M&M's Shell Shocked

"Rots away your time, not your mouth"

Midway's Tapper arcade game is surely the most shameless promotion of a product thrown into a video game. It's a darned good game, too, and a touch more universal than M&M's: Shell Shocked(MMSS.) After all, candy only rots your teeth and gives you a gut. Beer can mess with your whole body. But MMSS uses the increased level of detail available on the PSX to make itself into a first-person platform game I actually like. I can't say the advertising worked immediately, as I went with a couple of tubes of Pringles potato chips the first time through--pizza and cajun flavored, which was all I had in the cupboard at 2 AM, but if there's ever another game starring a junk food I might get some M&M's for late night sustenance as an inside joke with myself.

The premise is that the red regular M&M and yellow peanutty M&M that starred in so many commercials in the '90s are about to go on vacation, but Yellow reveals that he left the Minis in charge of the factory. Red is upset, calls in, and finds that chaos is the new order of the day there. He cancels the vacation and orders Yellow back to the factory. Yellow drives(that's the first level) and Red somehow finds a chopper to drive in before he delegates further. Later in the game the green female M&M, an obvious love interest, appears to audit their performance.

MMSS isn't particularly hard; it's made up of eight levels of three zones each, and there's a small skit before the first zone and after the last with credible sarcasm and tension as Yellow rushes to get the factory back on course--with Red supporting him morally and letting him stay out of the way. You have the option to save after every level, all you have to do is run through without getting killed, and there are plenty of opportunities to accumulate extra lives which can be saved with your game. Yellow can jump on the boxes and monsters or spin through them. Depending on a box's color you'll get a different number of Minis added to your life total the first time you break it: two, five, ten or a hundred. The last, in blue boxes, gives an automatic extra life as you usually get one every hundred minis. However if you die(i.e. touch something you're not supposed to or miss a jump,) it will only afford one the next time you go through, so it's not totally exorbitant. And monsters, mostly weird machines run amok, always give ten minis, so if you are able to kill them you can get more lives than you seem to have, especially on later harder levels where monsters combine with other obstacles.

Of course there are also special boxes, and they usually give a hard hat(invincibility to one hit,) springs(super long jumps that are hard to track,) and special sneakers(move too fast and run into a lethal trap.) But three in each zone hold pieces of a magic formula that forms an M&M's candy wrapper, and at the end of the regular level you're kicked to a bonus level if you form the whole thing, where you get even more life added if you survive through it. They skimped a bit here as multiple zones lead to the same bonus level, but often the boxes are positioned creatively, and once you've finished the game with seventy-odd lives, you can relax and concentrate on finding the dark brown boxes with the formula pieces.

Yellow's ability to spin and change jump directions in midair belies his timid personality but also creates the danger of making some parts of the game too easy. Fortunately this is balanced out by bomb boxes; spin into a red bomb box, you take a hit, and if you touch a green box you could've jumped over, you die. And there are some invincible monsters too, some of which sit back and try to guard you from passing, and when spinning allows you to pass over conveyor belts going the way you don't want like some sort of Tasmanian Devil you can see it's not just about offense. And many of the skill bits involving jumping(momentum is conserved when you jump off a moving platform) still force you to think. It's almost fair when a lethal patch pops up and pulls you down, since given the unlimited continues and option to build your lives up once before starting the farthest zone you've accessed(you start with four but can win ten or more on the early levels) MMSS is not going to frustrate someone who just wants a fun game to play and win, especially since the second time through, the player knows what is lethal and remembers most of the nasty tricks and blindsides, after which he can increase his life total through the level and save. I found I needed quite a few tries at the final level, and once I'd gotten over the shock of increased difficulty I wanted a few more--along with the extension of the skit. So I just made do with enjoying a sly allusion to the Pillsbury Doughboy. Even if you haven't seen the commercials it should be easy to relate to the characters, whose body language is clearer than many console characters'.

But while the game quickly indicates its tendency to light-hearted fun, it does have a few problems that should not have been overlooked. First of all, it interchanges the triangle and X buttons for the continue options a few times, which may frustrate beginning players who have to sit through a load scene several times because they pushed the intuitive button. Then checkpoints often seem unfairly weighted, and some of the levels seem recycled. Many of the bonus levels for finding formula pieces on different zones are equivalent, and level seven seems like a rehash of level one, with dangerous falling boxes and mechanical bugs replacing cars that you need to avoid as you drive a forklift--wider and more swervy than your old convertible. But the one you'll see the most is that, whenever you lose a life, Yellow goes 'Oops! Uh-oh.' Now while this firmly establishes him as a well-meaning lummox, it gets old fast unless the volume is low. Surely there was a list of random exclamations?

There is also the problem of boss fights, which make up zone C of each non-driving level--a game starring food that naturally saps your energy and keeps you out of shapes probably isn't given to fights(heck, even Tapper's boss fights consisted of a guy in a cloak and mask shaking and shifting beer cans) and so most either become running or jumping contests. Big, weird machines tend to run after you, and often you'll have to set off a delayed bomb or have something drop from the ceiling just as they run through the platform you just hopped off. Four hits and they die. Some, you just have to outrun long enough until you get to the end of the course, and another consists of walking onto the right square when prodded twelve times in a row--and it isn't even shuffled randomly. I feel that the zone C's shouldn't count as full levels compared to the variety of the first two, and given how the last 'fight' requires easy three-step jumps instead of one- or two-steps, the finale would be unsatisfying but for the cut scenes. Apparently it's a big secret but appears to be taken from one of the more obscure commercials.

But once you get used to the obvious, minor errors, the factory is a nice place to be if not quite at the Willy Wonka level. There's a small trade-off between attractiveness and challenge, as pits have to be good and dark, but when they switch from different colors of chocolate on one level to jagged red/green/blue lakes(the paint section, where M&M's get colored) on the next or even give variety to conveyor belts(a train replaces them on a bonus level as a taller obstacle to jump) you'll see that the color is not just frivolous. While some of the platform jumps require trial, error and shadow-watching in place of depth perception, you never feel they're just platforms. One will have a box or an electric current or one of the many weird but irrepressibly pastel floating brain-like creatures(with spikes or without) floating around. You're pretty sure most obstacles are cool even if you don't know what they are. And the key to finding everything in the game is to be observant. Often you'll have to look for the edge of a platform to access a secret area which often has several extra lives' worth of boxes to bash and part of the formula as well. Other boxes appear off to the side, and often you'll take out the boxes you were supposed to jump on before you notice them. Then there are the partially obscured teleports--the clues are there, and it injects a nontrivial hide-and-seek element into a game if you want a bit of challenge the next time through.

It's been a long time since I finished a whole bag of candies in one go, but that didn't stop me from doing so with MMSS. Despite a blip near the end where the game seems rehashed and the occasional unfair ambush the game perpetrates to pretend it has some sort of challenge before level eight, there are colorful and relatively clear challenges. The hero and concept are unique, and the levels that are fun seem to have ended too soon on immediate reflection. And the bonus level challenge provides a sort of refill to the empty bag of a solved game as it gives another excuse to play through and see the story wrapped around it. It's the sort of game where faults are obvious but never too nagging, and it strikes me that the designers managed to get the general mantra about how games should be fun right.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 12/20/02, Updated 12/20/02