Gaming Target - PlayStation 2: My Street

Written by Matt Partington on April 15, 2003

Full Review: I know this is a kids' game, but screw it, anyone got a gun? I'm not gonna use it to shoot myself in the face. No, quite the opposite, in the stomach. Because if anything is going to hurt me the way this game has, its gonna be me.

Once in a long while, a game comes around that makes you think. There are games that make you question religion, social and political issues, geography, and what Hitomi would look like naked. My Street is one of those games. It leaves you in a confused daze for days, weeks, months, even years. The level of brain activity that must have been used to think up this game and all its concepts must have been in the range of Уis he doing something?Ф to УI think its dead.Ф It will make you question mortality, believe me.

My Street places you in the shoes of the new kid on the block (insert lame joke here readers). Your mission is to go out and gain new friends by playing and beating them in the games that they specialize in. So your first goal is to gain the tools of the trade, or to name them more accurately, the toys. You go out to the local toy store and pick up your marbles and play. Then proceed to all the kids around the block by winning people over for items and money. Most people have done something like this in real life, and luckily (if you can say that) this game captures the concept fairly well.

Anyone can take a novel concept and turn into a game. Horror movies moved to the video game world with games like Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil. The Matrix introduced bullet time and made it the most overused feature in video games today. Doing things like that for children makes perfect sense. The problem is that the end result is rarely worthy of anyone's time. Bear this in mind as you read the remainder of this article.

M.S. is, in reality, nothing more than a collection of mini-games that you play through. It feels almost as though its one of those 99 cent shareware CDs you can purchase at most retail and computer stores. The only true difference is that it takes a little more work to get to the actual gameplay. In story mode, you'll need to track down characters, buy pieces and manage the clock. This is truly a disappointing game in that sense, as traveling the town is nothing but mindless meandering across the streets of the town. This makes getting to the games uneventful and does not set much of an exciting pace for the game. While this qualm may not seem like much, it can grow pretty irritating.

Once you get to the mini-games, however, things start to look up (so very, very slightly up). There is a decent array of games to play here, including RC Car racing, magnetic marbles, volley ball and Riding Lawnmower racing (plays similar to RC Car racing, accept the goal is to cut the grass on your way around). Unfortunately, they all seem to fall victim to many of the same faults.

I know this game is for children. I know children's games are supposed to be easy, but My Street is simply ridiculous. I tried my best to not win. I craved to be bad at any of these games so I wouldn't win as there could be some challenge. I was let down by Idol Minds here. I find it hard to believe that a trained monkey could not win on the hardest difficulty level, and the same goes for a five year old.

If there was one thing that managed to make this game difficult (even if it was synthetic difficulty) it was the controls. To put it in laments terms: They were awful. For everything from running down the block to diving for a volley, it seems as though the game is taking up to a half-second to actually process the button presses. As any gamer will tell you, delay like that is not going to win any awards. Unresponsive and slow, developers should play My Street to learn exactly how to formulate poor control.

When the time comes around and the class УVideo Game Development 101Ф becomes a college or high school course, I have a recommendation for the first lesson: УChildren's games should be cartoonish in a good way.Ф Look at The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. It managed to perfectly harness the cel-shading technique. Cel-shading should and could have been used with My Street. Instead, we end up with a lackluster visual piece that doesn't even begin to tap the PS2's vast graphical power.

Character designs are stereotypical kids that you can meet at every middle-school today. The science nerd, ghetto girl, and the surfer dude (who also manages to use the word УbrahФ in almost every sentence). The ideas for them are generic, and so are the presentations. The main character is a bit more entertaining though. You can create your own monster of mini game mayhem - it works a lot like the Create-a-Skater mode from the Tony Hawk series. Mine looks like what the deranged murder Jason must have looked like when he was ten years old. Its fun for a while, but its nothing that hasnСt been done better before.

On the technical side, My Street manages to fair a slight bit better. While there is not a lot of detail to this game, the frame rate rarely slows down which is nice. Although its hardly acceptable that there is slow down at all, the amount is minimal. On the other hand, there are few special effects that help separate My Street from any other game on the market, which does not do anything to help the score.

I wished I could be deaf. I kid you not, My Street gave me the driving desire to jam a pencil through my ears so I could no longer listen to the sound. Be it the repetitive music or the broken record voiceovers, they all had the equal ability to drive yours truly deeper and deeper into madness.

I will first address the troublesome voice acting. I will admit that it is somewhat decent when you are being challenged. Say somewhat because it is not up to par with voice leaders. Its bad when you get into games and the 3 AI controlled foes start running their mouths. They each use a repetitively repetitive list of repetitive catch phrases. They were so repetitive that I repetitively threw my face into tables to distract myself. That, my friends, is repetitive. On that note, the music falls under the same category.

Looking for games that give you a reason to keep playing? M.S. lacks this is as well. The virtual absence of a meaningful story and amazingly boring mini-games only add reason to set the controller down and move on to something more enjoyable. Online play would make a nice little extra, but what has been included can hardly be called online play. In the total time I tried to play online, I saw four accounts on and none of them were willing to play. If that is not saying something, I do not know what does.