Incredible Crisis

"Good for a few hours' break from the Incredible Crisis that is your life."

Incredible Crisis(IC) starts out harmlessly enough what with the Parappa-style office calisthenics(Taneo, the first player you control, doesn't even face the voluptuous woman who will make his life miserable later) but when this wrecking ball crashes through the high-rise window and forces him to pull no end of energy drinks from behind his pocket protector, duck ladders, and jump pylons it's clear the stakes are rising. Most of the time you'll just have to alternate between whacking one button repeatedly, holding it down the exact amount of time, or sagely alternating between two or among three as is necessary, but the game manages to make you feel stupid enough if you happen to mess the whole process up. Which you will. You think this game's not out to drain the pleasure out of things, reducing outlandish and generally pleasurable incidents to tentative button smashing? It gives you a time limit on performing a back massage for stinkin' out loud!

As a cartoon, IC is pure rubbish, despite an exciting trailer, nice titles for the mini-games such as 'Nerd on a Wire' or 'Snowboarding With Wolves,' and the plot weaving together convincingly at the end. As an abstract button pushing exercise it isn't up to much either. You'll never use more than four in one sequence, as it weaves between forcing you to solve simple box puzzles and learning when or how fast to whack a button. But combining the two, along with some random annoyances, you have a profound statement about the nuclear family. These guys have problems, and they deal with them. You're just along for the ride, with your boring life. You've got the luxury of being able to pick up weird games like this for your PSX and(admit it, now) no family of your own to worry about largely due to this gaming addiction. Why not take a few hours and try to help them out? Move above your silly Final-Fantasy-Umpteen-Costs-Sixty-Whopping-Dollars whining? Even if you don't care about them and just want to see what's next.

I don't play games for my health you know but Gustave Flaubert said you had to wade into life, and occasionally when I dust off my PSX I wade into not having a life. What it must be like. Fortunately I didn't have to wade in too deep. But I think I've seen enough of this game. It revolves around the progressively meager travails of a family wrapped into a ridiculous plot: Haneo, the father, is coming home from work. Etsuko, the mother, must try to escape from bank robbers. Tsuyoshi, the son, is shrunk to an ant's size and must walk home. Ririka has an encounter with an alien on the way home from cutting school early. There's also the nameless grandmother who just shows how depersonalized and helpless you get when you're older, and lots of Japanese characters pop up on the screen with only the occasional English translation, which along with the simplistic controls goes to show how you, the average game player, probably can't read a lick of Japanese. And that's not all you don't know I bet.

For each scene there's a weird guy in the upper right that looks like Billy Idol's face all painted red. He'll fill up as you make mistakes or, in rare mini-games, empty when you do something right. He starts steaming like a tea-kettle when you get near the top, and then he explodes at the end. You start with four lives but after each small collection of scenes you get a report card that pretends to average grades for each scenario(B and C average to A?) based on the stress level at the end and may give you an extra 1up or two if you've done well enough.

So what are the highlights? Probably Etsuko's trip through the bank, where you have to button-bash to make her walk across three lines of sight out of sight of the bank robbers in wolf masks marching back and forth. Just to make sure you aren't too big for your britches the game shows you your ability to hit one button a bunch of times in a row doesn't stop Etsuko from getting caught as she leaves--probably doesn't help the bank teller with the extra-secret police alarm at his feet either. But the robbers aren't barbarians--if she shows an affinity for music and math she has a chance to snowboard down a slope(and your math skills don't even help you with balancing your checkbook I bet) out of a log cabin and into an airplane hangar. Where if all goes well she gets to shoot down a giant pink teddy bear. Everything's done for you here, with autopilot and all, but the game sometimes just doesn't usually make it possible for you to hit the target some of the time. Then there's Ririka going shopping where you have to match up one item with another one like it in another menu. But you get to use the L1 and R1 buttons, see. There's even a Simple Simon where the panels matched with the buttons slowly rotate, and a news feed occasionally interrupts. Which you will feel dumb and spacy if you botch, and even if you get it right you'll realize you never seem to keep your focus for something that's actually important.

Now many people may feel that the later scenes for Tsuyoshi and Ririka that duplicate Haneo's travails are repetitive an unneccessary. I disagree, and I bet these people also complained that the scenes right after were too hard, too. Let's look at the boat scene, where you have some crazy nut that stands by and watches--hey, it was HIS boat, and each of these three in turn pulls out the peg at the bottom that flooded it. Then they press X to fill up a bucket and triangle to sploosh it over the side to get the boat going to shore. Occasionally some other item flops up in the air and you need to use the umbrella(any direction key, symbolizing how some umbrellas open in weird ways you don't expect) hooked to the back of your shirt not to get conked.

