When word came down to me that there was going to be a game based on the Television series “24” I knew I had a candidate for my O.D.O.G. series. Could I complete a game structured around a day in a single day? There would only be one way to find out, I cleared my calendar, bought a frozen pizza and a Fridge Pack of Coke Zero (I’m still waiting for my check, Atlanta!) and sat myself down after having paid to play a game about a show I could watch on TV for free. NOTE: The following contains spoilers, but nothing of the “Aeris dies at the end of disk one” kind of significance….whoops.

00:00- PS2 power on and the game comes to life on my home entertainment system, a pale shadow of the one belonging to Nav, but still no slouch at 36 inches. Sure I still don’t have surround sound, but after a youth of concerts and egregious headphone use, I don’t think I could tell the difference anyway.

00:01- NINE HUNDRED AND TEN Kb for a single game save????? I played DQ7 for 90 hours and it didn’t take up a fraction of that amount on my already seasoned memory cards, and hell if I’m going to abandon the serious man-hours I’ve put into real classics like MSG2 and 3, FFX, FFX-2 and KH 1 and 2. grumble…grumble…grumble.

00:48- Back from the store after a frustratingly lengthy quest to find a new memory card at 7am on a Sunday morning. I won’t even speak aloud the name of the store I had to buy it from, that’s how dirty I feel. Another part of my innocence lost for your entertainment, my loyal riders. (PS: You’re welcome).

00:00- Restarting the clock in the interest of accuracy.

00:02- 6am start for our hero this morning, early start for a long day.

00:04- I cannot believe I have to invert the camera controls! If a programmer never played a single flight sim growing up, I wouldn’t trust him to make a game about basket weaving!

00:07- I think I just shot a guy who was surrendering. Since when do bad guys surrender? You signed up to be a bad guy, take your head shot like a man!

00:13- Bomb disarming minigame is mildly amusing, but how much to do want to bet that I’ll get tried of it by hour 13?

00:57- Now here’s a driving sequence, why am I having a Dead To Rights flashback? Now there was a long game. I’ve got to be careful not to hit any pedestrians, since I’m a good guy in this game and Leavenworth is cold this time of year.

01:18- Ah, the first of no doubt many ‘interrogation’ minigames. At least the avatar Jack Bauer didn’t start this most tense of psychological interlays by shooting the guy in the leg, as he’s want to do in his televised incarnation.

02:37- The tried and true (and tired) sniper mechanic unsurprisingly shows its face for the first time. I decry it, but I’d bet I’d miss it if it weren’t included, its absence would be like a Mega Man game without a conveyer belt. It’s not as interesting as the hostile target tracking by satellite minigame that preceded it.

03:02- It’s now Noon in the game, six hours have passed in ‘real-time’ while only 3 have passed in real-time. Take that Einstein!

03:29- I knew there was a reason why people don’t run down train tracks….ouch.

04:06- Hey is that Stephen Dorff, as the head bad guy? Looks and sounds like him, guest star villain, neat.

04:58- Helicopter boss fights are common in these types of games, aren’t they? I can think of a few off hand: Far Cry, Enter the Matrix, The Adventures of Bayou Billy. The enemy helicopter is to contemporarily set action games as Dragons are to fantasy setting action games. Discuss.

06:37- Stealth missions are always a drag on time and on a game’s momentum, but now I’m sneaking past Monkeys. Really. There are Monkeys in cages that will alert guards if they disturbed. It’s a mad house, a mad house!

06:38- I get caught by the Monkeys, that’s what I get for not Hailing to the Chimp.

07:02- There we go! Jack just shot a guy in the leg before asking any questions. He literally shot first and asked questions later, classy.

07:45- The single greatest justification for controller vibration: an earthquake! Hey, that reminds me, did they ever release Disaster Report in the US?

07:47- The city’s in ruin, but knowing this show, it will be back to normal in 3 hours.

08:01- I have to use the interrogation minigame to keep a guy from shooting the hostage Governor of California. It doesn’t go well, and we discover, to my great disappointment, that he doesn’t have a titanium endoskeleton.

08:25- It’s now 2am in-game time, four hours to the end, unless the spinning of the earth slowed while I wasn’t paying attention to it.

08:52- Another chopper boss fight. What, they couldn’t get a tank?

10:12- The sequence to lock down the enemy base is Yellow-Blue-Green-Red. Someone played Wasteland in their formative years.

11:46- I’ve reached the end, and I’ve killed the evil terrorist mastermind, and sure the Vice-President was almost assassinated in broad daylight, and the Governor of California is dead, and the City of Los Angles is in ruins…but I did save Jack Bauer’s girlfriend…so…Hooray?

So it took me almost 12 hours to complete 24, and physics jokes aside, time definitely felt dilated. 24: The Game tried to do a lot of things and did them all moderately well, but the separation of labor that went in to the shooting, driving and minigame portions were very clear from a quality standpoint. Score a point for actual actors doing VOs, attention publishers: there is a difference. This was a game for fans for the show, and of lousy targeting systems. PS: Credits reveal that it wasn’t Stephen Dorff.

THE RIDE BOARD:

Did You Know: General relativity (GR) is the geometrical theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915. It unifies special relativity and Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation with the insight that gravitation is not viewed as being due to a force (in the traditional sense) but rather a manifestation of curved space and time, this curvature being produced by the mass-energy content of the space-time. (thanks, Wiki!)

From The Vaults: Before 24, and before Splinter Cell, there was Rescue: The Embassy Mission. An NES game ahead of its time. An embassy has been taken over by terrorists and over the course of four stages you job is to liberate it. Sneak to the Embassy site, snipe some easy targets, rappel to the ingress point, and go FPS inside to rescue the hostages. Stealth, sniping and FPS in 1990 played about as well as you’d think it would, but points for ambition. I have fond memories, but probably it’s just the ever-present fog that clouds my past.

This is my stop.

Comments?  Questions?  E-mail me at seth410@gamertransit.com.  Complaints?  Sorry, Time’s Up!

Back of the Bus is © 2006 by Seth “4:10” Robison, used with exclusive permission by gamertransit.com.  Reproduction without permission is prohibited.