Spy Hunter for PS Vita, AKA Nowhere to Run II?

This time, There Really is Nowhere to Run, and thank goodness for that. Embedded below is the trailer for the new PS Vita version of Spy Hunter. And quite unlike Spy Hunter 2 and Nowhere to Run, this one looks enjoyable. In particular, I'm intrigued by all the customizable options for the Interceptor.

If you have a Vita and want to take a crack at reviewing this one for us, by all means, leave us a comment below or shoot us an email: codereddnet@hotmail.com.

Hot Piano Chick approved.

PS2 Review: Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run (2006)

Turns out there's plenty of places to run to in Nowhere to Run. In fact, you do much more running and and grappling than you do driving and intercepting, which is an odd choice considering the property, and the creators of this game seem to have their priorities almost completely misplaced. The Spy Hunter series (including the classic PS2 remake, winner of the Code Redd Net Award for Best Action Game, and its unfortunately sucky sequel, winner of absolutely nothing and liking it) is about high speed vehicular combat. You drive fast and shoot things; one would think such a concept is virtually foolproof. And while I appreciate the attempt to innovate the Spy Hunter formula by putting the action on terra firma, this is one series that needs to keep its passengers locked up inside the super spy car. Nowhere to Run is a bit of an oddball; it was supposed to be the tie-in game for a Spy Hunter movie starring Dwayne Johnson (you know him better as The Rock) that has never left development. So all we have to go on in this game, and if its story is any indication, that movie would blow. You play as agent Alex Decker (The Rock), pilot of the awesome IES Interceptor, but this time the vehicle is stolen by the generically maniacal Nostra corporation/nation/band of thieves. So now you have to steal it back, but unfortunately you get to chase after it in the Rock's digital walk-waddle. It's slow, tedious going getting around in this swampy world. Controls are either excessively tight or exceedingly slippery, so while aiming your guns is slow as can be, driving the Interceptor is like ice skating. But the hand-to-hand combat is surprisingly enjoyable for its exaggerated sound effects and super finishing moves. There's plenty of fun to be had tossing adversaries about with the Rock's selection of devastating wrestling maneuvers, or lifting them above your head in a gorilla press and then throwing them helluva far, including off of bridges, construction sites, and airplanes. Ragdoll physics make this kind of carnage that much more delightful. I'd even say that my opinion of Nowhere to Run is comparable to the ideas shared in my review of Driv3r. That is to say, this game is just so bad it's actually redeemable. So very many weird things happen that it becomes comedy. Sure, it can be frustrating at times (most levels require some form of trail-and-error progression) and the graphics are muddy at best, but there is a lot of freedom and fun in choosing how to dispense with the Nostra grunts, and in seeing the limb-flailing, glitchy results. If you like broken, strange things, I say pick this one up. Everyone else would do well to stay far away.

PS2 Review: Spy Hunter 2 (2003)

The original Spy Hunter re-make (2001, and recent recipient of the Code Redd Net Award for Best Action Game) remains one of our favorite PS2 games to this day, and so you can probably imagine the level of anticipation we had for Spy Hunter 2 when it was announced. Now imagine our disappointment when the product finally arrived. SH2 is an absolutely startling example of taking an established, successful, you might even say nearly bulletproof, formula and stripping it of those elements that made it successful in the first place in favor of underdeveloped and incoherent new ideas. The smooth controls of the original are replaced with a sticky, unresponsive set, and even when you can get the Interceptor to behave properly, it feels like you're driving Mom's SUV rather than a souped-up-for-spies supercar. Furthermore, ammunition is no longer as plentiful as before, so you often find yourself using it sparingly rather than liberally, a strategy which is an odd fit in such an arcade-y universe. And the difficulty is totally uneven; while one level is strikingly easy, the next is maddeningly difficult, and the game bounces back and forth indiscriminately between these two extremes. SH2 also has a co-op feature, something which theoretically sounds fun, but is not satisfactorily executed at all. In this mode, the first player controls the vehicle and its primary and secondary weapons, while the second player can only manipulate a weak turret situated on top of the Interceptor, and this often leads your buddy with little or nothing to do. I will say, though, that SH2 has a decent variety of missions to complete, and the few boss fights are enjoyable and different. Overall, however, SH2 is a mediocre follow-up to a PS2 classic. It's a game which seems more impressed with getting the self-professed "hot piano chick," Vanessa Carlton, to pen a lame song for the soundtrack than taking the formula laid out by the original in any appreciably new directions.

