"One of the worst efforts on the 3DO"

Who Shot Johnny Rock is a port of a light gun shooter from the arcades. It features full motion video and your actions directly affect the next scene you watch. This game is very similar to Mad Dog McCree and Crime Patrol. American Laser Games certainly does try with these games, giving them huge budgets for set building and filming and editing. However, the translation to the 3DO and other home systems really did not go over well.

The game plays as a first person type shooter where the entire game play is a video. Guys come up on screen and shoot at you. If you shoot first, they die and the game continues. If you get shot, you have to start over. The game starts out with Red, the fiance of Johnny Rock, coming into your private investigation office asking for help. She says the police have done nothing and that you are the only hope to find his killer. From here you go on and talk to several different people who knew him, and every time you do, you get shot at. There are an excess of people shooting at you for reasons no one will quite understand. People come busting into your office to deliver a legitimate telegram and then shoot at you. There are huge flaws throughout like this.

At some screens, you will be looking up to a second story window when people randomly shoot at you. You fire back, killing three or four of them, so you know their bodies have to be piling up. Then suddenly some random person who isn't wielding a gun runs by. As Red is in your office you shoot four people, and she doesn't even flinch. It is almost like these people are such bad actors that they don't act when anything happens that doesn't directly involve them. Terrible.

The goal of the game is to avoid all the bullets and talk to four key people who knew Johnny Rock. Eventually, after killing enough people, you will get some information from each of these people. They all carry a piece of the combination to Johnny Rock's personal safe. Inside the safe is the answer to who actually shot him. How he knew who was going to shoot him before he was shot is anyone's guess. Why he locked up the information and didn't tell someone is a mystery. Lets just hope Geraldo doesn't show up and try to open Johnny Rock's Vault.

There are load times when bad guys are about to come on screen that cut the videos short by a second or two and leaves you suspended in animation, looking at the same screen until the 3DO can catch back up. Every time you die or you kill an innocent victim, you are treated to a somewhat mildly entertaining video. These videos include doctors removing bullets from your body and making a comment about Swiss cheese or a funeral director making some crack comment on how bad guys are the ones with guns. These get horrendously old because you die every ten seconds, literally.

One thing that perplexes me beyond comprehension is the fact that if you sit on the area select screen for more than five seconds, you get killed! You don't have the time to decide where you want to go and move your cursor over before some random guy shoots you without a chance to react. I don't know what the heck they were thinking here, but it is enough to make me never want to play again.

An interesting concept that the game employs is that you don't actually have lives, per say. Every time you get shot, you go to the doctors who remove the bullets and do surgery on you. Once you are patched up, you have to pay $400 to continue. If you don't have the money, they kick you out and then you get Game Over. This is actually a concept that I enjoyed and is perhaps the only saving grace of the entire game. Lord knows the rest of it sucks out loud.

Graphically the game suffers terribly. The videos are expanded to fit into the entire screen and when that is done, things become grainy and pixilated. Some scenes are dark and you can't see what is going on in the background. There are scenes where you are being shot at that you cannot even see where the bullets are coming from. There are also times were you cannot tell the difference between an innocent bystander and someone with a gun. If two people come in and one shoots at you, isn't it logical that the guy with him is also “packing heat?” Half the time you can't even tell which one is going to shoot you until you've been shot and it is too late to do anything else.

Something that is decent about the visual presentation of the game is that the scenery looks like it is from the time period. For the most part, the dress, demeanor and overall scenery looks straight out of the 1930's. Classic cars and rotary telephones can be found in most scenes. However, looking at the aesthetics of the game do nothing in terms of disguising how poorly it is designed.

On the back of the game box, it says, “American Laser Games GAMEGUN Highly Recommended.” This is the biggest understatement I have ever read. Unfortunately, the 3DO light gun is fairly rare and expensive so most people don't have it. That leaves you with only your controller to play the game with. You probably won't have that controller for long because it will be hurled across the room or out the window in frustration. Moving the cursor along the screen is extremely slow. When you shoot a guy on the left of the screen and another one comes up on the right you do not have time enough to move the cursor halfway across the screen before you get shot. This leaves you frustrated and swearing at the TV. This is just the absolute worse control scheme I have used in any 3DO game.

To get around to different locations, you are presented with a crudely drawn map on which different places are drawn. You shoot the location you want to go to and it takes you there. You can't wander off on your own and look at things from different angles. There is no way to enter through the back entrance to try and avoid gunfights in front of every single building. The slow cursor adds to the horrendous fact that you will be shot if you don't choose a locale fast enough. If you change your mind and want to go somewhere else you will get shot for not selecting fast enough. After you choose your area, you cannot back out of it and go somewhere else unless you get shot.

The acting ability of the people in the game is actually slightly better than your average FMV game. That being said, it is still terrible. Ignoring the fact that they completely ignore people right next to them shooting guns, they make everything slightly believable. The girl who plays Red has her moments where she delivers her lines with some conviction but at other times her lines feel forced and just plain bad. She tried to be sexy and seductive but it doesn't come across as such. The rest of the actors are Hollywood rejects who couldn't find any other work (or so is my assumption). It is obvious that they spent their entire budget on props and costumes and spent nothing on actors and actresses.

The sounds in the game include the same sound from your gun firing over and over and over again. There is a small amount of music that plays randomly more often than fittingly. You will want to turn off the sounds all together because of the bad acting ability but you cannot because you need to hear each person's story in order to continue through the game. There are no captions which is a huge downside because some of the time you cannot understand the mumbling these people do. Worthless.

In the end, Who Shot Johnny Rock is not enjoyable in the least. Even fans of bad movies will dislike this game because of the extreme frustration that the controls provide. Without the ability to move beyond the first couple of scenes, you cannot see all the game. Perhaps if you own the light gun, you may get something out of this game, although you probably won't get much. Personally, I wouldn't bother with this game at all. This is one game for the 3DO that is not worth owning or playing. While it may look better than the Sega CD version, it still isn't worth it. Do your self a favor and save the three bucks this game would set you back and buy some cheese burgers. You'll get more enjoyment out of them than you will this game.

Final Score 1

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 06/14/07