Emergency Mayhem
Score: 70% ESRB: Teen Publisher: Codemasters Developer: Supersonic Media: DVD/1 Players: 1 - 4 Genre: Action/ Party/ Adventure
Graphics & Sound: Emergency Mayhem is just about the most fitting name for a game that I have ever had the dubious honor of hearing. Do you recall, perhaps, when you were tiny, insane, and easily amused? Do you remember the barrels of toys that your parents would give you in the misguided attempt to get you to shut up for more than five seconds at a time? Those toys, however, were a mistake. They had buttons, and wheels, and things for our tiny hands to pull. And, happily for us, ever gadget, doohicky, and shiny thing we touched on those bloated toys from hell made the most high-pitched, annoying racket that man has ever had to suffer through. I give you Emergency Mayhem. I would say that I am a patient person (ok, for the sake of my review, let us say that I am a patient person). Emergency Mayhem tested my very homicidal tendencies as far as the music and sound went. It was like walking into a nursery full of little boys who all want to be cops, firemen, and ambulance drivers... and all the rowdy brats (say, five hundred or so) have about ten toy trucks each. Also, every button on each of the 5,000 cars are going off in unbalanced succession. My ears were bleeding at the end of my first mission to eliminate mayhem. Like most games in its genre, Emergency Mayhem has repetitive music droning on in the background. However, this can be overlooked fairly easily. Not necessarily because the music is bearable, but because the woman over the loudspeaker from headquarters is a vile siren that feels the urge to badger you every half second. You would think the prat was married to you and expected you to be home by dinner, and was quite cross that you were going to be late. I'll be turned into a newt (and then get better again) if she didn't say the same three phrases for thirty minutes. I turned the sound off after that. The graphics were to be expected from a game labeled Emergency Mayhem. They give you a headache if you play for more than thirty minutes. Actually, if you are over the age of seven, and you make it more than ten minutes... give me a call. I would like you to teach me your Jedi ways.
Gameplay: Ahh, gameplay. Well, again, the name is fitting. It was pure "what the hell am I meant to do" mayhem. You are literally dropped into the game and given a small amount of time to do... something. I am one of those gamers that pops the DVD out of the game case and crams it straight into the console (unless it is a Zelda game and I want to savor every last drop) without even glancing at the enclosed pamphlet of information. I figure a decent game will be playable without reading eight hours of directions, and will have in-game commands that prompt you along. I'm assuming Mrs. Says-The-Same-Thing-A-Lot from HQ was meant to be the game's prompt. Fail. Emergency Mayhem sounds like it should be a blast. You start out by picking what service you want to play as (fire, police, ambulance) and you get dropped in the game to reduce some mayhem. There are so many completely moronic pedestrians running around (some with their hands flung up over their heads like apes after bananas) that it is nigh impossible not to hit one of the idiots. I'm not sure how that is avoiding mayhem; I'm actually convinced that as a protective service, I should not hit the people running about the streets. That is about the most fun I had in the game, however. You actually do get to run over the bad guys (dressed in black and white striped shirts) while playing as a police car. The gig is that you have a certain amount of time to turn your mayhem meter from red to green. You can pick up more time during the game by running through items. The little items are everywhere through the game, and it can cause you to think you are going in circles. Everything tends to look the same after you've been running around for more than the initial shock of the game. The mini-games start when you run into a certain colored beam of light (depending on what service you are at the time). They are lame. I cannot stress the lameness of the mini-games. First, you have no idea how to complete them. Second, you could do them with your eyes closed once you figure out what in the gods' cursed world you are doing. My favorite one was moving dot A to connect to dot B. It took mad skills. I thought it might be more fun with more players, so I invited my buddies over. We stopped less than ten minutes into the game and put in MarioKart.
Difficulty: You want to know the difficulty in Emergency Mayhem? It is trying to figure out what on earth is going on! There are way too many items than you can run through (and hope they aren't bad), the stupid, nagging HQ woman keeps telling you that you are doing great and to keep getting rid of that mayhem. Things that you should be able to jump or run over stop you in your tracks and kill your momentum buzz. The track is way too bloody crowded for any ongoing sense of glee. The controls are pretty good, but with no way to actually enjoy them, what's the point? As said before, the mini-games are laughably easy and get old quickly. There are thirty of them, but when you are playing a mini-game every 10 seconds, thirty is not enough to keep you entertained. Perhaps if they were more challenging, the game would have had some value, alas I could do most of them with my feet. Do you know how weird it is to pump a Wii-mote with your feet? There is a difficulty setting (Easy and Hard), but it didn't really do much. If you are any kind of experienced in the mini-game realm, you probably won't notice the change either. The actual difficulty comes from how freaking touchy the game is. Only the hands of a surgeon could maneuver some of the mini-games without it screaming at you and telling you that you failed. Way to suck, you can't even disarm a ridiculously simple bomb! You will be frustrated either way.
Game Mechanics: On the up side, Emergency Mayhem really did take the Wii into consideration when fiddling with the game. You use the Wii-mote for a lot more than just pointing at the screen. You wiggle it around like a letch for a stroll in the park. Like most every Wii game, you maneuver with the Nunchuk's analog stick. If you manage not to run into the piles of stuff littering the street, you can tightly round corners regardless of vehicle. In a bit of a reverse (trying to be different or just difficult?), the game has made the acceleration button the (B) Trigger and the brake/reverse is the (A) button, but it works after you force your brain to accept it. Basically, Emergency Mayhem was a bad redo. It might be fun if it was shoved into a dark arcade and you were a little tipsy, but it might also frustrate you to the point of ripping the game apart. I really cannot even see this being fun for the younger generation. It is just too noisy, pointless, and insane. The decent controls provide a bit of entertainment until you accidentally hit a cone and all your momentum is snatched from you. The courses all start to look the same (even within themselves), and the sound effects are grating. Overall, there was nothing recommendable in this game. I wouldn't even rent it unless you planned on being very intoxicated and didn't care what you were doing with your time.
-Phate Kills, GameVortex Communications AKA Ashley Field
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