Tuesday 10 August 2010

DSgusting: Let's Play Flight Attendant!

Musicman3000 takes a look at the games that the kids of today are disappointed to find in their stockings.



You and me, we play games. When we go shopping to satiate our craving for interactive content, we know what we're looking for, because we read reviews, see ads, hear the latest hype, et cetera. Word of mouth is important in identifying the games that we want to play, but even those that get negative press are on our radars. Not as potential purchases, of course, but as something we can point to and say, "Yeah, I heard that sucked."

 *cough*

Then there are the games that no one's heard of.

I'm not talking about those hidden gems that develop cult followings and turn up years later on someone's list of games everyone should have played.

 "OMG Why haven't you played Beyond Good & Evil?!!"

Those are things that SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE has heard about. No, I speak of games that no one cares about, because no one should care about them.
Notoriously bad games can be entertaining in the same way that we intinctively look at car wrecks; there's a "how could this have happened?" moment that ticks something off in our brains, and suddenly we are amused. We are glad that such things did not happen to us. We did not invest ourselves into whatever led to this travesty. We are superior.

Just as there are games that are so bad that we can extract some sort of sick pleasure from them, there exist many more games that are just plain bad. No one talks about them, no one sees them, even when they are right in front of our noses. As such, finding one may truly be a test of my perception. It may require years of training and a veritable metaphysical transformation to enter such a world where these titles truly exist.

No wait, here's one.

Hint: I can tell because of the title.

They say, "Don't judge a book by its cover." I'm afraid that in this case, you really should judge this one, right here and now. It is exactly what it claims to be.

It has become evident that adults cannot produce games for children. As any parent will find out, only children seem to know what they want. Though I'm quite certain the people behind this game are not, themselves, parents. They would understand that kids do not dream of being flight attendants.

Our titular heroine sure does, though.

Oh, and it seems we are restricted to being a girl. Or at least a guy in drag. So much for Paul the gay flight attendant. I guess I'll call her Betty.

This is one really camp airline, there's pink all over the keyboard.

Let me spell it out for you: Stop making games for kids. Kids want what adults want. They also want things that can't exist, because they still have imaginations.
Here's a handy reference for you aspiring game designers.
Games by adults, for everyone: universal appeal.
Games by adults, for kids: no appeal.
Games by kids, for whoever: super awesome universal appeal.

I believe Let's Play Flight Attendant is not aimed directly at children, but rather children's parents who may be employed in the field of air transportation. As stated in the game, your character wants to be a flight attendant because (Spoiler alert!) her mother was a flight attendant. That is the only reason given and apparently the only reason needed for this woman to throw every other career option aside. At this point, I firmly believe that this was created so that children would gain more admiration of their parent's profession, even if the events that transpire are not entirely indicative of real life.

I think she does want to scare me.

So the actual game plays out through static 2D cutscenes, followed by a series of minigames vaguely related to the nature in which an airport operates. At times, you will be performing tasks that a flight attendant would never have to do, such as directing ground control. In fact, you will be directly controlling 20+ planes on the runway at the same time, so it's safe to say you'll be performing jobs no one in any position would have to do.

They really trust interns at this airport. 
I'm still not allowed near money at work.

The reward for working each day is a new article of clothing with which you can play dress-up. A game for little girls would not be complete without dress-up. Unfortunately, all the options are locked at the beginning, so you have to endure quite a number of the repetetive minigames before you can start looking fabulous.


The cutting edge of safety jacket style.

The cutscenes are handled pretty well. The art's a little inconsistent, but it all generally looks like it would appeal to a little girl. There's no animation or facial expressions, so don't expect any sort of emotion to be conveyed. The writing, while simplistic, serves its purpose. It's devoid of both emotion and typos, surprisingly, and it's occasionally funny for the wrong reasons.

I wonder about this airport sometimes.

There's not much of a plot to advance. If my earlier spoiler warning did not deter you from reading the rest of the review, I'm going to go ahead and assume that, like a normal human being, you don't care that much. So here it is: You, a teenage girl, are interning at an airport because your mom was a flight attendant. You are nervous on your first day, but you meet a few characters who make you feel safe and happy working there. You magically get hired after two days of work, and they put you on a plane without any sort of background check. Then you get to travel the world as you perform every job other than actually flying a plane. Of course, you never get to see any of the places you go, but that's what imagination is for.

In accordance with the lack of plot, there's a general lack of a game here. That's usually something you try to address when making games, but I suppose they overlooked it. It's not to say that they didn't try. They just didn't try very hard. They didn't make a single part of this game very engaging. The minigames, while somewhat varied in concept, are of less complexity than a WarioWare microgame, yet they can go on several minutes longer. Let's Play Flight Attendant thrusts you straight into the minigames with minimal preparation, so I assume the objectives of some of the tasks will be lost on earlier gamers. The story mode is short, and it tries to make little girls feel all warm and secure about the going-ons of an airport, which I suppose is admirable given the post-9/11 panic purveyed by the press, however unrealistic the goal may be. The production, however, is predictably lackluster. The sound is absolutely awful; there are two songs you'll be hearing throughout in the game, and the one that plays through the majority of the cutscenes and during minigames is maddeningly atonal. It may well be the only part of this game believably produced by children. Tone-deaf, retarded children. There's no voice acting (probably for the better), and minigame sound effects are limited to your standard crackles and beeps. It took me less than an hour to see everything this game had to offer, so I doubt it'll keep a normal kid entertained for too long. And if your kid can't read yet, they're already missing the better half of this game.
 

Two "different" minigames.

The 3D graphics are actually okay. The minigames that use them are really the high point of it all, relatively speaking. It's like a significantly more mediocre team came in to handle that part of the game. Too bad they didn't help with anything else.


Pictured: an unpleasant, Elite Beat Agents-inspired safety seminar and a minigame in which you learn no one paid any attention to said seminar.

All in all, I can't tell who they were trying to fool. The game's tasks are so menial, it's doubtful anyone will ever be entertained by slogging through them for fifteen minutes at a time. The story isn't interesting, partially because there's nothing memorable about the characters. The coding is so simple that it can't break. It's just one, big, boring hugbox for girls.

Let's Play Flight Attendant gets -2 out of -10. Double it if you dislike French game developers.

None of the games I will be reviewing are good. That is why I will, instead, use the Negative Scale, in which a perfect negative ten is the most ridiculously terrible thing I have ever played.

I will continue my quest to uncover laughably bad games for the DS next week!

4 comments:

  1. Do you buy, or even try out these games?

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  2. Curly, I would never shell out my money for this game. I stumbled upon it through more mysterious connections. But of course I played it, didn't you even read the review?

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  3. You ought to do more shitty game reviews. This was good!

    ReplyDelete