Even as fan service, Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Zombie Ninja Pro Am is just awful.
You'd think in a game based off a TV show would have some sort of story, but think again. In the games cut-scenes, the characters are casually thrown together with out any since of purpose. They constantly rehash jokes and story lines from the shows previous seasons. Some of it was funny the first time, yet the recycled material doesn’t pass the test of time. Apparently Frylock, the flying container of French Fries, received an invitation to join a country club. Master Shake, that’s the milkshake cup, thinks he is a much better golfer than Frylock, so he takes the invitation for him-self. We soon find our game’s namesakes running amuck around the county club.
Master Shake is the only character you get to play golf as in the single player campaign. He can use four different clubs though out the twelve courses. You’ll get a wood, wedge and putter, as well as a sword. The first three are self explanatory, while the sword is pretty useless as a club. It’s used mainly as a melee weapon. With these three real clubs you will stumble your way though the worst golf game of all time. Why is it so bad? Well for starters you have no clue where your ball is going to end up once it leaves the club. Upon making impact, your ball soars in air towards direction of the course’s countless obstacles. Obstacles consist of sand traps, as well as T.V. show specific jokes such as an “environmentally friendly super toilet of death”, and “giant wooden spaces ships”. There are well over ten zany obstacles per course, each set in the worst places possible.
As if the multiple course hindrances weren’t enough, it seams the way you actually hit the ball was an after thought. You’ll use the tired old three button press slider bar for measuring power and accuracy. You’ll press X once, and the slider will move to the left to indicate how much power you want to use. Then by pressing X again it will set your power rating and start to slide back to the right. The right side of the bar has an accuracy ranger, the closer you get to pressing X with in the center of this ranger, the straighter your ball will fly. The game is very unresponsive, especially when tiring to produce short puts. You will constantly over shoot puts due to the slider bar not registering inputs quickly enough. It also takes a lot of time to get used to the speed of the slider. It moves very quickly on the power selection, but then slows to a crawl in the range area. This means that while you will most assuredly not get the power setting correct for the shot you need to make, you will hit that ball perfect every time.
Hitting the perfect ball doesn’t even matter if you can’t put that ball right where you want it. This is why golfers use forward and back spin to accurately guide their shots. Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Zombie Ninja Pro-Am does not include the ability to put any spin on a ball. All of your shots will fly as if the ball was hit directly in the center. This causes you to either overshoot the ball, or put less power on the shot. Yet, with such a bad swing mechanic, it’s next to impossible to get anything done correctly.
Another major hindrance is the fact that you have no ability to get an overhead view of the course. You’ll get a small undetailed map in the lower right corner, but that’s it. All of the courses are covered in trees that obscure your view, save for a few yards ahead. So, you’ll blindly swing away hoping that you’re pointing in the right direction. Here’s where the many obstacles come in to play, as because you can’t see where they are, you’ll perpetually hit them. Every obstacle except for the sand trap will cause you to lose that ball and have to repeat the shot over again. It soon becomes a tedious game of trial and error.
But wait, there’s more. For unlike any other golf game you must walk to the spot where your ball has randomly landed. Walking though the course will cause series specific baddies to appear out of thin air. These will be things such as metallic turkey’s from the future and brownies that have been spliced with fly DNA. These monsters will haphazardly make there way toward you to be killed. In this platforming part you can play as another character, Frylock. Frylock will shoot lasers out of his eyes and has the ability to target enemies with guided laser balls. He also puts up the type of fight that your one hundred year old great grandma would shrug off as weak. While his lasers have range, they don’t have any power. It takes far too many to down single foes. Couple that with the fact that he has the glassiest of jaws around, and is constantly dieing from just a few hits. He can charge up his laser eyes and release a simi-powerful AOE explosion, but it takes so long to charge you’re better of not using it, or him for that matter.
Your other choice is Master Shake who will get melee attacks. By default he has a golf club and a sword for a weapon, but can also pick up others. The default weapons both have a 1 2 3 combo and that’s it, but they are by and far the most effective. The superfluous pickup weapons have virtually no use at all. The shotgun for instance, which one would think a bit more powerful then a golf club isn’t, as the thing sprays bullets so far apart it hits very little of what you are pointing it at. Speaking of spraying, you can also pick up a can of spray paint, which literally does nothing. I’m not sure if it’s even indented as a weapon, because if you use it nothing happens.
Now that the golf and combat have been discussed, it’s time to move on to the most annoying part of the entire game, golf cart racing. After you have beaten a course that features the series' “frat boys from outer space”, you will engage in a race around the course in your golf carts. The courses this time will be littered with speed boost and homing rocket power ups. Your job is to beat the other racer around the track. It sounds simple enough, but from the very first time you hit a jump, you’ll know you are about to have the worst racing experience possible. Every time your cart leaves the air it completely spins around. Every bump you hit, every hill you summit, will send you spinning like a top and land you facing the wrong direction. Toss in the fact that when you get hit by the other cart’s missiles, which will happen very often, your cart does a 540. You’re constantly spinning around while tiring to avoid bumps and hit the power boots icons. The racing is extremely rubber band, allowing the other cart to forever be right on your tail shooting missiles at you. The only way to win these races is to avoid any bump in the road and hit every single power boost icon, other wise your competitors will repeatedly bombard you.
Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Zombie Ninja Pro-Am is one of the worst games ever conceived. Its jumbled mess of poor golf, combat, and racing is the PS2’s version of what hell is. A game so bad, that it could only have been brought to market via the forces of the dark lord. Let’s get one thing straight here; I'm not suggesting the person whose decision it was to release such a horrendous game is the devil. I’m telling you he is. For no mortal man could play this game through the meager three hours experience and not want to immediately set themselves on fire in relief.