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I'm starting this blog to introduce new gamers (and maybe old) to old games that are still great when played today. This in a vain effort to help get people to broaden their horizons in terms of video games and try something out they've never tried before. The blog will be little more than a brief description of the game, a video showcasing its gameplay, and a slightly detailed review. Before I get started let me talk a bit about myself.
Gaming Background (optional read):
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I'm a 25 year old male who has been gaming since the age of four with a gray brick Nintendo. I've owned numerous consoles in my time (NES, PC (several different PCs over the years), Sega Genesis, PSX, Gameboy (brick, color, and Advanced SP), Game Gear, PS2, PSP, Wii, PS3) and while there are tons not listed (SNES, 64, Gamecube, Dreamcast, Xbox, 360, etc) I assure you I've spent an equal amount of time playing those either with friends or trading away my playstations for their equivalents to play each others single player games (kids on a budget, ya know?). Anyway I've got literally thousands of games and hundreds of thousands of hours played, I'm pretty much an addict. Which, along with great taste in things, makes me perfect for reviewing games. Anyway that's enough about me, on to the game.
![[image loading]](http://i110.photobucket.com/albums/n99/chuiu/G-Police.jpg)
Ahh yes, G-Police. One of my all time favorite playstation games and one of the biggest underdogs. G-Police is a first person or third person flying shooter. In G-Police you play the role of an ex-military turned cop who flies around the dome-cities on Mars dispensing justice with a armament of rockets and guns. Eventually your police force uncovers a rather gruesome plot and has to shut down the operation of one of the corporations. The game has many cheesy cutscenes which help narrate the story and in between mission briefings which fill you in on the details.
First person gameplay:
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My reviews will be a summary of three things. Story, which will include all things related to the story of the game including dialogue and voice acting. Gameplay, which will includes everything dealing with playing the actual game. And Design, which includes everything related to graphics, sound, music, and even menu designs and such if I deem it necessary to mention them. I rate these 1 to 3, 1 = sucks, 2 = average, 3 = great. If you're wondering how I can use such simple scoring and yet at the same time separate these games from games today which should score higher? I don't, I rate all games equally and as such they all get fair scores. Newer games really shouldn't get higher scores just because they have more polygons, bigger textures, and flashier effects.
Review:
Story:
The games story surrounds an ex-military pilots career with the G-Police. Earlier in the game your missions are focused on just snuffing out crime but during an innocent escort mission your wingman dies. But to Slater, the main character, his death strikes an eerie resemblance to how his sister died. After this point the story slowly unfolds to reveal one of the major weapons corporations are stealing microchips from the pilots brains to obtain their combat skills (I think it was for the AI in some of their weapons). From then on its knee deep in shit as you fight your way around the dome uncovering their plans and bringing down the hammer. There isn't much to tell really, there was a large variety of missions so its hard to really tell the story in respect to them.
Gameplay:
Like my last review I have to start off making a note about the controls in the game. They are extremely hard to learn and get used to. This game was made back on the playstation before two analog sticks was default and the control scheme painfully shows this. With a controller that has the sticks, however, it makes it a tiny bit easier. Basically you're controlling the direction of your craft with the left stick, the right stick does nothing, and speed and up and down movement are controlled by buttons. It takes a lot of practice but after a few missions I found the controls very comfortable and they even provide more control than some games today.
You pilot what is basically a helicopter crossed with a hovercraft, a gunship. Your gunship comes with machine guns with infinite ammo (provided you don't overheat it), rockets, missiles, bombs, flares, the works. If you need it in a mission you can be sure you'll have it. As you progress your newer weapons get more advanced and so does your gunship as you upgrade to a newer model. Your health bar is the circle on the top right and its clear to see what health you have at all times. A small note about health in this game you can only 'heal' yourself by finding a G-Police landing platform, which also serves to restock your weapons should you need more (this is shown around 4:30 in the video). Aside from that you slowly regenerate health at 2 health every 8 or so seconds (this is actually really good because it keeps you from having to heal while traveling from dome to dome).
As for the rest of the HUD, you have a radar in the center of the map which shows nearby enemies, objectives, and allies. Its 3d and very easy to read and follow. The top left shows your currently selected target and its health, you can keep enemies selected to help track them in dog fights. The two vertical bars show your current acceleration - red/orange for forward movement and blue for reverse. And the bottom left shows altitude which isn't terribly useful information until you start flying at greater speeds.