A Concise History of Code Redd Net

It all began on November 8, 2001, or thereabouts. Originally known as Code Redd.net, what was to become the Code Redd Net of today started innocently in ChickenMan’s basement during one of our marathon Saturday afternoon/evening gaming sessions. I had some experience in writing reviews for GameFAQs (my output during this time consisted of this charming piece) and my own personal sites (which I started up and dropped at an alarming pace and which, thank goodness, have long since ceased to exist). I suggested we start up a Geocities page and play around with its Pagebuilder feature, which required absolutely no knowledge of that tedious thing called HTML. All we needed was a name. I believe we bandied about a few ideas first before we decided upon our unusual moniker. Now, the exact details are fuzzy in my mind, but I do know that we took our name from the new (at the time, anyway) flavor of Mountain Dew, Code Red. As far as I can remember, our only justification for choosing that name was that were simply liked the soda a whole lot and we were strapped for ideas. Of course, to protect ourselves from litigation and brand confusion, however unlikely that seems now, we added an extra “d” to Redd. And that was that. We took on the aliases of Thrasher and ChickenMan to protect our loved ones from harassment or embarrassment, I suppose. Geocities.com/codreddsite was up and running, and slowly.

Reviews, always our bread and butter, were split between games and movies, though far more emphasis was placed on games than movies. Our first two reviews, Spy Hunter for PS2 and Rush Hour 2, have remained perennial favorites through a kind of affective blinding. In other words, our tastes have certainly matured beyond them, but we cannot untangle our memories from these objects. They stay with us no matter how much cultural education/exposure we receive, and that, I suppose, is in the very machinations of nostalgia, that’s how the phenomenon of mass culture works. Naturally, our reviews tended to cover only those things which we were interested enough in to rent or buy, hence the general scarcity of negative reviews (far as I can remember, we only scorched a few products, such as Die Another Day, GoldenEye: Rogue Agent, Spy Hunter 2, and The Tuxedo). Our interaction with popular culture was limited to our tastes because we simply didn’t have the monies, connections, or inclinations to cover more items. I would argue, however, that this made our site more inclusive, more of an ultra-specific fan culture (which included our love for Jackie Chan, James Bond, Mr. T, Spider-Man, Sonic, and anything else we fond amusing or “cool”) which communicated with whatever audience we could muster by sheer enthusiasm, rather than by some notion of comprehensive “objectivity” espoused by the popular press. We had our tastes and we had to freedom to do as we pleased, and that was particularly pleasing to our younger selves.

Looking back now, though, for all of our inclusiveness, CRN was quite the ambitious undertaking for two doe-eyed middle-schoolers. We clearly tried to mimic the appearance of most game/movie review sites, and this was difficult because the Geocities Pagebuilder was a beast to handle back then. We also tried to provide many of the same services that they did – at one point, we had our Games and Movies pages (both of which were subdivided into Reviews and Previews), our Beats page, Staff pages, Opinions page, a News page, a Newsletter (and I have to wonder if we actually sent any newsletters out), a “Grillz” page (similar to Opinions, I suppose, but perhaps nastier in tone), Links, a Message Board, a Chat Room, and more. And not only that, we also branched out into “colonies” which aimed to exclusively cover Bond, Sonic, and Spider-Man topics. Our naïvely comprehensive approach strikes me as hilarious now, almost satirical. I wish we could say parody was our purpose, but we were earnestly trying to be a significant source of so-called “objective” commentary on media. Reading over our archives from those days, our earnestness is infectious rather than cloying.

When the original site was removed from Geocities following its closing in 2009, I nearly missed my chance to archive it. CRN was something which I had nearly forgotten about when I went to college. I made sure to let ChickenMan know about it, and we decided that a blog might be a nice way to continue on. College is a weird time for everyone. People change and move away, you make new friends and forget about others, and tastes/interests change immensely (fortunately, ChickenMan has stayed true to himself, though his insight has grown tremendously). No longer could ChickenMan and I spend our afternoons locked in a middle school keyboard lab (our “office” or “base of operations,” you might say) updating the site. Several states now separated us. Thankfully, the proliferation of digital technology made communication much easier and fluid across great distances, but it wasn’t until we had our respective degrees that we mobilized CRN once again.

