"Cel Damage! See it tonight, on the GameFAQs Television Network!"

OPENING STATEMENT
When Cel Damage earned the praise of Jeanne Kim in Electronic Gaming Monthly, I was dismayed. It looked to me as if the X-Box would have a decent, exclusive vehicular combat game, and if you have looked at my reviews that I have written, I tend to enjoy playing games of that genre a lot. Of course then the pattern that we see today began occurring (X-Box ‘exclusives’ not being very exclusive for very long), and when Cel Damage jumped ship to the GameCube, I was waiting. What Cel Damage is, is Twisted Metal meets the Cartoon Network. Interesting, yes, but it manages to get weirder.

GAMEPLAY--8
Cel Damage offers all of the weapon based combat that a Twisted Metal does, but on a much lighter scale. The weapons that you get to use are childish, yet entertaining. Some of the choices are giant punching gloves, or a spear gun straight from the Amazonian jungle. You see, each arena, out of the sixteen battle arenas, has a different weapon. When you beat the arena, that weapon appears everywhere. This is both good and bad. Some of the weapons that you get early on are very good, and as you unlock some inferior weaponry, it takes away some of the spots in each level that would normally be filled by the better weapon. Luckily this plight affects the computer characters as well, but it makes some of the latest levels a quest to find the baseball bat.

Basically, there are short-range weaponry, non-combat weaponry, and long-range weaponry. Short-Range weapons, like axes and baseball bats, usually kill your foes in one shot. Long-range weapons, such as the machine gun, do not kill your foes very fast, but your opponents are less likely to counterattack you. And non-combat weapons, such as the holes you can scatter, offer no chance of your opponents hurting you in a counterattack while laying them, but you can drive over a well-placed hole later, even one that you laid, and get sucked down, wasting a hole, and precious time within the arena. In other words, always remember where you place the holes.

There are three game modes within Cel Damage. Of course, you will probably spend most of your time playing Smack Mode (the main battle mode), as that mode is all about destruction. Also featured is a rather dismal Flag Relay Mode, in which you battle for other vehicles for control of tiny little pink flags (with attitude). The Flag Relays can last for hours upon hours, because whenever you get all of the flags you need but that last one, you always seem to get blasted with a machine gun. It never fails.

‘That last little bugger is a foot in front of me! I’m gonna win! Hey! Where the hell did that spear come from?’

The third mode falls in between the aforementioned two in terms of the level of enjoyment. Gate Relay is an all-out, Mario Kart-esque, battle race through a certain number of checkpoint gates scattered about the levels. Shortcuts abound, mainly because of the fact that the levels have no alterations - the gates are just placed in locations in the existing layouts, which provides for a heated match, especially when the weaponry gets involved in close races. The spear gun is an especially good weapon to have in the Gate Relay Mode.

GRAPHICS--8
Cel shaded games are getting more and more popular, and, if you could not tell from the painfully obvious title, Cel Damage has fully embraced the style. The result is sine great animation that looks like it is out of a classic Warner Brothers cartoon, but with a modern edge. The animation is extremely smooth, and choppiness is kept at a minimum. The colors are all bright and vibrant, which relays the cartoonish mood even further.

The problems that I had with the graphics had to do with the views being issues at times. Often your vehicle will get shielded by a tree or a bush, or a building of some sort. In the worst case scenarios, you can get blocked by an opposing vehicle, which essentially means certain death for you. But at least it will be a flamboyant death.

That’s right. You have not seen deaths this stylish since Celebrity Deathmatch. Chain saws, spears pinning you to the ground, baseball bats slamming you like a tiny little baseball off the bat of Mark McGwire, all destroy you with formidable power, but all have an artistic flair and sense of humor within the animation that will force you to give a bemused little smile. Just seeing a spear run through Dominique's convertible, nailing her to the ground, and then waving her vehicle about for a few seconds makes you feel a real sense of accomplishment.

Also fitting in with the eccentric characters and weaponry, are the arenas, so stereotypical they would make Archie Bunker wince. You have got your western arenas, your jungle arenas (filled with ancient ruins nonetheless), your haunted arenas, and who could forget the space arenas. And each of these arenas has been filled with some of the most blatant stereotypes known to man. The featured western cities have a higher alcohol-selling-establishment to person ratio than Dublin. The space station levels are populated by rocket ships and flying UFOs. Each of the rainforest settings is sprawling with vines, car eating sea creatures, like pirhannas and alligators, and trees that like to give motorized vehicles whiplash. It just adds to the general hilarity in Cel Damage.

MUSIC--4
SOUND--9
The music in Cel Damage seems as if it were forgotten for most of the development cycle. Then, one day on a coffee break, everyone suddenly realized that they hadn’t added any in yet. So, they came up with a few extremely basic tunes that fit in with the levels themes. Very basic, simplistic tunes that a ten-year-old could compose in about ten minutes. At least they fit in with the level designs fairly well.

