Starsky & Hutch

 GameCube, Starsky & Hutch (2003) game

Had this sitting around for a few years as a title I wanted to get to, and it probably would have sat around a few years longer (perhaps until I next rewatched the series), until David Soul died and that spurred me into wanting to play it as some kind of tribute to him and the series he starred in. The game was released at the very cusp of that time when 'S&H' was returning to the zeitgeist, if only in a small way, just before the comedy remake film came out in 2004 and the series was being rerun on Channel 5 - my earliest encounter with it was in early 2003, the same year this came out, when I was still at college and watching the episodes during the day when they were shown on Channel 5. I don't think they were in the correct order and I certainly didn't consider it one of my favourite series' back then, it was just a name I'd heard and a moderately enjoyable way to pass the time when dog-sitting for a grandparent when she went shopping, though it was enough of a draw that I'd watch it at home, too. It wasn't until the following year when I started buying the DVD sets that I began to watch the series properly, in order, getting a sense of the progression of the series and characters, even if it was merely the basic passage of time rather than more deliberate story arcs or development. The more I watched and rewatched the series over the years (and this was in a time when DVD sets were relatively expensive so I had less to watch then), the more I came to appreciate and enjoy it. It's not that there were a lot of great episodes, in fact there were a lot of very average ones that would be considered filler today, but even many of them were enjoyable just to go into this world and live with the characters.

The question is, if I liked the series so much, why didn't I buy this game when it came out, since I did have a GameCube then? I really don't know, I was more careful in what I bought then compared with the N64, which I came to be more open to experiment with having joined the console halfway through its lifespan at a time when there were many games available and often at cheap prices, while worthwhile 'Cube games were less prolific and more expensive, and I couldn't help but feel generally disappointed with the console having bought into it as being a revolution (its working title), and finding that the games were mostly graphical updates of the kind of experiences I'd already had (with the occasional exception). I don't remember ever hearing about this game at the time, I'm not sure NGC Magazine even reviewed it, which suggests it didn't have good publicity or distribution as I'm sure I'd have been at least a little interested otherwise. Licensed games rarely had a good reputation so that may have been a factor, but I do wonder how I'd have rated this if I'd played it on release - the console didn't have that many great racing or car games so I didn't get many until much later, and having played the open worlds of some of the 'Need For Speed' games ('Most Wanted' being my favourite of that series and pretty impressive even when I first encountered it only a few years ago), this looks pretty basic now. But back then I wouldn't have had so much to judge it by so it might have seemed a little more advanced, and the interaction with scenery, pedestrians and other vehicles is done well.

The problems with the game would still be apparent, and to me, someone who prefers games which allow freedom, this strictness when it came to the main missions would have irked even then. The issue is that, while the game world itself is a sprawling creation, the nature of the gameplay is to force you down a specific route since most missions are a variation on following a target vehicle, either to destroy it, prevent it escaping the city limits, or escorting and protecting someone. There's no racing (other than the Racing TV Special), no using your growing knowledge of the city to take advantage (though it helps to know your way around), and little variation in your tasks - the series wasn't all car chases, that was only one small part of it, so you feel they painted themselves into a corner with this as focus from the start. I wonder if they had bigger ambitions, perhaps a true open world experience (as we'd later see on the console with titles such as 'Spider-Man 2,' the best example, 'Gun,' and later 'NFS' games), where you might have been able to do more investigating and exploration, but ran out of time and money and were forced to strip the game back to its basic chase mechanic. Or maybe I'm just speculating wildly and there was never any more intention than what was created. It's just that you get the impression those behind this production did love the series and the era it represented.

