"Exceptional Failure In Every Possible Aspect"

Congratulations to the NES title The Hunt For Red October for winning the "Exceptional Failure in Every Possible Aspect" award. It's really amazing how bad this game is. Bravo.

At A Glance: The year is 1990. Due to all of the hype regarding Sean Connery's Blockbuster "The Hunt For Red October," I guess Hi-Tech Expressions thought they could make a lot of money by creating a crappy game based on a successful movie. This happens quite often. "Harry Potter" games were crap, same with games of "Home Alone", "Back To The Future", "Predator", "The Mummy", "Godzilla", "Rambo", "Indiana Jones", "Blues Brothers", et cetera. I could go on and on. Just because a movie receives exceptional reviews or makes millions at the box office doesn't mean it should be turned into a game!

Game Plot: There is none. You have control of an American submarine based in the Atlantic ocean. You have to get to the right side of the screen so you can attack the Soviets or something. I'm not really sure about the story; Hi-Tech Expressions didn't stress the story too much. I do know, however, that the Soviets have something to do with it.

Game Play: The word 'play' suggests that there is a level of fun involved, but I assure, there will not be any fun when playing this game! Anyway, the game play of this game is quite simple. You control a submarine in the Atlantic Ocean. The entire goal of the game is to get to the right side of the screen. However, it's really not that easy as the ocean is packed with obstacles and enemies in your way. If you run into an obstacle or get fired at by an enemy, your submarine will lose armour. If your armour meter reaches zero, your submarine explodes and you get to sleep with the fish. You've probably seen the same idea displayed in several other games, but never this poorly.

Graphics: The graphics are really, really bad. I've seen worse though, particularly in a game called 10-Yard Fight, but that's a different story. Your submarine is small and grey, and you probably wouldn't be able to tell that it's a submarine if you didn't know that it was based on the movie. It doesn't look like Hi-Tech Expressions decided to spend too much time designing the sprites either, considering the same explosion is used over and over again, just rotated and resized. And I still want to know what they were thinking when they put that blue/purple background design thing into the game. Is that supposed to be water?

Sound: If you can play this game and actually stand listening to those 6 heavy deep notes over and over again for more than 10 minutes without bashing your head into a cabinet drawer reiteratively, I praise you. Yeah, I honestly don't think it's possible for the background music to be any worse. In all honesty, it would be better if they just left out background music all together. The sound effects are bad too. And the exploding sound that occurs when you lose a life was done so horribly that it makes my blood boil. Yeah, the exploding sound is that bad.

Weapons: In the hour that I've played this game, I've discovered two: normal missiles and upward shooting missiles. By default, you start out with 25 normal missiles and 15 upward shooting missiles. The only difference between the two missiles is that one shoots up and the other shoots forward. And for some reason, when firing your normal missiles, the lowest possible number on your missile meter is 1, so you don't actually ever run out of missiles.

Enemies: There are turrets that shoot at you when you approach them, submarines who shoot homing missiles at you, and tanks on the land above the water that drop grenades into the water on you. I have no idea how there is land above you considering you are in the middle of the Atlantic, but that's the kind of crap you will get used to when playing this game.

Levels: There aren't any levels. There are checkpoint places, however. For example, if you get past a certain point and die, you will start off again at that specific point. I guess this is good because it would be really tough if you had to start from the beginning every time you died.

Graphics: 1
Game play: 0
Sound: -1
Story: 1
Fun: -Infinity
Overall: 1/10

Final Thought: No amount of writing can accurately convey how horrible this game is.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 11/29/04