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Chef's Luv Shack (Dreamcast) When does a sucky, crapass piece of shovelware not suck? That's the Zen koan pondered by Chef's Luv Shack, a bastard child of You Don't Know Jack with a little Mario Party thrown in that somehow manages to be a good time with a group of people despite being designed and programmed by a bunch of lobotomized monkeys. CLS uses the Dreamcast's WindowsCE environment to allow one guy to port the PC version in about a week, and it shows. Big load times. No DC features. No memory card support. No nothing. The game mechanics are so You Don't Know Jack it isn't even funny, with pressure rounds, zany category names, and the ability to "shaft" your fellow players. Of course, there aren't that many questions, and they're not that wacky, really. Then, every once in a while you get to play a mini-game. Most of these are South Park versions of classic games, like Frog Toss, Parachute, Galaga, Asteroids, Super Sprint, etc. They're fun enough, but there's a fatal flaw. Not all the games are set up for four-player play. There's at least one that's two-player only (Asses in Space) and quite a few that are one-player only, and the only way you'll see THOSE in anything other than a one-player game is if they happen to come up randomly. Which means there's some games you play a lot, and others you almost never play. I've played half a dozen games myself, and I still haven't seen "Bad Kitty". Despite all that, you get some people together and pop that in, and they somehow manage to have fun. Even people who've played a lot of videogames. Whether that's due to the license, the fundamental nature of four-player party games, or what, I don't know, but it works. Enough. Barely. |