2 reviews liked by Chekko


This game taught me the word 'fuck.'

I first played Scarface: The World Is Yours on the PS2 at age 8, and I have memories of shocked guests (except for the one cool uncle who knew the movie) watching this kid play a game that yelled the F-word every 5 seconds. I have never finished this game, and I never will. I've tried a few times (a couple of years after my parents finally took away the PS2 version's disc, I burned this game onto a blank DVD to play it again), but after another day of giving it the old college try, I'm done.

It's incredible how our child selves overlooked flaws because we were just happy to have games to play. I used to think Scarface was a better GTA game than the actual GTAs, because you could go into buildings and have conversations with NPCs on the street and do vehicular combat and piss in trash cans and swim (I wasn't aware San Andreas had swimming).

Playing it as a grown man, I can see how shallow Scarface: The World Is Yours really is. If there was ever an AI-generated video game, this is what it would look like. Most of the aforementioned conversations are just you and an NPC speaking random lines at each other; the missions are repetitive and require grinding of randomly generated sidequests before you get a crumb of story; the world is designed to be faithful to the setting rather than fun to navigate. Almost all back streets have dead ends, and cars can't climb over anything. Forcing the player to stay on the road makes car chases a bore and evading the police a chore.

It's all very faithful to the movie, to a fault. The game quotes the film's classic lines into memehood. Tony Montana feels like a cartoon with Alzheimer's disease as his monologues are lifted wholesale from the film to be re-dubbed here by an impressive soundalike - Al Pacino couldn't reprise his role after one too many cigars.

If you do want to check out this curiosity piece, try the PS2 version. The PC port is bad and buggy. You've probably seen the famous glitch where Tony's head isn't attached to his body if you're playing on anything newer than Windows XP. Sometimes you're forced to restart missions because the vehicle required to do them doesn't spawn. The graphics miss details that were present in the PS2 version, such as Tony's jacket getting soaked with blood as he takes damage. I played this game with a fan-made 'remastered' patch, plus half a dozen other fixes duct-taped together to give the fucking thing controller support and better performance. It still wasn't very good.

There was more effort put into Scarface: The World Is Yours than most licensed games, but it's no Batman: Arkham City. It has a lot to do, but it makes you do it so often it gets tiresome. It hastily rewrites the ending to one of my favourite films, and proves that being in a licensed game is a fate worse than death. I will always be somewhat fond of this game because of the childhood memories, but now the rose-tinted aviator sunglasses are off.

Manolo, choot this piece of chit.

The fact that this is even remember positively, let alone considered a "timeless masterpiece", endlessly eludes me to this day. Even as a child, I could tell just how shit Petscop was. I wish I could type paragraphs upon paragraphs about how terrible it is, but there is genuinely so little depth that I can barely type a few sentences.

To give you the full picture; in Petscop, there is only one level. And said level has maybe 4 or 5 one minute dead-brained puzzles. That's it. No other levels. No extras menu. No easter eggs. That is ALL of content in this game. Anything else is either unfinished menu options or scrapped pets (which are all left in the game and do nothing).

The only reason I can conjure up that this unfinished, buggy mess of a game is so beloved is either 1. it's one big ironic joke that I'm out of the loop of, 2. I somehow received an unfinished build of the game, but judging by a YouTube video I skimmed through, I don't think that's the case, or 3. some people for some reason REALLY love the visuals, music, and general aesthetic of the game. The ladder is the only case in which I can understand liking this game, but even then, why not give your attention to other actually good, well crafted games instead of this shovelware scam game?

I do not recommend this game under any circumstance. Life is short, go obsess over something else.