Little Britain: The Video Game

Little Britain: The Video Game
The greatest failure on Sony's quality control. No wonder what could be the second.
Genre(s): Party Platform(s): Microsoft Windows PlayStation 2 PlayStation Portable Mobile Release: Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2 EU: February 2, 2007 PlayStation Portable EU: September 12, 2007 AU: October 4, 2007 Mobile Q4 2007 Developer(s): Gamerholix Gamesauce Runestone Games (mobile) Publisher(s): Blast! Entertainment Glu Mobile (mobile) Country: United Kingdom Series: Little Britain

Little Britain: The Video Game is a party game released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2 on February 2, 2007, PlayStation Portable on September 12, 2007, and mobile sometime during 2007. It was co-developed by Gamerholix and Gamesauce, and published by Blast! Entertainment. The game is based on the British sketch comedy series, Little Britain, which was originally created by David Walliams and Matt Lucas. The game was met with very negative reviews and was considered one of the worst, if not the worst, games on the PlayStation 2 and even one of the worst games of all time.

Gameplay

The game consists of seven mini-games, for example, collect all the cookies from the store, just like Pac-Man, another mini-game is about puking on everyone who comes near you, another mini-game is about skateboarding and collecting things so as not to trip and yet another mini-game is about jumping into the pool and doing various pranks and yet another mini-game is about shooting a goal without the goalkeeper catching the ball.

Why It Hates Cake

Blast! version

1. An idea of a game based on Little Britain is not a good one and it doesn't look like an interesting idea at all, as there aren't that many clever game concepts that you could over the show, as it never relied on overarching stories, since the show itself was just a sketch comedy series that mostly relied on exaggerated lives of random characters who are all one-dimensional and have different stereotypes from each other, what more could you get out of a video game about that?
2. One mini-game (most specifically the mini-game at Pox involving Maggie and Judy) involves you having to play a rip-off of Columns until you fill out a bar (or as the game says: Maggie's gullet), before controlling her to vomit on people to earn points. Another one (the mini-game at Llandewi Breffi involving Dafydd Thomas) has you collecting gay magazines while running over the villagers on the streets, who could be homosexuals (as evident by the voice lines of Thomas every time he runs over a villager). This led to accusations that the game was homophobic, resulting in the game being banned in Germany.
   • One of the minigames is incredibly disgusting because it literally involves puking on the people closest to you.
3. It has only seven mini-games and most of them are extremely easy to beat, even on the hardest difficulty.
   • The back of the box falsely says that there are eight mini-games. Though the PSP port of the game does exclusively have that one additional eighth mini-game and it's just as bad as the rest since it mocks people with mental disabilities.
4. The mini-games are also poor, with some ripping off arcade games like Columns (for the previously mentioned mini-game at Pox with Maggie and Judy) and Pac-Man (for the mini-game at Sussex involving Marjorie Dawes) and in general they are so simple and lazily made that they are almost at the level of games made on pygame and even these larger projects have more interesting gameplay than these minigames.
5. The gameplay for lots of the levels is very repetitive, not even super-patient players can master it without feeling unhappy making the gameplay very boring as hell very quickly, apparently, the developers clearly didn't want to create something interesting, they just stuck it in you.
   • Most of the gameplay involves you pressing buttons or/and combos of buttons to do wearisome tasks.
6. The controls for some of the levels are absolutely frustrating and are hard to get used to. For instance, the Vicky Pollard level involves you spamming the X button to skate along and the Square button to jump over obstacles, what makes it worse is that the jump button is incredibly delayed, as it takes about one second before Vicky Pollard can actually jump when you press the button.
7. Even for PS2 and PSP standards, the graphics and animations along with the character designs look absolutely terrible and almost look like a game that was made for PlayStation or Nintendo 64. It is worth recalling that this is a late game for PlayStation 2, and at that time consoles such as Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii have already been released.
8. Even though the original cast from Little Britain reprise their roles for their characters, the voice acting and notable one-liners are quite annoying to listen to, such as the infamous "I. Love. Cake. GO!" in the Sessex/Marjorie Dawes mini-game.
9. Most of the soundtrack in the game sound rather boring and repetitive and it can become irritating as if the authors of this whole soundtrack had no idea to create something interesting.
10. The boxart is very simple and lazily made, as it shows nothing but a plain white background with Vicky Pollard, Lou, and Andy, even the logo slapped on it. This can discourage the consumer from buying and rather it looks as if the publisher did not have outstanding creativity and just stuck a few things in instead of creating something completely new and interesting.
11. The menu is very embarrassing because it consists of only a few options and there is no way to set controls, gameplay or music.

Mobile version

1. Horrible and ear-bleeding MIDI music which infuriates almost very quickly and will surely make you want to turn off the music or even the entire game.
2. The digitized sound effects are low-quality, due to hardware limitations.
3. It has only four mini-games (once again, due to hardware limitations) in other words, it has much less content than all the other versions.
4. The skating, cycling, and diving mini-games are nothing but quick-time events which is quite lazy on the part of the developers.

The Only Redeeming Quality

1. As mentioned before, the PSP version has one exclusive minigame, which means this is the superior version of the game.

Reception

Little Britain: The Video Game was universally panned by critics and has been considered to be one of the worst games if not the worst game on the PlayStation 2 and also one of the worst games of all time.

Its GameRankings score is only 16%, and at the time, it was the fourth lowest-rated game on the site, surpassed by Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, Ride to Hell: Retribution and Double Dragon II: Wander of the Dragons.

Eurogamer's James Lyon gave it a 1/10 rating, calling it "absolutely appalling". UGO ranked it #65 in its list of the 102 worst video games of all time, and GamesRadar+ named it the 29th worst game of all time, and WatchMojo ranked it the #1 worst PS2 game on their Top 10 list.

Trivia

• In Germany, the game was refused classification due to a mini-game involving homophobia related to incentives and rewards, therefore banning the sale and promotion in the country, although the game was initially released with an unauthorized USK KJ rating, which was later pulled when the game went on the index roughly a few weeks after it was released, therefore banning the game entirely.

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