Richard's Online Journal

[11/03/07] The Horror of Hopkins FBI

It only gets worse from here. You have been warned.

If you're wise, you'll look away now. I mean it. The subject of this post is pure evil. Blood is its avatar and its seal, the redness and the horror of blood. Also the browness and ickyness of poo.

Hopkins FBI is the Worst Adventure Game Ever. No kidding around. Worst.

Obviously, I knew of this game of old. Everyone does, who's into adventures. It dates back to 1998, and I'd played it before - albeit in French, like a few adventure games. You don't know challenge until you're trying to decode Prisoner of Ice's mix of time-travel and ancient monsters with an A-Level vocabulary. Once you've heard of it, it lurks in your subconscious, ready to strike at any moment with the full force of its aching awfulness.

And then, yesterday I saw a copy on the shelves. 99p, as part of a double-pack. Clearly, they didn't know what evil they had taken into their midst. I had to remove it in order that their souls not be lost. This level of Weapons Grade Badness requires special training to handle, and I've played Midnight Nowhere, Druuna, and Plumbers Don't Wear Ties. I knew I could take it...

Installation instructions…

But then I thought, maybe I was being too hard on it. Maybe memory had blunted its better qualities. I reluctantly took the disc out of the microwave and fired it up in my gaming PC. The smell of raw sewage flooded the room. Outside the window, angels fell from the sky, screaming as they splashed across my gravel garden. Possibly a coincidence, I decided, hitting the start button.

But it wasn’t.

A beta tester plays Hopkins FBI for the first time

Hopkins FBI is the worst adventure game ever made. To have a shot at that title, you have to be more than just bad. You have to have the sort of production values that give you no right to be this bad. You have to transcend mere badness and be so horrific that the result is almost worthy of playing with sheer rapt fascination, just to see how much worse it can possibly get. Detective is worse. Gord@k is worse. No question. But that’s the kind of bad that you just don’t play. With Hopkins FBI, we’re talking Lula 3D bad, and while that game is undoubtedly Hopkins’ demonic bride, pound for pound, this is… actually, it’s almost a tie. But that doesn’t make for as snappy a header.

You may notice I’m trying to avoid talking about the game. You’ll see why in a second. First however, the story. Your challenge is to see how many words you get into it without bursting out into laughter, or smacking your head into the table. Master terrorist Bernie Berckson- goodness, already? Well, it gets worse. Master terrorist Bernie Berckson steals two nuclear bombs and drops them on California, killing 50,000. Seems a little underpowered to me, but hey, what would I know? Anyway, Bernie is captured and sentenced to death, escapes from the electric chair, and disappears.

Once the game finally begins, Hopkins FBI (as I believe I’ll keep calling him) is assigned to deal with a bank heist. You get to see the tellers being splattered with shotgun blasts, guards getting mown down, and a blonde hostage getting her throat sliced right open with a knife for absolutely no reason. All of these are depicted in lovingly drawn cartoon animations - especially the throat-slice. It’s impossible to overstate the stupidity of this whole section, right down to the terrorists’ timebomb - which actually features a little LED marked ‘EXPLODE’. It’s nothing less than an assault on your sanity, right down to the fact that if you haven’t got a screwdriver to defuse said bomb, you can casually drive back home, pick it up and amble on back with no problem at all.

Good lord, the game’s still pretending you’re investigating a case?

It’s not clear what Hopkins FBI’s job actually is, although my guess is that he’s the FBI’s trained monkey. His solution to the bank-heist is to give the bad guys exactly what they want, and hand himself over to them as a hostage. Luckily, they just knock him out - unlike the female helicopter pilot he also lets them have, who they promptly strip, torture, murder, and leave dead in an abandoned lot before escaping. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen. His big investigation consists of finding a shoelace, handing it over to the lab, and being told to go to the nearby forest. This is as close as the game ever gets to having anything to do with the FBI. Honestly, a clue? I almost felt let down when one of those showed up…

Jazzed with this success, Hopkins FBI returns to his office, where he gets a grenade out of his desk drawer - I swear, I am not making this up - and goes for an amble through the woods, shooting a few random people on a straight path until he finds a hut. Like the woods, it’s full of people shooting at him, and they may or may not be the bank robbers. Frankly, at this point even the developers seem to have forgotten what the hell’s going on, but who cares? You chuck the grenade into the hut, and one of the guys in the hut steps out and plugs you square in the chest. Before, this would have meant Game Over. This time, and for absolutely no reason whatsoever, things are a little different.

Hopkins FBI dies and goes to Heaven.

I will repeat that.

St. Peter later fudged this one in the records, but omniscient God still made him give back his executive parking space

Hopkins FBI dies and goes to Heaven. What has so far simply been merely the Worst Police Game Ever - yes, including SWAT2 - suddenly takes on all new madness. Heaven is like an airport waiting lounge, with people calmly sitting around with axes through their faces, and a big unisex shower room where the developers got to draw some naked girls. Hurrah for them. Unsurprisingly, there’s no naked guys, although there are stand-up urinals. Not sure how easy those would be to use, given the surroundings. Anxiety issues and all…

Still, heaven forfend - quite literally - that this be just another bit of childish clowning. This is all part of how you escape back to the mortal world, by…

Oh, go on. Guess! Good works? No. Helping out the locals? Hardly. What’s that? Oh, well done! Yes, yes, that’s right! You do steal a poor dead woman’s clothes while she’s in the shower, dress in drag, and persuade the angelic guard to ask you out for a drink at the bar. Obvious really, isn’t it? And not at all the kind of thing you probably want to avoid doing while in the Almighty’s very back garden.

Anyhow, back in his regular trousers, Hopkins FBI steps into a teleporter booth and is returned to Earth, exactly where he left off. His first words after having this life-changing experience? After seeing the face of the Infinite?

