The Final Word game review

Star Fighter -- Studio3DO/Acclaim

R.I.P.
Wow, this game is a living example of what we used to call "slanderware"... although, I'm can't imagine that a port this bad was really done on purpose since everyone was already moving titles off of the 3DO anyways.

Probably the worst version of the game to be released, this game suffers from just about ever problem you can think of for a 3-D polygon based game... Let see, slowdown, watered down effects and music, extremely limited view of play area, sloppy control, oh I could go on, but let's just cover these points above in detail.

First slowdown... or should I just say slow. Compared to the other releases of this title, you feel sometimes like your moving through molasses, I don't know if its because the overall frame rate of the game is slower, or because the game just runs slow. Either way, this alone makes the game hard to play if you've spent any time on the 3DO version.

Effects and music... the effects sound like crap. Explosions lack bass, everything sounds like it was encoded to play only in a high pitched squelch. The music itself, sounded like they recorded the 3DO's soundtrack by putting a microphone in the middle of a room and recorded it from the speaker of a TV turned up to loud to compensate for the lost audio quality. After playing this version I thought I was loosing my mind because I always remembered really liking the soundtrack to this game. So... I dug out the 3DO version and compared... the audio quality is like night a day. The only thing going for the music is the fact that I still like the songs even though the playback sucked.

Area of view... ok, put simply, on other versions of this game, you can actually see to the horizon. In this version, the fog effect that they have applied to hide the fact that the game can't render anything in the distance is so close that if you climb up to the highest altitude, everything disappears from your field of view except the gray fog.

And last but not least, game control is terrible. Right off the bat, I found it hard to accurately hit my targets, or do anything that required precision, let alone do things like fly sideways through arcs, or between buildings.

This game isn't just a bad version, it's just a terrible game for the platform. Unless you're a completist looking to finish off your Saturn collection, or a hard core glutton for punishment, I strongly suggest you give this game a really wide berth and skip it all-together.

(12/2001)