Charlie's Angels: Full Road Halo* X Throttle Cyclone

"Thank God that's over!"

This is not the what a developer would want a player to exclaim after completed their game but that was my soul's honest response to Charlie's Angels for the Gamecube. I can usually find some enjoyment in a bad game but after a the first two hours, the final two I had to endure to finish it were pure punishment. Well, at least it makes for a good story.

Rather than re-hashing the games problems(repetitiveness, awful models, invisible walls, terrible animation, weak dialogue, total lack of The Mac-man, etc.) I'll point you to the Metacritic page that has some wonderful and creative reviews on the title. Some times it takes pure hatred and anger to write a really good scathing review. Gamecritics.com's Gene Park(who actually called Ubisoft tech support about the controls!) put it best:

"...Charlie's Angels is a horrible game manufactured with the creaky spare parts of a rusty genre along with fallen gears from the movie hype machine. This is the kind of game that's given away when you order a large pizza and get the second one for half price. This is the kind of game you might see kids play in daytime cartoon shows. They look generic and lame, but it's clear that yeah, it's a videogame."

In doing research about the game is seems that there were a lot of failed tie-ins to the second movie Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle including jewelry, reproductions of clothing worn onscreen, children's clothes(!), awful-looking bobble head dolls, an online animated prequel, a mobile game, and a download-only PC title, Charlie's Angels: Angel X.

There's not much info out about Angel X on the official site, I had to resort to gaming enthusiast sites for a decent description and screenshots. The demo link on the official site doesn't work, but it can still be downloaded from numerous sources. So, I tried it.

The strangest thing about it is that it's a point and click brawler. The control is described as comparable to Diablo or Baldurs' Gate. I'll have to take their word on that as I've never played either but playing through the first level of Angel X doesn't really make me want to. I really couldn't see it being entertaining at all, especially at 20 bucks.

While I have to admit that it's amusing that there are Nestea Cool trucks and vending machines outside of the ancient Chinese training dojo-type place and a Sony-Ericsson Kyocera phone onscreen at all times but again, 20 bucks? This game should be free.

The nadir of the advergaming was when I had to take a picture of the the villain speeding away in the Nestea Cool delivery truck with the Sony-Ericsson Kyocera phone. I'm disappointed that they couldn't work in Best Buy and the Pentium 4 processor. I guess that's in the full version.

To make it even more baffling, it's often referred to as "Charlie's Angels: Angel X Online Game" but the only thing online about it seems to be the way to buy it and the leaderboard scores.

As a bonus to my obsessive ramblings, here's the code that I obtained by decrypting the flash file to the Best Buy portion of the official Full Throttle site(sad, isn't it?). The secret code to the Secret Content page of that site is "ca062703". Ah fuck it, here's the direct link.

*The original title of Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle was Charlie's Angels: Halo. I guess Microsoft didn't like Sony using the name of one of their most popular game franchises.