Loaded/Twisted Tea

Game: Loaded, Interplay, 1996, PSX
Beer: Twisted Tea, 24 fl. oz., 5% abv
# of beers consumed during play: 1
Level Reached: 2
Level of Intoxication: Woozy

Game
Back when the Playstation 1 first debuted, the games industry was undergoing a significant change. Its image as a children's toy was beginning to fade and while older gamers were still being compared to sweaty-palmed 15-year-olds, the target demographic was slowly sliding upwards. While bloody, violent games were by no means a new concept, it seemed as if the advent of the Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn embraced these ideals even more. The games industry was apparently going through puberty, as games of the time and their advertisements were filled with course language, accentuated female body parts, and lots and lots of chunky red blobs. Enter Loaded, a property which attempted to posit the notion that all you need to make a game is a ton of hallways, some locked doors, and lots and lots of chunky red blobs. Many would say that the developers of Loaded and its sequel succeeded spectacularly in making something game-ish.

Gameplay
From simply hearing about the game and possibly viewing a few screenshots or YouTube clips, one might assume that the goal of Loaded is to simply shoot everything that isn't you, including prisoners, insane people, security guards, sentry guns, tables, chairs, walls, doors, and anything else that could conceivably be aimed at in the game. While this might be technically true, it isn't really the actual goal of the game, and this is where the intrinsic problem with Loaded lies. The real goal of Loaded is to get to the next level, and yes, I realize that sounds pretty elementary. The problem is, that's really the goal of the game. Seriously. Oh sure, they may be dressed up in the loading screen as "Find the warden's elevator", "get to the escape pods", or even the clever and misleading "get to the level exit", but in the end, that's all you are doing, everyone you shoot at is just getting in the way. Now, I realize that once over-simplified, every game's objective boils down to that. But finding varied and interesting ways of getting you to that objective is one of the secret ingredients that make some games good, some great, and some abysmal. While Loaded doesn't quite fit into that last category, it comes dangerously close. In the game, you choose your character from a roster of criminal caricatures that for one reason or another makes me feel like I'm getting a disturbing peek into the hidden insecurities of the game's design team. Between psychotic clowns, gigantic babies, bald men in purple dresses, or a female who can only be described as disappointing; there's a specific criminal deviation for everyone. Each character has their own strengths and weaknesses, and no matter who you pick, you'll be wishing you picked the fastest one halfway through the first level.

Why? I'm so glad you're wondering.


When you are entering a new area in a level, you will be positively inundated with enemies, turrets, explosions, gunfire, lights, sounds, and power-ups. Once you have frantically dispatched all the baddies, exploded all the crates, and collected everything there is to collect, you will move onto a new area. Once again, you will be set upon by what seems like every pissed-off guard and lowly prison inmate possible, and you will again have to kill everything that moves. This pattern will repeat over and over, giving you an incredibly steady and well timed sine wave of conflict, collect, and carry on, all the way up until you find the key card. The. Key. Card. Old-school gamers know exactly where I'm going with this, but for all of you who just got your first game system in the form of a 360 last Christmas from your parents, I'll explain. Back in the hey-day of videogames, certain platformers and First Person Shooters used a combination of multi-colored key cards and correspondingly locked doors in order to create more branched and intricate levels, as well as to elongate the gameplay and get more playtime out of a given map. Back then, it was regarded as one of those basic gameplay conventions, something that any game in the genre would be crazy not to have. Unfortunately, no matter how cleverly the level was designed, the key card system always involved backtracking. Backtracking has never, ever been fun. Ever. Ever. Unfortunately, anyone who has played the original Doom, Descent, or yes, even the original Metal Gear Solid has come to understand how terrible it is to have fought hours through a level just to get a silly card that you needed for a single door on the other side of the known universe, and now, instead of sneaking/killing/shooting your way through a level, you are walking, in silence, through stuff you've already seen and slowly realizing how much laundry you have to do before Monday. Ask someone who has beaten any one of these games what color the keycards are, and once they've stopped having PTSD-style flashbacks, they'll tell you. It doesn't matter which game they played, because the colors are always the same across every single game that uses them. Red, Yellow, Blue, and sometimes Green. Loaded uses this exact same design cue. Players have to fight all the way to one corner of the level to snag a colored key card so they can slog all the way back to a door they saw right after the loading screen so they can continue to another remote corner of the game for another card. If you're wondering why I mentioned the first MGS, don't forget, at the very end of the game, you have to use three key cards to "deactivate" Metal Gear. One yellow, one blue, and one red. Aaaaand you have to backtrack.
Of course, I know why they included the keycard mechanic in Loaded. Aside from the fact that it was still in vogue at the time, it was also included to add artificial complexity to the maze-like levels of the game and the nauseatingly repetitive nature of the shoot-em-up gameplay. The sloppy controls, the cheap hits snuck in by the cookie-cutter bad guys, and the hideously repetitive graphics only serve as gravy to this decaying sack of potato slurry.

