South Park: Chef's Luv Shack
- January 01, 2000 00:00 AM PST
Slap the South Park brand on a silly little trivia game with Mario Party-like mini-games and you still have a silly little trivia game with Mario Party-like mini-games. Will this South Park game appeal to more than die-hard fans?
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The premise is simple, you and up to four friends choose to play as Stan, Kyle, Cartman, or Kenny. You then compete in a TV game show-inspired trivia contest held in Chef's Luv Shack--and I thought only sweet lovin' was going on in the Luv Shack. You'll earn points for answering questions correctly, and lose points for answering incorrectly.
Between rounds, you and your human opponents (there are no computer controlled opponents, none) will compete in a randomly selected mini-games like Bad Kitty, Round Up, and Frog Toss for example. The mini-games are the best thing CLS has going.
In Bad Kitty, you lead Eric Cartman's cat up ladders and ramps in a Donkey Kong-like mini-game where Cartman himself plays the notorious Donkey Kong. In Round Up, one of the game's 4-player mini-games, you and your friends will try to throw the most chickens into your respective coops. You'll also shoot down floating asses in Asses in Space; a mini-game inspired by the coin-op classic, Asteroids. You'll even save old Scuzzlebutt from a flaming fatality by putting out the flames with water balloons.
While CLS is fun, it's loaded with several mind-numbing problems. For starters, the load-times are ridiculous--even on my P-550! Each new screen takes a noticeable amount of time to load. Next, the game has no single-player mode. You can play solo, but you won't have any AI opponents to play against--you'll be all alone.
Eliminating the long load-times and adding AI opponents to play against would dramatically improve CLS. It's shocking the design team didn't realize this. And seriously folks, it's 2000; most people have incredible amounts of hard-disk space and RAM; nasty load-times in a 2D game are not acceptable.
So we're left with another South Park game that falls into the "could've been better" category. Fans of South Park will love the audio quality and voice-overs done by Isaac Hayes. Pick it up if you must own everything South Park--it's fun for a few days.