I would like to say that Cel Damage has the cheesiest announcer of any video game around, but I am afraid that that title still falls to the talking heads of NFL Blitz. But the difference between the two is that, while the NFL Blitz announcers only succeed in pissing me off, in Cel Damage, the cheesiness is actually funny, because it fits in so well with every other aspect of the game. The intro to the game is especially funny, and whomever the actor is that read this part, he got it down cold. He has got the tone perfect, he changes his inflections at the exact times - it is one of the best voice acting jobs in video games today. So long as you realize that the cheesiness is intended.

The other sound effects are extremely good as well, and they fit in beautifully with the theme of Cel Damage as one giant cartoon series. Most of the sounds seem as they were lifted straight from a Bugs Bunny cartoon. The way a spear wobbles when it nails a vehicle into the ground, for example, sounds like the noise heard whenever Daffy Duck steps onto a board, and it flies up and hits him in the beak. Don’t you pretend you don’t know what I am talking about. The chain saw effect is so exaggerated it can sear through your mind days after playing the game, and you will still remember it perfectly. The sound technicians clearly did their research by watching some classic cartoons, before adding effects into Cel Damage, and their hard work shows and pays off greatly.

CONTROL--5
Cel Damage has been blessed with the GameCube controller, which presents it with a very simplistic, essentially one-button, interface. ‘A’ is fire. That is really all you need to know. And the oddly shaped GameCube controller is great for one-button type games, because that ‘A’ button is easily twice the size of any other button. You should have no problems finding it in a heated battle.

Just because the interface works great, though, does not mean that everything is ducky with Cel Damage’s control. I felt that the vehicles were far too floaty in controlling, and that I often had to fight against some unknown force to get control of my car, especially when going up steep inclines, such as the one in ‘Joe Schmoe vs. The Volcano.’ If the developers could solve these control physics, and make them respond quicker to commands, then Cel Damage would be a lot more playable.

FUN--7
Cel Damage should be the poster boy of games that are fun for a while, but lose their luster after a while. On the last day of my rental, I was no longer playing for pleasure, but for my drive to complete as much as I possibly could before bringing it back to the store. A great deal of the lack of fun has to do with only having sixteen arenas, four in each theme, at your disposal. I felt as if there were quite a few stereotypes that the developers left untapped, and we could have really had about twelve themes, with four levels each. That would give us three times the arenas that we have, which would make Cel Damage a game that would have quite a bit more depth, even if you do the same things in all of the levels. You would just have to adapt a bit, and do them in different ways each time around. Cel Damage is also hurt by not utilizing the full potential of its multiplayer modes. They could have made Cel Damage into another GameCube multiplayer power, with Super Smash Brothers and Super Monkey Ball. Instead, they get a fun addition, but not one that can hold attention spans like those can.

CHALLENGE--LOW TO MEDIUM
I rented Cel Damage for three days. Now before you all spazz at me for not mastering a game before reviewing it, I would just like to point out that, in those three days, I won all of the battles in Smack Mode mastering each of the sixteen arenas, and I was victorious three-fourths of the races in the Gate Relay Mode. Cel Damage is not a difficult game, and you should have beaten most of the single player features in a week or so. The only reason that Cel Damage is remotely difficult is because of the Flag Relay Mode. The main reason for that being difficult is that the artificial intelligence is set up to let you come extremely close to winning, and then yanking you back down to earth again with a well placed snipe. Still, with some practice, all of those levels could easily be beaten as well. Some more obstacles in levels would have probably succeeded in making Cel Damage more difficult without detracting from the fun that the game provides.

REPLAY VALUE--MEDIUM TO HIGH
One of the bigger flaws with Cel Damage is the fact that there is no dedicated multiplayer mode. Instead of going through some actual effort to design some extra multiplayer arenas, or something like that, each of the sixteen arenas, in each of the three modes, can be done alone in single-player, or with some friends in multiplayer. This sounds like it would be good, but after you have beaten a level alone, do you really want to go do the exact same thing, against with a friend? There is no cooperative features, so it’s exactly the same as you just doing it, except with a touch of trash talking and a smaller screen. If there were some extra levels set aside for multiplayer play, it would make me want to play Cel Damage a whole lot more. I would have likely even bought the game.

PROS
*The most eccentric cast of characters ever assembled in a video game.
*Beautiful cel shaded graphics.
*General insaneness is always a good quality in video games.

CONS
*No dedicated multiplayer modes.
*Extremely floaty controls can cause you to lose control (both of your vehicle and emotionally).
*Only sixteen different arenas for you to play in.

CLOSING STATEMENT
“Tonight, on a very special episode of Cel Damage . . .
Will Violet find out about the disease that’s slowly killing her?
Will Sinder finally become house trained?
Nah, we’ll probably just blow up everything in sight, just like we do every week!”

The developers of Cel Damage do not try to hide the wackiness from the world. They flaunt it, and manage to make it out to looking like a bad cable action program as well. Creativity like this, along with humor that is definitely tongue-in-cheek, deserves to be applauded. If you can find it for a bargain price, pick it up, even if just for some laughs.

OVERALL--7

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/12/02, Updated 06/12/02