 Welcome to the Official PPM Slime of the Season.
Have you ever played a game so thoroughly rotten, so outright disgusting, and so downright despicable that you'd rather flush it down the toilet than plug it into your gaming console? Our team has dedicated this section of the mag exclusively for those nastiest of nasties. To them, we award our dishonorable Slime of the Season. There is no higher glory for electronic scum than being showcased as a Slime Award recipient.
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THE SPRING '98 SLIME AWARD GOES TO......!
 
Rascal on SONY PLAYSTATION
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British studio Traveller's Tales, creators of Sonic R, is here with their PS-exclusive Rascal. Now, at first glance you may be deceived. This nonlinear, 3-D platformer stars a young miscreant named Callum "Rascal" Clockwise on an era-spanning journey to save his father from an evil time manipulator. The major upside with Rascal is its impressive graphical ingenuity. Running at a silky-smooth 60-frames per second with virtually zero load times, lush visuals and realtime environmental mapping blurs the line between 32 and 64-Bit tech. Then you settle in, grab the controller and... oh dear.
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| Best of luck around those sharp turns! |
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Fight against a dragon and the camera at once! |
Play control is horrendously imprecise and awkward. Rascal bumps into enemies, fails to land safely on platforms, and generally is a glutton for getting himself needlessly killed. And no, the Dualshock analog controller fares no better. An inconsistent camera worsens the matter, oftentimes blocking your view and rendering progress impossible! This unholy combination left us mystified (and nauseous! -Jet), pondering if development was somehow sabotaged by a disgruntled employee. We can all have a hearty laugh at cash-grab atrocities like VR Troopers or shake our head at doomed projects a la Rise 2, but Rascal stands as a rare disappointment: A technical achievement buried by perceivably fixable issues. Better luck next time!
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