Party Game Sundays: Acme Arsenal

The time has come for me to talk about a truly awful game. Most of the time bad games can be funny, but in this case it was just kind of sad. Normally when you take a beloved franchise like Looney Tunes and make a game out of it there is some base level of quality. I realize that most of the time these licensed games are rushed out, but generally they're halfway decent. That was not the case with Acme Arsenal.

When we decided to play I didn't have very high hopes. It was described as a multiplayer shooter, with melee combos on the box. That's what it was. When we got into the game we discovered that it was a third person shooter. We also discovered that on the stage we had chosen we could see absolutely nothing. Sure, our characters and weapons were there, but as for the stage itself it was pitch black. We ran around aimlessly trying to find one another for a minute or so before exiting to see if we could find some kind of brightness setting. There wasn't one...

All the screenshots I can find of this game are from the 360 version. It looks marginally less awful

We then decided to go into a different map. We could see in that one, but it didn't help the experience too much. We could find each other and different weapons. I found the spawn point for a crazy rocket launcher and kept picking that up the entire match. I tried to use the melee combo system for a bit, but it seemed to do far less damage that the basic gun with infinite ammo.

For some reason we kept going and chose the third map. Luckily we set the timer to one minute, because we could only see on half the stage. Then we did the same thing for the fourth map, where we could no longer see anything. We then decided to not play anymore.

Yeah, it looked nothing like this... Were Wii ports really that bad?

To top things off the ending screen of a match doesn't say who won. It shows three completely indecipherable icons instead. The first was a grave stone, the second was a face with x's for eyes, and the third was a target. We assumed that the target was how many hits you got, because it was always high. The other two we couldn't decide if they were kills or suicides, because they didn't match up with either.

I normally want to go into a game and give it a fair shake, but when it's immediately unplayable due to brightness issues it's kind of hard. Going around as Marvin Martian shooting Foghorn Leghorn should have been a fun experience, but instead it was a broken mess. Don't play this game. I guess it was also for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 2, so maybe just the Wii version was terrible? Who am I kidding, all versions of this game are probably terrible.

     -Manny