PlayStation One's The Crow: A Cash Grab Classic for All the Wrong Reasons

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Introduction

Here at Cash Grab we spend a certain proportion of our time, perhaps sadistically, purposefully spending our time playing video games and movie tie-ins that are commonly known to be awful, testing and in some cases a complete travesty! 

So here enters The Crow for the PlayStation One, a single game that embodies everything we have spent our time searching for. A game of such epic failures that it can only be described, as many do, as one of the worst video games of all time! Considering the shear volume of video games available on the market, even in the era of the PlayStation One, this counts itself as no easy achievement or feat. 

The Crow: City of Angels for the PS1

Origins

The Crow was originally a comic book series, first published in 1989, following our friendly, undead, vigilante anti-hero taking down the criminal scum on the streets that plagued him, and his city, in a life once lived. Both within the comic and the following film there is a great sense of dark spirituality, pagan imagery and harsh retribution, all of which strike as strong symbiotic themes that can be used to great effect with the correct direction and understanding, especially in the form of a video game. To some extents these themes are played upon successfully in the films, yet, to the great misfortune of many and the great delight to us at Cash Grab we were soon to discover that the game held no such grand notions...

The Game

The Crow styles itself as a 3D beat 'em up, in the spirit of games such as Final Fight or Streets of Rage, a premise and direction that would seem incredibly fitting and certainly the correct direction to go in terms of game design, especially considering the continued success of such games within the mid to late 90's. Yet, the end result does not quite come across with the same level of polish or finesse as such classics. 

The Crow instead decides that comically disjointed combat, character movement akin to that of an individual with life-threatening hemorrhoids and 10 seconds of sound design, recorded in a toilet basin and stuck on repeat is the true winning formula, something that the Final Fights of the world only wished they could have come up with first. The end result is a cacophony of tragedy and some of the most hilarious gameplay we've ever had the pleasure of experiencing.

Oh Lord...

Within the first five minutes of starting the game, without any explanation as to the story of the game or why we're taking violent revenge on apparent strangers, we had searched for a door for four and half minutes and then followed that up with getting kicked to the face, throwing a bottle against the wall and missing seven punches against our foes within the following thirty seconds! This instantaneous outburst of disjointed chaos sent us in to a frenzy of laughter, especially considering the relentless and incessant dialogue from our foes of "Hey clown face".

The real problem for your diaphragm is when the madness ends... Suddenly, ever so suddenly, you're faced with an unnatural silence, except for the endless repetition of a 16-bit distorted guitar in the background, after pathetically murdering a room full of people. It's only then that you realise you have no idea where you're meant to be going, meaning you spend an embarrassing amount of time casually strolling over the corpses of your foes while testing any bit of poorly rendered wall or door you can find until suddenly, and quite randomly, finding the path forward to only more disjointed chaos!

This dynamic is constant throughout the game, much to our great pleasure, and if you ever find yourself with the urge to become the world's worst undead vigilante then we can't recommend The Crow: City of Angles for the PlayStation One enough. It is one of the worst games we've ever played, it is one of the funniest games we've ever played. Here at Cash Grab it lives forever as a true Cash Grab classic... For all the wrong reasons!

Please do watch our full podcast episode on The Crow Below

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Tom - Cash Grab