This issue's 'something different' is ...

                 MDK - Shiny Entertainment

             Reviewed by James Judge on a P120

I had it in my mind to write this review from an extremely
Xenophobic viewpoint. More specifically, a Francophobic viewpoint.
Why? Well, it seems a tradition for all games reviewers to hark on
about how strange the French are and thank the quirk of fate that
separates 'us' from 'them' by a small channel of water (owned, in
name at least, by 'us'). Reviewers will do this at any time, but
mainly when they are reviewing a game written specifically by the
French.

Great, I thought, I don't need a new and interesting angle - I can
just slag the Frogs off. One small problem - this game is not
French. It's American. Not even the distributors are French. It's
about as French as a pile of French Fries from the MacDonalds in
Maidstone high street. However, it plays like a French game, has
the same whacked out craziness of French game, the general lack of
coherency that applies to most French games. But you know what
made me think it was French most of all? The end of game sequence
showing a few clips of the game being played in front of this
French girl who is singing a pop song in, erm, French. And I
really don't know why that happens.

So sod it. There goes another chance to be overly hostile towards
our Gaelic friends from across the water. Arse.

On with the game review then.

MDK is, basically, a 3D platform and, realising this, I sat down
with great anticipation as I hadn't played a decent platform game
for years and being in 3D made it seem all that much better. I
grinned at the strangeness of the manual as it outlined the reason
for you being in your current predicament and my eyes goggled at
the first sight of the nicely created 3D landscape.


It seems that you play a bloke called Kurt who is aboard a
spacestation orbiting Earth collecting information with a crazy
doctor and an obtuse six legged robotic dog called Bones. While
looking down at the Earth you saw some strange kind of stream
heading towards it from space and in the stream were giant mining
ships that landed upon the Earth's surface and started stripping
away all the minerals, haphazardly killing squillions of people.

Excellent.

When you manage to free up your timetable you finally manage to
fit 'saving the Earth' in and don a suit built by the doctor and
pick up a gun, also designed by the good doctor thanks to his work
with dental floss and gyroscopes.

'Saving the Earth' involves jumping out of your station,
freefalling through the atmosphere and landing on the mining
ships. Once you've landed you must blast your way through hoards
of robotic minions to reach the evil controller of the miner and

blow him to Kingdom come.  Once that's done it's off to the next
and so on until you've completed the game and saved the Earth.

Everything is seen in 3D, but not from a first-person viewpoint as
you would expect. Instead your viewpoint is placed just behind
Kurt, meaning you have to look at his PVC clad butt for the
duration of the game. Some may find this appealing, I just find it
mildly aggravating.  Still, it does make platform jumping a lot
easier.

Each minecrawler is split into a number of different arenas, each
of which is independent of one another and connected by a series
of tunnels which you must run, jump and fly down. Each arena is
'themed' so in one you must use guile and cunning, while in
another agility is the top of the menu and in yet another sheer
brute force and speed is the order of the day.

Guile and cunning... of yeah, the really good bit of the game. You
see, not only does Kurt shoot his little dental-floss endowed
gyroscopic gun like a madman in the 3D behind-his-tight-bum view,
he connects it to his helmet and it turns into a multi-purpose,
high precision snipers rifle.

For this your view switches to a first-person perspective where
you can zoom in and out of the scene, and killing enemies from
afar with carefully aimed sniper round, of which there are many
from mortars through to homing grenades. This pat of the game is
truly innovative and great fun.

Controlling Kurt is simple with four movement keys, a fire button
and a jump button, as well as a use button and <space> gets you
into sniper mode. After a few minutes everyone will be jumping
around like a good-un and showing off their long forgotten
platform jumping skills they honed to a sharp blade during the
hedonistic Spectrum games.

The graphics are good - all polygons, but in some rooms the
shading and texturing of the room polygons are exceptional and the
animation of the 3D polygon enemies is very good too. The sound is
pretty good as well, excluding the highly annoying music which
fades in and out when exciting parts come and go - trying to
emulate the LucasArts iMuse wossname (which was put to really good
use in the X-Wing games) but failing miserably.

If this was the state of the game and it was really large I'd be
as happy as can be - a good looking, fast playing, diverse game
that has a cool sniper mode. But the only problem is that I
completed it in two sittings - both of about an hour and a half
each. The game is soooo small.  There are only six levels (or
minecrawlers) and even though there may be around ten arenas in
each, this just isn't big enough - once the basic idea of an arena
is figured out, then it is a simple task of completing it. I only
got killed twice during the whole game and both were down to my
own stupidity instead of the difficulty of the game ("Now, which
one is the jump key? Doh!").

Also the first three minecrawlers were well designed with a
variety of different tasks to be completed in each arena with
little out and out blasting. There were even some cool
snowboarding scenes being played over a James Bond-style theme
tune. However, the last half of the game saw a distinct lack of
design innovation and I found that my well-honed Quake skills saw
me through any arena without the slightest of problems or mental
strain. There was also a complete lack of the sniper mode - you
HAD to use it once or twice, but in the main using it was
impractical, which spoilt a great part of the game for me.

So, if you like your games short and sweet (with obscure French
pop videos at the end) then this is for you. However, if you have
got any degree of co-ordination and prefer games to last over the
three hour mark (that's œ10 an hour, folks) then you will be
extremely disappointed with this game when that strange pop video
makes an appearance.

MDK. Not so much Murder, Death, Kill. More of a Maybe Derek Knows.
Or Mice Do Knitting. Or....



                              - o -