Looney Toons: ACME Arsenal

This game wasn’t on my radar in the slightest. Then a friend of mine from America contacted me. He is more into achievement hunting than I am – to the point where I have supplied him with a European Xbox 360 to play region-specific games. To be fair, in exchange he gave me a load of region specific games from America, but I still need the specific Xbox to play them.

Anyway, he recently contacted me to ask me to hook him up with some more Euro-zone games. He had a list of 9 games of which I already owned 6. Of the three I didn’t own, Looney Toons was the first one I played as I clearly have to finish all of these games before I send them on to him… right?

I’m not really sure what the ACME Arsenal storyline is despite playing through it in its entirety. You play as Bugs and Daffy and the Martian chap... Foghorn Leghorn and Taz… and Gossamer though I can’t remember what he’s from? And you have to stop some evil thing from doing something with robots.

The gameplay is very basic with a jump button and three different attack buttons that do different things, but the controls are shoddy if I’m being polite about it. The first thing you will notice is that the camera is a fucking pig. For some reason their default camera movement control is left to go right and right to go left. This makes no sense. Not even in-flight simulation games would be that way around. The camera also appears to be a separate entity that gets stuck on walls or behind scenery.

The jump controls are complete shit as the speed and distance of your character jumps are bizarre. This is especially noticeable when playing as Gossamer who is one of the faster characters. You can be running at full speed, and as soon as you press jump, you practically stop like you’ve got hydraulic brakes equipped and don’t jump very high either.

Looks wise, it shows its age for a game released in 2007 and the music is painful to listen to. It’s not traditional Looney Toons music and sounds like a cheap knock off. Even the voice of Bugs is off to point where it’s not charming – it’s just horrible to listen to.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 44 Achievements

I powered my way through this list, keen as I am to get it off my backlog and off to America.

For playing through the story, you will get 10 achievements. A couple more if you do it in local multiplayer however, I got caught out by this. I was doing it with two controllers and signed in with two profiles however, when I unlocked the last local co-op level related achievement and went to continue in single player, I loaded up my game and found that the last three levels hadn’t saved. It turned out I had saved progress on the second profile as that profile was the lead when I unlocked the achievements.

While I’m on co-op, there are five achievements associated with specific local co-op play. Three are for completing specific levels in co-op but two are a bit different. You must complete a co-op level with two characters wearing superhero outfits. To do this, you must complete the game and also pick up the super suits while playing the story, then replay a level with both characters wearing said suits. This is annoying as you can’t wear costumes until after completing the game. The next one is last achievement I earned and it’s a fucker and mainly down to, shockingly, the game’s controls. You must score an atomic combo of 9. I think this means killing nine enemies at once using a combined attack from both players. However, I say ‘I think’ because it seems to be totally hit and miss as to what counts. I swear I did this five or six times in a room with 13 enemies all of which died only to get a combo of six. It’s like the game doesn’t know its own system. Along with this one, there are three achievements associated with a getting a 6, 9 and 12 combo in single player. I’m pretty sure I lucked out on the last one.

In addition to this, there are a few collectible achievements and three speed runs to do. Two of the speed runs are straight forward but the game doesn’t tell you what the time to beat is. At least I think it doesn’t. The time wasn’t obvious if it was there. Anyway, once you complete the game, Gossamer makes two of these easy. The third is for doing a speed run of a level on a scooter. Another control issue, these levels are essentially vehicle sections but for some bizarre reason, the left trigger is accelerate and the right trigger is shoot… like no other racing game before or after. This speed run requires a very precise route to be taken as any deviation from the route will result in you missing the time by one second. It was incredibly frustrating.

Multiplayer

There are three achievements associated with online play and I only really started this game now because True Achievements were doing a viral week and one of the achievements is for playing with someone who has Bugs’ bug. I still have no idea what Bugs’ bug is or how to get it despite internet searches but the viral session meant that I didn’t have worry about it. I got this one and another for completing a game over Xbox Live. I was also fortunate to meet another gamer who wanted to get the other online achievement… for getting an online atomic combo of 9. That’s right, you have to do the stupid combo thing a total of three times. This was the first of the three combo achievements I did and it took us four hours before the game finally let us have it.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Looney Toons: ACME Arsenal feels like a cheap, rushed attempt at cashing in on the Looney Toons franchise. It’s got a poor story, poor gameplay, poor controls and a glitchy game structure which turns what should be a mildly amusing experience into an episode of frustration. I think it took around 10 hours to get all the achievements based on the fact it took me four working days to get them all. I can’t recommend playing it so I hope my friend knows what he is getting in to.

Battleship (Xbox One)

This was my last selected game prior to the Bean Dive and one that I’m unsure why I added to my collection in the first place.

Battleship is the video game adaptation of the popular board game of the same name. The premise is that you have five ships, your opponent has five ships and you take turns trying to sink each other. There are two modes. Classic – which is the standard board game, and Clash at Sea – where each of your ships have special attacks and you build up resources each turn to use these special attacks.

The main solo campaign is all Cash at Sea and this is where the game reveals itself to be a pile of garbage. All the missions involve having a battle with another fleet with only minor changes from the mission before. You also have to use different fleets with different special attacks but this proves irritating as some of the other fleets have entirely different special moves, some of which are next to useless and cost more resources.

The most painful thing about the campaign is the basic premise of Battleship. The idea of the real game is that your opponent doesn’t know where your ships are – this is made evident in the local multiplayer where the game asks the other player to look away when you are placing your ships. However, the AI has no real way of not knowing where your ships are. This can go one of two ways. For the early missions, the AI becomes fundamentally retarded when it hits your ships and does deliberately crap shots that only a two-year-old would maybe think is a hit. The second way is that they will use a specially attack that hits 12 squares at once… and find four of your ships. This was majorly annoying because if a human player did that it’s total luck but when the AI does it, it knows where your ships are. In the later missions, once the AI finds your ships, it will actually sink them, making the whole game primarily luck based. This is even more true in the notorious mission 24 where you must win receiving half the resources of the AI.

Musically, it’s repetitive and annoying. Graphically, it doesn’t do anything other than irritate you with overtly long cutscenes which play every time you sink a ship, even if you sink more than one ship at once – one cutscene per ship. The other negative thing I noticed was that the load times were excessive, especially when you consider how little there actually is to load.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 16 Achievements

Most of the game’s achievements can be earned by playing through the campaign but as per my earlier comments, this is the most ‘challenging’ part of the game.

You have to play with the different fleet types in the game a certain amount of times and sink 150 enemy ships. If you are winning missions, that’s a minimum of 30 games you have to play. There are 30 campaign missions and 8 tutorial missions so this takes care of itself too. You will need to play some local matches as the Tech Fleet to round this off though.

Outside of the main campaign, you have to play some versus games. There is an achievement for playing a game under Classic rules which doesn’t happen in the campaign so you have to start a versus match to do this. While you are at it, you may as well do a local player versus player match and score ten hits in a row on ships when you know where they are placed, and then win the match. Doing all of this will net you 4 achievements. It’s also worth playing another game with normal rules to get another achievement for revealing all your opponent’s grid squares before winning – made easy when you control both teams.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Battleship was a less than mediocre gaming experience that took me around 10 hours to complete. It would have been less if the AI didn’t luck out and hit four of my ships in one go twice in a row in the final mission. It’s a good one to get on to the completed pile and yet another reason why I shouldn’t just buy games that I see other people playing.