Tryzon?s Nostalgic Gaming Trips #21
Cel Damage Overdrive (PS2, 2002)
After getting a pleasant semi-surprise with Motorsiege: Warriors of Primetime in my last review, I decided that I should hunt down some more budget games to see if there are any others worth having, unlike the good majority of them, which are most certainly not. It then occurred to me that I had sampled such a title in the moderately distant past. Not only that, but it was another vehicular combat game published by the same folks who both published and developed Motorsiege. ?Well hot dog!? I thought, eagerly clicking through Amazon and ordering a dozen or so other things while I was there, ?I can?t wait for my latest acquisitions to arrive!?
Within the week, all had turned up, and among them was my very own copy of Cel Damage Overdrive (no, that?s not a typo).
As I mentioned, there are some rather harrowing parallels between the two games: vehicle combat; produced on a tight budget; sold at the lofty price of £10.00; published by Play It!, a cheapy game company who I am beginning to develop a mild affection for after two pleasant experiences (and one less happy, but let?s not spoil the mood, eh?).
As you can imagine, since a similar title from a similar background must logically be similarly good, I went into this expecting Motorsiege with fewer fat rednecks and more Loony Toons-esque violence. In short, I wanted a Wacky Races adaptation. In all honesty, I think I basically got just that.
Oh, I do so love violence...
In a plot setup that sounds intriguingly similar, a selection of oddballs end up working as what amounts to modern gladiators, tearing apart each other?s fossil fuelled chariots for the entertainment of the masses sitting at home watching the escapades on their tellies. I very much approve of a pure filler plot such as this in the case of a game that?s really just about mindless destruction. It keeps the focus where it?s most needed.
Fowl Mouth: He'll learn you a *bleep*ing lesson you mook
Of the ten characters available (although some must be unlocked), I went for Fowl Mouth, a 1930s New York gangster. His car and even his body are inexplicably coloured black and white, and he lives up to both sides of the pun in his name, being not only a farm bird but also a speaker of nasty words that are bleeped in-game to protect the wee ones from what they will inevitably learn by the age of nine anyway.
Other avatars who caught my attention were Sinder, a cowardly red demon, and Dominique Trix, a provocatively dressed temptress (including a whip) who utters nothing but massively suggestive phrases in her best porn star voice. Because, you know, kids? games don?t feature nearly enough sexual content these days. Seriously though, some of the things she says make me wonder how the Pan European Game Information people let the title sell with a 3+ rating and such stuff in it. There are examples of much less deserving games getting their rating ramped up. Although I could be rambling.
The Wild West level may not hold a torch to the one in Timesplitters, but it's not half bad, either
Whoever you end up choosing, you must then pick a game mode, of which there are exactly three. I checked the manual: there are no more to unlock or find or even any codes for them. What you see is what you get. A little lacking, but what can be done?
You have the omnipresent Deathmatch, which is slightly different to the norm because you are rewarded not only for killing enemies but also merely wounding them. Not a massive change, but a significant one nonetheless.
Then there?s your bog-standard Racing. This is easily the most tedious of the bunch, because the cars were primarily made for fighting, not speed. This means that as you loop around an arena through the designated goals, you move at a slow walk unless you utilise the boost, but that still fails to make affairs interesting. What could have been literally Wacky Races 2 is tragically an utter bore.
At last comes Capture The Flag. Nip around the track collecting flags and then deposit them where required, all while fending off your ravenous opponents. A couple of niceties are thrown in though, because the flags have legs and attempt to evade capture, and you can pick up numerous flags at once to get a multiplier when you cash them in, resulting in a higher score than dropping them off individually. Also a heavy jolt will dislodge one part of your cargo, leaving it easy prey for others to cannibalise. I have yet to test the 4-player version of CTF, but it might well be the multiplayer highlight.
All in all, two out of the three gameplay styles are more than acceptable, but the third is simply a waste of time. Just pretend that one doesn?t exist, then. Still, I was never expecting anything revolutionary, but Motorsiege introduced the wonderful Siege mode only one year later. For those of you not blessed with knowledge of this noble sport, it was literally the divine offspring of F-Zero and Pro Evolution Soccer. With such cleverness going on there, the lack of true ingenuity in Cel Damage?s roster is off-putting.
Now that all the paperwork?s done, you can begin actually playing the game. Once you?ve gotten your head around what seems like an awkward control system initially, everything starts making sense. Your car is actually a car here, as opposed to the unidentifiable super-fast battle tanks from Motorsiege. This means that you cannot strafe left and right, although you do possess the improbable ability to fling your entire vehicle side to side or forward at a flick of the right stick. The only real uses for this are avoiding falling into a pit and charging your boost counter. You can pick up a weapon to use (because your default firearm is distinctly meh) until its ammo runs out, and the basic goal is to make everyone who isn?t you extremely dead.
"Realism"? Bah
The best thing about Cel Damage is the weapon selection and the horrible acts of carnage that can be performed against adversaries. A frankly staggering total of 36 guns, launchers, melee beaters and other dangerous implements are at your disposal, although most of them need unlocking. Probably my favourite is the circular saw flinger, which simply sends massive saws the size of Minis hurtling forwards, tearing through the ground in a straight line and chipping away at anything which approaches. At their best, the weapons are bags of fun to use, since each hit on a target can send them reeling if you?re talking about the big guns. Everything responds to being struck in a delightfully idiotic way. Supposedly a highly complex physics system is involved, but all you have to know is that when you pound a truck with a pair of mechanical boxing gloves, it will bounce away in a crumpled mess.
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Go, my pretties! Churn their bodies into sawdust! Muhahahahaha!
In the heat of battle, things degenerate into utter clusterfuck territory, with cars just piling into each other until someone brings out something with a wide area of effect like the baseball bat to clear a path through the crowd. It may be almost as ridiculous as Celebrity Deathmatch, but much like that, it remains gleefully funny to play throughout.
The only real issue with the weapons is that some are grossly overpowered. This might be workable if they required extra effort to obtain, but all arms come from randomly generated power-ups that can spawn anything from the weakest to strongest tools. This luck-reliant factor means that if someone just happens across one of the über-guns early on, they might gain an advantage which is practically undefeatable. You can limit the damage by turning off any of the weapons you choose, but that feels like caving in. Never give up. Never surrender.
The jolly cartoon visuals I have entirely failed to mention until this moment are complimented by the inclusion of twelve settings, spread out across four different themes. These are desert, swamp, horror and alien. The locales all drip charm, and share Motorsiege?s sound design to an extent, because all manner of hilly bits are placed strategically to make moving around hand-clappingly good, and certain death-traps must also be negotiated. I particularly like that each track has one or two unique little player-killing bits, such as hungry plants and a precariously placed car crusher. Try not to smile the first time a metal cube pops out of that thing and then magically bursts into shape again seconds later.
Just playing the game to unlock places, boomsticks, characters and videos for the characters is rewarding enough to warrant finding Cel Damage for yourself. It?s got some big wrong bits, the longevity is limited and it falls a bit short of Motorsiege, but when you consider that I bought both of these games for a penny each, you should nab the pair of ?em. Now if someone can just make a Mr. T kart racer we?ll have a potential Mashed beater. Someday...
