Also this issue: Icepack -A.D. Amorosi

April 10-16, 2003

naked city

Schlock and Awe

Monster smash: Robo 47 (foreground) is struck from behind by Agamo in the no-holds-barred War of the Monsters.

War of the Monsters recalls simpler times, when giant mutants were the greatest threat to national security.

by Frank Lewis

It’s funny the things that make parents proud. OK, maybe it’s just funny the things that make me proud. But when my 5-year-old son’s teacher showed my wife and me a picture Conor drew, which he titled "My pet dinosaur destroys the world," I was touched.

Feeling obligated to explain my son's depiction of wanton destruction, I almost told the teacher what inspired the picture -- the video game Conor and I have been playing lately, War of the Monsters (by SCEA, for PlayStation 2). But then I realized, if the teacher was at all concerned about this illustration -- and who knows what will set off alarms in the post-Columbine era -- my telling him it was based on a video game would probably only make things worse.

If the teacher was worried he kept it to himself. So I went back to feeling good about the time Conor and I spend in front of the television, virtually killing things.

Not that I share all of my games with him. But War of the Monsters is a great game for kids, despite the ridiculous Teen rating. Inspired by '50s science-fiction movies, the game pits an array of giant monsters -- a Godzilla-like dinosaur, a King Kong wannabe, a couple of robots and some others -- against each other in various heavily populated locations. (A brief intro explains the creatures' origins.) Buildings can be climbed or simply decimated, as you see fit, and almost everything -- steel girders, broadcast antennas, even occupied buses, fire trucks and train cars -- can be picked up and thrown or used in hand-to-hand combat. Crowds of helpless civilians swirl and scream in terror, which is a nice touch.

The difficulty ramps up quickly; I needed several attempts just to figure out how to fight on the third level, in which you battle an ill-tempered giant, giant robot on Planet X or some such. The entire game revels in the cheesiness of duck-and-cover-era horror movies. If the Soviets ever knew how easily spooked we were back then, I'd be writing this in Russian.

Discount Bin

According to a recent report, game rentals and used game sales are into the billions of dollars and growing. In that spirit, Arcadia will occasionally review some less-than-new titles.

Conor sometimes seems to grow bored with calling me Dad and gives me another name for a while. I've been MacDaddy (my suggestion), Big Butt-Butt (his) and my favorite, Jango Fett, the coolest character thus far from the Star Wars prequel trilogy. At the same time he renamed himself Boba, even told his friends at school that those were our real names.

I was so tickled I ran out and bought Star Wars Bounty Hunter (by LucasArts, for PS2 and GameCube). And it was fun, for a while. But pretty soon the amount of running involved became fairly tedious. The settings are amazingly detailed and friggin' huge. You spend far more time getting from place to place than you do killing and capturing people.

The game is OK -- you can gun down as many innocent bystanders as you want, with no repercussions -- and judging from the introductory scene it gets pretty cool at the end, which apparently involves a hot female Sith (I can think of worse ways to die.). But the running may wear you out.

So Boba and I abandoned the mission. I had to leave my partner behind for my next game, however: The Thing (Universal Interactive, for PS2, Xbox and PC), based on the brilliantly sick John Carpenter sci-fi movie. The blood flows freely in this hyper-violent adventure, which picks up where Carpenter's movie left off: with a shape-shifting and supremely pissed-off alien on the loose in the Arctic, just waiting for more humans to inhabit, twist all to hell and use to hunt other humans.

You control the leader of a rescue team sent in to find out what happened to the team at an American base camp (the setting of Carpenter's film). What makes The Thing different from most adventure/shooters is that your squad members are semi-autonomous. They know as well as you that anyone could be infected, so you must maintain their trust and manage their fear in order to keep them on your side; lose their trust or fail to keep them calm when creatures resembling 7-foot-tall walking digestive systems show up and they may shoot you.

You gather quite an arsenal of weapons as the game progresses, but the amazingly intuitive controller arrangement makes it easy to swap guns quickly and interact with your squad, even in combat. Which is good, because the action is fast, unrelenting and unforgiving -- you can set yourself on fire with the flame thrower if you're not careful, or accidentally kill a squad member who's not infected. There's even cursing!

When Conor asked to play The Thing with me, I explained that it's scary and that I didn't want him to have nightmares. He then told me about Bark Bark, a monster who pulls down his pants and dances and poops out his eyes. Clearly I am in over my head.