You look at the fact they brought Antonio Fargas back to voice Huggy Bear, the 'snitch' who was also Starsky and Hutch's friend and who brought a cool 'street' verve to the TV series even though he had a lot less screen time than the two title characters. They didn't have to do that, he could have been played by a voice actor doing an  impression the way Dave Starsky and Ken Hutchinson were (to mostly good effect - I can imagine the kind of inane comments Starsky says, shot down by the more discerning Hutch, as being straight out of the series!), or there could have been text instead of speech, but they chose to use part of their budget on Fargas. They were also playing to the strengths of the series in setting it in a fully fictional Bay City that can be driven around in its entirety rather than keeping to specific streets and being unable to drive down side roads. And the comic book style of the cutscenes, while not being particularly close to the series, looks better than if they were simply using the in-game graphics, which were fine, but the graphical style is more punchy and dramatic and suits the semi-comical Seventies action. In those scenes we get to see famous locations such as Police HQ, Hutch's apartment at Venice Place, or Huggy's The Pits, not to mention Hutch's beat up old jalopy with the mismatched door panel and dents, and Starsky wearing his famous cable-knit (even if he only actually wore it in a couple of episodes!).

The series itself, in keeping with the episodic nature of TV at that time, didn't have a lot of continuity - sure, you'd have the occasional recurring characters who might appear in two or more episodes, and even a villain that appeared in two of the best episodes (George Prudholm), and they weren't a two-parter! My point is unless you're an aficionado like me, there's not a lot of recognisable 'lore' available to easily draw from in the series other than the iconic basics, so it's not an easy task to create much content in a game that's going to go deep into a story as such. This means you're free to create your own story that fits easily into the jumble of the series, but also means you have to do something that's in tune with the typical story. Consequently, the main story, which occurs in serialised form to suit a game's need for some progression, is also quite a dull, simplistic story. Some might say that's in keeping with the quality of the series itself, and they'd be right in a number of cases, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have tried harder to make a more dynamic and involving story as if the series had been made in the 2000s! They were already bending the series' format by having an ongoing story (not to mention there being only three seasons when the series actually had four, and there never were any TV Specials - not that this is a beat for beat remake in the slightest), and each season has only six episodes - and this was made before short TV seasons became common!

The story isn't the draw of the game, it's the actual play that's most important. Here is where the game also suffers the most. As I said before, the freedom is seriously curtailed, the style of the game being a point to point journey of following another vehicle or vehicles, there isn't the room within that to go off and do what you want. Some cursory attention has been paid to this problem in the fact that you're given bonus collectables to find in every episode, so if you find a car key you unlock a vehicle, and if you find Huggy tokens it enables you to unlock extras in the Locker Room from the main menu, another addition that makes me think the makers cared about the series and wanted to make a tribute. The best bonuses are actual interviews with Fargas recorded specifically for the game, and that was motivation for me to try and get the cards when the game itself wasn't quite enough on first play through. I wasn't even sure I could be bothered to replay the levels and find everything, I knew I wasn't really enjoying the game by the fact I was so often making excuses not to play it (I'll watch something instead; I'm too tired to stay up and give it a crack; I'd rather play 'WSCR'), but like many games, I've found I enjoyed it more once the main game was completed, I'd fully got into the game and become used to its style and rhythm and came to really enjoy going back over each episode to get everything - seeing a complete line of those gold police badges for maximum success was a real pleasure.

That's not to say it redeemed the game's flaws, it merely meant I could overlook them in order to get the satisfaction of completion, and I did gain an appreciation of it all the more I played, especially when I solved a particularly tough mystery or succeeded at a difficult challenge. Collectables were a replay incentive, but by the nature of the game they couldn't be too far removed from the main route or you'd get behind and the mission would be failed early, so you were still resigned to travelling a specific route and mostly hammering the fire button as you whittled down your target's energy bar, or that was how I felt at first. The main idea of the game, and which makes it somewhat unique, is that rather than having a time limit or energy bar yourself, the 'currency' is your VR score, or Viewer Rating: if you pull off stunts, driving over ramps, crashing through cardboard boxes or narrowly avoiding crashes with other road users this all brings your VR up which is otherwise steadily eroded unless you pick up a siren which freezes the rating for the duration the pickup lasts. Other icons give you a VR boost, and shooting your target also achieves this. Although this all makes the game slightly different to the norm it's also slightly confusing in that the game is in the world of 'S&H' yet at the same time it's breaking the fourth wall of the TV screen and suggesting the reality is that you're also making a TV show. Perhaps if they'd gone further than that and had the whole game be 'the making of' episodes or stories with a behind the scenes story, maybe some resource management aspect like dealing with budgets and hiring actors and that kind of thing, that might have given the game more depth. At the same time it may not have appealed to gamers only interested in fast arcade action. Trouble is there isn't a lot of fast arcade action either!

