Mad Dog McCree (3DS eShop) Review

Mad Dog Crap –

This is a really, really terrible game and you should definitely not play it.  In fact, you should stay as far away from this game as possible and the five seconds you wasted of your life reading these two sentences is already too much time talking about this game.

Ok, there.  I saved you the trouble and you do not have to waste any more time concerning yourself about this game.  However, keep reading if you care to know why this game is a piece of garbage.

Mad Dog McCree was originally released as a laser disc title back in the early 90’s and has been ported to many other systems.  The kicker behind this game was the live action video; this might have been cool for about 10 minutes back in the early 90’s but doesn’t hold up well in today’s modern age.  Like playing a movie from a first person perspective, the player wanders into a town and uses a lightgun to shoot villains in an old western setting.  But since this is the 3DS version, the stylus is used navigate and attack instead of a lightgun.

The story is awful and really doesn’t make sense.  You apparently are just some dude walking down the street but yet this random stranger is forced to save a town from bandits, release the mayor from a prison cell and recue his ugly daughter.  Why should the player risk his life for this Podunk town and some ugly chick?  But even if you look through the ridiculous plotline, there is no ignoring the laughable live acting…  And this is laughable for all the wrong reasons.

Mad Mad McCree actually has very little user input and can barely even qualify as a game.  On a rare occasion, the player is tasked at shooting the bad guys that appear on screen.  But this 3DS port really has no consistency with its control scheme.

The video, aka the game, takes place on the top screen while the player moves the stylus on the bottom screen to aim a cursor.  Once the target has been lined up, the player shoots by tapping a shoulder button then can reload by tapping the shoulder button without depressing the stylus.  Aiming, however, has a mind of its own.  No matter where you touch the touch screen, the cursor always snaps back to the middle of the screen. But this cursor centering feature is not used when navigating the game’s initial bland menu screen.  The consistency in the controls is wonky at best and immediately frustrates. Making matters worse, the bottom screen is much smaller than the top screen so navigating the crosshairs to the top screen is never accurate because of the different screen proportions.

Even if you don’t mind suffering through the broken control scheme, the gameplay is just piss poor.  By the time you realize that you actually have to shoot someone, you will already be dead.  I also think the game is buggy because I was shot on more than one occasion after I killed the bad guys; the hit detection also seems random. Then the player has to sit through the grave keeper’s repeated bad dialog.  Hell, even the local leaderboard system doesn’t seem to work; only after I played the game a few times did it ask me to input my initials.

The best thing about this game is probably the video compression.  It looks pretty good but the downside is the file size – this game is going to take up a good chunk of your limited SD card storage space.  However, there is no 3D option.  That’s right – a downloadable 3DS game that has no stereoscopic 3D functionality whatsoever! The sound is also too quiet and I had to turn up the volume to max to hear anything.

Mad Dog McCree is not a good game.  At all.  The broken control scheme, the unreasonable story line, the lack of 3D, and the overall lack of excitement and user input makes this one of the worst games available for download on the 3DS, if not THE worst.  The only benefit that players will get out of playing this game is to learn what a genuinely bad game is.  Students at DigiPen and FullSail should be required to play this game to learn what NOT to do when designing a game.

Worse Than: pretty much everything else in life

Also Try: holding your excrement for 5 days

Wait For It: Point Blank 3D

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By: Zachary Gasiorowski