The Untouchables

"The heinous misadventures of a hideously rendered Eliot NES."

The Untouchables is probably one of the best gangster movies ever made, bar none. Coincidentally, The Untouchables made the transition to a NES game and became one of the worst action titles ever released, bar none. The reason for this will probably remain an unexplained phenomenon, along with why Pauly Shore got a career and why Americans play Dance Dance Revolution seriously. As it is, anyone who sees the flashy cover, with Kevin Costner pointing his .38 RIGHT AT YOU will see this as a sign of Majorly Potential Assrockage and actually PURCHASE/RENT IT. When you're in that frame of mind, picking up a bottle of Pine-Sol and chuggin' it down would be an appropriate compliment to your choice of entertainment. Would you like some Dramamine with your game? Yes, thank you.

Everyone remembers Eliot Ness (sometimes spelled ''Elliot'', ''Elliott'', ''Eeliòt'', etc) as a Prohibition-era crimefighter, starting out as a policeman, later transferring to the Treasury Department and finally to the FBI, on a valiant quest to rid the US of A of organized crime and other Bad Influences. In the film, he meets up with a veteran police officer, an accountant, and a crack sharpshooter in training to do raids against Al Capone's alcohol-smuggling operations. In the game, it's just you as an Kevin Costner-shaped entity dragging yourself through excruciatingly painful levels, loosely based on actual scenes in the movie, which in turn was based on actual events. So, like the equally dreary and absurd Fatal Frame, this game can claim to be ''based on a true story''. But why would Ocean, this project's unfortunate publisher/developer want to do that and get scalped by the Estate of Eliot Ness for tarnishing his fine name? Let's face it; if this game was a tribute to a great person, it would be akin to delivering a eulogy by starting out, ''He let it slide when I burned down his house, beat up his girlfriend, and stole his baseball card collection.''

It took three years after the movie was released before this game was unleashed upon a hapless public. Since The Untouchables as a NES game doesn't appear to have astonomical production values, I can only assume that Ocean didn't take too much of a loss, until they were bought out by French industry giant Infogrames sometime after they developed the brilliant Mission: Impossible game for the N64 (a case in which a film-to-console adaptation has worked beautifully). Judging from these scraps of a game, I can only determine that the vague cause of death was Lack Of Anything Cool. I'm going to have to perform an autopsy on this one to get the specifics down -- it's been dead for a long, long time. Most likely since all the classic signs of a ''screw it'' project are apparent, it was DOA before it was even born.

On initial appearance, we have an unbeatable storyline, which should have been lifted directly from the movie. How can you go wrong with classic action sequences in which Ness and his men, with the help of some Canadian Mounties with exeptional cojones, eventually surround a convoy shipping whiskey; or chasing a bloodthirsty hitman around a courthouse as he mows down civilians after taking a wild potshot at a police officer? Ideally you should also be able to switch characters more or less on-the-fly, since they worked so well as a team. Granted, these scenes are in the game in some form or another, and at only ONE point do you slip into the skin of another character (and only in the relative split-second when Andy Garcia shoots that dude in the mouth). Even then, the coolness seems to drain from those timeless moments like blood out of that huge zit you can't seem to pop that rests right at the end of your nose. Therein, the lame-o gameplay in general is the figurative zit.

Throughout the game, each level tries to feature varied styles -- for example, the first level, in which you must decimate endless gangsters that appear out of random windows (which seems to have inspired Lethal Enforcers... but never mind that), relies on you to aim for Kevin Costner by USING THE NES D-PAD. How insane is that, ladies and gents? First, you must hold Right or Left so you can pop out into full view in order to shoot the Bad Guys, then you must move the aiming reticule, which moves at around half the speed of a twitching, shrivelling slug across your countertop after you pour salt on it. Each gangster is in view for the exact amount of time that it takes to move the damned cursor towards them, then they disappear and the next thug shows up on the exact opposite side of the screen. Repeat process until you're lucky enough to have a gunman pop up within a negotiable distance of where your cursor happens to be, and there's a reasonable chance that you'll miss and they'll hide again. Oh yeah, all the while you're sticking your happy ass into their lines of sight, they're plugging it full of melted-down Hot Wheels cars and you only have two shells in your shotgun before you have to cower in your foxhole and reload. And you only have a minute, twenty-five seconds to kill fourteen of them. For no particular reason, you are on a strict time limit. Why? Are you going to wither away if the ''thug'' content of your blood gets low enough? Are they going to nuke Chicago? Are they going to repeal Prohibition if an insufficient amount of gangsters are dead by day's end? Needless to say, Ocean doesn't provide an explanation and instead shows one of those cutesy ''fake newspaper headlines'' if you mess up -- Time Runs Out For Elliot Ness. You get another message if you're able to achieve a miracle and slaughter fourteen of Capone's men-- Elliot Ness Wins War On Crime. Whatever.

