Crime Wave

The Good
Cheese!! And lots of it!! Crime Wave brings you back to the 80's in full swing, and does so with such incredible lack of taste that it's almost fantastic! This is truly one of those "so bad it's good" cases :))

Let's see, you have a classically retarded storyline in which some bad dudes have kidnapped the princess, er... president's daughter, and since instead of resorting to the secret services or something like that, the president just sits on his fat ass you, a super-hero extraordinaire and swinging 80's fashion icon (complete with gigantic sunglasses, a white/redish jogging outfit and... is that a mullet???!!) decide to take the opportunity to mow down the slums and all those nasty druggies to get to the big bad kingpin and arm-wrestle him for the girl. Much like in Final Fight. Cool huh?

To get you going, there are a series of digitized comic-book like cutscenes that try to explain you what the hell is going on, though they usually just consist of your character inspecting clever pieces of evidence (such as big notes left by the baddies that read "The chick is on X place! Don't come rescue her! Repeat: Don't come rescue her!") or that simply show you how the super-hot chick is being tormented by her captors.... no, they don't do nothing like that, you pervert!

Since beating everyone to death is sooooo lame, you have at your disposal a bizarre machinegun/rocket launcher hybrid that gives you two firing modes, and you go around collecting ammo & money and blowing the shit off whoever crosses your path. And that my friend is where the magic is: the game features some pretty gory stuff with burning people, exploding people, skewered people, etc. etc. Sure, by today's standards the gore in here is pretty much nada, but on those days it was pretty interesting, and it was even more so because all the character sprites were digitized people! The detail was pretty low, but they still animated pretty realistically and it was a fair cry from the usual jerky characters on standard 2D beat 'em ups (though you'll still be killing the same dude over and over again :).

So, there you have it. Crank up the theme for Miami Vice, or Taaaaake Oooooon Meeeeee! -Take, on Me!- and you are back in the 80's only you now get to kill everyone!!!! WAAAHOoO!!! :))

The Bad
It was way softer than Narc!!!!!!! I mean, Narc was like the official Nancy Reagan videogame, what with it's "SAY NO OR DIE!!" Motto and it's blatant disgegard of such crap like civil rights in it's quest to eliminate everyone that used/distributed/made/heard about Krack...... Dammit!! That's quality material!!! Besides Narc had the Narc-Mobile! Where the hell is the Crime-Wave mobile?? You could say our hero doesn't need no stinking cars, but since he walks like an injured snail and needs to come to a full stop and wind up every time he wants to jump I'd advice him to at least take a bus....

Also, unlike Narc, there's no 2-player action. So you are gonna be breakdancing solo on this one. I'm afraid that's never helped these types of games and it doesn't help here (the single player-only gameplay, not the breakdancing you moron!!). Plus the controls are hard-wired into a pretty anal configuration that makes it pretty hard to jump or crouch in the middle of the action.

The Bottom Line
Well, if you are in the market for some stupidly cheesy 80's fun Crime Wave will deliver, it's easy enough to be finished, and you can let go off all your aggression with it even if it's gameplay is well under par.

Problem is, with MAME around you might just want to try and see if you can find Narc around the net. It's much more funny with it's Nancy Reagan-like/kill 'em all antics, and has a 2-player mode. Sure, the main characters are nowhere near as cool as our white Mr.T wanna-be here on Crime Wave, but it's a small price to pay for a game that says SAY NO OR DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!