South Park: Chefs Luv Shack

And the South Park bandwagon just keeps rollin' on. South Park Rally is due for review next issue (it should actually have been here for review this issue, but it didn't turn up in time) but beating it to the post is Chef's Luv Shack. Just as the first South Park game was more or less Turok 2 in a parka, Chef's Luv Shack is basically Mario Party with swearing.

Chef's Luv Shack is one of those games that's designed to be hauled out and played at parties, but which offers very little appeal for anybody sitting on their own in the living room. If you don't have a warm body at the other end of each of the N64's controller ports, you're not going to be getting a full fun quotient from the game. A quiz show with arcade interludes, Chef's Luv Shack needs a room full of people – preferably South Park fans – to stop it from being almost totally pointless.

Sweet

Up to four people can play, each person choosing from one of South Park's half-pint anti-heroes; Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny. (If you're playing with fewer than four people, the characters that don't get picked yell abuse at you.) As you might guess from the title, Chef is the host of the show, donning an outfit that looks like Steve Buscemi's duds from The Wedding Singer. The format of the show is simple; each round – from two ('quickie') to eight ('hot 'n' heavy') – consisting of three questions, at least one of which will lead to one of the numerous mini-games.

This isn't your typical quiz show. The categories of the questions aren't ones that are likely to pop up on Family Fortunes; some of them include 'Hippie Crap' (questions about the environment, Sixties music and vegetarianism), 'Limeys And Teabags And Frogs, Oh My!' (about the French and us) and 'Firemen' (either men in helmets or, er, the part of a man's anatomy with a helmet). There are well over 30 different categories in all, some of which have a very American slant, but this doesn't cripple the game like it did in Jeopardy! because you can usually take a reasonable guess at the answer.

Questions appear in a quickfire format – the first person to hit their button gets to choose one of four possible answers within a short time limit. Get it right and you win 500 points, get it wrong and you lose the same amount. Occasionally, a 'double down' question pops up where one player can gamble up to 5000 points that they'll get the answer right – only they can buzz in, but if they answer incorrectly their score will be decimated in seconds. Other events appear at irregular intervals, like the pressure rounds (see boxout) and the rather tedious Wheel Of Fortuitousness, an entirely random and skill-free knock-off of Wheel Of Fortune. The parts of Chef's Luv Shack that provide the most entertainment, though, are the mini-games, which usually appear at the end of each round in the quiz.

Mr Hankey

There are more than 20 of these little diversions, some designed for one player at once and others which let all four contestants compete against each other. The games range from good (Bad Kitty, Asses In Space) to mind-numbing (Tug-O-War, Chicken Lover) but in general they provide some amusement – the amount increases with the number of players and your degree of love for South Park. All the games are quite simple, rarely needing more than one button and the D-pad to play. Some of them are almost identical to games in Mario Party, though – Chicken Lover is practically cloned from Party's Shell Game, and there are some mini-games that are old Game & Watch titles with added obscenities.

If you're playing with a group of friends who are into South Park, Chef's Luv Shack is a riot for the first few times you play it. After this, the mini-games get a bit too familiar and the questions start repeating themselves. If you're playing it with just one other person it loses much of its appeal, and if you're playing it on your own... well, you really need to leave the house more often and find some friends! The games aren't as imaginative or varied as in Mario Party, and while some people will prefer Kenny and co's fart gags and crassness (this is the first, and almost certainly only, N64 game ever to feature the word 'scrotum') to the cuteness of Mario Party, ultimately it's not as good a game. Blockbuster will probably do well renting it, but it won't last long if you actually buy it.

South Park Cable Access welcomes you to Chef's Luv Shack, the sexiest, sultriest, most soulful game show on earth. This month, our previews not one but two new South Park titles for N64. (Nobody can accuse Acclaim of letting a perfectly good license go to waste...) While South Park Rally is a Mario Kart-style racer, South Park: Chef's Luv Shack is an irreverent game show parody that tests your knowledge of South Park, pop culture and Leonard Maltin.

While the rules are similar to Jeopardy, the categories--Foul Balls, Styx and Twigs, Giant Japanese Monster Bad, Famous Gay Cowboys, etc.--are decidedly more offbeat. Like junior college, the game's questions are all multiple-choice, saving you the agony of typing on an on-screen keyboard. Here's a sample: Male vocalists without balls are known as: Geldings Unichs Castrati Backstreet Boys While we're all in favor of Backstreet Boys bashing, the questions--which were written by Acclaim, not Matt Stone and Trey Parker--are a bit sophomoric and lack the show's comedic edge. Still, you're sure to get the occasional chuckle or two.

On the plus side, Chef's Luv Shack has hundreds of original soundbytes created specifically for the game by Isaac Hayes (the voice of Chef) and South Pork creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker. You also get dozens of multiplayer mini-games, such as Spank the Monkey with Mr. Mackey, Asses in Space with Terrance and Phillip, and Tethered Pheasant Shoot with jimbo and Ned. judging from the screens in the sidebar to the left, the creators seem to know their classic arcade games as well as their South Park Trivia.