Perhaps the biggest flaw is the sluggish handling and lack of speed in the game. Now, like those who may claim a dull, workaday crime story was just the game reflecting the reality of the series, one could also link the criticism of speed and handling with the fact that the real Ford Gran Torino, or White-Striped Tomato as it was known affectionately, was as mulish and slow as in the game so it's actually quite accurate in that respect! Of course that doesn't hold water because the physics of the game are as arcadey as they are unreal in other ways - if you drive off a building, for example (yes, it is possible!), your car will merely roll over like a child's toy and you carry on, so reality isn't at the forefront of the game's mechanics. Once you get over the sluggishness and lack of excitement you do get used to the gameplay and take it on its own terms in order to complete it. When I first started playing I was hitting the 'A' button constantly to fire off Hutch's gun - you get a yellow targeting reticule which automatically homes in on the target. As I went on I came to realise it was more effective to wait and allow the reticule to home in until it went red for a more accurate, and thus more damaging, shot. Tactics like this and understanding the way the game wanted you to play it eventually made it a more enjoyable experience, but you still could wish for more intuitive play.

They did get a lot of details right: I already mentioned connections to the series' icons, but the music is spot on and there are little details like Hutch reaching out to put the red light on the roof just like he used to do in the series. Occasionally even episode titles were reminiscent of the series ('18 Wheels of Trouble' sounds very similar to 'Ninety Pounds of Trouble,' for example), and I loved that they used the original typeface throughout, attention to detail that helps you believe this is 'S&H.' And once you get your head around controlling two characters at once, Starsky driving while Hutch fires out the window, it becomes more natural. Bay City is huge, and you come to understand that more in the TV Specials which are away from the main missions and where your knowledge of the city affects whether you complete the tasks since it's easy to go down a wrong road and lose valuable time on your way to the next pickup that extends your time (these are time-based challenges rather than all about your VR). Bay City itself was never clearly laid out in the series so I don't fault them for not recreating the city perfectly and they had pretty much free rein to do as they would within the limits of needing to have certain areas (like the Docks or the inner city streets), but I do wish there were known locations clearly marked so you felt like you really had the run of a fictional city, like Memorial Hospital, for example. I don't know if the series' locations are actually there to be found because, as I say, most of the time you don't have time to explore - there is a Free Roam mode, but there's no motivation to play that as there's no goal other than to drive around and learn the layout. It's good the option's there but a shame there wasn't more to it. But the city is large, varied and provides plenty of challenge as an environment, it's only disappointing what you can do within it is so limited.

Another aspect of the game were the secondary objectives, something to achieve while doing the main one (also necessary to unlock extras), and some of which could be pretty difficult. Also, power-ups that affect your abilities, such as freezing VR erosion for a time, speeding you up, VR boost, a tyre which gives you better grip, one that prevents enemies firing at you for a time (taking 'damage' decreases your VR), were among other advantages. Better weapons could occasionally be picked up which did more damage than Hutch's six-shooter, but the fact remains you're mostly pursuing another vehicle and following where it leads, trying to shoot it out. The game can be unfair in terms of your automatic targeting which will sometimes home in on friendly targets like police cars (although they don't seem to be great friends of S&H since more often than not they get in the way or knock you about and are quite useless as allies!), losing you VR if you accidentally shoot them, or a car you're protecting, which is highly annoying. But when you get used to the ways of the game it just becomes part of the challenge, and though you don't have tight control of the aim, you learn to adjust it through your handling of the car and become more skilful in control with practice, a rewarding aspect of the game. But then there's the inconsistent nature of the environment, something many games have an issue with - you're allowed to smash through some things, say a glass window or fence, but if you thump into an immovable part of the scenery you're stopped dead or penalised when you'd think viewers would love seeing things get smashed up (why is it good to destroy roadside objects, but not cars?)!

