Techtite's PC Game Reviews!

"So, you're asking; WAS it worth it? Well, that's the guilty pleasure of it all; destroying over 63 items of Sam's --ranging from priceless museum exhibits to a radio station antenna-- is a lot of fun."

---from the review

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Sidebar :

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The finale factor... Games with good finales get played again; games with gruddy finales, if solved in 30 days or less, get returned or exchanged, to never be played again. That's bad news for Taz: Wanted, which I solved in a mere three days. In case you can't read between the lines, that means the finale sucks. The final "boss" is a total joke, and not a funny one (the concept of a cutie-patootie WB character turning "bad" is not a fun idea). Then you beat this boss character, save your "she devil," and...you get a joke! It's not even a good joke. Sort of a "Hillary Clinton" feminist joke, if you ask me. Hey, couldn't Mrs. Tasmania at least growl the words "THANK YOU"...? After those incessantly annoying water jumping puzzles, Taz --and the gamer-- deserves nothing less.

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Taz: Wanted is one of those great game ideas that, if not for the tiniest of flaws, would've been a classic in gaming. Regardless of most of the game being a total blast (literally), it has those little, teeny design flaws that can be so aggravating, you don't know if you should pull your hair out trying to deal with them, or pull the game designers' hair out, for keeping them in the game to begin with. In short, you help Taz smash stuff...presuming you don't smash your gamepad out the window in the process.

This game's hero (you) is the Tasmanian Devil, from classic Warner Brothers cartoons. Yosemite Sam wants to turn your home island into a theme park! It is up to you to spin around and break, smash, and demolish Sam's plans.  This is fun for kids and adults alike, because being able to either demolish or EAT 50% of any game map, is as fun as an interactive cartoon. Your resulting score is a dollar amount, implying that with every major item destroyed, your "wanted" price rises; a cute touch.

You may ask where is the challenge to all the "smashing" and "eating". Well, each level has 7 major items, marked with a Taz Wanted poster. These include a gas station(!), a construction site, and even a museum of (formerly) priceless exhibits. You must solve the puzzle of how to demolish them for good!  Each time the big "kaboom" sound byte plays, the "Taz logo" zooms on screen, and you hear Sam's "Oooooh! You're as bad as that pesky wabbit!" you'll be ready for more.

Before I get to the bad news: YES, this game has some truly inspired moments. For one, no "limited lives" nonsense. True, if you screw up you must try again at the start of the puzzle, though there are no limited tries to do so. This means you can take chances at will, exploring every nook and cranny of locations like a deserted ghost town (complete with a Speedy Gonzales cameo and even a crashed UFO!), Sam's "haunted house" ride, and a snowy winterland. This amounts to a little over a dozen levels, though it's truly amazing how non-repetitive these levels are. Each has guards/obstacles that are totally different; impressive, considering they had to make a dozen separate props/bad guys, for a dozen separate levels. That's the good news...are you ready for the bad?

Now for the flaws...and remember, they are doozies. First of all, every level has Tasmanian dog-catchers (or whatever). Now, I'm not one for cartoon logistics, though when Taz can shatter anything non-metal, it makes little sense he can be caught by these over-glorified butterfly nets. Get caught, and your score goes down...again...and again...and again. True, you can defeat these guys by donning disguises, getting close enough, then using the disguise's "attack move" (my favorite being the ninja Taz karate chop!). Each level also has a new costume, worthy of another attempt to stomp these guys. However, Dog-catcher fights are not an exact science. You'll mostly wind up getting caught, again...and again...and again.

More bad news: Taz can't swim. This leads to a few --aaaaauuuuugh!!!-- jumping water puzzles, where blah blah blah some lily pads sink and some logs tilt blah blah blah when will this be over so I can smash more cool stuff blah blah blah. It needs mentioning that the final level is on Taz's island, which, of course, is water-jumping-city. This is where the game's rating took a nose-dive, via a Can-you-top-this? water puzzle where you must jump on tilting logs in the water, then tilting logs on ropes in the air (don't ask), hop over a broken rope bridge, try not to slip and slide on a final beam where some IDIOT level editor put slippery grease (ha-ha, jerk, very funny), and hopefully, you don't fall, drown, or slip along the way. If you do, you must start at the very beginning. It's puzzles this ludicrous that force a gamer to wonder if any of it is truly worth it.

So, you're asking; WAS it worth it? Well, that's the guilty pleasure of it all; destroying over 63 buildings and giant props is a lot of fun. Yes, the final, cliché, "uber-boss" battle is an annoying, hair-pulling tirade. Yes, the game has the occasional repetitive sound byte, so much so that the final boss' "Aw, did that hurt?" and Taz's drowning mantra, "What for you drown Taz?" are going to be ringing in my ears for a month. It still was a heck of a lot of fun using Taz to help ransack cartoon land. If there's a Taz: Wanted 2 in the future, I'm all for it. Just give me more of Yosemite Sam's stuff to demolish...and leave the dogcatcher nets at home.