Worth the Money? - Watchmen: The End is Nigh

For a while now, I've been meaning to start writing a regular feature called Worth the Money?. (Trademark pending.) In it, I'll download the demo versions of Xbox Live Arcade games and let you know if they're worth the full-price upgrade. Most of them aren't, of course. Making quick, crappy games and throwing them up on the Arcade must keep some game companies in business, but I don't know who's downloading these things. There are only so many dual-stick Asteroids knockoffs the market can handle. You think developers make terrible little games as some kind of tax writeoff? I don't know.

There is a silver lining, though. When a genuinely good game slips by the quality control wizards at Microsoft, it sticks out even more. Braid, Bionic Commando: Rearmed, Mega Man 9--these are all great downloadable games that are worth however many ridiculous Microsoft Points they cost. There are even a few hidden gems like Marble Blast Ultra. Luckily, there's a free demo available for each and every XBLA game, so you can preview the horror before plopping down the cash. So browsing the Arcade is limited only to your hard drive space and your tolerance for self-abuse.

Speaking of self-abuse, Watchmen: The End is Nigh. My expectations were pretty low going in. Movie-based games are famously terrible, and I had no reason to think any differently about a game based on the movie version of a comic book that couldn't be less suited to a video game adaptation of an adaptation. I understand that Warner Bros. invested a huge amount of money in Watchmen, and they have to make that investment back somehow. I don't begrudge them that. I can ignore the action figures and jammie pants if I want. They don't diminish my opinion of the comic or the movie, and if people are willing to fork over the money, who am I to judge?

So, as much as I love Watchmen, I only downloaded the The End is Nigh demo out of morbid curiosity. And morbidity is exactly what I got. This thing is a corpse, starting with the very first cut scene. If you're familiar with the horrendous Watchmen Motion Comic that came out on iTunes and DVD recently, you have a pretty clear idea of how these cut scenes are animated. They aren't, really. The Motion Comic basically took panels from the actual comic, cut out some shapes, and moved them around a bit while an actor read every character's dialogue. It's like watching Superfriends in slow motion, but without the amazing Casey Kasem voice acting.

The opening cut scene sets up the games story. We're in 1973. Rorschach and Nite Owl still work as a crimefighting team, and masked vigilantism hasn't yet been outlawed. The two of them are hanging out together in Nite Owl's lair. Rorschach complains about liberals like he do. Then, word over the Owl Ship police scanner is there's a riot at Sing Sing. Rory and Owly hop in their sweet ride and fly on over, dropping down into the prison courtyard against the wishes of the warden. Aaand...fight!

The game then switches to its regular graphical style, which is when you first notice the only bright spot in this entire misguided endeavor. The End is Nigh is gorgeous--not just for an XBLA game, but for any game on the 360. Rorschach's rain-spattered coat, the glow from all the random flaming debris, the succulent curves of Nite Owl's...cape. There's some real prettiness on display here, which explains why the demo eats up over a gig of your precious hard drive space.

Unfortunately, the attention to graphical detail isn't carried over into the art design. Our two protagonists look just like they do in the movie, so I can't really judge that (I think both designs--even the revamped Nite Owl costume--look great), but everyone else? Boring. You'll be pummeling your way through prisoner after prisoner, and the only thing distinguishing any of them is the color and style of their jumpsuit. The prison itself looks just like you'd expect a prison to look, save for the ludicrously out of place buttons and switches that you'll have to arbitrarily flick to open doors and whatnot. Interactivity!

This game is an old-fashioned, button-mashing brawler without any of the bizarre charm that made similar games like Streets of Rage fun. You can choose to play either as Rorschach or Nite Owl, but there's really no difference between the two. Both of them have two basic attack buttons--one for fast and light, the other for slow and heavy. You can easily get through the demo simply by softening up every generic prisoner with a flurry of fast attacks and finishing them off with a hard punch to the face. There are tokens placed conspicuously throughout the level that grant you new combo moves, but they don't add much to the gameplay. The sheer brutality of Rorschach's moves (eventually, he'll be able to disarm opponents and smash in their faces with their own weapons--you know, like he do) is sort of fun to watch, but even that gets old quickly. And the demo only let me play for half an hour.

So, is Watchmen: The End is Nigh worth the money? Of course not. The full game costs $20, which is absurd. Granted, some real work went into polishing the graphics and, I'm assuming, placing microphones in front of the actors' mouths, but just because a developer passes cost on to you, it doesn't mean you have to pick it up. This is supposed to be the first in a series of episodic Watchmen adventures, but I don't see how that could possibly pan out unless the next episodes are a completely different type of game.

The only way to benefit from paying full price for Watchmen: The End is Nigh is if you use that very act as a reminder to blink-signal your doctor to check your feeding tube.

Equivalent Value: A papercut to the cornea