The mystery of J. Scott Campbell has finally been solved. Yes, the comic book industry icon has been at his drawing board for the last year — despite the belated release of the newest issue of Danger Girl. Sharpening his pencil for countless hours, he’s been edging the video game adaptation for his badass girls Abbey Chase, Sydney Savage and JC toward completion.
The final classified report: Big guns and bigger breasts can’t save this dud from spontaneously combusting. The first mistake for development team N-Space were the opening credits of Danger Girl. Instead of using traditional, hand-drawn animation, a sloppy, 3-D look is applied to Campbell’s 2-D characters. Though smoother than squares and rectangles, taking any detour from the pen-and-ink illustrations that made the Image comic book series famous is a gargantuan mistake — let alone utterly unethical by comic industry code.
As for gameplay, imagine Tomb Raider for Atari. The graphics are quite blocky, and the controls are extremely handicapped — and if you thought Campbell’s creations were Playboy bunnies with bazookas, after one look at their polygon renditions, Roseanne will seem like a goddess.
Now relieve all your PlayStation tension with the extremely engrossing Spider-Man. Using the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater engine, Peter Parker and gang are transported almost flawlessly into an interactive, digitized New York City — complete with rooftop, web-swinging capabilities. It is, by every definition of the genre, the most stellar superhero game on the market.
Yet, is Spider-Man truly 360 degrees of pure perfection? Well, almost. Cheesy dialogue, though in synch with the original Stan Lee comic, is sometimes unnecessary; and for such an enthralling game, there aren’t many levels to keep your Spider-Senses enticed.
So thwart your enemies using web-slinging palms, soaring around the totally free-roaming, Big Apple skyscraper canopy — and do not rest until the Spidery impostor is behind bars. And straight from the Daily Bugle advice column: “Danger Girl is a weak weekend renter, at best.”
