After seeing the game in the bargain bin at my local games store for under ?15 I decided to give it another whirl. Previously I only had the game on loan, so when we got stuck half way through the second series of missions I just gave it back and that was that. We did keep the save on our memory card in anticipation of giving it another try, though, so it wasn’t as if we had to start from scratch.
Sadly we couldn’t get any further than that same level, coming close a couple of times, but just running out of time before having to start all over again. In frustration, we gave up, bemoaning the difficulty of aiming the gun sights with a Dual Shock controller.
A few days later, I had the chance of picking up a Namco GunCon 2 at a reasonable price. Since it came with Time Crisis 3, which is a fun if samey diversion, I snapped it up in the hope that Fliss and I would stand a better chance of completing Starsky and Hutch into the bargain.
First results were promising – we managed to pick up better scores in many of the earlier levels while learning the driving / light gun combination, and we were looking forward to besting our nemisis once and for all.
Sadly, after many attempts, we just couldn’t seem to get past it. We came pretty close on more than one occasion, but since each attempt means having to sit through cut scenes of cheesy dialogue you cant skip, it really was wearing and sometimes it’s better to admit defeat than to make a hole in your tv with a fake gun.
What sucks is that there’s so much more of the game that we’ll never see, and I know this because we’re stuck right in the middle. To my mind this is poor game design, as there’s not even an option to change the difficulty setting, and having searched on the ‘net for hints it turns out we’re not the only ones who’ve hit a brick wall at this point in the game. Shame, really – playing it through with the light gun would have been fun.