Crossover # 8: Hellboy Asylum Seeker
Long before Hellboy was popular enough to garner a high-quality game with a big budget behind it (thank you, Guillermo Del Toro), he was a part of a cult comic with a small but rabid fanbase. For some reason, though, he was deemed worthy of a video game that went by, depending on its release location, Hellboy: Dogs of the Night, Hellboy, or (as it was here in the States) Hellboy: Asylum Seeker. Dreamcatcher Interactive, which was still a small publishing company at the time, pulled its typical fast one on the gaming audience by polishing a turd until it looked golden and then dropping it on store shelves.
Cryo Studios, which began its life as Dark Horse Interactive, was the developer behind the 3rd person shooter on the PC and Playstation. Sadly, the Playstation version of the game sat in development hell for a total of four years and featured embarrassingly dated graphics, the same bugs that plagued the game's earlier PC incarnation, and embarrassingly awkward controls. It was too bad, too, that the game itself was such a pain to play, as the story was good enough to be straight out of one of Mignola's comics: in 1962, Hellboy is sent on a mission to Czechoslovakia to find a missing colleague. A strategic error finds both Big Red and his partner, Sarah, in a creepy insane asylum where they discover one of the inmates is trying to open a gateway to one of those Very Bad Places which will let all sorts of unspeakable nasties cross over into our world and make us watch every Uwe Boll movie ever. Or something. I don't know, I never really got that far into the game because it was so broken.
As you've probably guessed, this week's Crossover isn't so much of a recommendation as it is a warning to keep away from this steaming pile of shoddy programming. I wouldn't be surprised if Dreamcatcher tries to market its leftover copies as somehow being connected to either the film franchise or the upcoming game from Konami and Krome Studios. Hopefully, when they try it, they'll get pimp-slapped by Ron Perlman while he's wearing the Right Hand of Doom.
Boy of Tomorrow
Posted to Comics on 13 June 2007
Other stuff like this: asylum seeker, crossover, dark horse comics, guillermo del toro, hellboy, mike mignola, right hand of doom, ron perlman
