beverly hills cop for the ps2

pasquinelli

last night i learned there was a beverly hills cop game made for the ps2. i skimmed a playthrough, i watched the last boss fight and the ending, and i could feel the feeling of working on it. not only am i pretty well versed in how bad games get made, and don’t, but i worked on a school of rock game in 2011. remember school of rock? the jack black vehicle from, i’m guessing, 2002. you played the game with a rock band or guitar hero guitar.

the worst part is that was the best game we made. like, we finally got our shit together for that destined to fail game.

i’m listening to some seriously sentimental french pop music. i recommend you do the same, watch a playthrough of beverly hills cop for the ps2, and imagine it’s your job to make that game.

b i g m o o d

hellomrkearns

pasquinelli i’m interested in hearing more about this School of Rock game. What platform was it on? I’m having a hard time finding anything on it.

hellojed

Jeff Gerstmann called Beverly Hills Cop for the PS2 “the 9/11 of videogames” and I haven’t played any of it to know for sure, but that seems correct.

I think for me this mindspace is taken up by the MULTIPLE ps2 racing games based around The Flinstones. One on the cartoon, and one on the sequel to the live action film

I dunno what you do with the Flintstones IP in the mid 00’s. A platformer is too complicated and doesn’t make sense. Cars were a big part of the show, so why not…make a racing game.

Also there’s multiple cave man themed racing games. I should post these to the old “Why are there so many cave man games” thread.

BC Racers

And

Cro-Mag Rally

I really just want to be in the room when someone says “yeah lets making a racing game based on the neolithic period” and try to understand why this makes sense to these people and how they can set these events into motion,.

copySave

hellojed here’s a quick look (?) of it from the man himself

pasquinelli

hellomrkearns oh, you won’t find anything on it. we pitched it to activision, i think, and they passed, naturally. the place i was working at the time had been nearly shut down after we shipped our last game, and we were trying to land that as a new project. everyone was called back in after getting laid off to work on the prototype. i have no idea why or how we landed on school of rock. could be somone was trying to make a sequel to the movie.

antillese

copySave The dude in the YouTube preview image looks like he’s going to tell me about GameStop stock. He was ahead of his time!

Moon

My favorite tie in game was the joy of finding a “Pimp My Ride” playstation game in the Gamestop clearance bin. You better believe I took that home.

Karasu

As a person who got my start making advergames for upcoming movies and TV shows, the thing that strikes me is less that the Beverly Hills Cop game is lousy (it’s pretty much inevitable that most licensed games will end up that way– not that there aren’t exceptions) and more that I’m not sure what sort of force got it made like a decade at least after the third movie. Like, who paid for it to get made? And released only in Europe (according to wiki)?

Me calling licensed games lousy isn’t me saying they shouldn’t exist– to the contrary, I love lousy games and would go repeatedly to the mat to defend their existence.

I feel as though I should also mention that the pressures of working with the IP holder who both wants a game to be made and doesn’t want to take the chance that it will potentially be too hard for even a single player or that their logo will not be displayed prominently enough leads to games that are remarkably bland in most cases.

copySave

exodus I love it when a licensed game turns out… well pretty good or at least interesting. You’ve been given a chance to make something so make it more than a cash grab right?

Some notable ones I can remember:

Minority Report on PS2/GCN/XB (see my What’s that Game post)
The Mummy Demastered
EA’s Lord of Rings brawlers
Toy Story 3
King Kong
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Simpsons Road Rage
Astro Boy Omega Factor (GBA)
Pepsi Man (I guess)
that Snoopy Game
and so on…

Of course legit bad licensed games are great too for the reasons Karasu mentioned when they aren’t boring (such as this thread’s topic game). Hard to come up with something comparable to BH Cop - maybe something other than the other games they worked on

or maybe later Titus Interactive or games from Neko Entertainment
Ah here we go - that Robocop game

exodus

Frank and I played this back in the day and had a good loltime. We used to do a thing called “shitty games club” (chris woodard who you heard on the podcast was involved as well). We’d play bad/cheap PS2 or Gamecube era games, which was how we discovered that that lemony snicket game was actually pretty good.

I was always fascinated by weird, out of time-feeling licensed games, and was almost jealous I never got to be a part of one. I see this game in the game shops from time to time and think - this is probably what I would do if I had access to the peanuts license.

It actually looks pretty decent! The idea of making something under those weird constraints has an appeal to me that I can’t quite describe, but also I don’t reeeeeeeeally want to do it.