no excuse to foist this conversion of the bloodthirsty PC game onto poor game-starved DC owners. The enormous loading delays (three or four minutes wasn’t unusual, and several times per level) were bad enough, but the control system was so mind-bogglingly cretinous as to defy belief.

Shunning the superbly adaptable config setups of DC Quake 3 and Unreal, developers Crave inflicted one of the gaming crimes of the year (if not of all time) on unfortunate SOF purchasers. In one of the tiny handful of control options, the game actually invited you to perform a forward jump by pressing – are you ready for this? – left on the DC’s digital joypad and forward on the analogue stick AT THE SAME TIME. (If you have a DC pad handy, go and give it a try. I’ll wait.) For that, viewers, Hard Wired sincerely hopes someone amputates all the developers’ hands while they’re sleeping and stitches them back on the wrong way round. With the thumb and index fingers sewn together at the ends.

But now, even though we’ve just done No.3, it’s time. Time to award the title Most Deserved Flops Of 2001. We’ll do it on the next page.

THE MOST DESERVED FLOPS OF 2001

1=. WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE? JUNIOR
1=. WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE? 2ND EDITION
(PC/Playstation, Eidos)

It’s easy to get offended at terrible games, and especially successful terrible games. It marks a victory for cynical greed over loving care, a warning that gaming could be on the route to being taken over by the same sort of idiot market that ruins every Christmas by making Cliff Richard No.1 in the singles charts and subjecting us all to horrible torture every time we switch the radio on hoping for a nice bit of Steps or something. But in jointly awarding these two Millionaire titles the Deserved Flops Of The Year accolade, I like to think that I’m celebrating the ultimate triumph of good over evil, in a positive and optimistic way that gives us all hope for the year to come.

You see, like the legendary Rise Of The Robots (if you’re too young to remember, ask your dad), occasionally a game comes along that, by a combination of enormous hype, clever marketing and lazy, slack work by the videogames press, manages to sell huge numbers of copies despite being spectacularly awful. But, by and large, the game-buying public isn’t completely stupid. You might fool them once, but when they’ve been fleeced by a stinker, they very rarely come back for seconds. Rise Of The Robots sold hundreds of thousands, but not content to rip the public off once and quit while they were ahead, the publishers churned out a sequel for the following year. Despite being much better, its sales were disastrous as resentful consumers took their revenge, and the company plunged into the toilet.

And so it is with the Millionaire sequels. The Junior version was released earlier this year, identical to the revoltingly bad original except that the questions were even easier. It did amazingly badly, but the experience wasn’t enough to dissuade Eidos. Desperate for another lorryload of cash in the absence of a Tomb Raider game this year, they punted out a third Millionaire game in time for Christmas.

This time they at least bothered to smarten it up a little – the graphics were better and there was a studio crowd, for example. (In the original, when you chose “Ask The Audience”, the camera panned round a studio full of empty chairs. If there’d been some way for Eidos to make the game actually spit at you, I’m sure it would have.) But basically it was the same cheap, lazy, rotten game, with a pathetic handful of questions and entertainment value that ran out before you got to the Christmas pudding. But this time, nobody bought it. Well done, everyone.

Next week, we’ll take a look back at the GOOD games of 2001, and hopefully by then the games industry will have woken up again and we’ll have something new to talk about. See you then.