System Requirements: 400MHz PowerPC, Mac OS 8.6, 96MB RAM, 8MB video card, OpenGL
Network Feature: Yes
3D Support: OpenGL
Mac OS X Compatible: No
Retail Price: $19.99
Availability: Out Now
Rating: E
[Editor's Note: Bill originally reviewed this game on his own, but I wouldn't have been able to sleep at night with him thinking he had to suffer through this on his own. Therefore, I played the game myself, and have added my comments in blue throughout the review.]
Wow. Barely two weeks into 2002 and already we have the dumbest game of the year. Don't get me wrong: I'm not one of those people who'll berate someone for being a fan of reality TV shows [I am.]. After all, it was writers who were ultimately responsible for Pink Lady and Jeff [Nah, I'll wager it was producers. Not a lot of writing going on on that show.].
I watched episodes of the original Survivor [I didn't.], and was intrigued to watch a group of attractive, tight-buttocked Gen-Xers be ultimately outwitted by a stoutish middle-aged guy. Certainly an ending no studio would have come up with. [My problem with the show is that you knew they were going to survive. If they'd released some lions in the camp or had some eccentric millionaires hunting them down, then perhaps it would've entertained me.] And if you, too, enjoyed watching Survivor, then this could be the game for you, for it effectively recreates the experience of watching Survivor.
In Survivor, you take the part of one member of a group of two teams. You are "stranded" on an island with limited means of nourishment, and made to take part in various challenges which will alternately give the winning team an item to make their stay a little easier [Peaches! Yes!], or force the losing team to boot the least popular member off the island. The last one left gets a cool million, tons of endorsement deals, and becomes the joke of the month on NBC's Today show, until they can book you and Katie Couric can shamelessly lick your boots. Oh, while I'm thinking of it: Ann Curry, get bent.
So the premise: win challenges, remain popular, get everybody else kicked off. On TV, it was interesting to watch these "regular," albeit mostly attractive, people push themselves physically, and survive by their wits. I mean, they ate rat on national television! How cool is that? [Yeah, that's what I call entertainment. People eating rat. Give this show a 24-hour cable channel!] On the Mac, however, it plays like a less interactive version of the Sims. How much less? In the first fifteen minutes of gameplay, I controlled my character for like, two minutes; I kid you not [He's really not.].
You begin a game "day" by picking what, if anything, you're going to do to help your tribe survive. Options include water carrier, fire tender, hunter/gatherer and the like [The box states you can play characters and locales from either of the first two seasons, but the game disagrees. Currently, only the first season is available, I guess. We can only hope it stays that way.]. I thought I'd be a water carrier, since my character was relatively strong and the water was close by. Once the work section began, however, I was at a loss on how to control my character. She just started walking and nothing I tried--arrow keys, mouse clicks, WASD, nothing--changed her course. She then paused to pick up a water bottle, changed course, walked to the river [...which looks oddly like the sewage system in level two of Dark Forces], filled the water bottle, and walked back. Yes, you don't even control what your character does to help in the daily survival. You can, however, click on the other tribe members mincing around and talk with them, using a list of pre-generated questions/statements, like "What's up with Jeff?" "I'd give anything for a pizza!" and "Well, got to go to work." I'm not sure if this was supposed to recreate Richard's Machiavellian maneuvering of the first series or an AOL chat room circa 1996 [I theorized this may be more interesting with real people, rather than AI, but you're still limited to the preprogrammed questions, for the most part.].
After three thrilling real-time minutes of that [Yea, how I pine for the days of Intellivision football when three minutes lasted thirty seconds.], you move into the first challenge, which is for a prize, like matches, blankets, or a blurry blue dot to cover up random unattractive body parts. The second challenge determines whether your team or the others will lose a member that night. On television, the challenges were fiendish and disgusting, pushing human beings to their physical and moral limits. On the computer, you have to click a mouse every fifteen seconds or so. Take for instance, a race where you have to pull a log for the first leg, then run unburdened for the second. You have a control for how much effort you put into it, and an exhaustion meter which slows you down. The game advises you to go for "slow and steady," but I [We.] found that by running my [Our.] character to the point of a minor stroke and then stopping cold, I [We.] finished the race with such a lead that I [We.] literally couldn't see anyone behind me [Us.]. Or another test where you travel down the river in a canoe, shooting targets with an arrow. Fine, okay, except that the graphics got so clunky that the target would disappear into the hill it was sitting on as I adjusted my shot [In my case, I quite often couldn't even turn far enough to see reach the target. I could see it on the side of the screen, but I wasn't able to face it.]. And most aggravating of all, a test where you run a small maze and then try to guide other characters through it, only they turn around and run the other way, even though the exit is in their line of sight!
More than half the game is completely noninteractive. Between challenges and days you get brief video clips from the show of marsupials and people in Speedos [All of which look worse than a TV show from 1972 pulled in with rabit ears.], and I mean between every single challenge and every stinkin' day. But those fly by. Wait till you get to what was the dramatic pinnacle of the TV show; the Tribal Council, where members are voted off. Here, the programmers stumble badly. It begins with a non-skippable helicopter shot of the cliff where the vote will take place. The camera spins around this complexly-rendered shot while simultaneously zooming into the interior of a fire-lit circle. Needless to say, this takes a lot of processing. I got up and cleaned my living room while I waited for the sequence to finish. I'm not kidding. I tested this on my wife's iBook 300 MHz, and every time we went to council, my apartment got substantially cleaner. And I'll grant you, there may be Macs which would render it faster [Mine did. No problems here.], but is anyone with a 800MHz G4 going to buy a game like this [Only if we have to review it.]? People with ultimate gaming machines are playing Unreal Tournament and Balder's Gate, people with iMacs are the ones going for the "family games" based on TV game shows.
