V.I.P.

"Not as bad as 'Barb Wire' might have been"

At my local athletic club I managed to get pulled into watching the show VIP on Sunday afternoons. It helped drown out the offensive techno music a bit and was marginally less unwatchable than dreck such as Melrose Place. And not just because with four women and two men employed by Vallery Irons Protection, the show gives you the impression that two of the women have to be free even if they are probably Nikki Franco, who in the game has committed the triple sins of having short hair and wearing clunky shoes and long pants, and Kay Simmons, the techie who comes off as too wimpy even for wimpy guys. When I saw this game in the Value City bargain bin I felt guilty, given its trashy cover, having evaluated it as the best $9.99 game, so I also bought some lame children's game with cute little Duplo looking figures to accompany it. But of course after plowing through a game backlog I played VIP first that night(well, of the two. I actually took time to play Xena: Warrior Princess first. But you get the point, I hope.)

Now I shouldn't use my cheapness as an excuse for buying this game, and I don't want to show everyone how cleverly sarcastic I am by making subtle fun of myself(the sort of thing that annoys me about VIP's humor) and berating anyone who laughs too hard or soft. What's done is done. In fact, this game, due to its simplicity of controls, served as a sort of boot camp for me to get used to combination movements and which shape buttons are where on the controller pad. But it is consistently bad. The game sends you through the equivalent of an entire episode in action scenes; you must rescue Dr. Kendall, a plastic surgeon with a spiffy white blazer, but some fellow named Dr. Macabre manages to kidnap him and several of your party members too. It takes double the non-commercial time of one due to the extended combat scenes and, during the dialog-filled intermissions, is about as snarky. You constantly alternate between characters when each scene fades, and there are five types of situation:

1. Standard hand-to-hand combat where you see button patterns on the screen and must replicate them quickly. Doing so hurts your foes, messing up lowers your life bar. These patterns get tougher as you go along(the men tend to take the later work, with mandatory combos of six for the final boss scene) but thankfully they are not random. I often sacrificed a few games just recording what was going on and found that a shape button more often than not succeeded its corresponding direction, while each character had specialty moves. The scoring here is somewhat interesting as you get increased points per consecutive action performed correctly. Also, continued correct moves can help you dispatch an enemy before three gang up on you at once; this can force a few six-button moves or just the semi-insulting 'one triangle' directions for no-hopers who are completely befuddled and will probably be more likely to kick the bucket than the thugs any time soon. You also get random power-ups(healing or attack strength--the second seems bogus) in the form of gems(huh?) after disposing of a baddy.
2. Bashing a single button as quickly as you can, sometimes at ascending difficulties.
3. Gun fights, an orgy of X(shoot) and O(reload) with a variety of firearms. They are impossible to lose with sensible play until the final boss scenes including one where you need to shoot the grenades launched at you too. Most of the time you just need to shoot bad guys(often you can blow up obstacles that cover them) although you may have a primary target to hit while you still have to dispatch distracting snipers. While the game is usually very generous with shot hit detection, it overcompensates in the final shootout.
4. Terminally easy fleeing(from snipers) or sneaking(around pacing guards) scenes that are reductions of (1) where you have one-key 'sequences.'
5. Preposterous tasks for non-fighting Kay. For instance, a 3x3 tile-slider puzzle that's even lamer than the built-in Macintosh game where you arrange an Apple with fifteen 4x4 blocks. Solve three and you break into a computer. Really. Although it's always possible(unlike the Mac,) that's because it's never shuffled randomly. But it is clearer than a scene where a wave keeps scrolling by on a computer screen and you have several iterations to bend a line into its shape.

