The Hall of Shame 11.19.08: Total Recall

Posted by Vincent Chiucchi on 11.19.2008

Acclaim promises us a video game based on the Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick. What we instead got was a horrible mess lacking any three-boobed chicks.

Total Recall was one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's most successful films, which not only boosted his career but also Sharon Stone's. The plot involves Arnold's character Quaid remembering that he used to be an agent on Mars, but his memories of his time on Mars had been completely wiped out. He finds out he used to be an agent for the main bad guy Cohaagen, but decided to join an underground resistance to fight him because of the way Cohaagen screwed up the city on Mars. The movie is kind of like The Matrix with it's themes of simulated reality, only with a lot more over-the-top violent action scenes. As per usual in the NES days, any successful movie instantly saw a game get released.

But where as the movie was good, the game was just absolute garbage, and that's why it's getting inducted into the Hall of Shame.

Remember when Arnold fought pink midgets? Yeah, me neither.

Right away the first problem I have with this game is the lousy looking text. Yes, it seems odd to point out text font as a flaw, but seriously, when the O and D look exactly the same, it gets annoying to read.

The fighting mechanics in this game is absolutely horrible. The only thing you can do is punch or duck and punch, and it's a very lousy punch because it barely works on enemies. Sometimes it'll actually hurt enemies, sometimes it won't, and depending on where you hit the enemy, kills them with one hit. It would have been better if you can do a chain of punches like in Double Dragon to perform combos.

Starting the game, the first enemies I encounter are pink midgets who drag me into an alley to fight them. I haven't watched the movie, but I've never heard anything about Quaid fighting pink suited midgets. In these alleys there are pipes you can jump on as platforms, but the steam that comes out of them will damage you. Yes, steam causes your health to go down. Sometimes when you step out of an alley after beating the little people, a car suddenly drives by to shoot you, and unless you act extremely quick, you're going to get hit. Then you've got this one guy who shows up to chase you, and the moment he touches you, you instantly die. Guess who didn't realize this until getting instantly killed the third time? I assume this guy that kills Quaid was some character who was chasing him in the movie, but still, one hit deaths in the first level of a broken game is NOT FUN!

Things seem pretty normal until I reach the first boss fight with Quaid's wife Lori., and this boss fight alone makes me hate this game with all my being. Because of the horrible hit detection, it's almost impossible to get through this boss fight. When I finally hit her with enough punches I get the gun she drops to use that a weapon, but the bullets from the gun don't work half the time! What's the point of having a gun in this game if it's going to be no better than the punches? That's not even the worst part of this fight. See, you have to beat Lori in a quick amount of time, or else another guy suddenly bursts in and starts shooting at you repeatedly. You'd think that if you at least got the gun you can shoot back at the guy, right? Wrong, because he takes NO DAMAGE! Once he shows up and starts shooting you, you are officially screwed. One bullet takes away too much health and in order to get past him, you have to get close and jump over him. It would be possible if you had a good amount of health, but odds are you don't since Lori likes to jump on top of you where it's impossible to hit her and the controls are nearly broken! This boss fight frustrated me so much that I resorted to using an infinite lives code with Game Genie to get through the rest of the game.

Welcome to screwed, population you.

Even if you're able to get past that guy, you'll find that the rest of the game is even more absurdly hard. The next level has you fighting the same enemy and dogs in the subway over and over again, and just to mock you, they have cans of energy up so high that there's no way in hell that you're going to be able to reach them. Well, it looks like you can't reach them, but then I read you can if you jump on the links between the subway cars, but since the subway cars look like background animation, I didn't think it would be possible to do that. Thank you lousy graphics!

The third level has you getting the briefcase from some guy who apparently knew you, just like in the movie. Unlike the movie however you have to go through a bunch of hobos and avoid spiked balls. In order to get the briefcase you have to defeat the boss which I dub Annoying Hat Guy. Annoying Hat Guy will throw his hat at you like he's Oddjob from James Bond, and killing him is nearly impossible. If I didn't have the Game Genie code on, I would have died so many times. Neither my fists or my gun were working on him until I realized I had to hit him directly in the face, which requires jumping to reach. So the fight basically boils down to having to avoid his hat which goes in a boomerang patten and press the fire button at the right moment. He takes a lot of hits, so this fight lasts a LONG time. After getting the briefcase, you backtrack to the very beginning of the level to finish. Doesn't that just sound like fun?

After this level you'll head to mars. The first part is a brief side-scrolling level, and then you have to do a driving level, and I SWEAR to the lords above that this driving level is so horrible that I thought I was playing an Action 52 game. Because the controls are horrible, way too many times I wind up crashing into walls, which I assume does damage. As if hitting a wall every damn second wasn't bad enough, people suddenly pop out of nowhere and start firing at me. I can fire from my vehicle, but if all the enemies are going to attack me from behind, what's the point?!

If you somehow survive the car trip from hell you go through another side scrolling part of the game where at the end of the stage you have to get inside the bar. Getting inside was so difficult I thought the game was glitched or something. The bars doors only open when a drunk suddenly flies out and can do damage. At this point you'd think you can simply press up and go inside, but sometimes, the game doesn't want to seem to register the fact that you're pressing up and makes you repeat the process of getting hit by drunks while attempting to get inside.

The next part has you going through the mines, and it's at this point I start to realize how completely unbalanced the enemies are. See, in early levels enemies can take multiple hits from fists and bullets, but here most of them can be killed with one hit. Oh, and you also have to fight skeletons. When in the entire freaking movie did Quaid have to fight skeletons, and why do none of the bullets work on them but punching them multiple times does?! Eventually you fight Digger Dan at the end who becomes a pain in the ass to kill just like all the other bosses.

The final level definitely does not feel like a final level. It's basically the same awful side-scrolling action only a lot shorter. Afterwards you fight the final boss Vilos Cohaagen, whose main strategy of attack is to jump so high that you can't hit him. Also he'll sometimes attack you offscreen just to piss you off. This final boss fight was so anti-climatic that it makes me think the movie must've been really bad if this was how it went down. I mean Lori and the other guy were almost impossible to defeat, and this guy is relatively easy. So after you beat Cohaagen, the pyramid explodes (or mountain according to the game text) explodes, the sky turns blue, and the game is over.

This game is horrible on all fronts. The graphics are lame, the music is lamer, the controls suck, and the enemies are unbalanced, cheap, and nonsensical. Arnold is supposed to be a badass superhero, but in this game, he comes off looking like a complete pussy. A lot of people hated this game. So much so that years after people were still talking about it, one of the producers sent e-mails to many game reviewers telling them to get over it. I await his inevitable complaint to me within the week.

Overall, I'm going to sum up the way the game made me feel with this video: