Junkman
Dec 13 2004, 02:27 PM
Game: South Park Ultra
Creator: Mark Hadley
Genre: Compilation
Description: Test your skills into 5 unique games. Go on with Mr. Hankey in a quest to save Christmas, test your potential visitor skills into human abduction, shoot zombies, clear off boards of tokens using chocolate salty balls and various items and finally, race for the triangle of Zinthar.

Rating: 77%

Review: The third instalment of Mark Hadley's compilation saga has got a mission; trying to upstage both of it's precessors down with a better game collection and a better overall show-off. South Park Extreme had some fun games but had a pretty bland presentation whilst South Park Gold did the total opposite, throwing off some uninspired games alongside a nicer-looking menu. With South Park Ultra, Mark Hadley managed to deliver his first compilation that manages not only to be both entertaining and nice-looking, but also interesting and ambitious as well.

Mr.Hankey Saves Christmas opens up the show wisely. It's a fun, yet rather epic platformer in which you help Mr.Hankey go through many different locations in order to save Christmas. In the many still screens of the game, you must go through the level's architecture, picking up Salty Chocolate Balls to fight off the enemies that will block your way whilst not getting killed in the process. The levels span over a couple of screens, featuring occasionally branching paths that you need to choose from in order to reach the end. At the end of the game's 3 rather-lengthy levels, you need to fight off a boss. Even though the bosses are on the basic side when it comes to AI, they still deliver interesting battles as they sometimes prove that they've got a trick or two in their sleeves (The UFO's bouncing lasers can make for a rather tough fight). The game's often frustrating, since some of the screens are actually quite tricky. Going through some of the screens and staying in one piece will prove to be a real challenge at times. The only complaint I have to issue about this game is the delay at the start of each screen as Mr.Hankey yells "Howdy ho!" during which you can't move. With that critism aside, this is a great title and the definite highlight of South Park Ultra.

Visitation is yet another game involving the dreaded visitors, but unlike both Visitors games that appeared in the past compilations (Just Visitors and Space Visitors), this one's actually good. It's a simple, yet challenging game in which you play as the Visitors' ship. You need to abduct Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny but unfortunately for you, they won't surrender easily. They will throw rocks at you in order to wreck your spaceship and whilst trying to use the track beam on the kids, you also need to avoid the rocks they throw at you. Even though it looks easy at first, the 2 last levels offer one hell of a challenge. The kids throw an awful load of stones and avoiding them all will take a lot of skill. The AI is a bit sloppy here, seeing the kids bounce back and forth across the screen looks a bit awkward, but it's an otherwise fun game that will require quite some time to master.

Zombies Ate My Cheesy Poofs! is more shoot em' up action with additional twists, involving you trying to protect Stan, Kyle, Cartman, Kenny and Wendy from an endless army of zombies swarming toward the gang. This game can actually be played with 5 people; 4 people control the main kids (the person controlling Stan can get Wendy to follow him, otherwise Wendy is not a playable character) and the last person does the shooting with the mouse. Even though I never got to see how this game would fare with that much people, it's mostly a mouse-shooting affair. There are 3 different skill levels and each of them affect the number of bullets your gun can shoot before it needs to be reloaded. The game is quite boring when being played on Easy and you aren't likely to find yourself in trouble too often, but it's one hell of an adrenaline rush when being played on Hard. You'll have your hands full there trying to stop the zombies from reaching the kids with the pressure of reloading at every shot.

Chef's Salty Chocolate Balls take an entirely different approach and attempts a venture into puzzler territory. It's like a board game on which there are chocolate balls and other pieces based on South Park characters. Your goal is to get rid of all of the chocolate balls on the screen whilst managing to keep one token of the main kids on the board. In order to do so, you must place pieces that are given to you randomly on the board and use blast pieces that allow you to destroy certain tokens if they're located next to each other, destroying chocolate balls if they get in the way. Whilst the concept sounds good, it's incredibly frustrating and not in a good way. There's no real challenge involved here, it mostly is a luck-related affair. If you get the right pieces, you can complete a level in about 5 minutes. Otherwise, you might almost spend a whole hour trying to clean the board, which can't be done if you don't have the right pieces. It's good to see that Mark Hadley had tried doing something completely different, but it just doesn't work. Race for The Triangle is a more traditional platformer game that can only be played by two players. As the title implies, it's a race for the triangle of Zinthar between Kenny and Cartman. Those races occur into pretty ordinary looking levels that only offer different level architecture with no obstacles. Most of the jumps that need to be done to reach the triangle need to be pixel-perfect and it's just annoying.

South Park Ultra definitely is one step further from both of Mark Hadley's previous compilations, mixing nicely-designed games (for the most part) and a good-looking interface. It also suggests new directions that would be explored with further and better flair through South Park Rage, which is undoubtedly Mark Hadley's crowning achievement in his SPG career. As for South Park Ultra, this is a pretty cool batch of games from Mark Hadley that deserve to be looked into. Check this one out, folks.