Loadstar

Rocket Science needed some SAG for this little project of theirs, and two intrepid actors answered the call: Ned Beatty and Barry Primus. You might remember Ned Beatty from his appearance on "Roseanne" as Ed Connor. You might not remember Barry Primus, as he's never done anything worth remembering, including this video game. It's a shame, as he plays Tully so well that I truly feel sorry for him. The guy's perfectly old and grizzled for the part, and he puts his heart into it, so it's sad that this game sucks so bad. I hope they paid him big. Ned Beatty plays his role as the backwater moon sheriff as if someone told him clearly to "act like Boss Hogg on the moon". He knows what a waste of time this game is and he's not exerting an ounce more effort into his acting than is absolutely needed. In this case, I can respect that.

Graphically, this game is a tour-de-farce. The irrepressible John Mastin summed up the visuals of this game susinctly when he first reviewed it for Just Games print: "This game looks like a load in someone's trousers." This was made on the razor's bleeding edge of video compression technology, and it shows. Video is horribly grainy, and you'll be able to see the pixels on every scene. Hey remember dot matrix printers? If the pictures they printed out could move, they'd look like this. RealPlayer streaming video is better. The actual game looks like it was shot in a miniature model and then compressed the same way, so it looks like it could be real and believable if you could see through the mess, making the pixelation all the more annoying. Though to its credit, you can usually tell what everything on the screen is supposed to be (except Beatty's face - all I saw was a pink/white blob). But even back when it was first released, compared to even VHS, this video quality was not impressive a'tall.

Controlling the Loadstar isn't much of a chore, though aiming its weapons definitely is. The game has three sections, and in every one you're driving the ship along the moon's extensive magnetic rail system. Well, the ship more or less drives itself, but you need to steer it for track changes. These come fast - usually you're barrelling down on the scene of an accident and have a second to make the detour. The D-pad controls the cursor, and moving the cursor to the edge of the screen when a turn is available makes the turn. The cursor also targets enemies, who also appear on the edges of the screen, so expect a LOT of accidental turns as you're trying to target a foe. These foes are robot cops who threaten you with citations before crashing into you and causing damage. You must target and shoot them with C, or target the shots they fire and deflect them with B. This means the screen gets hectic fast, and the cursor is pretty slow for such a challenge. Combinations of buttons will activate super shields and a screen clearing attack, and these are pretty easy to pull off. Still, the unnecessary confusion with targeting an enemy and turning instead happens so often that it makes the controls overly frustrating. It would have made so much more sense to have a separate button activate the turns.