Monday Memories: South Park 64

With South Park: The Stick of Truth due out in stores tomorrow (3/4), I figured I would do a little piece on an "oldie but a goodie".

Believe it or not, there are not that many South Park related games. According to Wikipedia and Jeffipedia (aka my brain) there are 6 (counting Stick of Truth). There is a pinball machine and also (I'm sure) a TON of mobile games, but there are only 6 South Park console based games, and 2 of them were Xbox Live Arcade Games.

So let's take it back to the beginning, the first South Park game I played. You know what they say about your firsts? You never forget them....for better or for worse.

Worse
.
.
.
.
just....worse
.
.

Oh my God, they killed....fun....you bastard!

The year is 1998, Comedy Central was still kind of a niche channel, and everyone was freaking out about Y2K. South Park the show debuted in 1997 and the world was never the same. 17 years later the show is still going strong and is mentioned in the same sentence as The Simpsons: the gold standard of animated comedy longevity and relevancy. Of course there is going to be a video game based on the foul-mouthed Colorado kids.

It's just too bad we got this one first:

Snowball Fight with Turkey Simulator 1998 - in stores now!

The premise here: a comet plummets towards South Park, Colorado. As it gets closer, enemies descend upon the town, including mutant turkeys, deformed clones, robots, aliens, etc. Your job as Kyle, Kenny, Stan, and Cartman, is to save the town FPS style!

Did I mention you can piss on the snowballs to make it more powerful.....it's a South Park game, what do you expect?

You travel through many iconic South Park locales and meet many recognizable characters along your journey and they are all voiced by the right people and the look is definitely South Park. So at least they got that right. That gameplay though....

There are guns but you'll probably stop playing before you get there.

South Park was released for N64, PC, and Playstation from 1998 (N64) to 1999 (PC and PS) and was developed by the now defunct Iguana Entertainment, who were best known for developing sports games like NBA Jam and College Slam. Maybe that's why an FPS from these guys isn't that great. Though I would love the Jam announcer to scream things like "BOOM-Shakalaka!" and "He's on FIRE!" whenever I killed something.

There was a multiplayer mode, the PC version even had online multiplayer.

In case you had friends who didn't get the memo.

Head to head mode let you and your friends have at it as different South Park characters in a deathmatch style mode. Pretty bare-bones and boring. Still made for a somewhat fun time since you would inevitably say some stupid one-liner as your character whenever you killed someone. Fun until you get that guy who thinks he does a REALLY good Cartman impression prove to you why you normally don't hang out with him.

Definitely not the worst game I've ever played. It still was pretty funny and it was the only way to get a South Park fix outside the TV show and (gasp!) VHS tapes.

Still, pretty bad game.

I actually have high hopes for Stick of Truth from all that I have seen. Expect my first impressions sometime this week.