Okay, sure, maybe I'm being too hard on Loaded, seeing as it's almost 16 years old. It has its moments, and to be sure the game is good for blowing off some steam and just cutting loose with some mindless kill-em-allitude. Unfortunately for the game, I'm definitely not looking back with rose tinted glasses and in playing this, I can see that now, the game's shortcomings outweigh its highlights, with the ultra-violence and super fast paced gameplay engineered to mask the weak underlying structure of the game. Before you jackals start emailing me, I actually still own an original copy of this game, and it is in pristine condition. So yes, there was a point in my life that I enjoyed this game enough to pay upwards of $50 for it. I know it was heralded as groundbreaking when it was originally released, but sadly, this property has not aged well.

Graphics/Sound
Given that this is a Playstation 1 title, the graphics aren't half bad. Of course, textures in this game are reused so often, one may start to think the level artists went on strike halfway through the development cycle and the programmers paid some kid to just sit there and hit Ctrl+V until the game looked finished. All I'm saying is that the blue vented steel floors texture apparently won some sort of contest because they are everywhere. Of course, aside from potentially falling into the pit of "I'm lost because every part of this level looks exactly like every other part of this level", the repetitive graphic assets are bad because really, the designers had free reign of a storage medium capable of 650MB of storage, and most of that was taken up by songs from a band whose name alluded to someone's father engaging in self-cannibalism. Or something. I don't know. The 90's were a confusing time. Forgetting for a moment the repetitive textures and sprites, the lighting in the game was superb, and set a benchmark for smooth, colorful, realtime light sourcing. There, I said something nice about this damned game, get off my back you hateroids.
The sounds weren't bad at all, seeing as this game came from the glory days of the CD era. Music tracks were streamed directly off the CD, and sound effects were nicely digitized. In addition to the two or three music tracks that were actually pulse-pounding, pump-up murder music, the majority of the game had level scores that were quiet and unfortunately repetitive techno rave material. The sound effects are an unusual mix, with menu effects and certain other cues being authentic sounding gun loading and shooting sounds, whereas pretty much all of the characters' guns have a variation on the "pew-pew-pew" sound libraries. Classic fight noises and cartoonish grunts also abound as you skitter through a level, and guards in the game will oftentimes yell a stern "FREEZE!" None of these sounds ever really seems to get auditory priority over any others, and when absorbed in a normal play session, will all wash over you in the exact same fashion, as a dull roar that you'll instinctively tune out. If you've ever wanted to know what sensory overload feels like, sit as close to the screen as you can in a dark room, turn the volume all the way up, and play this for as long as you can stand it. Loaded excels at overwhelming your pathetic human brain.

Story
Story...Story...Okay, well here goes.

You are one of six psychotic maniacs, armed to the teeth. You have been imprisoned on a maximum security planet because you have been framed for the crimes of a failed military-cook-turned-space-pirate named, no joke, Fat Ugly Boy. This paragon of charm has actually worked his way up to the position of warden in the very prison system that your character is jailed in, and it is up to you to exact your revenge on F. U. B. for saddling you with his crimes before he uses super-advanced technology to hold the universe for ransom. Nevermind that you are already a psychotic, mentally deranged mercenary who already has a storied past of mass-murder and sociopathic behavior. As you chase F. U. B. across the galaxy, killing what can only be quantified as everyone who ever existed, you will begin to realize that no person ever played Loaded for the story, and the designers themselves probably came up with it as an afterthought one night during an intense session of injecting liquid LSD into their eyeballs.

Beer
Twisted Tea, yeah I'm again stretching the definition of beer with this outing, and you know I can feel you judging me right now. Fortunately, I know that you are more curious than judgmental, and that once I begin to describe this oral misadventure, you will decide, like I did, that choosing this product for this review was a terrific idea. Which allows me to segue nicely into something that wasn't a terrific idea: drinking this...thing. This...abomination. The person who sold this to me remarked casually that her friend loved it because she was unable to taste the difference between it and real sweet tea, and that this got her inexplicably bombed after just two cans. Had I been a certain ascot-wearing preppy crime solver, I would have correctly identified the preceding two sentiments as "a clue" whereupon my nerdy but still hot female sidekick would have uttered something along the lines of "Jinkies!" Unfortunately, I had neither the ascot nor the insight and simply paid my money and took the Twisted Tea home. Before I continue, I want to make one thing clear; whatever choice phrases I coin to describe Twisted Tea, however badly I rag on it, it will never even come close to touching the rings of Hell that is Earthquake, Joose, Four Loko, and others. Nothing can. Sure in its own little microcosm, the relatively weak Twisted Tea is bad, but comparing it directly to those other alcohols is like comparing Lindsay Lohan to Andrei Chikatilo, the scale for comparison is simply not able to open that wide. Anyway...

