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Meh

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 26 / 32
Date: February 01, 2005
Author: Amazon User

First, there are a few things that need to be clarified, as many people seem to be misinformed.

American McGee did not write this game. In fact, American McGee had almost nothing to do with the game. If you look in the game manual (sorry, I mean "American McGee Presents: The Game Manual") you will see that the game was created by Mercury Steam entertainment. The lead designer and story writer was Enric Alvarez.

Once Mercury Steam had completed this game, they needed to find a publisher. So they went to American McGee and asked if he would "present" their game. The idea was that if they got someone whose name was known to front the game they'd have greater success. McGee agreed to this arrangement, much like Quentin Tarantino placing his name on already-established Kung-Fu films to help promote them in the States. But unlike Tarantino, McGee is not in the least bit subtle or humble about the matter.

McGee's name is smack at the top of the box. His name appears in the folder where you install the game. His name appears in the shortcut itself. His name is at the top of the menu screen. When you start playing the game, his name appears, alone, during a cutscene. After about two minutes of delay the names of the people who actually made the game start showing up. The pure egotism of this offends me. I'm sure if he could have added an "American McGee" semi-transparent HUD icon to the lower-right corner of your screen, he would have.

Frankly I will never understand how American McGee became a "hot" name in gaming. The guy lived in the same building as Jon Carmack, and lucked into doing a couple of levels on Quake and Doom. Somehow this translated into his getting his own development deal and the right to plaster his name all over the place. Seems a person of talent would just let us learn his name by ourselves, not force it upon us at every turn. Strange that it's not called "Miyamoto's Zelda", or "Spector's Deus Ex". But I digress.

Scrapland is an okay game, but nothing special. It's protected by StarForce which has its usual problems (nothing like installing a game to find out you have to reboot to play it). Once you get it going you're treated to about 15 minutes of cutscenes, with intermittent brief player control, and placed into a world which claims to be "GTA-like" in its openness.

But the problems begin to present themselves rather quickly. The dialogue is below-par (the spoken lines rarely match the printed subtitles) and delivered woodenly. They seemed to be going for a type of Saturday-morning kitsch. This might sit a bit better if the missions were more morally decisive. It's just hard to buy the good guy act when the game will have the main character killing people, shooting up a city, and randomly stealing.

The visuals are rather good - the art design is creative. But once you're actually in the game you'll find it a bit ... lacking. Even though the environment is open, it feels curiously lifeless. You can walk up to people and talk to them, but they don't seem to be doing much except waiting for you to do exactly that. There's no feeling of life beyond your presence.

When you're in the spaceship you are free to cruise all over the city. But the city feels strangely truncated, enclosed, and limited. There's no sense of vast distance, and there is a constant feeling of being hemmed in by the walls. You can't even go very high before hitting an artificial ceiling (a layer of red fog) that pushes you back down.

Navigation is extremely straightforward. You just spin the curiously laggy camera and use the cardinal direction keys. Combat is a bit more frustrating. The first mission has you trying to track down and kill two police cruisers. The constant turning and pivoting makes the mission tedious - I actually stopped playing at this point.

It's hard to evaluate Scrapland because so many other games have done with greater success what it tries to do. GTA has environment and attitude. Mafia has the ambience, "The Getaway" has its cinematic appeal. Scrapland just feels canned, constrained, and unpolished.

In the end Scrapland isn't a bad game, it's just a strangely unambitious and lifeless one. If you want a time-waster there's some stuff here to do, but I'm not too excited about it. I suggest you wait for it to hit the discount bin.

Sorry, I mean "American McGee's Discount Bin".

Beutiful, but bad.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 15 / 20
Date: January 28, 2005
Author: Amazon User

First of all I want to say that though I was disappointed with this game, it is not ALL bad, well at least not MOSTLY bad, well ok its pretty bad now that I think about it.

When I first saw scrapland it looked like a fun adventure game in the style of Beyond Good And Evil (HIGHLY recommendable), with an intriguing storyline, unique gameplay, and cute characters reminiscent to the still-upcoming film ROBOTS.

And so I use some of my still warm Christmas money to purchase a copy, gleefully taking it home and ogling over the excellent manual (hi-gloss, full color pages!). Popping it in the DVD-ROM drive at home I admire the short EULA that is understandable enough, and install it. Starting up the game I am greeted by several cute beginning videos and an awesome 3D-menu depicting the asteroid that your adventures surround. a short load time later (and indeed it is short loads) an ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL environment greets me, one so good that I couldn't believe it was playing sooo smoothly on my machine (celeron 1.2 Ghz, 256 megs of RAM, a dvd-rom drive and a Nvidea Geforce 5700 LE). However this is where what would be, up to this point, just about THE perfect game ends. Beginning the story a loveable, goofy, somewhat Jar-Jar-ish robot greets you, showing you the sights and his hard earned (and still being paid for) spaceship. soon after this, you are told to take-over your friends body! Essentially stealing it (because nobody dies in the game, you just have to pay for more "lives") from someone who has done nothing but befriend you. soon after your next order of business is to destroy several cops, both in ships and outside, later to cheat and steal, lie, etc. All completely without remorse or any morality at all. Done with complete innocents for all intensive purposes. Now this may not be a problem to you. You may say a game is a game. That it's not real. However I like my good-guys to be good and my bad, well, bad. The people who are supposedly the "bad guys" are little worse than you! Thus there is a feeling of "what's the point?". And so I became so disenfranchised by it that I quit in disgust. Coming back several times over the next few days I played it a bit at a time to see if there was ANY redeeming qualities to the story. There weren't any. Eventually I settled to flying around the city slowly building up my credits in the only legit way I could find, shooting bugs. However with the main story out of the picture I found that there wasn't a way to get any new ship-plans. And so even that had a "what's the point?" to it after a time.

