It must be nerve-racking having a snotty-nosed journalist turn up to play your wares. When I visited Hello Games the team were so deep in crunch that they had been hooked up to Monster energy drink intravenous drips to boost productivity.
At least ten pairs of tired eyes followed my motorcycle platform antics, as I sat amongst them. Worried glances scraped across my back whenever Joe was floored, or shark tanked. Poor Hello Games had no idea that they’d invited in someone who was so abjectly rubbish at games.
I was playing a Snowmobile level – singing along with the ‘Danger!’ soundbites, gently rocking to the Bond-esque music and aiming the frontend of my vehicle at vast missile pads while an ominous off-screen villain counted down to their launch. It was so glorious that at its close I span around in my big black swivel chair and said ‘This is f*cking awesome!’. To my mind, at least, there were a few Hello air-punches. It was like I had finally become the Man from Del Monte, and I had not only said yes – but next up there was a mission with a jetpack!
A first play of Joe Danger: The Movie is like mainlining endorphins: a proverbial explosion in a sweet shop. As you play through the various films Joe’s a stuntman for a huge variety of level-types are thrown at you – outrunning avalanches on skis, police bike chases after Team Nasty in a city centre an Indiana Jones mine cart. Amazingly, meanwhile, each vehicle is as much fun to pilot as the last.
The only reduction in Joe joy could ever come when those as cack-handed as myself reach the game’s later Deleted Scenes missions – but, as we all know, for many that’s just where a Joe Danger game begins.
Joe Danger 2: The Movie will decorate XBLA with colours so vivid that your flatscreen, so used to muddy browns and dark red blood, will probably vomit. Vomit though, in a wonderful and sweet-smelling way. It’s a bloomin’ triumph.
