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The good outweighs the bad

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 14 / 14
Date: April 14, 2008
Author: Amazon User

When this game first came out for PS2 I was curious, but never got around to playing it. Now that it's out for Wii, I finally caved in to my curiosity and picked it up. Overall, I'm very impressed.

I actually find this game more enjoyable than the Grand Theft Auto series (although GTA IV looks pretty amazing), because the universe is so much more quirky and unique. There are loads of bizarre characters to interact with, and based on your actions they'll either befriend you or try to pound you whenever you walk past. The environments look great, and the whole town has an almost 1950s vibe to it (although it takes place in present day). If you have any sense of imagination whatsoever, you'll be able to find countless things to do. Even without doing missions, it's fun experimenting and seeing just what the game will let you get away with (answer: quite a lot). From giving wedgies and stuffing kids in trashcans to riding your bike across moving cars downtown, the developers pretty much thought of everything.

When I heard the controls had been optimized for the Wii, I cringed a little bit. The Wii-mote can be great, but it seems most developers use it as a gimmick. Some sort of command is mapped to an awkward shake of the Wii-mote as an afterthought, and the gameplay just gets frustrating. Here, though, the controls are brilliant. To throw a left or right handed punch, you (surprise!) simply punch the air with your right or left hand. It's intuitive and satisfying at the same time. Once you start unlocking new moves (from your P.E. class and your homeless friend) the fighting gets pretty comical/over the top.

I do have a couple issues with the game, however. For one, there does seem to be a bit of lag when you're moving quickly through some of the more complex areas of the game (the carnival, downtown, etc.). This is pretty minimal, though, and doesn't really impede gameplay. I've noticed a couple bugs (characters flickering in and out of existence for a second), but these are pretty minimal as well, and don't really interfere with gameplay. You would think they would've fixed this, though... Beyond that, my only complaint is that the characters and events at times can be painfully cliche. Nerds are your textbook nerds, preps are by-the-numbers preps, homeless characters only ever talk about alcohol/drugs, the "war", and transistor radio parts, etc. I would have appreciated a little more creativity here, since there is so much potential for storytelling. However, the ridiculously fun gameplay and decent overall story (much better than most videogame stories, even if it's not quite as good as a movie) more than make up for this.

All in all, worth the buy [...]. Hope they make a sequel, and I hope they don't skip the Wii like they did with GTA IV.

Buy this game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: May 09, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This is soo much fun, like microeconomy version of GTA. small in scope than GTA but much more detialed, funny, bitting social comentary, very well done combat and the classroom mini games are challanging. A must buy for anyone looking to vent some anger but kicking the crap out of some nerds, or jocks if you like, or just smashing windows out and running from the "law", get it.

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