Incredible Crisis Preview

Have you ever had one of those days? You know the kind. You wake up, climb into the shower, and the water's shut off. So you make the best of things, get dressed, and head outside - only to step in some doggy doo. By the time you get to work, you've run two red lights, received a speeding ticket, lost your wallet, and somehow ripped your brand new $100 jacket. For most people, this is a recipe for a bad day. In Titus' upcoming Incredible Crisis, though, it is the recipe for a quirky new video game.

The popularity of beat-timing games such as Space Channel 5 and Dance Dance Revolution has increased by leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, while such Simon-style gameplay is universal, not everyone enjoys musical themes. Incredible Crisis takes this tap-happy game style and wraps it in the framework of a life simulation. The game focuses on a family of five characters: a husband and wife, their two adorable children, and a quirky grandmother. Taking control of each character, you must guide them through the worst day of their lives. It may sound cruel and unusual, but the family's antics are meant to be comical and hilarious rather than destructive.

The action in Incredible Crisis advances through a series of more than 25 minigames. The initial sequence opens with the father in an office building. For some unknown reason, he and his coworkers decide to perform a choreographed dance number. A graph of controller commands appears onscreen. Hit the correct command at the proper time, and the father dances. Miss too much, and you're relegated to being an old fogey. After the dance-off, a construction mishap finds you running down a hallway Indiana Jones-style fleeing an oncoming giant globe. You have to tap the circle button to run, but sometimes you need to take a drink of juice with X if you want to keep running. The action just keeps going via a variety of minigames including dancing, snowboarding, shooting, sneaking, quiz games, and the most insane hospital gurney race since the one seen in The Naked Gun. Later vignettes find the son coping with the effects of a shrink-ray mishap, the wife leading a life of espionage, and the daughter attempting to survive a hazardous day at school. To top it off, aliens are coming to invade Earth!

Visually, hands-on experience with the game leads one to ask a very important question: How did they make the in-game visuals look so wonderful and the FMV snippets worth watching? Each of the game's settings - be it an office, elevator, street, subway car, school, or backyard - is oozing with animation and detail. Better yet, texture warping and polygon dropout are nowhere to be found. Musically speaking, a mixture of ska and orchestral anthems rounds out Incredible Crisis' multimedia experience.

Titus' Incredible Crisis is slated for release sometime in the third quarter of this year, likely around early September. Though the Japanese version of the game is complete, there's a lot of translation work remaining. Titus and Interplay are planning an all-out marketing blitz for the game, so look for Incredible Crisis to make some waves when it hits the shelves.