Phoenix Games
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| Phoenix Games | ||||||||
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 They rushed their games so fast that they also rushed to their death.
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"They really are a phoenix. Because every time you dispose of them, they manage to crawl back out of the ashes."
— Caddicarus
Phoenix Games was a British-Dutch video game company, who focused mainly on publishing titles for the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 (although they also released games for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo DS, and Nintendo Wii) and only consisted of six employees.
There's little information about the company, but their more infamous games tried to rip-off various franchises such as the Dalmatians franchise.
Phoenix Games also had a few collaborations with Dingo Pictures and Longsoft Multimedia, in which the animation company's rip-off movies were published on consoles by Phoenix Games. Originally, Dingo Pictures' movies were released on the PlayStation by another Dutch-British budget publisher named Midas Interactive Entertainment.
Much like Blast! Entertainment and Team6 Game Studios, their games were notorious for a common negative reception.
List of video games
- Main article: Phoenix Games/List of games
Why They And Their Games Sucked
- They commonly collaborated with the equally infamous Code Monkeys who are notorious for creating The Simpsons Skateboarding.
- Poor graphics and textures in most of their games.
- All titles that were created in collaboration with the also as infamous Dingo Pictures mostly focus on animated films and much like The 3D Adventures of Sailor Moon, wouldn't qualify as games. The only playable content in these is a few basic mini-games like a puzzle, many of which are playable without even needing electricity.
- The animated films have some of the worst animation ever made combined with some of the worst voice acting ever recorded. The quality and sound of these voices would actually make Bubsy's voice and the cheesy acting of the first Resident Evil bearable.
- Despite ripping off various franchises, the source material is never used but sometimes exploited. In Dalmatians 3, Cruella De Vil appears on the cover even though she herself never appears anywhere in the game. Same with Snow White and the 7 Clever Boys, where the box art depicts poorly rendered CGI clones of Snow White, the seven Dwarves, and the Evil Queen (in her Hag disguise), yet they don't appear in the game (in fact, the game itself also uses a different animation style than what is depicted).
- Utterly horrendous voice acting. One of the worst examples of this is in the opening part of their game Peter Pan when a husband and wife leave the house but it's a male narrator so bad that you can't distinguish gender. On a side note, many of the games are voiced by just the male narrator regardless of the character’s genders. Needless to say, they do a terrible job at doing so.
- Another related but equally infamous note is that they were so cheap that they couldn't afford more than one voice actor per video. The worst example of this was in their Pinocchio where the Blue Fairy is voiced by the extremely male narrator.
- On a tangentially related note, both Snow White and the Seven Clever Boys and Pinocchio have the same narrator.
- The box arts are horrible, and poorly made. The most infamous one is the one for Paccie for both including green Pacman and the vaguely racist name (The title sounds similar to “Paki”, an offensive British term used to describe Pakistani and Southern Asian people, mostly Indians) .
- One of the “clever boys”: Sonny, in Snow White and the 7 Clever Boys was depicted wearing blackface. This implies that the game developers were possibly racist or unaware of that.
- Even their original games are largely uninspired. London Cab Challenge is clearly a rip-off of Crazy Taxi and Shoot is a rip-off of Duke Nukem.
- The games were rushed to be made in three to five months while better games required about 18 months to ship out.
- Though they have a large library, it mostly consists of fairy tales, sports, and rip-offs of other franchises.
- Some games, such as Paccie, were advertised but never actually released.
- Many of the discs Phoenix has printed their games on were poorly made and get hot easily. Once hot, the disc become warped and will never load again.
- They also tends to make really loud noises while the console is reading them. Coupled with the stupidly long loading times, it becomes very tiresome.
- Dalmatians 3 was not a sequel to Dalmatians 2 but rather a port to the PlayStation 2. This shows that the company either had no idea what a true sequel was or that they are just unbelievably cheap. In fact, the rare Dalmatians 4 for the Nintendo DS and Wii is said to be the exact same game as Dalmatians 2 and 3.
- In fact, even Dalmatians 2 is not a sequel to The Dalmatians. Instead, it's just a republish by them, especially since The Dalmatians was published by Midas Interactive Entertainment, but Phoenix Games decided to republish it as Dalmatians 2 in 2003.
- Many of their games have graphical glitches. In London Cab Challenge, for example, the textures glitch out at times.
- They stole official artwork from other titles and used it for their own cover art; for example, the cover of Peter Pan uses the artwork of the Destiny Islands from Kingdom Hearts as background.
- Similar to Data Design Interactive (another notorious shovel-ware developer), Phoenix Games would often re-skin the same game and release it again under a different title, showing their laziness when it comes to making games. A lot of the mini games in their animated film titles are the exact same games but with different pictures.
Redeeming Qualities
- They actually had one good game: Hoppie for the PlayStation 2. Unfortunately, it was apparently only released in Italy.
- Sometimes the animations can be unintentionally funny, due to how bad they are.
- They also published a small number of games that were originally created by Japanese companies. One of these games is Sonic Wings, a surprisingly fun vertical shooter that originally was an arcade game. They even licensed Buttsubushi, a game from the company Selen. It was Selen's only work that wasn't pornographic.
- The logo looks nice.
Videos
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Trivia
- This page was shown by YouTuber PolarSaurusRex in his video covering Paccie, suspected to be one of Phoenix's lost games. Although he mainly looked up the list of games made by the company shown in this article, at that time and nowadays, Paccie was and is not listed on the list of games in this article, confusing PolarSaurusRex about if the game existed or not.
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