“Also, I wonder what happened to those guys who gunned me dead. Oh well. They probably weren’t important anyway.”

Which brings us to Misogynism Alley. After going to Heaven, Hopkins FBI promptly goes right to hell, with one of the most shamelessly pathetic sequences ever to appear in any adventure, ever. You see, Samantha is your fiancee - I’d have mentioned her before, but she only appears once for about a line or so, so she’s easy to forget. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. Get to her house and you immediately hear a vocal track singing “I’ve lost my girl, I can’t express. My grief, my soul, my emptiness...”, which clearly suggests we’ll be getting to know Samantha pretty well in the next few scenes. There may even be some snuggling, and some genuine sentiment. Perhaps the game is finally discovering its heart, and redemption is on the-

No, I can’t keep a straight face either.

Before we get any further, let me quote from the game’s own advert:

During his investigation, the player will meet and dialogue with some forty characters. These are often caricatural, especially the women who, with some rare exceptions, tend to have dumb-blonde roles.The atmosphere of the game is fairly gory and violent. But this aspect is always mitigated by the black humour of the characters and dialogue, as well as the at times surrealistic air to the situations.

You’ll note the words ’his investigation’, despite adventure games having one of the larger female fanbases at the time. Some of the rest needs translating from the badly translated text, so let’s try that now. Where they say ‘surrealistic’, what they actually mean is ‘nothing makes any goddamn sense’. When they say ‘dumb blonde roles’, think ‘savagely murdered victims, shown in close-up, with their boobs hanging out’. Oh, sure, there are some dead guys too, but they’re pretty much all fully clothed and largely unharmed; the sadism is saved for the ladies.

But of course, it’s all okay, because it’s only joking! Black humour. Gotta love it. That puts everything into a better context, indeed, it changes everything. It’s almost a disappointment, only having had one half-naked, tortured-with-knives corpse to chortle at. Finally, it’s time for the game to really tickle our funnybones with some wholesome, lightly comic sexual violence and serial killing! Hey! Samantha! Come over here! Samantha? Samantha, honey? Where are you, my sweet fiancee who I apparently love and cherish yet have barely met? You won’t want to miss this!

Oh.

Seven this is not. Oh. And SPOILER WARNING…

Yes, you guessed it. It’s Woman In The Refridgerator time; that mainstay of comic misogyny since year dot. But not immediately, because that would mean only being able to draw one corpse! No, before you get to the big one, that totally gives meaning to your fight against a baddie who hasn’t even been mentioned since the intro, you’ve got a whole train of dead women to find! The first one’s in the bathroom, strangled with a rope and left naked in the tub. Black comedy! The second is impaled with a hook at the local swimming pool. Surrealism! The fourth is nailed upside down to the local cinema screen. Mitigated!

You’ll notice I missed one. Yep, that’s because the third… wait for it… the third is at the local museum, baked into a wax statue of Louis XVI! Is it even worth mentioning that the way you find this is to construct a molotov cocktail out of inventory items, and use it to light a fire next to the statue? It’s not even the game’s dumbest puzzle…

I’m convinced that Hopkins FBI is the result of some game of Truth Or Dare played out at a development house. “Hey! I’ve just come up with the stupidest thing ever! Dare you to beat it!” “You think? Wait until you see what I’m doing!”

I hate this game so much.

“Underwater science base? Sure, why the hell not? Say, remember when we were doing that bank heist thing? Seems a long time go, doesn’t it?”

Needless to say, Hopkins FBI doesn’t react to any of these deaths. I suppose that’s a victory over his enemy in a way, what with the whole trail-of-tears thing. He acts like a robot from start to finish, with only the briefest flicker of emotion when he accidentally kills Samantha. The idiot. He’s sent to the shooting range, to a specific box, after finding about five dead women around town, and promptly fires a million shots into the target without the slightest hesitation. Gosh, shocker, Samantha was behind it, and now she’s dead. Bernie has a good giggle, and players everywhere smash their hands into their foreheads.

Still, it all works out okay, because the big plot’s really about a resurrection machine.

No. Really.

Only a kind of a god? I don’t know, that sounds a bit defeatist for a supervillain…

Through a series of events far too stupid to go into, it turns out that Bernie Berckson’s big plan is not in fact catering to necrophiliacs, but rather using human clones and Heaven’s teleporter device… oh good lord, I’m still serious… to cheat death. There’s an island fortress, and an underwater base, and clones, and a Wolfenstein 3D bit that crashes all the time.

The truly terrifying bit is that some of this stuff is even foreshadowed earlier in the game, via newspaper reports and brief conversation snippets. They knew where they were going, and they were going here?

The only reason to possibly play this game is out of a sheer sense of morbid fascination at how low it can go. It’s almost a work of genius in that respect; hitting the bottom of the barrel almost immediately, and then digging, digging, digging, digging until it reaches the bottom of the universe and falls forever in a doughnut shaped oblivion.

Need a lobotomy? No, but it’s not a bad start to your adventure!

In summary: if you like this game, you are wrong. The only reason to buy it is so that you can lock it in a lead-lined box and shoot it into the sun. Perform this public service, but under no circumstances actually try to play the game first. Doing so will be your crime and punishment, neatly wrapped up in one little 99p box. It’s misogynistic awfulness, with horrible puzzles, stupid sequences, idiotic puerility, and half-translated writing that will make your eyes bleed. It’s at its best when it crashes, and its worst while existing. It proves athiesm and puts the lie to karma. Its very presence makes meat go rotten and sores fester with pus. It’s a childish, poorly made piece of shit, deserving of nothing but contempt, and of being held up forever as a warning to the children of the future.

But the graphics are okay. 78%