Adding insult to injury, once you get to the Council sequence, what happens? You watch your character walk (again, with much camera tracking to slow it down to a crawl) to the voting stone. It took, honestly, five minutes altogether. Then you vote by clicking on a name, and it's over. Then the day begins all over [And get this; if you get voted off, no worries. Just close and relaunch the game, and you're right back to the beginning of the same episode. Rethink your strategy, talk to a couple different people, and see if the seemingly random votes aren't now cast in your favor.].
Survivor isn't much fun to play, and it isn't much fun to look at. The competitors look so much like Sims that I can't help but wonder if they used the same engine. I'm not sure, since I couldn't set anyone on fire or convince them to have a lesbian love affair. I'll show you a Survivor! But even the backgrounds are rendered weakly, and, of course, you can't explore it anyway. Your character goes only where she's supposed to, whether on a river, racing down a hill, or looking for food [Food you never see, I should add. The characters jab their spears at nothing, they cook nothing, and they eat nothing. It's like a tea party for grown-ups, which is probably the next evolutionary step...make-believe reality television!].
So let's compare Survivor with a classic computer game with a similar
theme, Oregon
trail:
Survivor
Oregon Trail
Winner
Goal
Survive treacherous outback of Australia (rendered in two
colors out of 1,000,000 possible choices)
Survive treacherous frontier of America (rendered in two
colors out of two possible choices)
Oregon Trail
Reward
One million smackers.
Arrive in Oregon.
Survivor
Combat
Shoot targets for points from canoe with arrows, provided they don't
spontaneously disappear. Do not get to shoot Colby.
Shoot deer for food by hitting space bar. Can pretend they are Colby.
Oregon Trail
Stacey
Stacey
No Stacey
Oregon Trail
Survivor is an example of the dark side of a product license. Whereas some precious few turn out like the D&D-inspired Baldur's Gate series or the even more pleasantly surprising Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, more often than not they're quickly-produced and poorly thought-out [Sort of like all the Survivior clones.], made simply to get them out the door and capitalize on the name recognition of the tie-in product. Starship Creator Deluxe, anyone?
Even if you're a huge fan of Survivor, the TV series, I won't recommend this game. You're better off buying the far better game The Sims, which will give you much more of what you really loved: the mind jobs. Heck, you can even download better-looking characters.
Review: Survivor: The Ineractive Game
I watched episodes of the original Survivor [I didn't.], and was intrigued to watch a group of attractive, tight-buttocked Gen-Xers be ultimately outwitted by a stoutish middle-aged guy. Certainly an ending no studio would have come up with. [My problem with the show is that you knew they were going to survive. If they'd released some lions in the camp or had some eccentric millionaires hunting them down, then perhaps it would've entertained me.] And if you, too, enjoyed watching Survivor, then this could be the game for you, for it effectively recreates the experience of watching Survivor.
You begin a game "day" by picking what, if anything, you're going to do to help your tribe survive. Options include water carrier, fire tender, hunter/gatherer and the like [The box states you can play characters and locales from either of the first two seasons, but the game disagrees. Currently, only the first season is available, I guess. We can only hope it stays that way.]. I thought I'd be a water carrier, since my character was relatively strong and the water was close by. Once the work section began, however, I was at a loss on how to control my character. She just started walking and nothing I tried--arrow keys, mouse clicks, WASD, nothing--changed her course. She then paused to pick up a water bottle, changed course, walked to the river [...which looks oddly like the sewage system in level two of Dark Forces], filled the water bottle, and walked back. Yes, you don't even control what your character does to help in the daily survival. You can, however, click on the other tribe members mincing around and talk with them, using a list of pre-generated questions/statements, like "What's up with Jeff?" "I'd give anything for a pizza!" and "Well, got to go to work." I'm not sure if this was supposed to recreate Richard's Machiavellian maneuvering of the first series or an AOL chat room circa 1996 [I theorized this may be more interesting with real people, rather than AI, but you're still limited to the preprogrammed questions, for the most part.].
More than half the game is completely noninteractive. Between challenges and days you get brief video clips from the show of marsupials and people in Speedos [All of which look worse than a TV show from 1972 pulled in with rabit ears.], and I mean between every single challenge and every stinkin' day. But those fly by. Wait till you get to what was the dramatic pinnacle of the TV show; the Tribal Council, where members are voted off. Here, the programmers stumble badly. It begins with a non-skippable helicopter shot of the cliff where the vote will take place. The camera spins around this complexly-rendered shot while simultaneously zooming into the interior of a fire-lit circle. Needless to say, this takes a lot of processing. I got up and cleaned my living room while I waited for the sequence to finish. I'm not kidding. I tested this on my wife's iBook 300 MHz, and every time we went to council, my apartment got substantially cleaner. And I'll grant you, there may be Macs which would render it faster [Mine did. No problems here.], but is anyone with a 800MHz G4 going to buy a game like this [Only if we have to review it.]? People with ultimate gaming machines are playing Unreal Tournament and Balder's Gate, people with iMacs are the ones going for the "family games" based on TV game shows.
Survivor is an example of the dark side of a product license. Whereas some precious few turn out like the D&D-inspired Baldur's Gate series or the even more pleasantly surprising Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, more often than not they're quickly-produced and poorly thought-out [Sort of like all the Survivior clones.], made simply to get them out the door and capitalize on the name recognition of the tie-in product. Starship Creator Deluxe, anyone?