Army Men: Air Combat

This game is part of a long series by 3DO, which is about plastic army men come to life. It’s is one of my favourites, and the story is as follows. You take control of some southern colonel, who is the best of the best when it comes to helicopters. You have to fly and shoot your way through tan forces, bugs, sprinlers, roman candles, and tons of other stuff, in order to claim victory for the green. All you have to do this is your trusty helicopter, which can be upgraded. It comes fully stocked with machine guns, napalm, missles, rockets, and a ridiculous amout of other explosives. Oh, and you also have some useless computer ally who dies right away.

The gameplay is very good, and really holds your attention. There is a lot of action, and you almost never stop shooting, seeing as there are so many enemies. Luckily, you can move pretty fast, and it’s not too hard to avoid fire.

The levels are also pretty varied, so you won’t just have to blow up some tans over and over, or see the same garden 10 times. The game starts out at a normal difficulty, and gradually gets harder. Luckily, it doesn’t go too far, so you won’t be shooting the screen or anything. Also, said screen can sometimes be too cluttered, and the scenery gets in the way a bit, because it’s hard to tell what is at the same height as you. Sometimes you’ll run into a freaking flower, or some grass. But, the game is too fast paced and entertaining for you to really notice. The difficulty overall is probably “normal.”

The graphics are very mediocre, and are the game’s weakest point, which is surprising, because it’s for N64. Anyway, everything is bland, and the scenery doesn’t look very good. It’s sometimes hazy or blurry, and I’ve noticed a few spots of nothingness around hills and bottoms of trees. The only thing that looks good is your helicopter, which is obviously focused on in order to distract from the rest of the game. It doesn’t work well, because you have to look for the small, blandly coloured enemies, which are sometimes exactly the same colour as the mountains or snow. Finally, anything with legs moves a little bit….jittery, and the many bugs in game look like they have been put on fast forward.

The sound is quite good, and is pretty impressive, seeing as a lot of 3DO games have terrible sound. The gunfire, explosions, and other prominent warfare sounds are very realistic, and there are no spots where events and sound don’t match up. Unfortunately, the music is not very good, and is usually covered up by the sound of helicopter blades. The music is annoying, and repeats a lot, with little variety between levels. Otherwise, the game has a good sound feature.

Crash Bash

Crash Bash is basically Mario Party, but with Crash Bandicoot characters. The story is that Aku-Aku, and his evil brother, Uka-Uka, want to see who is stronger. So they get other people to compete for them. Anyway, you have to battle through 28 levels, with somewhere around 5 different minigames, which increase in difficulty, depending on what level you’re on. There are bosses, too. The game is about 5 hours long, if you don’t get stuck.

The gameplay is not very good, seeing as it is ridiculously repetitive. You end up doing the same thing over and over, as well as redoing levels to get the special collectibles, crystals, trophies, and gems. Another flaw is that a lot of the bosses are recycled from previous games, stretching as far back as Crash Bandicoot 1! This is the fifth game in the series, by the way.

Also, most of the games and bosses are very simple. For example, one of the minigames is just a game of air hockey, but you’re in ships. This is probably the most complex one. Even though this is a terrible game, there IS a piece of hay in the needle stack, the minigame polar push. You ride polar bears, very small ones. You have to push each other off an icy platform. There are some cool powerups, like a shrink ray, giant anvil that crushed whoever its over, and lighting that makes you unable to move. This is probably the only reason to play Crash Bash, but there is no ‘quick play’, so you have to do the campaign.

The graphics are also pretty bad, but only because they haven’t changed at all from the first game, which was released almost five years before. Everything looks okay, but it should be better.

The sound is just fine, but still lacks dialogue on most characters. As with the other games, Aku-Aku does a lot of talking. He still gets to say my favourite line, “Unamagola” in the Deathmatch mode. He’s a powerup. But the baddies, Cortex, N.Gin, etc, have lost most of their speech. They now just scream, yell, laugh, or grunt a lot. The good guys do the same thing. The sound is probably the best thing in this game, which is pretty sad. It isn’t great, but at least it matches up with stuff that happens, even if the music is repetitive and annoying.