An odd thing happens between levels. You revert back to the title screen, so you can wait for it to load up and then confirm that you want to advance to the next level by hitting START. What the Hell is this, an intermission? Would it have been too hard to simply load up the next level, since there is nothing else to do on the title screen but hit START to proceed?? There is no ''password'' feature to load an old game, no other difficulty levels (other than insane, it seems), no way to hide the crappy rendering of Kevin Costner from the lower right of the screen. I can imagine the break between levels touted as a special feature: ''We are offering up what can only be described as a revolution in pausing the game -- YOU DECIDE WHEN TO PROCEED AFTER A LEVEL!! Now you have the freedom to do anything. Watch a movie, bake a quiche, mix a Pine-Sol liqueur, practice your backhand; do it all without turning off your Nintendo!!!!!'' Alternatively, it could be a break for the player, battle-weary after one gruelling level. ''Whew! My heart was jammed into my throat and my lungs were ready to burst, but Ocean gave me the opportunity to catch my breath. Now I STAY in peak shape and I even have time to adjust the rubberized grips on the edges of my controller, which are usually dripping with my palm sweat at this point!''

We trudge on. After making the hard decision regarding whether or not to mash START after being greeted by the butt-ugly title screen, the next level, morphing into the form of a side-scrolling shooter, begins and YOU CAN'T HELP BUT BE ASSAILED BY ITS AWFULNESS. WHAT THE HELL WENT WRONG, OCEAN SOFTWARE, LTD??? Good Lord, sometimes I regret divulging the details, but I must. In this travesty of a level, everything that could concievably go wrong, well, does. Very spectacularly does it fail in its purpose, which is to keep the gamer entertained and enthralled. Just the implication that this level was supposed to amuse me made me want to head over to France in the off-chance that a remaining member of the Untouchables team might be doing something far more damaging, like working on Driver 3. Then I would force him to struggle through Level 2 of this game.

Oh, yeah, I'm supposed to give details here. Where to start? The pre-level briefing advises you to ''get the guys in the gray hats to obtain evidence''. Taking a conversational approach to a rather vital message seems like some random programmer was stuck with telling the gamer what to do. He might have been well-trained in BASIC but his writing lacks voice and direction, but the point manages to come across. Assumably, ''get'' means ''kill'', judging by the brainpower required to plow through a stage. So when the level starts, a very ugly level which consists of brown crates before a gray wall, and you suddenly realise that YOU are wearing a gray hat, which might lead to consternation among the mentally deficient. Before you can say ''Huh'', though, a Guy (to use the programmer's terms) in a yellow suit AND hat, apparently dressed for night-walking in Seattle, suddenly barges in and PUFF PUFF PUFF, starts to unload his tommygun at you. It's obvious that everyone is using a Thompson, since Ocean was nice enough to render them recognizably (unlike many other things). When you return fire, however, you'll soon discover that those zany pranksters at the police armory outfitted their star gangbuster with the crappiest semiautomatic ever made. Not only can you only loose a round once every two seconds, but the clip houses only TEN ROUNDS. Think about this for a second. Thompsons that were widely used in that era boasted impressive drum-clips that could hold in excess of thirty rounds, and could empty these in about five seconds. In addition, someone took the time to rub Novocaine all over Kevin Costner so he was totally numb. How else could you justify the utter lack of a reaction whenever he gets struck by a hot chunk of die-cast iron? Your healthbar, which can only be checked by looking directly beside the mysterious blob in the corner labelled ''NESS''. If I were Kevin Costner and I found out that this is what Ocean thought I looked like, I'd hate to be in the shoes of those poor developers when they find melted Untouchables cartridges in their beds the next morning. Besides this, your health deteriorates remarkably quickly, the Guys In The Gray Hats only appear once every two minutes (and you have a strict four-minute time limit, again for no reason). Each Guy drops a slip of paper after you bust some caps in him; each of these is 20% of your Evidence. So let me get this straight... there are five slips of paper, each most likely with one word out of the phrase ''AL CAPONE COMMITTED TAX EVASION''. Why these men are running amok in a warehouse I cannot say. As an added bonus, there's no way to replenish your ammo supply once you run out. Eliot Ness, trained as he is, cannot bring it upon himself to bust some skulls with his set of fives. But I could bring it upon myself to bust my NES with my set of sledgehammers, but that would mean that I could not play River City Ransom.

