Saturday 26 September 2020

Independence Day (PS1)


 There are some games which have a bit of a reputation that are a bit undeserved in my opinion.  The ones that spring directly into my mind are Nightmare on Elm Street and Silver Surfer on NES.  Given the reputation unfairly due to YouTubers like AVGN making videos on these games and then large numbers of twats not being able to think for themselves piggy-backing the opinion despite having never tried the games for themselves.

Sometimes however the hate a game gets is completely deserved and Independence Day on the Playstation is one of those games.  A truly cursed title that I hate so much that I'm hoping that everyone involved in its development are now suffering from mild back problems.

The first thing I don't get about it is that other people and the game itself refer to itself as "ID4", which despite making a little bit of sense once it was explained to me, still manages to simultaneously still make utterly no sense.  The I stands for "Independence" and the D stands for "Day", seems obvious but the 4 stands for "4th of July" which I know is the American holiday of the same name but that's got nothing to do with the title of the movie...right?

Well doing a quick google search for the movie poster I found this fucking thing.  So does that mean that the ACTUAL title of the movie is ID4: Independence Day? In which case that's a stupid fucking title and however came up with it should be ashamed

Anyway I'm talking about complete and utter bollocks just to fill post space so lets talk about the actual fucking game.  It's a dime a dozen flying game, sort of like those free-fly missions from Lylat Wars. The game gives you a couple of things to blow up and then you get in your plane and you go blow them up, easy, right? No

The first few missions aren't so bad but then the game just bombards you with enemies and dodging anything becomes an actual impossibility.  When you do get hit, in addition to losing HP you also get shunted around like a puck on an air hockey table so you're probably going to take some additional damage from smacking the floor or a nearby building.  The game tells you when an enemy has a lock on you but there are so many enemies on the map at any given point that even if you shake one, the next one is just going to lock you right away, there's basically no point in time when you aren't being bullied by some alien bastards wanting to shove lasers up your arse.  Also your bullet weapon appears to do fuck all of nothing.  I can fire bullets until the town underneath is flooded with shell casings and it would have maybe done about 1 point of damage to an enemy ship.  The only effective weapon is missiles and you only get 20 of those and once you're out and you've picked up all the refills on the map, you can get fucked sonny jim.

At first I thought it was because I was trying to be a big-dick "pro gamer" and playing on Hard.  So I turned it down and still got equally wanked on with Normal mode.  After I stopped the stream I thought I'd see what easy mode was like since that's what the game defaults to when it starts and it didn't change diddly jack shit and I still got wrecked.  I thought maybe there was something fundamental about the game I wasn't understanding so I took to YouTube to find some videos of people playing it.  I found one group of people who struggled with easy mode only to get to the exact level I was stuck on and then they just started cheating! Don't blame them but that's not the solution to the problem I was hoping for.

It's a viewer request so I WILL beat it, even if I have to wear down the skin on my fingers to dust to get there but holy good lord Jesus Christ the internet was not joking about this one, this really is a stinker.

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