Men in Black Charlie Brooker's used to dealing with repulsive alien creatures. He's been to Thurrock in Essex! Chortle. Crap opening puns aside, here's the review for Men In Black.. CRAZY ASS CASH IN SHIT This should be a barrel of laughs, yeah? After all, Men In Black (the movie) was both sassy and enjoyable - hardly the most memorable movie of 1997 by any means (that honour surely falls to the infamous Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee tape) - but nonetheless, it was fairly engaging, wasn’t it? And the central premise - secret government agents performing immigration checks on outlandish intergalactic visitors - should lend itself nicely to a computer game translation, right? And hey, look at those graphics - they’re grrrreat, aren’t they? Well, yeah, but.. You can see what they’re aiming at. Men In Black (the game) is basically Resident Evil minus the exploding ribcages. The leading players (Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, and Linda Fiorentino) have been ‘translated’ into eerily accurate polygonal marionettes, complete with scanned fizzogs, hairdos, and characteristic animation routines. Indeed. the attention to detail is so meticulous, they’ve probably even got painstakingly reproduced, millimetre-perfect ringpieces, too. With working cleft hair and everything. And little turtle’s heads that poke through whenever they need to ‘go’. But we’re veering off-topic here. Let’s go back to the game. IT'S DARK AND WE'RE WEARING SUNGLASSES The idea is that you, Mister player sir, are in complete control of one of the eponymous dark-suited fellows, and must complete a series of taxing missions without getting them all killed and that. The game eases you into the proceedings with the caring demeanour of an experienced courtesan: following an ‘initiation’ level during which you may control only the Will Smith character, you’re ushered into MiB central and forced to complete a sequence of yawn-a-licious training exercises before getting to the real ‘meat’ of the action (and the choice of any damn character you want). As we’ve already pointed out, the visuals are pretty much Top of the Pops, the very peak of professionalism - a fact which largely serves to emphasise just how unsatisfactory the actual gameplay itself is. The problem is scowlingly simple: it’s a complete pain in the arse to control. The character movement just doesn’t feel right. The controls are sluggish, fiddly, and indistinct. Useful objects are often hard to spot. Worse still, the player sometimes needs to manoeuvre themselves into position with pinprick-accuracy in order to pick up or use a given item. All in all, it’s a chore to play: if we hadn’t been reviewing it, we’d have happily snatched the CD from the drive and hurled it straight into the face of the nearest child. At least that way, it would have provided us with a little old-fashioned entertainment. Still, why should Gremlin care? It’ll probably sell. Probably already has (it came out just before Christmas - for some reason, our review copy arrived ‘late’). Men In Black is destined to generate profits on the strength of some nifty visuals and a popular movie licence - it’s just that here at PC Zone we’d have preferred to see a game. SCORE - 49% Lovely visuals and that, but the gameplay chews bag.

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