Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis
Platform: Xbox
Aquaman is like a cheap male prostitute that has long passed his prime.
Review by Undead Wes

The history of comic book games has been a rocky one, filled with disappointment after let-down, with only a few shining gems among them. For every X-Men: The Arcade Game, there are five truly putrid manure piles like Ultraverse: Prime for the Sega CD, and far too many Superman 64s. The challenge in transferring an already established license to a foreign medium must be great. Of course, that difficulty is surely magnified when a developer has to deal with a character that is so ridiculous and so stupid that it can’t even be done well in its native world of comic books.

Aquaman is one such character.

You may remember him as the orange, scaly-sweatered hero of comic lore who fought crime by talking to fish. You might not remember the surly, mullet-clad Aquaman who rules the extremely boring Atlantis with an iron fishing lure. Guess which one you get to play as in the game!

In 2002, TDK Mediactive, for whatever reason, came to the decision that Aquaman was a valuable license, and that featuring him in a game would bring them enough profits to justify wasting months of some developers’ time working on this project. And poor Lucky Chicken Games, they were actually faced with the task of taking this useless, faggy dickhead, and turning him into a majestic, powerful, kingly dickhead. The prospect proved insurmountable.

In the beginning of the game, you are treated to dressed-up in-game stills that are presented in small squares or rectangles of varying size on the screen. You know, to give you that real comic book feel. All the dialogue is even text inside balloons! Of course, the layout of the squares is about as creative as your typical Sunday Cathy strip, with shoddy lettering that sometimes over the edge of the speech balloons. It’s too bad there aren’t any scenes where Aquaman discusses how fat he is and how he really loves chocolate!

So, the story starts with Aquaman hanging with his homies in the highfalutin’ throne room, talking about their royal duties or something, when Grandpa, with an extraordinarily silly grin on his face, warns him of imminent danger coming to the city. Then the Pink Puffcake Brigade’s Captain appears, telling Aquaman that villains are attacking the city! Thanks for the advance notice, Grandpa.

Thus, the gameplay begins. The first thing you are going to notice, probably, is his beautiful golden mane, to which Lucky Chicken paid a strangely large amount of attention to animating. His hair looks more like an 80’s rocker’s poofy tresses than a broody dark hero’s. You see, they decided that they were going with the early 90’s redesign of Aquaman, which gave him a full beard, long hair, and a shirt of armor that completely covers one arm and one side of his chest, lovingly crafted to reveal a lone, supple breast on the other. He also has a golden cybernetic morphing hook on his left wrist that proves mostly useless in the actual game. For instance, the only level where it becomes practical(and really, this is only barely), is one in which you are firing the hook to grab bombs from buildings, bring them to you, then throw them, at which time they will explode. This is Aquaman’s method of disarming explosives. Never you mind their trajectory. It doesn’t matter. You can throw the bombs directly at the building upon which they were planted. However, if you do not get all of the bombs in time they will blow up, taking out, well, nothing. And then you have failed the mission. Not because they toppled buildings and killed millions; It’s just that Aquaman is just REALLY offended by ineffective bombs. That’s understandable, though; insufficient munitions are just tacky. Other than that level, the hook hand is generally useless, even in battle. In fact, no button or combination of buttons will cause the hook to do anything in direct combat. If you are lucky, though, as you approach an enemy, you may lock onto him, and if you react quickly enough, you can fire your hook ensnaring the villain and drawing him near. You know, for kissing. It remains a mystery, though, where our hero keeps the rope that tethers the hook when he sends it off. His arm is still flesh and bone.

Speaking of the combat, this is one of the weakest and easiest aspects of the game. In order to fend off the hordes of Black Manta’s scuba diver army, you must master the art of tapping the hold button over and over again. This is a surefire tactic for about the first 8 or 9 missions, and still your trusty fall back for the next 5 or so. You may also press the left shoulder button to blow big, pink smoke rings, which signals any nearby dolphin or shark to materialize and head butt your enemies into oblivion. You may only do that 3 times, sadly. After that, the animals of the ocean are tired of helping you, and they pretend like they are not home when you call. If you would like to fully utilize the fighting system, you are free to learn any of the button combos, ranging from 2-button combinations to 8 and beyond. Of course, this is terrifically intuitive.

The only variation from fighting the over 11 different enemy types over and over again lies with the submarine fighter missions. The first time you introduced to one of these, you are given a shot of Aquaman sitting in the cockpit, wearing his SOCOM headset, trash-talking his friends and yelling at his mom for chocolate milk issuing orders to his men.

These missions are actually playable, and one might even call them fun, but beware this trap! By this point, you’ve been playing the normal game for long enough that you may have forgotten what a fun game is like, and indeed, you may find these free-flying portions to be reason enough to continue playing the game. Lucky Chicken are clever, indeed!

Now, while this has not been confirmed, it would seem that the game actually rewards you for shooting down your wingmen. In fact, as I played the first of these missions, I was zealously going for my compatriots, because that’s what you do in these games, and upon shooting one of them down, the mission ended abruptly. This is a wonderfully acceptable feature of the game. Nintendo should take notes for their next Star Fox game, provided that Slippy is again a returning character.

Later in the game, you fight with lava trolls! That’s right, under the ocean, you do battle with creatures made of lava. Their abilities include having the same animation set as the previous scuba diver villains, being on fire under water, and throwing balls of molten lava at you. The lava trolls are after you because somehow, Black Manta’s massive armies of up to 50 scuba divers managed to steal a bunch of subs and attack the lava people, under the ocean, where they live. You know, in water.

Soon, of course, you have to fight the Lava King in his palace at the bottom of the sea, where, naturally, a lava race would be residing. He is really, really big, which is why he is the king, and he therefore takes a lot longer to defeat. It requires true mastery of mashing the hold button to defeat him, as well as some strategic 8-button combos. He is actually a little hard, because, as you are fighting him, he is constantly blocking you or trying to grab you, while two of his minions take cheap shots. Additionally, since you can only fight one guy at a time, only switching between targets with the digital pad, you may die once or twice before defeating him. You may also find yourself more and more reluctant to return to this game each time you die, until it becomes merely a game that you show your friends so they can laugh at Grandpa or the odd pelvis-thrusting idle animation Aquaman has. Obviously, it was a conscious decision on the part of the developers to give him that animation, if only to symbolize the proverbial rape of your wallet, even if the game debuted at 20 dollars. There can be no other interpretation when Aquaman is dressed like a cheap male prostitute that has long passed his prime.

Gameplay: 1/10
Graphics: 6/10
Sound: 4/10
Story: 2/10
Lasting Appeal: 1/10
Final Score: 3/10