Review of Drug Wars

Introduction

Despite the cover, I held a small hope that this would be a cutting exposé into the American war on drugs of the 80`s, how they sponsored Noriega to rule his little corner of Latin America so the commies wouldn`t succeed and ended up cleaning their own mess when drugs started flowing in. Alas, Drug Wars is an `interactive` game for your DVD player. Those of you who have played Mad Dog McCree in the arcades will be familiar with the genre. Actors dress up as innocent bystanders, and vicious drug barons, and you as the heroic gunman shoot the bad guys and avoid the good guys. This is accomplished by means of the directional keys on your remote and the enter button. Your adventures will take from a little town via the big city to the South American jungle, killing bad guys all the way.

Video

The graphics of this game suck. FMV as a medium for game graphics has always been dismissed as useless, only suitable for cutscenes and never the game proper. You get a tacky gun sight that you have to move jerkily to where the bad guy is and the onscreen action pauses abruptly for you to find the time to aim and shoot. It also pauses while it decides which character will pop up next, it also pauses while it is making up its mind whether you have shot or missed the character. Each pause feels like a really bad layer change. The sets are tacky and there are no effects whatsoever when you shoot a character, they just keel over and die. The FMV looks like NTSC quality and appears in a 4:3 ratio.

Audio

It doesn`t really matter what format the sound is in, as it stutters badly with every pause. "You`ll never take me alive" Pause… Press Enter… Pause… "Bang!" Guy falls down dead. Pause… Next Guy pops up. The fact that there is a music track is completely lost in the pauses, and the voice acting is dire indeed. If it means anything, the audio is presented in 2.0 Stereo.

Features

There are 10 or 12 trailers for other similar games in this genre

Conclusion

I have fond memories of Mad Dog McCree. Back when I was at university, many was the night when we were refused entry to a nightclub, (What do they have against jeans and trainers anyway?), and after drowning our sorrows somewhat, we would end up in an amusement arcade in Piccadilly, and while I would be getting battered at Streetfighter II, some puffed up little dork would be trying to impress his girlfriend on Mad Dog. Ah, memories. The decent games quickly ditched the FMV, giving us the likes of Virtua Cop that offered a far more rewarding experience. The last time I really enjoyed a lightgun game was Operation Wolf, back in the times of yore, but I`m not averse to the occasional blast.

I suppose the only good thing about these games were the lightguns. Something that by its very nature, DVD does without. All you get is the kind of grim acting that even `erotic movie` producers turn their noses up at. Playing this game with my DVD remote, I rapidly realised that this is a quick way to wreck the handset. It takes too long to get the cursor over the bad guy anyway. I quickly adjourned to my PC, where a mouse might provide a better and more rewarding experience. But to no avail, the pauses were still there, despite being able to move the scope more fluidly. The game wasn`t 100% compatible anyway. I had a look at the packaging and the small print states that it works with DVD players, Playstation 2`s and XBoxes. The even smaller print states that it will only work on the XBox if you have the DVD Movie playback kit.

Let me be frank. If you have an XBox or a Playstation 2, what would you want with this rubbish anyway? There are loads of real games out there with better graphics and sound and more importantly, rewarding to play. Lets face it, this doesn`t even keep score and you don`t have to reload. You can`t duck behind anything, and there are no power ups. I have this Flash game that someone e-mailed me, called Bill Gates Killer where you use the mouse to shoot BG`s disembodied head. That is more rewarding than Drug Wars. If you have a DVD player, then you should be watching movies or TV programmes on it. It is not a games machine. Use your intelligence, N64s are selling for a few notes now, Dreamcasts are given away with mobile phones. For a few notes more you can play a real game. Let me put it another way. I have just wasted 2 hours of my life, so you won`t have to.