I close by saying if you like Grand Theft Auto and the like then maybe this game is for you. If you want a game with cute, admirable, nobel characters, where evil is evil, and good good, then stay away like this is the plague. Personally I plan on selling my copy.

Hope this helps any who might yet make my mistake.

Loads of atmosphere and creativity.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: April 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Yes, American Mcgee did not 'make' this game like he did Alice (more or less). However, the end product was his to polish and ultimately produce. And, he was willing to put his name on it because he felt it was of the utmost quality. And, i trust his judgement. He's never let me down. As far as gameplay, this one is very high on my list. The manueverability of the character(s) is wonderful. The variety of playable characters is outstanding. The adventure mixed in with action plays out sweet. The graphics are very colorful and top notch. The way they drop you into the game with virtually nothing to go on as far as plot and where the plot may go was done with a touch of class as well. I totally disagree with anyone who says this is value bin stuff. It most certainly is not. But, the price seems to b going there anyway. Underrated program with a high level of re-playability. No installation issues. No bugs that I've found. And no terminal crashes. Free and open play in a lot of the game (though, not all of it). I have to say, on just about every level, this game is as high quality as they come. Unless your idea is simply to blow something's head off just to see the different variations of how the head explodes. Granted, that can be fun, but very shallow. This game is far from shallow.

American McGee states in his site he is Executive Producer

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: April 17, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This in regards to Mobbs, who posted a "discount bin" as his profound review for the game.

The game has richer textures and more more detail than his previous work, Alice. Maybe a large part of that is because Alice delved into the dark and mysterious, whereas Scrapland is all about androids living in space, thus all the colorful lights et al.

As quoting from American McGee's site, he states he is working as an Executive Producer for the game. Maybe Mercury Steam "asked" him not to divulge the fact that he wasnt the lead designer or creator of this game because apparently he is already known in the RPG gaming industry, being popular has its benefits especially in the advertising industry. Popularity also is refined through having a reputation of being a good game developer, which is vital
in this field.

The game runs on a smooth environment where the user can explore different areas in the game, which is very popular in gamers nowadays and quite honestly is what gamers have been looking for in a very long time. The ability to explore areas in a game has not been developed by a lot of companies.

I give this game a rating of 5 stars because it has humour and sharp wit, the effects are non-predictable and overall the game deserves more credit than it gets from its lowly detractors.

Beautiful game - Horrible controls

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: December 12, 2005
Author: Amazon User

What a shame, The story seems great, the graphics are amazing, everything was extremely well thought out - except for the controls - (PC version) for some reason the X axis is extremely choppy - I tried to change the sensitivity but it did not help at all. Also you can invert the mous but its universal so it inverts for both ship and character - this is a problem if you play one way on the ship and another with a person - A real shame - could have been one of the great 3rd person games but is barely playable due to the controls.

OMG TERRIFIC!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: November 23, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Scrapland. Congratulations on a tremendous effort. The game seamlessly blends together graphic quality of Half Life 2 with the gameplay and general replayability of GTA. I know that Scrapland is compared to GTA everywhere! but its true, Scrapland is just as good set in space, with more weapons, more characters and more bang for you buck. The game allowed me to fly ships as well as walk on foot, making the Scrapland world enless to explore and come across the next thing the game throws at you. To sum up this rambling review, i rate this game 10/10 terrific and a definite for those fellow gamers out there looking for something unique and different

Ala Peanut-buttah sandwiches!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 10
Date: December 05, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Strange game that takes place on an abandoned asteroid that is overrun by machines. I only have the DEMO but it's fun. Thier are numourous glitches however such as no dialogue tree at times with the characters(ANY of them) and sometimes there is a tree. The "space" ships as they are called do not travel beyond the asteroid, but the backdrop above is cool. This is a game about city living and city traffic... from outta'space.... or rather NOT D Mietri's planet. dominated by robots, of course it can't take place on other planets that are dominated by organics because the robots couldn't function there and this is about ROBOTS. The characters are comical and sound like they came off of seseame street with the quirky brookland accents and muppet-like heads. The game is still fun to play and the ships fun to "drive". Nice camera. Why only 4 stars? Because 4 is great, 5 is perfect! This isn't perfect but I am still asking for it for Chistmas.

Great game and yet being underlook...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 5
Date: January 20, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I can't beleive so little people is playing scrapland. You people out there is definately missing one hell of a game! imagine to fly in a robotic city with 6 or 7 layers of traffic on top or bottom of you. A better picture? 5th element? is exactly the same and you are driving a space craft totally built by you with different parts you gathered through quest or the story. Imagine a racing or a battle at such traffic and scene... Moreover the game is not only about driving! It has a very cool action style side too, where you transform into different robot to finish the tasks... Get it now! and enjoy !

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