You know, I bet the crazy nut who conks himself with a latrine brush is a God symbol or something. Or maybe he symbolizes nature, or art for art's sake. Perhaps there's some allusion to Ulysses in there. I don't know. You figure out Finnegan's Wake, some kid-stuff knowledge has to fall by the wayside. But the juxtaposed episodes show the sins of the father are, indeed, passed down to the offspring.

Yet most of the hereditary indignities are heaped on the son. In 'Nerd on a Wire' Haneo has to walk across the top of a streetlight before it bends and breaks. But all you have to do is hold down the X button as a white line runs across a continuum filled red/blue/green/blue/red. The line disappears leaving the first red and you have to guess when it falls in the green--blue moves you forward too but brings you to a time wasting middle game. You can fall out of your bed at 1 PM in your pajamas, you klutz, while counting out the right timing, and Taneo will go forward, and you'll probably get it right by accident the first time. Until later when the green and red zones shrink and the white line moves more slowly. Tsuyoshi has a similar scene on a web with a watchful spider. It's like that in the real world, too; once you know when and how high to jump, it gets changed. Because everyone else has learned.

But there's more to it than that. I remember one time sneaking into the VIP area of a nightclub I'd gotten into with a free certificate. It was about as boring as the rest of it, with the same techno music. To me. Everyone else in a group was having a riot. Incredible Crisis feels the same way--the stuff you seem to have to be privileged to get(later levels or the mini-games, identical to the stuff you've just been through, which open once you solve the respective chapter) just ain't cool unless you have people to bask around and feel superior to the peons on the main floor with. And if you're plugging away in your room, you just don't have that human touch. It's not whether you win or lose the game, it's how you play it off. Also the whole repetition thing--finding a successful formula and cloning it is GOOD BUSINESS SENSE(the game.) Repeatedly doing something even if it doesn't seem to get anywhere is A RUT(you.) Is this too deep? Oh, I'm sorry, some people like games that make them think--but not too much!

The cut scenes also require analysis. First, this dorky aging Haneo character chases after a voluptuous woman in a red dress without a single gift. She's out of his league. Why, it's like paying twenty bucks or less for a game and expecting a magnificently transcendent experience! Then this grandma character--she doesn't get any mini games. You can't control her. She's had enough. Although some may feel that the yearly family photo albums show a touching moment with Grampa there in 1995 but not 1999, I say phooey. She's learned she can do what she wants to do what she wants and make her feel awkward despite the ways they surprise her as they come home. Lord knows she's earned it over that many years. She can also push you, the player, around. She isn't bounded by four PlayStation buttons and four directional arrows. In fact this game gives strong evidence dissemination and showing people what's what and getting them to clam up no matter how arbitrarily you contradict them is about the only thing that can't be reduced to that. Question is, will you wait fifty-odd years for this opportunity? Probably, unless you are fated to keel over in front of your PlayStation XIV, lethally malnourished and subsequently impaled on your controller featuring twenty whole buttons.

Well this review was straight from the gut give or take the three hours it took to come out. But I think you get the general gist. Don't try for escapism, especially if your life is already an escape from how the real world is(*ahem* try not playing video games like a regular job.) Like your mother said during her power-plays to make you eat your least favorite vegetables or shut up about a toy you had to have but would disavow owning now, there are people a lot worse off than you are. So try to show a smidgen of self-awareness. Nip your disproportional emotions in the bud next time you swear 'I know I can get through this mini-game, I understand the concept. I deserve to.' It's too late for that nonsense. You're probably understanding the concept of this REVIEW but are you going to go forth with any life changing actions? Whoa Nelly no! See, if you'd kept your head on right and availed yourself of a fraternity's crib notes instead of the free Solitaire games in the college computer lab, you'd be on the other side of the coin, in an office, telling people how to do simple tasks, watching them bungle it up, and very objectively explaining that if THEY can't learn a few simple tasks then it's THEIR meager wage down the tubes, and YOU aren't the one living paycheck to paycheck. Ah, what life could be! But for me, IC was just a few hours slumming.

So my advice is, sit back and 'just relax and laugh and enjoy the game,' whatever that means. Knowing that every laugh is either the desperate laugh of one who's seen something much funnier than he could conceive or the reflexive laugh given to someone who's gotten an office and you don't. Heck, if you ever get serious about things, maybe one day this game will help you to write a review, nay, fathom and subsequently construct a profound moral and sociological screed such as the one you just read. More likely though you'll have a few hours of yuks, say 'I liked this game even if it was dopey and repetitive and button mashing and over too soon, the nice jazzy music made up for the characters mostly grunting' and move on to some equally hackneyed RPG that's better because it guarantees wasting ten times as much of your life on the first play round. But hey, that's your right.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 11/25/02, Updated 11/25/02