Send in Jimmy

Send in Jimmy is a first-person shooter that looks like Goldeneye and thus it’s bound to snag a few buys just off the screen shots alone.  And in a lot of ways, some positive, most negative, it serves to remind people of that bygone era known as the late 1990s, back when games were just entering 3D and Duke Nukem Forever was just entering development.

In Jimmy you run around and shoot aliens with a pistol.  Later you get the ability to throw fireballs or upgrade your gun to an Uzi.  Enemies start off only with the ability to run up and flail their arms at you.  Later, they get armed with guns that seem to hit completely at random.  There are also ones that explode when shot, which can be used to set up combinations.  The aiming system works well and head shots do seem to matter.  There’s a handful of missions that carry the playtime to around 90 minutes.

I really would have liked Send in Jimmy if not for some really bad technical issues.  The game is as foggy as Michael Jackson’s mind was around June of 2009, if you catch my drift.  What, too soon?  As a result, when enemies  start firing at you it leaves you looking frantically off into the distance hoping to catch a glimpse of the gun’s muzzle flash.  Later in the game, when you get the ability to throw fireballs quicker, the situation fixes itself.  By then I figure most people will have quit and moved on to something else.  This is the Xbox 360 after all, where the average owner has enough first person shooters to land themselves on the government’s terrorist watch list.

The game also has major issues with skipping.  It seems like every ten feet the game has to pause to load up more terrain.  As a result the game flows like a Parkinson’s patient operating a Rascal scooter.  There’s also an issue of slowdown when too many enemies are on-screen at once.  In the last stage these two problems combined to form a sort of clusterfuck version of Voltron, alternatively making everything skippy and slow.  The Blazing Sword came in the form of invisible walls that seemed to trap my character in them temporarily.  Then, hilariously, the game nearly crashed during the ending that saw dozens of aliens on-screen at once catching fire and dying.

Developer Stamp had something going here, and despite its primitive looks and outdated gameplay, there is an undeniable charm in Send in Jimmy. It’s a little like the Quasimodo of the indie marketplace.  It’s ugly and broken and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but if you do get suckered into buying it you might enjoy it while it wraps its arms around your corpse and dies of starvation.  Yea, that’s how the fucking Hunchback of Notre-Dame is supposed to end.  Up yours, Disney!

Send in Jimmy was developed by Stamp

80 Microsoft Points are like “seriously, they lived happily ever after?  What a load” in the making of this review.