Reception for The Golden Compass: Downright chilly
What do you get when you cross a polar bear with a little girl? A bad game based on a bad movie based on a good book. In other words, a small tragedy.
AMN’s review of The Golden Compass for the Playstation 3 brings up a complaint we see so often with licensed games: Corners cut for the sake of meeting impossible deadlines. Whenever I think of games based on hot movie properties, my mind automatically conjures up an image of a boring, flat plain. The potential is there, but it’s never realised because that’s just too much damn work. Originality? Sorry, there’s profit to be had.
What’s kind of sad is how long we’ve allowed licensed games to be crappy. As long as clueless aunts need a last minute Christmas gift, name recognition will count for a lot. This always caused me a lot of pain as a youngster; even as far back as the days of the NES, I was jaded enough to know that Bart vs the Space Mutants was a pile of plop, but my friends didn’t play games often enough to realise that games based on licenses make for piss poor party entertainment. I’d be forced to watch them stagger over and over through unbalanced, poorly designed levels…and it seems I just gave God a good idea of my own personal Hell for when my time inevitably comes. Blast.
Going back to The Golden Compass for a second, is everyone’s soul represented by “cool” animals? Doesn’t anyone have to, like, tote around a banana slug or something?
I remember what it was like not knowing the truth about movie-based games. I spent so many hours trying to get past the third or fourth stage of Total Recall.
The whole level is Arnold wandering an abandoned apartment building fighting hobos, which was hard enough. But at the end, there’s a Mega Hobo who has the ability to use his hat like a deadly, crusty boomerang. Oh, and his head is his only weak-point. So it’s like the worst version of Dracula’s first form ever.