And if you're really lucky, you might even get to see Cartman get anal probed! If you're a South Park fan looking for a good multiplayer game to entertain your friends-even those who don't particularly like video games--at your next party, Chef's Luv Sack might be the ticket.

Imagine a large selection of both general knowledge and South Park-based questions presented game-show style and then interspersed with a variety of mini-games a nd you have a rough idea of what this is like. Developed by Acclaim Studios in Austin, Texas, the game is currently scheduled for a November release and is suitably puerile in its humor.

A Simon-esque game called "Spank the Monkey" anyone?

After the crushing disappointment of the idea-free South Park - a flat and ugly shoot-'em-up Jurok engine - the relatively simple ÆÿaÄ Chefs Luv Shack comes as somlMifqc of a surprise. It doesn't try anything special visually - in fact it doesn't try anything special full stop1 - it outright copies Mario Party's mini-games, and it only includes about eight characters from the show. But in all departments, it's far better than South Park.

Perhaps because it does things a whoooole lot simpler, or perhaps because it somehow remains truer to the original show, Chef's Luv Shack is a bit of a winner (and, from what we've seen this issue, better than the intriguingly good, but overly complicated South Park Rally too) - and the best thing about it is, it takes just two - seconds to get the hang of.

It's got Wheel of Fortune, ifs got Jeopardy, it's got Mario Party, ifs got South Park and most importantly, ifs got a barrel-load of spicy swearing. But the question is, is it really worth 40 quid?

If Mario Party was the perfect console board gamet then Chefs Luv Shack is the almost-perfect console pub quiz. Rather than Mazza's dice-rolling, family affair, Luv Shack prefers a first-on-the-buzzers quiz show with a dash of general knowledge and plenty of swearing for when the action lags. What the two games do have in common, though, are their mini games and, like Mazza Party, ifs this part of Luv Shack that works best.

Compared to the 56 that Hudson and Nintendo managed to squeeze into Mario Party, Luv ShadCs paltry 22 mini games look a bit lazy by comparison. Certainly, ifs not long into the game before you're playing the same sub-games again. However, unlike Mazza's slightly more^^ creative way of doing things, a lot of Luv Shades mini games are self-contained challenges in their own right, using age-old retro favourites as templates, and then tweaking them slightly. There's the knee- knockingly tricky Asses in Space, a fantastic Asteroids done with fart gags. Bad Kitty, a Donkey Kong take-off. the Calaxians-a- iike Bees at the Picnic, Scuzzlebutt, which is a bit like one of the old Game and Watches, and Pizza Delivery, a Paperboy- style bike ride. Mention should also go to Mr Mackey's chucklesome Spank the Monkey, where you have to follow his lead as he spanks one of his monkey's four butts. Top.

Undoubtedly, these provide the real meat of the game, though some are as short as 30 seconds, while the three rounds of questions that precede the mini games - whilst often hilariously funny - are really just a run-up to a top grade burst of frantic button-jabbing.

Even so, developers Acdaim-Austin deserve a hearty slap on the back for the sheer amount questions they've managed to cram in. Apparently there are a staggering 800, and although that doesn't stop some repetition kicking at around the two or three-hour mark, there's an enormous amount of variety. The fact that they're also split into three distinct strands - serious. South Park and completely surreal - means there's also an edge to the game, as you're never sure what to expect except that you'll very rarely have to answer the same question twice. Slightly odd. though, is the fact that the questions are divided into about 20 categories, and the category headings have absolutely no bearing on the questions at all. It's not a major criticism by any stretch, but it's bizarre all the same: the category 'Aliens, Asses and Anal Probes', for example, could easily be general knowledge.

If there's a serious problem with Luv Shack, it's that you might be finished with it a bit quicker than you would have liked. The mini games are almost universally brilliant, and generally offer far more of a challenge than Mario Party's, but they're not as dever and. worst of all, there's only half as many as in Nintendo's game. The 22 on offer are great while they last but it won't be long before you're trudging over the same old ground. And, because the mini games are picked at random by the CPU, you often end up playing the same games over and over, while others – Buckeroo and Chickenlover in our case - will hardly appear.

Kind of tied into this is the problem of having to buzz in when questions are being read. It's a fairly simple process in single or two- player games, but when there's a proper multiplayer game underway - and four of you trying to nab the points - too often you're just reduced to buzzing in as early as possible, even before the question has been fully read out, and certainly before you know the answer. Additionally, many of the mini games become just a little too cluttered when there're four of you, and a couple of them - Bees at the Picnic especially - are so obviously one-player games with three other characters shoehorned in.

Conversely, when you're playing Luv Shack in one-player, no other CPU characters play with you, so it's just you on your own. It would have been nice to have at least one of the other kids alongside you. just to add a little extra spice during fidgety rounds of buzzing.

But, even with these problems chalked up, Luv Shak will still make a top grade Chrimbo pressie. It's a triumph of simplicity and design, and offers a significantly different playing experience to Mario Party. In fact, it's the perfect companion piece to Nintendo's game and, as a bonus, has a fabulous South Park 'feel'. As Cartman might say. this kicks ass.