Nostalgia does funny things to us, especially now, when our technology makes access to these fondly remembered products nearly instantaneous. You can download you memories now. It makes us fond for things which aren’t really “old,” or for things which didn’t interest us before (such as commercials and bad PS1 games). But if nostalgia has ever ringed true, CRN is as good an example as any other. And it moves beyond just remembering what once was; CRN has grown considerably, beyond a simple exercise in nostalgia. Our reviews have only gotten better, even though they share the same format (300 words or so of blocky, unorganized text, at my insistence), and we are far more prolific than ever before. We now review books as well, which, as ChickenMan has told me, seems like a strange fit in the CRN universe, and our extension into the social network has been nothing but a positive experience for us. We continue to grow our inclusive community.

When I look back at our old reviews, I often laugh at our prose, but not derisorily. I laugh joyfully at the words, or rather, between them. I can see the friendship which was the groundwork for CRN somewhere in the spaces. I hope this is visible to whatever readership we have or may have in the future. If it isn’t, and our readership is in fact nil, I know that this brand of nostalgia has served its purpose admirably.

Code Redd Net Awards: Best Action Game

Up next we have the award for Best Action Game. And the nominees are...

Spy Hunter (2001)
Winback: Covert Operations (2001)
Second Sight (2004)
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (2005)
Crazy Taxi (2001)

And the winner is...

Spy Hunter

Friday From the Archives: Spy Hunter (2002)

Every Friday we celebrate the heritage of Code Redd Net by posting a retro-review from our considerable back catalogue of embarrassingly naive, but nonetheless entertaining and heartfelt, movie and game reviews. Please pardon the prose; most of these articles were written in our immediately post-pubescent years. Hopefully you find them as enjoyable as we do.

Now, if I'm not mistaken, our review Spy Hunter was our very first game review. And boy, does it show; but, as I've argued elsewhere, it's charmingly so. I believe we wrote this piece in middle school, and both ChickenMan and I agreed that it was the only suitable candidate to kick-off our games section. Today, of course, my review reads more like a satire of the often hyper-hyperbolic video game press than your usual critical undertaking (I sincerely wish I had that kind of awareness in 2001, but alas), while ChickenMan's prose at least has some life, some enthusiasm, and doesn't sound like a compilation of quotes taken from the back of the cover art (though I would like to see his quotes there at some point). As for the game itself, it holds up remarkably well today. It is way too short still, and the multiplayer options are spare stuff, but it as fluid and crisp as you could possibly hope for. Though the game is not too easy, neither is it frustrating, and that's a pretty difficult balance to maintain. Spy Hunter was the first game we ever gave a perfect score, and that reminds us that the very first Code Redd Net Awards is less than a week away, and Spy Hunter is in the running for the Best Action Game award. Join us on November 8 to celebrate the 10-year history of Code Redd Net.

"Spy Hunter is a great addition to any PS2 owner's library of games and it really shows off the machine's power. The missions mix the right variety of gameplay and none of the missions seem to get boring. One mission you are destroying enemy interceptor prototypes and another you are breaking out of a warehouse using a regular car. The storyline is also great and the beautiful next-gen graphics only contribute to the excellent controls which are intuitive but easy to master. I recommend this game to anyone looking for a great action game. This is one of the best games this year, so make sure to pick this up. And with the success of this game, there is a high chance of a sequel."

ChickenMan had this to say:

"Spy Hunter marks one of PS2's greatest games yet! Its gameplay style is not like many others.It seems like car games that don't have to do with racing make good games. One of the miscues of the game (if you use the analog like me) is that the lightest flick of the down button and your slowin', slowin', goin' backwards! And the other is the rather long load time, but it's all worth it, baby! Going through the missions your interceptor gets upgraded with more ammunition, better ammunition, new weapons and defenses. This game is the bomb! And defuse da bomb with EMP. Can you make vehicle combat games better?! No!! Maybe, but NO!! Chow baby, play some Spy Hunter!"