The missions are all very objective oriented and you go around completing them one by one with some missions carrying several optional objectives for a better score. The game feels right even if it is rather alarming that you're a cop flying around in a city blasting bad guys every chance you get with some pretty hefty weapons. You never really question it because its too damn fun though. The difficulty curve is great and the game gets pretty hard towards the end as the enemies become more and more advanced and capable of fighting back, the AI is pretty strong too.
As for weapons you get a variety of different weapons in the game but you can only use what they issue you per mission. Eventually they issue you larger varieties of weapons to cope with more dynamic situations but you're still limited at times and sometimes you'll be in a mission wishing you were packing some Firestreak missiles or Electronic Pulse Paralyzers. The missiles are pretty much just 'homing' (IR), 'super homing' (Firestreak), 'super fast' (HV), and there is a set of multi missiles called Starburst. The super fast missiles are essentially rockets that you can aim more easily, everything else is self explanatory. Rockets are used for stationary or slow targets that your guns have a hard time with. There are three sets of bombs and if you're someone who plays in first person mode be prepared for a world of hurt because aiming the bombs are damn near impossible that way. Once you switch to third person mode you see a nice little reticule on the ground where your bomb should land and it becomes very easy to drop one on your target. Bombs are almost always a specialty weapon that you get for specific missions. There is a laser later in the game that acts like a super powerful and super easy to overheat machine gun. There is also a charge cannon you can use in situations where exposure to enemies means taking a lot of damage. And then there is the EPP, electronic pulse paralyzer, which is a specialty weapon used for disabling craft instead of destroying them. The EPP is a tad hard to aim but they give you extra shots, so if you're good at aiming you can use it on non-mission targets also to help you out.
Design:
The music in the game is sort of a hip hop crossed with 80's style electronic mix. Hell I have no problem with it, it beats all the generic 'lets make our game sound as epic as possible' crap developers usually go with nowadays. It blends fairly well and doesn't get in the way of the game. The sound effects are all there and are pretty satisfying, though the clunking sound when you hit something never changes and gets annoying especially if you're trying to hug a building or something and end up dragging your ship on it. There is a good amount of voice chatter in the game when stuff is happening but between events when you're flying from dome to dome it can get quiet real quick and that has the strange effect of setting up for a more interesting encounter as the music and chatter pick up.
The voice acting is actually fairly good even if it does sound like one or two voice actors doing several different characters. (Specifically the ground team voice guy sounds like someone is disguising their voice - and it sounds a bit forced) It never gets annoying but it does interrupt the music (if you happened to be enjoying it).
The graphics are playstation graphics, once again remember there were polygon limits and they had to limit visibility to compensate for this. Since G-Police is very much like being in an open world (with many domes to explore), it hurts sometimes as the visibility can be very low for a game where you need to see very far. Since buildings are not marked on the hud or map you run a high risk of smacking into them when flying at higher speeds and making maneuvers. Aside from that the game looks great, the textures are all pretty detailed for the time the game was released and the city feels right for being futuristic.
I briefly skimmed over what some other reviewers had to say about this game because I knew it got shitty scores when it was released and the games atmosphere and style were compared to Blade Runner. While I've never actually seen the movie I can definitely see the resemblance just watching short clips.
Story: 2 (it tends to get really cheesy at times and a lot of it is told through boring briefings)
Gameplay: 3 (difficult controls but once you get past that this game is fun as hell)
Design: 2 (I feel like the small viewing distance really hurt the game, a remake of this game would be the shit though)
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Overall: 3
I don't average my scores to get the overall score. I gave it a 3/3 because the game really is great despite its setbacks. You can get the game used for a couple bucks at used game shops, for 30-40 hours of gameplay this beats any triple-A title being released nowadays. The game spawned one sequel and without doing a full review of it I have to say its basically G-Police but with a ton more variety, in the second game you pilot a wide range of vehicles. I played the game in the late 90's borrowing it from a friend and eventually bought my own copy and the sequel.
One last note, the developer who made this game became swallowed by another company and eventually became Studio Liverpool. They're the guys who made the Wipeout series, which is basically a beefier version of Nintendo's F-Zero and also another great game I love.
