This game taught me the word 'fuck.'

I first played Scarface: The World Is Yours on the PS2 at age 8, and I have memories of shocked guests (except for the one cool uncle who knew the movie) watching this kid play a game that yelled the F-word every 5 seconds. I have never finished this game, and I never will. I've tried a few times (a couple of years after my parents finally took away the PS2 version's disc, I burned this game onto a blank DVD to play it again), but after another day of giving it the old college try, I'm done.

It's incredible how our child selves overlooked flaws because we were just happy to have games to play. I used to think Scarface was a better GTA game than the actual GTAs, because you could go into buildings and have conversations with NPCs on the street and do vehicular combat and piss in trash cans and swim (I wasn't aware San Andreas had swimming).

Playing it as a grown man, I can see how shallow Scarface: The World Is Yours really is. If there was ever an AI-generated video game, this is what it would look like. Most of the aforementioned conversations are just you and an NPC speaking random lines at each other; the missions are repetitive and require grinding of randomly generated sidequests before you get a crumb of story; the world is designed to be faithful to the setting rather than fun to navigate. Almost all back streets have dead ends, and cars can't climb over anything. Forcing the player to stay on the road makes car chases a bore and evading the police a chore.

It's all very faithful to the movie, to a fault. The game quotes the film's classic lines into memehood. Tony Montana feels like a cartoon with Alzheimer's disease as his monologues are lifted wholesale from the film to be re-dubbed here by an impressive soundalike - Al Pacino couldn't reprise his role after one too many cigars.

If you do want to check out this curiosity piece, try the PS2 version. The PC port is bad and buggy. You've probably seen the famous glitch where Tony's head isn't attached to his body if you're playing on anything newer than Windows XP. Sometimes you're forced to restart missions because the vehicle required to do them doesn't spawn. The graphics miss details that were present in the PS2 version, such as Tony's jacket getting soaked with blood as he takes damage. I played this game with a fan-made 'remastered' patch, plus half a dozen other fixes duct-taped together to give the fucking thing controller support and better performance. It still wasn't very good.

There was more effort put into Scarface: The World Is Yours than most licensed games, but it's no Batman: Arkham City. It has a lot to do, but it makes you do it so often it gets tiresome. It hastily rewrites the ending to one of my favourite films, and proves that being in a licensed game is a fate worse than death. I will always be somewhat fond of this game because of the childhood memories, but now the rose-tinted aviator sunglasses are off.

Manolo, choot this piece of chit.

There's a moment near the very end of this game that I think really epitomizes Simon's Quest for me. You're going up to Dracula's Castle again.... and it's quiet. Nobody's home, just the eerie ruins of a place you once passed through long ago. There's no real twist to it either, it's just played straight. You walk in, unceremoniously kill Dracula, and that's it. It leaves this sort of hollow feeling, a deep reminiscence of the Castlevania that once was.

Simon's Quest is the most interesting kind of sequel to me, one that seeks to completely invert and upend the status quo of the original game. If the original Castlevania was about a methodical seige to defeat evil and save the day, then Simon's Quest is a showcase of the genuine aftermath shadowing such a task. Even after defeating Dracula, Simon doesn't have much of anything to return to. The world that he supposedly "saved" is completely dead looking, and he's left with a curse that's constantly eating away at his body. It's a premise that lies in stark contrast to the elating feeling that came with beating the first game, almost as if we've been kicked down and mocked despite our greatest efforts and supposed victories.

Simon's Quest is a game I'd consider to be genuinely brilliant and forward thinking, but not everyone seems to agree with me. Perhaps there couldn't be more fitting fate for it. A game reviled and dismissed by most, just as its hero is left with nothing but bitterness and decay.