Smell
I have the feeling that everyone on the face of the planet knows the smell of tea, whether it be hot Earl Gray, or chamomile, or even plain old black tea left to sit for a day or two, the smell of tea is pretty characteristic. Following that assumption is that with an odor so widely known, it's a fairly trivial matter to tell whether or not it has gone bad. In the case of tea: does it still smell tea-like? Well, if you were like me when you opened the can of Twisted Tea, you smelled it and immediately came to the conclusion that your can had somehow been tainted. If you were quite unlike me, you would have immediately poured the offending beverage down the drain and spent some quality time sorting your sock drawer. My sock drawer was left unattended however, as I carefully considered the smell. The tea is in there, but it has been...changed...corrupted by the introduction of alcohol. The alcohol presents in an unusual manner, tempered perhaps by the tea, it isn't as sharp, and is somewhat changed in character. Instead of the normal notes of ethanol and casual sex, there is an almost wooden quality there, coming off with a similar odor to most British insurance claims adjusters.

Taste
Get some cat urine, add some Splenda, toss in a dash of Armor-all if you really want to do this right. Drink. Bam, you have Twisted Tea. If you don't have cat piss handy, go to your local bus station and lick the floor, it's basically the same thing. If I have irreparably grossed you out, please send me an email telling me. I am so lonely.

Okay, to be absolutely truthful, the tea taste, the sweet taste, and the alcohol taste just do not go together, it's like sour cream and watermelon, or goat cheese and chocolate, or snails and salt. Basically what I'm trying to get across here is the taste of Twisted Tea has a habit of making one's tongue cringe. I can say however that the taste seems to flatten out as more TT is consumed, until the taste really becomes inconsequential, and is really more of a minor annoyance to the newly risen goal of making it through the whole can. Now, in my limited experience, and as a mental throwback to the comments made to me by the saleswoman in regards to her friend, I am under the impression that Twisted Tea creates a specific female phenomenon whereby a woman will eagerly drink multiple cans of this substance in order to inoculate her own brain against the horrors of being hit on by that guy across the room who keeps eating his boogers. In extrapolating my own experience with the stuff, I can say that with enough Twisted Tea, a woman can successfully weather just about any adverse social situation, including waking up with Doctor Snotmuncher the next morning.

Intoxication
With only 5% abv, Twisted Tea is not going to obliterate you like certain other bargain basement offerings, but if you are the aforementioned lightweight chick who is prone to intentionally drinking away her lack of self-worth, Twisted Tea will get you there in fairly short order. The intoxication this drink offers is more mental. Where other alcohols make you look like John Travolta with a Novocaine shot to the lower spine, Twisted Tea leaves your gross motor functions mostly uninhibited, choosing instead to attack your upper mental faculties, leading to the well known phenomenon of telling everyone in earshot that you "totally love them" and asking any possible authority figures "if everything's cool...because you totally love them too."

Feel
Well, technically, Twisted Tea is not carbonated, there are no bubbles to foam up in your mouth. The weird thing about this is that when you do drink this concoction, there is a certain zing that you can most definitely feel on your tongue. I know it isn't carbonation, it doesn't even feel like carbonation, but there is a kick there that defies rational explanation. It's as if the tea and the alcohol have pulled some weird Captain Planet thing and through their powers combined have become even more tooth-curdling. Of course, aside from that, the rest of the drink is as flaccid as one would normally expect from a sweet tea-derived product. It's sweet, it's tea, and if it wasn't for the strange and clumsy interjection from the alcohol, it would be refreshing and forgettable. Also, just in case you missed it, I used the adjective flaccid to describe a product that you put in your mouth.

The Matchup
Both of these products are actually well paired here because in a certain capacity, they both do the same job. They reject the typical reality and substitute their own. Loaded is a game that you fire up and play to simply forget the world around you and indulge in your basest fantasies. Even so, at its core, it manages to take something that normally dwells on the fringe of acceptability and make it boring. On the other hand, Twisted Tea is a can you open when you want to forget the world for the next 6-8 hours and go from some boring nobody to that person everyone always records and posts to the internet. Each property has its own core audience that it caters to and who consequently adore it, and that reason alone may be enough to recommend giving these properties a go. Some people may hate it, some may feel as though they found their secret vice, and others may just be like me, who shrug their shoulders and sigh out a half-hearted "meh..." and that's okay too.

Cheers/Game on.