Recently I did a post on how arcades are a dying breed, and have been for about the last decade or so. One of the reasons I gave for this statement was this generation of home consoles, have finally caught up with their arcade counterparts and are now beating them down to the ground as we speak.
Earlier in the year, my family turned to what some Xbox fanboys might call ‘the dark side’ and got a PlayStation 3. Now my mum surprisingly love arcade shooters such as Time Crisis (+5 cool points there) and she went and got Time Crisis 4 for the new shiny Japanese console. While my first reaction was some thing along the lines of ‘How damn cool is that!?’ I then took a step back and thought, is this such a great idea? But me being me, I don’t like to judge books by their covers. So grab a cuppa and take a seat as I will tell you about my time with the PS3 port of Time Crisis 4.
This version of the 4th Time Crisis title doesn’t stray too much from the original arcade machine outing, in that you have the same cheesy over-the-top American storyline and characters that the original arcade game had; this is your typical Time Crisis game, whatever platform you choose to play it on. The low-down story wise is some terrorists have launched a biological weapon, known as ‘Terror Bite’. In a nut shell this weapon is just a load of genetically engineered bugs that will chew through any human being alive, So in true arcade style shooter fashion, your mission is to shoot your way through the game to stop these terrorists.
This is classic Time Crisis really, the PlayStation 3 version however is missing the pedal, which the Time Crisis series is really famous for, being one of those things that makes the Time Crisis series differ from your average arcade shooter.
Speaking of hardware, I have to outline the huge FAIL Namco have done here with the PlayStation 3 port of the game. Now I don’t know if it’s my family getting a gargantuan sized TV, or Namco themselves not taking into account that people like to buy gargantuan TVs (bet you can see where I am kinda going here) but when you buy Time Crisis 4 for your PS3 you will have a nice day-glow orange light gun controller and two receivers for the gun, which are joined together by some wiring. The idea being you have to put each receiver on each end of the TV. The problem I had with it though is that the main HD TV I was playing it on is a whopping 55 inches, meaning the receiver could not reach each corner because the wire joining them together wasn’t long enough. It was still playable…till about half way through my play time. There is a bit in the game where you have to turn, by aiming the gun to the left or right hand side of the screen. I physically couldn’t move and was getting a lead pummeling from both sides, while I just stood there and watched a ceiling-mounted water sprinkler trying to put out a non-existent fire… awesome.
This isn't a shot of my actual TV, but you get the idea...
Hardware fails aside, something still lacks here, and I really cannot put my finger on it, I mean the gameplay is still the same-ish (minus the pedal, it’s just a lot of moving the gun about). Maybe it’s because you have to be in a room the size of a small town hall to really play it; or at least dismantle all your furniture in the living room. Die Hard Trilogy on the PSone never had this much trouble.
To be frank I am disappointed. I wanna pick up a game and play it. Not pick up a game and have to assemble it like Ikea furniture before I get a chance to play, there is a time and a place for assembling things, and playing a video game isn’t that time or place. So take it from me, hitting the arcade and playing Time Crisis 4 is a lot less frustrating.
-Garvaos
