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jp's Operation Warcade (PS4)

[July 13, 2020 05:40:13 PM]

I don't really know where to start with this game. It has so many weird/interesting/curious design decisions I want to get down - but I'm worried about overly pessimistic given the, uh...real lack of polish this game has.

The premise is that you're playing an "old school" arcade shooter game - the kind where you held a replica weapon and pointed it at the screen (my old fave is Operation Wolf). Now, that is taken literally in Operation Warcade because you start by standing in front of an arcade cabinet you can play at. You can also look around the arcade where there are other people playing other games. I was somehow able to teleport away from the cabinet - but not to any other games - and there's a weird guard also. I got the sense that I was supposed to only stand in front of Warcade rather than any of the other games. Weirder still, after having played a few games - I looked around and there were 3 people behind me! Cheering me on? It was unclear...they weren't really animated. Anyways, the whole thing was bizarre.

Now, once you're in the game - the set up is sort of like you're on the other side of a window - and you can peer "into" the game. To be fair, the designers added some "matrix code" pillars (green binary code that goes up into the sky) to double down on the "you're in a game" - and, well, it plays like a really bad version of the shooters of yore I enjoyed playing. Like, really bad.

Now, this makes me wonder - how did this game actually get published. I'm sure everyone who worked on it isn't entirely happy with the game, but - how did it come to get published in the first place? I wonder if there's some cool story of "things went south" or if it's a business story? (we bought this game from a bunch of students and decided to push it out the door to meet the terms of a deal we had with the publisher) or...what else? I honestly don't think that anyone sits down and says "hey, lets make a game that looks really unpolished and isn't that good".

And, I say that because there are lots of little cool ideas that just...weren't developed/polished to a level or point you'd expect from a published product. So, it's clear that this wasn't a half-assed asset flip type of game (where the intention is to hopefully get some $$$ quickly by really skimping on the dev). I mean, this is a boxed product I bought (for real cheap) in a bricks-n-mortar store (rather than a fast download someone could pump out in no time at all). Also, it's a PSVR game! So, maybe the story is that it was a fast cash grab using a prototype for another platform?

Anyways, I'm really tempted to have students play it just to see what "not polished" looks like...it's easy to find games that aren't "good", but that have clearly been worked on/developed to a point that publishing made sense. But this game, this is not it.