Total Overdose

The reason Total Overdose kind of works on me is that it's so stupid that sometimes it's stupidly funny. Roam around the actually quite small and load-time-ridden areas of the game and you can uncover literally hours of amusement helping it to cock up in creative fashion. One of my favourite early adventures I've dubbed Car Juggle. You stand in the really GTA-esque road and wait for one of the really GTA-esque cars to stop, really GTA-esque, just in front of you. You then fire your gun, really GTA-esque (getting this bit yet? Good, I'll stop) into its bonnet and it suddenly goes to race off - directly at you. You will be struck and bounced about 10 feet ahead of it. It will continue to drive at you and with each collision you'll be tossed back up in the air. If you try you can keep juggling yourself for quite a while and - with a modicum of control over your trajectory and car logic that demands they veer onto any given side-road - there's a bit of a challenge to it. My record's now eight juggles, but you usually die around the fourth or fifth unless you've got upgraded health. If you stock up on the one-use Prince of Persia rewind power-ups you can just keep trying it.

The game's full of stupid things like this that make you laugh. You're supposed to have fun by finding (okay one more) really GTA-esque ramps and doing jumps off them, but - and here's where my ramp gag comes in - you can seemingly only do this on prescribed ramps, which aren't so much hidden as bloody everywhere. This isn't a proper physical 3D world like GTA's - if you race up to an angled surface you don't jump off it; you get stopped and your car shudders violently against the incline. Or maybe the back end gets bounced up in the air and you can grind along the wall with your arse inexplicably ten feet off the ground. Brilliant!

When you hit a proper ramp, you fly off it, it cuts to a third-person slow motion camera angle and you then fly through the air. I've seen that before SOMEWHERE. You can go up ramps at weird angles and find yourself propelled off them like it's a fast-moving conveyor belt; and when you land you can probably jam your car in the pavement so the camera shoots through a nearby wall; and you can hit the lamp-posts, but watch out for the yellow ones which are indestructible. It's like Grand Theft Auto designed by the guys who did SOLDNER.

When you're done laughing at the bugs... Actually, I'm not done laughing at them yet. You see hats and heads suspended in the air; you can shoot a guy who's sitting in the cab of a truck until he dies, then for some reason his chest lurches forward like he's had a nasty turn with a xenomorph and he shakes his way violently through the shattered windscreen; the oft-gun-toting general populace flee your campaign of violence by running into walls, falling over, lying there a bit, getting up, leaning casually against the wall, then falling over again, etc. That's if they're not too busy leaping in front of your car and getting knocked miles into the air like bowling pins.

But when you're done laughing at all of that, and it takes a while, you've got the things that game actually intended to play around with, and some of them are genuinely fun and amusing. The running-up-walls and leaping-around-in-slow-mo stuff is okay, but being able to headshot someone and then run under his sombrero as it flutters to the ground and claim it for your own is actually amusing; the random (sigh) really GTA-esque side missions that involve killing men dressed as zombies or wrestlers are passable; the power-ups that give you twin guitar case machineguns are nuts; and the constant points-gathering is actually mildly addictive. On top of that, you can do the story missions. You'll have to suffer the characters, but you'll get to blow lots of things up. Lots of things. And you'll get to shoot people in creative fashion.

It's not particularly funny by design ("You sound like my old girlfriend..." ... YEAH! That showed HIM!), but you get to laugh at it and in spite of it often enough for it to be fun, and its unpredictability is practically arresting. Shockingly, it even does a couple of things that the GTA chaps could learn from instead of suing over - the time-rewind feature, regular save points during story missions, and ability to load missions directly from the pause menu, are good things, as is the ability to pick up guns, health packs and the like just by running over them. You also strafe by default instead of squirreling like Carl Johnson, and you auto-target properly. That works.