MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch
It’s a bit of a tragedy, since the TV show has long been screaming to be a videogame. For those whose innocence remains intact, Celebrity Deathmatch pits the famous against one another in heartless, no-rules arena combat for the entertainment of the unwashed hoi polloi. It’s truly anything-goes, as each celeb unleashes an arsenal of gag weapons themed to suit his or her pop image.
I love the show, but it’s hard to find one nice thing to say about this game. The graphics are bad to the point of blurriness, as if I’m to believe my P4 has been crippled with a PlayStation graphics chip. The dialogue is painfully unfunny — as evidenced by the fact that I played matches with every single one of the game’s 16 characters and didn’t laugh once. The jokes are barely even jokes by definition: Busta Rhymes calls female opponents **** Jerry Springer whines; and Ron Jeremy assaults people with a massive banana. How droll! Unfortunately, none of the TV show’s subtler satire or gem one-liners made it over.
Worst of all, this is a fighting game in which the fighting is neither exciting nor funny. The controls are a wreck, whether you’re playing using a keyboard or a gamepad — and even when you master the combos, they do nothing more than trigger the special attacks. If you’re imagining the total freedom that the show’s combatants enjoy, forget it: here, you’re on a dual-axis rail, flailing like a Rock ’Em Sock ’Em robot. As a huge fan of both fighting games and the MTV show, let me be the first to tell you that this game fails utterly at capturing the spirit of either.