Stuck Behind the Eight Ball
Not even the promise of unlockable boobs can save Pocket Pool from bombing. Hard.
Published: April 29, 2007
The presentation, at least, is a little more consistent. It's consistently bad, but at least you know you won't have to hold out hope that the game will suddenly pleasantly surprise you. The entire game seems to be running in interlaced mode, which is awesome because it's also apparently running in 8-bit color mode; everything in the game is dithered to hell and back, making it look like you're playing one long animated .gif file with all the fun that you can imagine that level of non-interactivity could provide. Menu buttons are torn -- literally, I'm almost positive -- from do-it-yourself clipart galleries with such awesome offerings as "beveled oval" and "text that flashes so fast you can see the interlacing." I seriously think someone learned to use Photoshop while making this game; even the pictures of the girls on either side of the screen are blended in poorly.
It's possible some of you will actually play this game out of a sense of morbid curiosity. It won't matter if I tell you not to, because that's just encouraging you sick bastards, but listen to be carefully about this: mute the game. Just do it. You don't need the menu chime effects and you certainly don't need to hear the repetitive dialogue by the AI when they take/miss shots, but the music will actually cause your head to implode if you listen to it long enough, I'm sure of it. Either that, or the blood leaking from your ears will prevent you from hearing it for too long.
I'll say it again because it probably bears mentioning: I love me some sexy girls, and I'll admit that more than perhaps any other reviewer of this game. Believe me when I say my never-ending quest for finding the perfect Asian girl with huge fake boobs won't even allow me to sit through this experience. It doesn't matter how hard up for boobies and butts you are -- you're on the internet right now reading this review, and chances are you could probably misspell the URL for this very site and stumble across a porn site with pictures better than some of the stuff in this game.
The PSP is not inexperienced in the ways of the crap game, but Pocket Pool is something of a shitty diamond in the rough. The king of crap games, if you will. Hell, man, the game is such a half-assed effort that the placeholder savegame process is still in there (for those that haven't seen it before -- and if I remember right, only the abysmal first Generation of Chaos game left it in as well), and you're asked every time if you want to delete any savegame files before you're taken to the screen to name your savegame every goddamn time, even if you just want to overwrite the old savegame. Quality.
You will hate yourself so much that it might actually lead to bodily harm if you pay money for this game. Please don't hurt yourself. We love you. Almost as much as I love boobies.