One saving grace is that you don't have to achieve everything in one go, so if you win the episode's badge you don't also have to have the car key, the Huggy tokens and accomplish the secondary objective all in the same attempt, you can go back and do things piecemeal, which makes life easier. Useful, because some of the missions can go on a bit and it's frustrating if you don't succeed, so if you had to replay it until you managed to get everything all at once, it would be a real chore. It can be a bit of a chore sometimes even so, aimlessly searching for things you can't find, restarting and going through it all again to be able to check another area, and so it goes on, but completion still brings happiness. Before I'd got everything and was on the verge of deciding I'd found as much as I was going to, I didn't see any likelihood of replaying the game, finding it too simple and in need of a broader perspective (perhaps the Free Roam as the main part of the game where you could encounter crimes across the city while taking part in story-advancing specific missions when you want), but by the time I was stuck on those last episodes (especially the last two), and then moved on to the very tough Stunt Special I discovered perseverance paid off. Trying to smash ten shop windows (hardly in the spirit of two clean cops you'd have thought, unless they were all owned by crooks!), during the episode where you have to hare about town at the whim of a criminal giving instructions through phone boxes (definitely inspired by 'The Psychic'), was a real challenge, for example, or just getting those last Huggy tokens... I was so close to giving up my completionism at points and it really irritated me, but I knew I couldn't leave it unfinished, and when you finally work out what to do it was a supreme relief, primarily, but also a rush of reward.

My final complaint is that it could be a bit glitchy. One time when I knocked the target vehicle into a pit in the construction site area, it was somehow pushed underground and sent off to another part of the level. How did I know it went beneath the environment? I made my way to the marker but it wasn't there even though I was right on top of it! Then sometimes you can nudge a vehicle into the scenery where it can get stuck, although generally the AI was pretty good, vehicles reversing and speeding off if they get knocked out of their course. But then there was the second Huggy card in the penultimate Episode of Season 3 - I'd seen it appear when heading towards the underground car park after setting off a special event that smashes a flatbed and I wasn't sure if it had been picked up or not as you see yourself fly through the air in slow motion, but then the card vanishes. Going back it had definitely disappeared, but I never could find any other card and wasn't sure if I'd got the other one on my original play through the game. In the end I solved the problem by going through the entire level twice and on the second run the card had mysteriously reappeared and I was able to collect it, but it didn't give me confidence in the game! Then in the Stunt mission trying to do one of the last stunts, you go over a ramp and two of those mysterious black cars (which I never did get to the bottom of), come at you, preventing you reaching the badge in the sky. If you do it enough they'll eventually be so mashed up they don't hit you, but I went through the activation symbol so many times it eventually disappeared, preventing me from collecting the badge - I wasn't sure if that meant you only had so many attempts or if it was a fault with the programming.

In the end I did manage it, just as I'd found that elusive Huggy token in the penultimate episode, beaten the Scorpion vehicle secondary objective in the final episode, and, at last, found the final Huggy token (hidden in the cast-off lorry trailer), and these were all so incredibly pleasing to succeed at that my view of the game as a whole changed - I like a challenge, and I prefer one that's achievable rather than you have to complete an entire game in one six-hour sitting as so many much older games demanded. This was hard enough (the Stunt Special would take around twenty-five minutes to get to the last three stunts, which I had to work out how to succeed at with only minutes of time to spare), but just enjoyable enough for me to keep trying late into the night. There are other criticisms: the map, which is limited to a small circle on the bottom right of the screen, does well enough for your immediate surroundings, but it would have been better if you could access a full map in the pause menu to plan a route, put in direction markers and visit key locations, but then I've been spoiled by some of those 'NFS' games and it's more realistic to some extent that you have to rely on your 'local knowledge' to get by rather than always having aids. Maybe the game is true to the series in a negative way in that it can easily be seen as not that great, and only if you dig in do you find the gold, too inaccessible and basic for those unwilling to make the effort, needing more depth. Even so I'm glad I played it, and metaphorically fire off a six-bullet handgun salute to David Soul. Most importantly I'm glad I stuck it out and discovered the joys of the game that make it worthwhile in the end.

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