The Grinch

"To quote the Grinch himself, "AGH. IT'S UNBEARABLE.""

The Grnich was an an example of a perfectly good license, gone awry in the hands of developers trying to make a quick buck. I mean, Konami, what were they thinking? Did they start working on this game a month before the Christmas season? Were they too busy working on Metal Gear Solid 2 to give a few hours of attention to this game's producton? What ever the reason, this game falls right to the bottom of the Playstation food chain with a combination of horrid graphics, awful sounds, and terrible controls.

Graphics
3 out of 10

From a distance, Who Ville sure is bland. Every area is just a miriad of single colored polygons, awash with pop-up and draw in. Only when you get close to things is any texture prensent, and it still looks pretty bad. Unreasonable amounts of pixelation and graphical clipping plague everything. It's hard to believe that they let such bad quality go FIVE YEARS into the PlayStation's career. And finally there's the people, and they look even worse than Grinchy ihmself. Each person looks like they are made out of eight polygons or less and, from their animations it's pretty apparent that they were. Clipping and choppy movement everywhere you look. Not even the Grinch or his dog Max are spared from said visual torture. What a nightmare.

Sounds
1 out of 10

The sounds? Downright awful.The Grinch is played by a horrid voice actor, and his grunts of pain and spoken phrases sound downright terrible. The hours Ive spent sittin gthrough his obnoxious grunts of pain and repeated phrases ring in my ears to this day, and any mention of the this awful game's name instantly brings back terrible memories. The other voices in the game are even worse, to boot. Every now and then you run into a kid who runs around, making a really loud, really really obnoxious screeching taunt over and over again, or the occasional cutscene where you're exposed to even more bad voice acting. And the music's awful too, it's just hour after hour of loony elevator music.

Controls
3 out of 10

Man, this is where Konami messed up bif time. All their other games had great controls, why'd they stop that tradition now? Its impossible to even make your character walk a straight line, which, needless to say, means that allt he other controls are a mess too. Simple tasks like jumping and activating weaponry are made difficult with the game's crummy reaction speed- you press a button, it takes just about a full second to respond. This is a pain in combat sequences and the like, when quick button pressing is a nesessity.

Fun
2 out of 10

As the Grinch, you venture through five levels, smashing presents by stomping on them, killing christmas trees with the Grinch's nasty breath, and doing other things to generally be a menace to Whoville, such as throwing beehives into chimneys. Unfortunately, you'll probably spend a generous portion of that time falling off of ledges and unintentionally walking into enemy's shots because of the game's poor controls and shoddy hit detection. I guess they gave the player infinite lives for a good reason- you're going to need them.

Overall
1 out of 10

With awful clipping and control problems, eyesore graphics, and blight-on-the-ears sound, this game is more snotty green than the gRinch himself, a feat that few other games can claim. If you really dont want to have fun, the Grinch is probably the game for you. Look elsewhere for fun adventure game action on the Playstation, such as Croc and the Spyro series.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 11/26/01, Updated 11/26/01