Here's an open message for the people at Midway: You mess with the classics, and you have to answer to me.
I rented Spy Hunter recently, because I had quite an affinity for the original arcade game. One of my earlier memories is of playing the original Spy Hunter on my Commodore 64. (How's that for dating myself?) I used to play it for hours, laying down smokescreens, bumping enemy cars off the road, and generally having a great time. I was hoping to relive that nostalgic experience with Midway's updated version of Spy hunter for the GameCube. Needless to say from my opening paragraph, I was severely disappointed.
Spy Hunter (hereafter referring to the GameCube version; I dare not disparage the name of the arcade original) is, quite frankly, one of the absolute worst games I've had the displeasure of playing on the GameCube, or any system, for that matter. I'm actually appalled that a horrible piece of junk like this could actually make it through Nintendo's QA department; Midway must have caught them in a weak moment or something.
The general premise of the game is that you're a Hollywood-type spy, with a cool car that goes really fast and has lots of different types of gadgets. Your job is to take down the requisite evil empire by driving around and shooting stuff. I'm not going to go into a detailed explanation of the storyline, because it seems limited to one or two cut scenes and a handful of mission briefings. That might have qualified as a story in the late 1980s, but it doesn't hold water now.
But you're not playing Spy Hunter for the story; you're playing it to drive around and shoot stuff, right? Sure you are. To facilitate the driving and the shooting, the game is broken up into a series of missions, each with primary and secondary objectives. Simply put, you need to fulfill primary objectives to be able to advance to the next level, and secondary objectives are optional. But wait, there's more! The secondary objectives (which are generally obnoxious tasks involving finding every hidden shortcut in the level and collecting beacons, or blowing up certain inopportunely placed enemies) are also essentially required, because each mission requires that you've fulfilled a certain quota of secondary objectives in order to unlock it, and that quota is generally next to all of the available objectives up to that point. This is what's called manufacturing replay value; while the game, from start to finish, would likely only take a couple of hours to repeat, the added requirement of having to play each level over and over again to complete one obnoxious objective adds to the replay value tremendously, but in a bad, tedious way.
This might be OK if the actual gameplay was fun, but it's really not. The objectives are either absurdly simple or outlandishly difficult, and it gets to the point where you really just stop caring about the game very quickly. The problem really is that, with so much repetition (and even between levels, not just from having to play the same one repeatedly), the game just plain gets old fast. I ended up putting it down and not picking it up again within about a day. One day's worth of gameplay is not worth $50, no matter how you cut it.
It doesn't get better when you consider that Midway didn't even try to disguise the fact that they simply ported the PS2 game to GameCube without even attempting to take advantage of GameCube's superior hardware. This is particularly evident in the control scheme. One would expect that, being a driving game, that Spy Hunter would use the analog shoulder buttons for acceleration and braking, and one would be wrong. In fact, A and B are used for these functions, which is an absolute sin. The only reason I could think of to have this awful control scheme would be if they just ported over the PS2 code, since the PS2 doesn't have any analog buttons to use for such functions.
To rub salt in the wounds, if you think that you might want to reconfigure the buttons, tough luck. The default control scheme is the only control scheme available. That's just unthinkable in this day and age; I don't think I've seen a game with only one control scheme since the days of the SNES.
Graphics are equally bad. Pixelation abounds in Spy Hunter; the ground looks like a mess of gigantic blocks, and there are jaggies all over the place. Again, there's not so much going on that they couldn't take advantage of the Cube's graphical capabilities to make the game look cleaner, but obviously Midway was more interested in making a quick buck than putting out a quality game. The fact that there are moving objects that show themselves to be completely flat (as though they were straight out of Paper Mario) as you passed by them is disgusting. Basically, Spy Hunter looks like a late-generation PS1 game more than a second generation GameCube game. Absolutely inexcusable.
Sound is fairly generic. There's a decent remix of "Theme from Peter Gunn" (which was the original's theme song), but everything else is unremarkable. Sounds effects and further music are generic, and voice acting is passable.
All in all, Spy Hunter should be avoided at all costs. It's not worth even a $5 rental, let alone a $50 purchase. Spy Hunter mangles a beloved classic arcade game beyond belief, and doesn't even take advantage of the capability of the GameCube in the process. Show Midway that you're not going to tolerate poor quality work at top dollar by staying far, far away from this travesty.
