King of the Hill

"Bury this game in a hill, but if there's another CD there it won't be king."

I'd almost forgotten I'd picked up a King of the Hill game CD from the Babbage's bargain bin for a measly $9.95, but the other day I saw it in the massive double-decker bin in Gurnee mills for $4.95, which jogged my memory enough to make me try the game. The drop in price was ominous(i.e. this is one cheap game) and once I finished with the game I realized why it wasn't worth much. It's basically a glorified Shockwave application based on the Fox cartoon show. In it you have two possible sub-games, Texas Hunting where you stay in a blind and shoot animals, and Hootenany, the lesser of the two evils, where you move to Arlen and attend a block party and play games the developers hope turn out to be whimsical. True, Dale, Bill, Boomhauer and Hank are in evidence, but the game never overcomes a clear obstacle; the TV show itself relies on surprisingly touching(for the creator of Beavis and Butt-Head) interactions between small-town folk in Texas who lead lives most folks would find uninteresting. This game delves into the lives and is at risk of getting dull fast. The sort of maudlin humor associated with the game turns into one-liners that don't pan out, especially since every character has only ten or so. When humor has a certain sadness attached to it, as it does with these generally slightly downtrodden but genuinely people(even if folks like them did put Bush in office, it can't be pulled off as snappily as sarcastic nihilism. As it is, the game only leaves you feeling depersonalized. One game, and I blinked like Hank(that's it?) before muttering like Boomhauer, feeling depressed like Bill, and feeling suspicious of the computer gaming industry like Dale. That's really the closest I got to the whole King of the Hill experience.

Let's look first at Texas Hunting. Hank Hill's welcoming speech is only moderately funny the first time through. He gives you instructions on what to shoot, the points you get, and so forth. You then get to choose a bunch of items for hunting--various guns, decoys, and food. You can even choose the area where you'll go hunting as well as the particular duck blind. The graphics are most impressive but each session takes so long(the time can't be adjusted) that you'll probably want to quit in the middle. That, and there's no real-time way to keep track of other people's scores. Although you get to choose your drinking buddy, who offers comments each time you shoot at an animal, he doesn't have many different things to say(true to form for folks in Arlen,) and shooting the animals isn't exactly difficult as long as you remember to take a gun. I've never gotten much of a rise out of shooting deer, either, so I found myself stuck between a mild sense of failure and thinking of new novel ways to say ''whoop-de-doo.'' Apparently you can get your hunting license suspended by shooting the wrong thing, which would change the pace nicely for a few seconds. The terrain is decently done in the few blinds I say in, with trees and bushes, swamplands and hills, but there's not a lot of variety among trees and such. So Texas Hunting is a simple and silly add-on.

Hootenanny is a bit more complex. Basically, you are at a block party with various events scheduled throughout the day; the block party starts at 11 AM, and there are five events scheduled at a game-hour from 12 to 5, with the party ending at 6. A few seconds of real time equal a minute of game time, and you can actually miss some of the events, which is rather annoying, as you'll have to sit around. Conversing with other people(neighbors not in Hank's circle of ''men'') can alleviate the waiting tedium, as you get standard quotes from your various neighbors, but often you will talk with someone you didn't intend to with a mis-click. At the end of the day, there is clean-up and in fact I was hoping it was a sort of game but instead I got a dopey cut-scene for the ending. In any case the only difference between winning and losing is the schmaltzy quote you get afterwards, and there's no way you can concentrate on one specific game. Here's a laundry list of the events.

Miniature Golf in Bill's yard is probably the best of the lot. It usually occurs first, and you have 9 holes in a par-31 setting. You can position the ball within a rectangle and shoot it by moving the mouse in the opposite direction it should go. Bill makes wimpy comments when you start off(it is fun to cut him off,) and you get penalties if you hit the ball too hard and knock it out of the yard. You'll have to shoot past rolling empty beer cans, water puddles that stop the ball completely, an iguana that moves its tongue and tail to block, a Christmas tree setting, and gutters on a roof. Although it's a bit odd it's the most creative of the lot.

Paintball is pretty quick and not terribly exciting. It's in Dale's yard, and the ''other fellas'' hide behind appliances, popping up to shoot you(you need to move left and right to change your scope of vision and where you will aim) and sometimes run between hideouts. The game ends if you shoot anyone else three times--an odd way to keep track. They take forever to shoot you(beer, which you can't drink, must deaden their reflexes) so this is a breeze.

The Scavenger Hunt in the Hill household is moderately interesting but you can funk out by mistake if you leave through the back. Bobby gives you clues and you have to find the right item, and this repeats several times. The Hills' house is designed slightly illogically, and I do not know why they didn't implement forward/left/right movement as in the early RPG's. You wind up going where you don't want to most of the time.

Beanbags with Peggy is somewhat interesting; you have a four-by-four set of holes and four letters to throw at it. Pick the hole and your beanbag will fall in there. You want to make a four-letter word(nothing dirty) and for each one you make you get a point. You can also hit one beanbag with another to replace a letter, but you are never allowed to make a nonsense four-letter word. Although the game boils down to making a word and quickly modifying it(HERB to HERO to HERD to HELD, for instance, but you can even flop between HERD and HERO) it is still mildly fun, although Bobby and Luanne's comments are particularly irritating.

Finally the Lawnmower Races stink. Although you have choices of three lawnmowers of varying capacity, speed and mobility as well as of your opponents(who taunt you differently) the premise is rather stupid. Whoever mows a certain amount of grass and fast-growing weeds first and dumps it in a garbage bag(hence the speed/capacity trade-off) wins. There aren't enough insults to keep you interested.

There are of course little things intended to keep you distracted. They may cause you to miss any one event even more than overlooking that your cursor needs to be at the very TOP of the screen to enter. Luanne may be in the back of the Hill house working on the truck, or Dale may ask you to steal an item from Hank's kitchen. There's minimal randomization of what to steal or which tools to give to Luanne, so the puzzles aren't a big deal, and even throwing beer to various people including Bobby falls flat.

Overall, block parties can be a bit tedious if you're not very social and over thirteen years old and that was the case with me, but I guess they are better than church ice cream socials. With the rigid structure(can't concentrate on one event, and you need to wait around for five minutes--a shocking amount for such a simple game--for the action to even start) as a foil to the general disorganization, the party is a dud for me. I only played through a few times because I kept managing to miss the scavenger hunt.

I suppose the graphics and sound overall are decent and copy the cartoon, which was never meant to be stunning anyway. That is probably not the developers' fault as most of the good stuff was Mike Judge's idea anyway. But it's a given that the technical side will come through. There's just very little you see the people doing or that you can do with them.

You get some options to vary KotH but they are really minimal; you can skip over many cut-scenes such as instructions for a game(handy if you can bear it a second time through, only vaguely recommended if you got suckered into missing an event) and there are five different things you can bring to the party(Peggy gives a different response for each.) There are even some choices that don't do anything(you can choose to be a Mr./Mrs at the start of the game.) There's also randomization of event times but even the dialogues with certain people come in a specific order each time you play. The best parts about this game? The ''clean up'' project reminded me to clean up my room(it's so crowded that I can't help but see the mess, but oh well,) and the necessity of installing QuickTime put an application on my new computer that I needed. As for the game proper, the bean-bag and mini golf were a bit cute, but I don't want to sit through the rest of the game to get there again. It would have been a passable add-on to an adventure game along the lines of Daria's Inferno or Beavis and Butt-Head DO U, but it's too banal and short as it stands. Buy some old episode tapes on the cheap if you can, but the game should be avoided.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 11/25/01, Updated 11/25/01