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Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Anyone reading this old enough to remember the old arcade hit, Double Dragon?

Double Dragon was one of the earlier side-scrolling beat-em-ups. You played as one or two (if you had a friend with to take the player two controls) karate-savvy brothers out to rescue kidnapped girlfriends or something like that. (Hey, if you’re old enough to remember this one, you’re old enough to be fuzzy on the details, too!). Anyway…

That game epitomized everything that was great and everything that sucked about the era of 2D side-scrolling beat-’em-ups. Of course, this was long before 3D gaming so we never called them 2D. Mostly we just called them side-scrollers. Whatever. The point is, Buffy the Vampire Slayer for GameBoy Advance is, at its core, a Buffy-fied version of Double Dragon. With all the inherent strengths … and weaknesses thereof.

Load up the game and select New Game and for a moment you’ll be impressed by the photo-based cut scenes taken from stills of the TV show. While it’s just still photos, it’s fun to see that GBA can display photos that crisply and you think, “okay, looks like we’re in for a bit of Buffy-oriented fun.”

Except after the setup scene, you find yourself playing Double Dragon with Buffy filling in for the Karate Brothers and vampires filling in for “street toughs.” The gameplay is all too familiar. Take five steps and trigger a vampire coming at you. Fight till he’s dead by you “staking” him. Push too far to the right in the process and you’ll trigger more vampires and soon be overwhelmed by them.

Which is all well and good, I suppose. Except the game is filled with all the same frustratingly bad “puzzles” of Double Dragon-era 2D gaming, such as lacking a “jump” control when, clearly, that’d be the best way to get past an article. Or a “slide down a slanty rope past a barrier” puzzle whose margin of error is so precise, you’ll spend about 25 “lives” learning just where you need to jump from to grab on, then die another 25 times learning exactly when you need to release to land safely rather than fall into a pit.

I suppose “I fear change” throwback gamers will find this romp through the Buffy-verse a blast but trust me, unless you’re die-hard about 2D games so frustratingly designed you pull all your hair out, this one is not for you. It’s nowhere near as smoothly designed as modern 2D GBA games like Castlevania: Lament of Innocence and the controls are so bad, it’ll make you flee back to PS2’s Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness for wonky controls that are less rage-inducing.

The story of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, such as it is, is pretty thin stuff, even for GBA, comprised mostly in those cutscene stills that are, for most gamers, too few and far between the frustrating levels to make all that effort worthwhile.

Oh, and like most early 2D side-scrollers, forget about saving the game once you learn how to do something EXACTLY as the game wants you to; you have to clear a whole level before you get that satisfaction.

Personally, I’m a big Buffy fan and nothing would give me greater pleasure than to say this is the game we’ve all been waiting for on our handheld systems. But the problems here run deeper than there being the lack of a “nude mode.” The game just doesn’t measure up and is far more frustrating than it’s worth. So unless you’re a die-hard, it’s time to say, “My time is better-spent with the Season 4 DVDs than playing through this piece of vampire-dung.”

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Tags: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Sep 18th, 2003 and is filed under GBA Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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