Niagara Motel - The Game Review
Niagara Motel - The Game is an advergame promoting the upcoming Niagara Motel movie. The game arms the player with a stapler and instructs you to staple the $#!% out of Kevin Pollack.
What I liked: The integration of voice overs and scenes from the movie gives players a good idea of what to expect from the film. It also allows players to interact with the movie character in a new interesting way. How many other places can you go to shoot staples into Kevin Pollack’s head?
What I didn’t like: The performance of this game is horrible and makes the game nearly unplayable. There’s not a whole lot going on in the scene but for some reason it becomes very stuttery every time a staple is fired, and extremely slow when you actually hit Kevin Pollack. In the end this actually worked to my advantage as I was able to click repeatedly on his head and rack up a huge score while the game nearly froze up.
Along those lines while my final score was in the thousands, the game over screen only displays the last 3 score digits so I’m not sure exactly what my final score actually was.
Overall: This game could be really great. It is a unique idea, and could easily become something that people send around to their friends. As it is however the execution is holding this back. Users with even an average machine are going to find the game largely unplayable which is too bad, because its a fun idea, and otherwise pretty well done.
(Thanks Dave for the link)
Update: It looks like Dave and the Twisted Image team have addressed many of these issues and posted a new version that plays much better at staplekevin.com
This entry was posted on Friday, September 16th, 2005 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Gaming, Advergame reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 19th
2005 at 6:14 pm
Hi Brian,
Thanks for your candid and constructive feedback. We took your comments into consideration, and have further optimized the game for better performance. We also addressed the final score display issue. After some further testing, we feel the game play has been greatly improved. We hope you will think so too.
We appreciate your feedback. Fuel Games are a leader in the Flash games space, and your input is valuable from a peer perspective. We loook forward to any comments that you may have with regards to the new version.
BTW: you can check out the game at its new home: http://www.staplekevin.com
Thanks again,
Dave
September 20th
2005 at 9:06 am
Yes, the game performance is much much better now. It’s very smooth on my machine, and should be quite playable on slower machines. It definitely changes the gameplay mechanic a bit when Kevin doesn’t freeze every time you hit him