A Shit Game I Love: Small Soldiers

There is no rhyme or reason to this, but everyone has one of these guilty gems hidden away from the rest of the world. Everyone. I'm not sure if its something buried within us that connects with unparalleled bad design but I digress. Mine in this case was shared with my cousin and was Small Soldiers for the original Playstation.

This game was plagued with bad design, sparse levels, shoddy AI and was an absolute blast in multi-player. This was odd because the multilayer levels only supported two players yet the levels were large enough for Sixteen – definitely way beyond the lowly PS1's power capability. So the inexplicably large levels resulted in the two of us running away, gathering a suitable array of weapons, joining in a quick skirmish, death, rinse-lather-repeat.

The beauty in these games is finding that one thing that everyone hates, doesn't work, is totally broken and yet you love. In Small Soldiers' case its the 'helper' system. On each of the levels for each main character there is a pet that can be deployed.. For Archer it's normally something from his home planet, for example Ocula which is some kind of eye on legs, and Scratch-it which seems to be some kind of hyperactive piece of cheese that likes to bite things. Chip on the other hand relies on a series of robots – none of which are used in the film and are all severely outclassed by Archers comparatively nimble counterparts. It must be noted that these helpers are nothing short of awful. Chip's helpers Bi-pod in particular was a horrible creation that whilst appearing to have suitable recognition of enemies and the ability to traverse a large amount of terrain nobody thought to program this robot to walk and shoot simultaneously. As a result the mechanical companion would walk blindly into the firing line in an attempt to line itself up with a target. Here's where it gets good: when hit by fire Bi-pod would do a backflip (yep a backflip) then would proceed to walk back into the firing line again and again until its inevitable defeat.

Erratic behaviour of the pets gave the game a lot of charm however. One of Archer's pets Stench would on very rare occasions flip out and become infested with a new set of powers and invulnerability, this was not a game mechanic merely a glitch. An awesome glitch. Furthermore every once in a while the helper would run off in a random direction. Often we would team up to chase down the stray pet in the completely oversized levels. This was made ever more exciting by the fact that the draw distance was all of five feet. Literally everything around you was a fog of war and meant continuous running into a mossy-brown wall. Beautiful stuff.

This fog meant that when running into battle – often down a very large, empty, blue cavern – you would see nothing until moments before coming face to face with your enemy meaning strategy and planning were key. Battles consisted of standing opposite one another and strafing back and forth until one dropped, bland you think? You ain't seen nothing yet. In some of the larger (than large) levels metal walkers that fired some fireball-esc things were available, no strafing was available in this particular vehicle so fights were reduced to walking towards each other before standing still to shoot each other. The loser was killed by one shot from the fireball out of mech and so was dead before he hit the ground.