What’s this? An Xbox exclusive ported to GameCube? Cool. That’s about all I knew of this title before I received it. I hadn’t played either version before, nor had I even read a review. So I was as open-minded as could be.

Threw it in, was given the choice between 2 hot chicks (Dragon Adventure), or Elton John and a slender Asian man (Spy Story). Tough choice. Jumped right into the first mission. After a horribly compressed FMV, the mission was basically ramming enemy cars to blow them up before the time limit. Seems simple enough.

Starting up the mission, I noticed the lovely 60 frames per second and the very “Crazy Taxi” Arcade feel of the game. Nice. Tipped my car on the first turn, but soon got a hang of the controls. Blew the guys up and got a silver medal.

This is where I knew the game would get me. HOW DO I GET A GOLD. (I use caps there because I actually screamed that when I got a silver - heh). I’m such a completist gamer. So I try it again, and notice there’s also a sub-mission of hitting 150 things to get the gold. Did it 2 more times, and got the gold. Whew.

Then I see there’s a Hard and bonus version of that same mission. Well I must do this!!! I must’ve sat there for another 20 minutes just to complete it on hard and get a gold for that. The bonus mission was 30 minutes long, a “going through the whole city” mission to find 16 hidden boxes. It was mind numbing, but I did it. It took me an entire hour, but whaddya know, I finished the entire first mission all golds and bonus.

At this point, my impression was very good. It’s extremely fun to run over pedestrians and guardrails. The instinct to destroy is pretty fun. And this whole medal system works on “Sheep-Gamers” like me. I have to 100% complete games.

So I move on to Mission 2, get gold on both difficulties, but the bonus is going to take quite a bit of practice so I, just move to mission 3. I complete it on easy, but needed to stop out of pure exhaustion. Playing for like 3 or 4 hours and it was late.

I pick it up the following morning, and it says there’s no save data on my memory card. ?!?!?!? You ready for this? In order to save this game, you have to go to the main menu and hit OPTIONS, then select “Save Current Game State”. How on earth doesn’t this game have a simple auto-save feature? So I spent the entire day getting back what I had lost, saving, and then playing Metroid. I was pissed. Stereo or mono is an option – saving is expected. (Sigh)

I finally came back to it and whizzed through the remaining missions on easy. It does get more difficult, but that’s not why I didn’t try to complete it 100%: It also gets mind-numbingly boring. The missions are repetitive in all possible ways. How many times can you bump a car to blow up a gang? It’s fun to mow things down a few times, but there’s no charm in doing it ad infinitum just to receive a medal. It’s like getting gold in Rogue Leader; you have to love the game, because it’s repetitive as hell. Here, the game is only mildly amusing, and there’s very little motivation to get 100%

I mentioned before that I could have also chosen Elton John and the skinny dude: “Spy Story”. This opens up the second half of the game, which you’re lead to believe would be a bit different than the Dragon Adventure. Not at all. Same thing, uglier characters. Heh. Throughout the missions though, they trick you into thinking it’s a little different. “Obtain plutonium from enemy” Which you find means again: ram the car. (Sigh) That’s seriously the whole game; race other cars while destroying guardrails…or just ramming cars.

It’s a fun diversion if you happen to be bored with all the stellar titles available for the GameCube, but otherwise there’s no reason to spend your money on a buy. Definite rent though.