It took sixteen years, but we finally got a South Park game worth playing. South Park: The Stick of Truth is an utterly hilarious mash-up of childhood fantasy gone awry and modern gaming tropes. It’s a straight up legit way to kill several hours over the course of a long weekend, and it plays like an explosively big-budget episode of the cartoon. In short, it’s everything a fan of the TV show could want packed into a video game. Unfortunately for you, this is the last thing I’m going to say about it. Yes, this week I am talking about South Park, but I’m talking about the original South Park. The one programmed by Iguana and published by Acclaim. The first-person shooter from 1998. Yeah, that South Park. Sorry. Please hold all piss-laden snowball volleys until the end of the column.

Title screen from the PC version.

South Park was one of largest cultural phenomenons of the late 90s. Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s subversive brand of foul-mouthed comedy delivered from the gaping maws of school children grabbed hold of a pop culture nerve in 1997. Twenty seasons later it’s still going strong, blatantly ripping on everything we hold dear like a chainsaw-wielding maniac stuck in your basement. With its popularity rising like the Hulk’s own rampaging erection, the brand was unstoppable. Merchandise flew off the shelves as fast as Chinese factories could crank it out. Then the whispers began: soon fans would be able to play as their favorite characters in a mad-cap, no-holds-barred, no-joke-too-raunchy video game. Acclaim had gobbled up the game rights to South Park as soon as they went on offer, and dropped the assignment square in the laps of Iguana Entertainment.

Choose your hero.

This may seem like an odd choice, since Iguana was mostly known for sports games like NBA Jam, NFL Quarterback Club, and Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball. But one stand-out feather in their cap was Turok: Dinosaur Hunter on the Nintendo 64, a game which proved Iguana had what it took to make a fun, compelling first-person shooter. This being the late 90s, when every new FPS was poised to be the next Quake killer, Acclaim decided they wanted a first-person shooter for their precious new license. Turok sold well, GoldenEye on the N64 was all about letting four friends destroy that precious bond by offering OddJob as a playable character, so by golly, South Park was going to do both so well gaming would not only experience a second coming, but a third, fourth, and even fifth (depending on how long your Rumble Pak’s batteries held out).

Hmmm…speaking of ‘coming’…

Never mind the closest the cartoon had come to anything approaching shooter territory was an episode from the first season where Jimbo and Uncle Ned take the boys hunting. Also never mind Stone and Parker didn’t want to see kids in the game running around with shotguns and bazookas. South Park’s creators were nothing if not savvy–while the show was aimed at adult audiences, they knew a massive swath of their viewership came from teens and younger kids whether they liked it or not. Cartman might be an asshole, but not even he was a big enough asshole to commit cold-blooded murder (‘Scott Tenorman Must Die’ was still a couple of years off). Finally, never mind that South Park consisted entirely of two-dimensional animation: construction paper cut-outs placed over flat backdrops that were given life by swapping out different eyes and mouths as the characters spoke to one another, and who moved by swaying and bouncing across the screen with nothing approximating real-life movement. Not only did Iguana have to come up with a storyline worthy of the cartoon’s good name, not only did they have to devise a suitable assortment of appropriate weaponry for their grade school protagonists to unleash upon equally-suitable baddies, but they also had to translate every single two-dimensional scene and character from the show into a fully-realized 3D model. This last task sounds easier in theory than it was in practice, for as one 3D modeler assigned to the task put it, how to do you rig and animate characters who literally have no knees?

“Yeah, I want Cheesy Poofs!”

Nevertheless Iguana pushed forward, arming their kids with snowballs, dart guns, and dodge balls. They populated their world with Cheesy Poofs and Snacky Cakes to restore health, a bouncing Mr. Hanky to use as a shield, and exploding Terrance & Phillip dolls to lay as traps. They gave the kids targets like pissed off turkeys, imperfect clones of Big Gay Al and Mr. Mackey, and alien visitors to gun down. Best of all, they got the original voice actors, including Isaac Hayes, into the studio to record the authentic character voices for twenty different characters in multi-player mode. The opening cinematic is a competent rendering of the show’s first-season opening in full 3D. So where did it all go wrong?

And you thought that was just a joke.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the single-player South Park experience is duller than a the clay ashtray you sculpted for your non-smoking dad in first grade. The story about a rogue comet heading for Earth causing all sorts of disruptions in the town is the kind of lowest-common-denominator writing we’d come to expect from video games based on TV shows (evidenced by over a decade of bad games based on TV shows). Levels feel too long, like the designers were intentionally trying to pad out the experience. The simple design style which works so well for the animated cartoon looks flat and uninteresting when translated into a 3D medium. Worst of all, the enemy variety is best described as a joke. The first ‘chapter’ of the game sees you killing nothing but angry turkeys, spawned forth by giant, mutated angry turkeys, and the occasional cow. This is funny for about five minutes. Unfortunately you’ve got another hour or so of listening to the now-repetitive sound effects of turkeys running at you, gobbling furiously, and choking out one final gobble-gasp as you brain them with a piss-infused snowball. This gets no better once you’ve reached the second chapter, where you maraud through the town, knocking down mutant clones of the townspeople. Imagine playing an entire episode of Duke Nukem 3D where every enemy was a Pig Cop: no Octobrains, no Assault Troopers, no Enforcers, just Pig Cops, with a giant Pig Cop at the end for a boss. Duke would OD on Steroids and pass out on the floor of an adult move theater in a puddle of his own excrement before braving that level of tedium.

Oh, this should be interesting…

If South Park shines anywhere though, it thrives in multi-player. On the PC version, all characters are unlocked right from the get-go so you could jump online and start engaging in mayhem as soon as you installed the game. The N64 version, on the other hand, made you collect unlock codes by playing through the single-player game if you wanted to use more than the default gang of Kyle, Stan, Cartman and Kenny–an option slightly less appealing than reading Steinbeck for the laughs. The developers must have understood this, because they included an ‘unlock everything’ cheat, so thank ‘Jesus and Pals!’ for small favors, I guess?

“Dude, these turkeys are really pissed off!”

The nice thing about multiplayer is that unlike, say, Quake II, you aren’t playing the same character just with a different skin. Every character in South Park is different in some way: the kids tend to be smaller and harder to hit, but the adults are taller and thus have a better field of vision. And unlike in GoldenEye, the really tiny Ike and Starvin’ Marvin have massively reduced hit points to compensate for their almost non-existent hit boxes. Common consensus among my group of friends was that multi-player South Park was like Quake on crack, with the characters yelling insults and griping about taking damage. Cartman’s “Damn it, stop hitting me!” still makes me laugh.

Cartman’s big fat ass in 3D.

But that’s not enough to save South Park from the bargain bin where it belongs. Thanks, Acclaim, for butchering Kenny (and everyone else in town) with your inaugural offering, and setting the bar so low even Jimmy could high-jump it. You bastards.

I wish I knew, Stan. I wish I knew.

We’ve got two retro ad goodies for you this week, loyal revenge seekers! Share and enjoy:

Michael Crisman

In 1979, Michael Crisman was mauled by a radioactive Gorgar pinball machine. After the wounds healed, doctors discovered his DNA had been re-coded. No longer fully human, Michael requires regular infusions of video games in order to continue living among you. If you see him, he can see you. Make no sudden moves, but instead bribe him with old issues of computer and video game magazines or a mint-in-box copy of Dragon Warrior IV.


If he made you laugh, drop a tip in his jar at http://paypal.me/modernzorker


(If he didn't make you laugh, donate to cure his compulsion to bang keyboards by sending an absurdly huge amount of money to his tip jar instead. That'll show him!)