There's more joy ahead if you're able to beat Level 2 (and this game sucks so much, there are no default GameGenie codes for it), mainly the repetition of these two levels, only in front of a different background scheme. So exceedingly unattractive are these backgrounds that they make the people (big fat sprites) look great. The first level, the Lethal Enforcers Inspiration, only utilizes two colors out of the broad color palette that even the NES was able to display well -- Orange and Gray. These are two analagous colors that don't even blend well. The walls are either Dark Orange or Dreamsicle-y Bright Orange, Kevin Costner's skin is Pale (sherbet) Orange. The ambience consists of two trash cans and three beer cans scattered ominously in the foreground; all are Dark or Rubbish-Stained Tin Gray. Guys that pop out of the windows are Expensive Armani Suit Gray. Finis. The bottom of the screen, along with the Barbie Pink lifebar and the Vague Costner-Blob are green stripes, between these are your Vital Information. I suppose this was to make the information bars look like dollar bills, which was an excruciatingly dumb idea in itself, but when you take into account Ocean's ineptitude at rendering even simple objects, your average screenshot would probably melt someone's corneas in its sheer crapitude. This game is not even comfortable to behold in all its badness, and the enemy designs shamelessly repeat themselves. These Guys have no souls. There was one design, and some palette-swapping made it seem like slightly more than that. If you should accidentally look at this game, I recommend extended doses of Final Fantasy X complimented by Metal Gear Solid 2. If irritation persists, contact your local software supply store.

I'll take back what I said earlier about the lack of options on the title screen. There is one. MUSIC ON/OFF. Veteran review-readers can probably guess where this paragraph is going. I fear I'm not beating a dead horse by observing that there is not a speck of Ennio Morricone's sweeping, Oscar-nominated score for the vastly superior film in this game. No, Ocean was determined to get rid of everything else but the movie's name, replacing Morricone's majestic orchestral music with really cheap synthesizer noise. Perhaps it would be a compliment to imply that the tunes came out of something that cost them money; they sound more like awful ring-tones on someone's cellphone who is extremely far behind the times, or they were recorded from a Commodore 64 computer. Either explanation I would believe. Besides having no quality at all, the music is also wildly out-of-place. As in, the individual tracks were recorded and then jumbled about among the seven levels. This is obvious when you're being viciously owned by the faceless Guys in Level 1, they're spewing steaming lead everywhere as you're struggling more with the cursor than with them; the score happily chirps out something that would be more suited to Sim City or a Bob The Builder episode. Various sound effects were most likely made by hitting low notes on a keyboard (wired into their Commodore 64) and simply transferring these over. Gunshots sound more musical than sharp and sudden, emitting BMMMMs rather than BLAMs. There is the extent of the sound FX -- gun noises.

And here is the extent of my patience with spending so much time describing something damn near indescribable. If you see someone else playing this game, make sure they have their organ donor cards in order. They're legally brain-dead. As is this game. Why the 2? I felt like awarding this game more than one point out of guilt, because it made me want to see the movie to cleanse its exceedingly foul taste from my palate. Since the movie is excellent and makes me feel wonderful afterwards, this game might actually serve a noble cause. So if you ever need something to remind you to see The Untouchables, go ahead and buy this game, but by all means don't EVER EVER EVER play it.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 04/17/03, Updated 05/24/03