VIP is considerate enough to provide checkpoints for saving your game and sub-checkpoints for you to return to if you are unsuccessful. If you do well enough in your mission you get an 'A' rating(survivors seem to get no lower than 'B'--grades here are more inflated than Pamela Anderson's... perceived fighting abilities although at least you don't get an F when you lose) and Pam even pulls her hair up. But that's not all! You have an opportunity to buy the cut-scene videos, replete with ellipsoidal faces, to watch again and again even though you probably got sick of them(or hit the key to skip them) the first time. There's also an opportunity to buy pictures of the cast in various poses and I found it a bit of a challenge to pick out which of the tiny thumbnail pictures(they had horizontal bars through them) did not feature Quick Williams or Johnny Loh. Aside from figuring out when the hit collision was off this was the only part of the game that required any real reasoning, so it cannot be considered a total loss.

The game progression itself is slightly shaky. At the start you will see the following occurrences:

1. Nikki runs up the stairs
2. Vallery meets Nikki
3. Vallery runs up the stairs Nikki just ran up

Later on Quick leaves Vallery behind to force a novel firefight. Is this sort of thing part of VIP's alleged attempt to poke fun at the action genre or just carelessness? Maybe VIP has adapted to its new genre and is poking fun at video games in general--'Under it all, any one game is just about pushing buttons and moving around.' You are often rewarded, upon completion of a scene, with your main character getting beaten up as the bad guy runs away, which drove me nuts several times when my strength was low and I thought I'd beaten Paulo(Macabre's main henchman, who is surprisingly graceful for a 6'6'' man in a rip-proof tight grey suit and, I must say, a spiffy tie.) The Pammy ex machina at the end, followed by one incoherent joke and a gratuitous sexual allusion, further develop the sort of artistic critique that works much better if your blood alcohol level is a batting average. At any rate, if the game was going to be slightly unrealistic, they could at least have shown Valerie in different outfits even though she had no time to change, or(just to show that's not the only sort of thing I think about) when your character loses his life, he could do more than get on one knee.

Sadly there are more serious things the stay put too long. Most of the time you will wind up beating up or shooting thugs in black suits who occasionally somersault into view(often from behind a black limo) for variety in shooting scenes. Later the game moves on to thugs in white suits and Paulo. When you get near the end there's a guy that looks like Elton John in a priest's uniform and although you don't have an extended fight with Macabre, he has a white double-breasted suit with black buttons and lapels(I want one, but I can't imagine anywhere I could wear it. Does that make me semi-evil?) Too bad there wasn't more of this sort of variety and detail early; of course you don't want the bad guys taking over, but when the good guys are themselves restricted, this rule is a bit repressive. See, the good guys generally have three or four flashy moves(this banks on the whole parody of second-rate action stars having the same repertoire as well, natch) and don't convey enough personality. For instance, even if Vallery does look cute whacking guys with her purse, the knee to the crotch thing is a bit overdone, and Johnny's punches often look like a cat pawing lazily, contrasting his annoying karate noises. Special effects such as the game's background noises(one techno beat is the same as the next to me) distract you from the more suitable flames and mayhem, and the dialog's obvious set-up lines get on my nerves. (Tasha Dexter: 'Copy those files!' Kay: 'Wish I'd thought of that.') But at least the backgrounds have the usual variety of stores, high-tech skyscrapers, and lush insides of mansions you expect from a fast-paced action production. Even when a VIP'er passes through area where another's already been, you generally see the same locales from different views, and seeing how they break and meet up added some complexity to my perception of the plot.

Sadly VIP doesn't even manage to end on an upbeat note although it really promises to 90% of the way through. Still I think there is a place for a game like VIP for a while. I suppose an educational or kids' game might be too obvious a learning tool for people who haven't used consoles too much, and given how hard it is to take VIP seriously, you will find progress pleasant. I guess the game also taught me the importance of consistently using the memory card I had bought(it froze unexpectedly before I promised myself I'd save 'next time) so it was a good introduction even if one thing it will not teach me is that I often get what I pay for with cheap games. So although the game itself is rubbish and I won't be going back soon, not even to get an 'A' ranking in all the scenes so I can look through all the pictures that exclude Johnny and Quick, it didn't work out half badly for me.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 04/14/02, Updated 04/14/02