Rosco McQueen: Firefighter Extreme Review

Rosco McQueen - when are you going to come out of the closet?

When reviewing a game titled Rosco McQueen: Firefighter Extreme, it's hard to keep a straight (or in Rosco's case, not so straight) face. The first question you have to ask is just how "extreme" a game Rosco McQueen is, without laughing about how ludicrous the name sounds. Once you get past this initial laugh, what you are left with is an absolutely pathetic game. Rosco McQueen is one of the worst games to be released on the Playstation.

First of all, the story is incredibly bland. You, assuming the identity of Rosco McQueen, must put out fires and save people. And that's it. While simple goals can be fun (Quake, for instance), the tedium of holding down one button to put out incessantly annoying fires is enough to drive you crazy. It almost looks like the developers were trying to make a tongue-in-cheek game completely aware of its ridiculousness. Even if that was the case, they still failed in every way possible. Rosco McQueen just comes off as a total piece of trash.

The graphics are the game's only decent point. I say decent because they are nothing special. The buildings and laundromats that you have to save from fiery death are mapped out well, and the fires that catch around the building look interesting. While the enemies do have a cartoonish flair to them, Rosco himself looks big, bulbous, and out of place. Even though graphical glitches are minimal, the camera has a tendency to show areas that are either outside the world or are completely black space. Not only that, but also the camera doesn't point in the best direction most of the time either. It seems to track things randomly, looking at a power up while you are trying extremely hard to put out a fire. It's truly sad that these mediocre graphics are the game's only good quality.

Gameplay in Rosco is absolutely pathetic. You walk around buildings where robots set fires, attempting to destroy the evil robots and save the day. All the enemies are extremely easy, simple button mashing will suffice to kill any of them. Putting out fires is just as elementary; you just hold down a button and the water stream auto-aims for you. This monotonous gameplay just continues for what seems forever until you finally decide to turn your Playstation off!

The sound is equally terrible. From the insidious voice of your robot helper to the idiotic voice of Rosco McQueen, the sound is so bad it makes you want to hit mute on the remote control. Swinging your axe and shooting water sounds just as bad too. Even the music is bad; generic midi melodies just aid the boredom that the gameplay supplies.

Rosco McQueen: Firefighter Extreme offers absolutely nothing extreme. Instead, it throws up a boring gameplay paradigm with a deplorable story. Kudos to Psygnosis for creating the first videogame to star a homosexual firefighter (that I know of). You can take that however you want to, but I'd rather not take this stinker at all!