Title: Holy Invasion Of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do To Deserve This?!
Genre: RTS/God
Developer: Aquire
Publisher: Nippon Ichi America
Ratings: ESRB - T
Formats: PSP Only
Synopsis:
Hmm...
Hmm...
Hmm...
Well, there's not really that much of one really. You play as an invisible god (lower case g, we're not talking about some worldwide invisible friend here...), who is worshipped by a traditionally demonic Big Bad. Although, this particular demon seems utterly incompetent at his job, and has summarily pissed off the local population of heroes. Who are now currently beating down his door. You job is to mine the surrounding areas, combine both natural nutrients and mana into various creatures to defend said demon. If you kill the hero, GG. If they manage to get to him, and drag his sorry ass out of the door, then you lose.
It's just that simple.
So, aside from the HUEG LIEK XBOX title,
Holy Invasion of Privacy (You have no idea how many times I've typed Piracy by mistake)
, Badman! What Did I Do To Deserve This?! doesn't really have that much going for it. You dig tunnels to hide the demon, and create monsters from varying amounts of resources. So far, so much turtling RTS. Just without the nukes that make the endgame go so much faster. Or the rifleman zergs. The enemies get progressively harder, you run out of resources, and the demon eventually gets caught.
Now, part of the defense section is that some heroes drop torches. The next wave (assuming you get that far), the heroes will automatically follow those torches, hoping to get an easy capture. So you dig away from those, and hide the demon somewhere else. Except for you run out of places VERY quickly, if you don't plan anything. Even quicker than running out of places, is running out of resources. The ground is procedurally generated every time you start again, so no dry runs to get the feel of it.
As far as defenses go, creating monsters is frustratingly hard. I actually printed out the strategy guides online, and I STILL couldn't get anything about the fucking green slimes that populate the dungeon in their millions, with all the hero stopping power of thin air. When I did finally manage to make something powerful, the heroes just carved their way through it, barely losing any health in the process.
Graphically, there's nothing to speak of. Think a 2D version of Minecraft graphically, boxy sprites and strange coloured blobs. Sound... ugh, very little ambient music, and the speech is something that you expect if you mangle a tape that's loading in a Sinclair.
So what's the appeal? Well, I guess that the fast game times (I averaged about 12 minutes per game) makes it useful for bus journeys (Funnily enough the Park and Ride to my work is ~17 minutes, so that left me 5 minutes of feeling
why the fuck did I just play that on the bus?!), or for amusing small children. But those 12 minutes each play were enough to make me want to order the driver to pull over, and for me to launch the UMD into the river Cam.
Scores!
Graphics: Very little to speak of. Antiquated sprites, and not much else.
DGameplay: Fast paced, but not really through design, more through circumstance. Good for public transport, but not for couch play.
C-Sound: Got a Sinclair? Got a tape with a mangled ribbon? Insert tape into deck, and try loading that. Yeah, that's what this game sounds like. Not many games I'd recommend pressing Mute on, but this is very much one of them.
FReplay Factor: If you've got a regular journey where you're not steering, then this might tide you over for a week at best.
D-Overall: Kitsch, if done correctly can make an awesome game. If done incorrectly, well... you get
Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman!.
D-Is it worth it?
(Caution: YMMV) - In a nutshell.
No. I mentioned a couple of times about public transport playing a nice role in making this viable, but, to be honest, the PSP has a soft-save function, so these quick fire games are really losing their value in a world where I can flick the PSP onto standby, and pick it up again 8 hours later to resume my gaming.
Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! is not a game that I could recommend to anyone, and it seems like no one else could either, to the point where sales outside of Japan are practically non-existent. Which brings us to the root of the games existence.
2 words.
WTF Japan?