Crossover: Danger Girl

Danger Girl is one of those comics which exists to be a guilty pleasure. It manages to be both a satire and a send-up to James Bond-style storylines, and it also manages to do so while looking absolutely gorgeous. Admittedly, J. Scott Campbell's artwork makes it easy to love based solely on appearances, and the writing is snarkily funny enough to keep readers entertained. Honestly, the series would translate well into a sarcastic cartoon along the same lines as Futurama; I imagine it would probably get put on Fox, praised by critics, loved by fans, canceled by the network, and then revitalized by Cartoon Network.

However, one thing it didn't translate well into was a video game. Which is a shame, because THQ has definitely done some great work with comic franchises (remember how much fun The Punisher was?), but they certainly screwed up in 2000 when they released Danger Girl for the Playstation console. It wasn't as awful as, say Superman 64 or Batman: Dark Tomorrow, but it came pretty close.

The game itself follows Abbey Chase and her allies going up against Major Maxim and the Hammer Empire. Well, that's nothing new, because that's typically how the comics go... except the comics are actually enjoyable. Developed by n-Space, the geniuses behind the Die Hard Playstation games, Danger Girl actually featured the same graphics engine used by those titles and looked just as awful. To make things more insulting, though, the game also sported Campbell's artwork on its case cover, so playing the game after viewing that art was the cruelest bait-and-switch ever. It was like being promised visual paradise only to have an acidic turd dropped directly into our eye sockets.

The controls for the game were pretty awful, too. The characters' slow turn speed made it practically impossible to actually engage enemies in a fair fight, so one had to stick to leaning around corners and picking off antagonists from a distance before they could spot the player. Needless to say, if you actually wanted to last through the game, you had to rely on absurdly repetitive gameplay in order to do so. Granted, it didn't involve you flying through the same rings over and over again, but it was almost as bad.

Finally, the smart and sexy humor the comic was famous for just didn't translate into the digital realm at all. Instead, the writing was tepid at best, and painful at worst. That, coupled with some truly mediocre voice-overs, forced a lot of us to test out effectiveness of the mute buttons on our TV remotes.

Ultimately, Danger Girl was one of those games which could have been so much fun had the license been properly used. Instead, it was so bad that it sank close to the bottom of that generation's game barrel... though the lowest position was actually taken by Spawn: The Eternal.