Crossover #7: Shadow Man

There were many reasons to hate Acclaim back in the day... soooo many reasons... such as the stupidity of their ad campaigns (like offering money to anyone who would legally change their name to Turok) to the horribleness of BMX XXX to the sheer boredom contained within World Championship Rugby. Personally, I will never stop hating them for the way they managed to castrate the greatness that was Valiant Comics in order to create comic book tie-ins that they could eventually turn into mediocre video games.

However, before they managed to drive themselves out of business, Acclaim managed to pull off a totally unexpected hit with their surprisingly good Shadow Man, a voodoo-themed action game very loosely based on the superb comic which took place in the Valiant Universe. Of course, when I say "loosely based on", I mean that it had a couple of similar settings and characters, but was totally different from the comic series overall.

The plot does not mention Jack Boniface, the comic's protagonist, at all outside of a brief couple of sentences in the game's manual. Instead, players assume the role of Mike LeRoi, a failed college student who now drives a taxi and is somewhat randomly chosen to become one of the voodoo warriors known as Shadowmen. Switching between the Deadside and the Liveside (akin to the material and spirit realms in the Soul Reaver games), Mike and his alter ego must eventually destroy an evil insane asylum and do battle with the one-and-only Jack The Ripper (don't ask, it never really tried to make any sense).

The game itself was a third-person horror-action title featuring visuals and audio that managed to come across as decent, but nothing truly outstanding. What made it a lot of fun to play were the game's tight controls and bizarre-but-entertaining storyline, as well as some fairly original characters pulled from voodoo mythology. Unfortunately, though, gamers who played Shadow Man on the Playstation were shafted with muddy graphics and sloppy ports of the controls, while those using either the N64 or the Dreamcast managed to find themselves playing a game that didn't actually suck.

All things considered, the game managed to provide a solidly entertaining ten hours or so of playtime. In fact, if you never read the comics, you probably had a good time playing Shadow Man. But, if you were like me and were a fan of Valiant's voodoo-themed antihero, you most likely found yourself lamenting the fact that Jacck Boniface and all of his saxophone-playing goodness was nowhere to be found. And lamenting the fact that Master Darque wasn't featured in the game, either. Or those cool spider-aliens... sorry, where was I?

Oh, yeah: screw you, Acclaim. Screw you so hard.