Review: Redneck Rampage

By: Kirk Hiner

Genre: Shooter

Format: CD

Developer: Xatrix Entertainment

Publisher: Logicware

Minimum Requirements: PowerPC, System 7.5.3, 16MB RAM, 150MB hard disk space, 13" monitor supporting 256 colors, CD-ROM

Network Feature: Yes

3Dfx Support: No

Retail Price: $38.95

Availability: Out Now

Debbie Gibson is pregnant with my two headed love child.

That's not a brag, nor a valid claim of any kind. I mean, I did see her in "Beauty and the Beast" on Broadway, and she was really checking me out, but that's as far as it went. Honest. No, the quote above is a song title from one of this country's greatest singer/songwriters...Mojo Nixon. Most of you have probably never heard of Mojo, and that's probably for the best; you'd only disagree with my claim. Be that as it may, it can't be argued that he was the perfect choice to pen a couple songs for Logicware's Redneck Rampage.

I first saw Redneck Rampage in the computer section of the Virgin Megastore in Times Square back in 1997. It looked funny enough, but it was PC only at the time and I was making my way to one of the few well-stocked Mac displays in the city at that time. When I learned last year that Logicware would be doing the port, I let out a whoop and a hollar and sat down to wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Until finally, at the Macworld Expo, I entered the Redneck Rampage competition in the National Macintosh Gaming Championship just to get a chance to play the game. And you know, without ever having played it before, I won. Well, me and all the other entrants because the judges didn't know how to declare a winner. So I took home my victory copy and began to play. And after all the waiting, here's my advice.

Buy a Mojo Nixon CD instead.

It's not that Redneck Rampage is bad, but more that it's...lacking. It's lacking an instruction manual. It's lacking modern graphics capabilities. It's lacking the ability to remap keys. It's lacking expansion packs. It's lacking...and I hate to say this...it's lacking jokes.

Before I get to the details, I suppose I should present the premise. Aliens have invaded Earth and are repopulating through clones of your friends and neighbors. It's up to you and your redneck ways to put an end to this threat...and to get back your prize pig, which the aliens have apparently stolen. Your mission will take you through trailer parks, junkyards, chicken processing plants and other such locales in which you really should be worried more about bacteria than about aliens.

Okay. Detail. First, Redneck Rampage sells without a printed manual. That's all well and good in the day of PDFs, if not really appreciated. I'd still rather have a book handy than have to waste my paper printing it off myself, but if it keeps the costs down I'll accept it just like I accept those intensely aggravating Coke commercials they show before movies now.

But there's not even a PDF manual on the Redneck Rampage CD! Nothing! I had to actually go to Logicware's website to get the manual. And as if this weren't annoying enough, when I unstuffed it, I was presented with twelve jpegs, one for each page! So I had to launch each page individually, only to find that they were illegible and had to be printed. Okay, so I printed them, and because of the graphic-heavy format (it's set up like a local newspaper), I wasted a lot of ink on pages that really didn't do anything more than tell a few jokes.

Ha ha. Now on with the game.

The first thing you notice about Redneck Rampage is the opening movie. This is because there isn't one. At least not one worth talking about.

Then came the gameplay graphics themselves. They're decent, I suppose. At least on par with other fare from Logicware such as Killing Time. After all, we're talking about a game that's two years old here. But I expected to get quick frame rates with system requirements this low. Nope. Even on a 200MHz 604e with minimal extensions/control panels turned on and 64MB allocated to the game, the action stuttered horribly during the more intsense scenes. The aliens/townsfolk would suddenly drop into slow motion when shot as if in a John Woo movie.

Where's Chow Yun Fat when you need him?

I was also stymied by the inability to remap the keys. If some stranger were to walk up and kick my mother's dog, only that would annoy me more than developers who don't allow users to remap the keys.

And while we're talking about lazy developers, let's talk about delayed releases. See, the best thing about getting our ports so much later than the original PC release is the fact that we get for free all the add-ons that PC users have to pay for in increments. Not here, my friends. If you want the expansion packs, you'll still have to go over to the house of your last remaining friend who still owns a PC.

But the fundamental fault with Redneck Rampage is the same fault that plagues all of those movies based on Saturday Night Live sketches; there's only one joke. You've got rednecks, and they talk and act like rednecks. There it is. There's the game. That's not to say that I didn't laugh for a bit. If you install the "cuss pack" that's included with the CD, you can't help but laugh at the over-the-top vulgarity. But like a Jeff Foxworthy special on Showtime, it gets real old, real quick. So does blowing up cows with dynamite, surprisingly.

So if Redneck Rampage were a little funnier, I'd be able to recommend it to those looking for a laugh. If it ran a little better on mid-range systems, I'd be able to recommend it to those lacking in the hardware department. If it had a few more songs by Mojo Nixon, I'd be able to recommend it to appreciators of fine music. Instead, I can only recommend Redneck Rampage to those who either hate chickens, love fart jokes, or want to convince their parents once and for all that video games are solely responsible for the decline and fall of western civilization. But if that's your goal, then I recommend getting "The Real Sock-Ray-Blue" by Mojo Nixon and the Toadliquors. You may not get to kill anyone, but you'll certainly get more laughs.

Recommended Instead: Killing Time

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November 20, 2008