bringing JUSTICE to the worst garfield game.

due to extremely negative reception the Garfield video game from 2004 is considered to be one of the worst Garfield games of all time receiving a zero out of 10 from critics now I'm willing to believe that it's one of the worst Garfield games but a zero out of 10 how could this game be so deplorable for critics to imply that it fails at everything it's trying to do does the game really deserve such exaggerated criticism or were these reviews just a product of their time and Garfield ended up with a raw let's find out together shall we it released as a PlayStation 2 game in Europe and later as a multi-region PC version and that's the one we're talking about today the game is just called Garfield but I'm going to be referring to it as Garfield 2004 from this point forward just for clarity so let's get the game going and I'll introduce you to how everything works the game opens with a cut scene in which Jon chews out Garfield for scratching his chair eating his lasagna and shredding his favorite suit if Garfield destroys one more thing he'll be put on a diet so JN leaves and then immediately OD rexs the place absolutely destroys everything and now Garfield with the threat of dieting arms himself with a vacuum cleaner to clean up the house before Jon gets back after the cut scene the game just drops you in it doesn't explain anything at all about how to play the game you just have to figure it all out yourself like I've said before I think no tutorial is better than a bad tutorial but when I first picked up the game I was lost a tutorial would have been nice but to their credit I found it very fun trying to piece together how the game worked myself but today it's my job to be the Garfield tutorial so here's how the game works so there's a few different goals you're working towards your primary long-term goals are to clean up the house and collect all four ingredients required to make lasagna the main Collectibles are puzzle pieces which are technically optional but they're fun to collect and they also reward you with being able to build a jigsaw puzzle at the end of the game there are mini games some of which are required as they give you lasagna ingredients that you need to complete the game and others reward you with puzzle pieces which like I said are optional as for the short-term gameplay goals you pick up items by sucking them up into your vacuum which puts it in your inventory and then blowing them out in the place that the item belongs represented by a ghostly silhouette of where it should be when you pick up an item Garfield will usually say what room it belongs to I think that goes in the utility room at first you can only access the kitchen living room Den utility room hallway and Landing but there are no shortage of locked doors visualized by star particles surrounding the doorknob you can only open these doors once you earn a key in the corresponding color and you earn these keys by cleaning a room in its entirety and that means placing all the items where they belong in a room and fixing all the Crooked wall art later in the game once you've collected all the keys completing a room will just reward you with puzzle pieces often you'll pick up an item that belongs to a room you don't have access to yet the only way you can put down an item you've sucked up is by putting it in its rightful spot or placing it in an item chest you can only hold three items at a time so you'll be interacting with these item chests quite a lot if you press select it shows a timer ticking down this is your death clock you have to complete the game in its entirety within 8 and 1/2 real life hours or else you have to start the entire game over from the beginning not a lot of games feature a real-time clock that's always ticking down as a method of manufacturing haste I love it it is very effective now the main gam playay Loop of putting items where they belong ends up being a very Zen activity easily my favorite attribute of Garfield 2004 is its heavy focus on micr level problem solving here's an example of an average problem the game would ask you to solve I found a plate so I sucked it up Garfield said it belongs in the kitchen so I look around the kitchen and that looks like where it belongs but I can't get up there because I can't jump that high ah I can use my vacuum to pull the drawer open jump off of that and then got to step back a little bit to get my vacuum vortex in the right place and there we go that's done 94 items to go now that wouldn't be quite so satisfying if the inverse didn't also exist where you have an item that you don't need or need an item that you don't have I know that's where the rubber duck goes I can see the silhouette have I seen one before is it in the chest somewhere and then it's like oh my God there's the rubber duck I got to find a way to get in there so that I can get the rubber duck and then I can complete the bathroom and then once I complete the bathroom there'll be more items and more places for items to go and then the whole thing just keeps going but organization isn't the only thing you're working towards sometimes putting an item in the right spot also acts as the solution to a platforming puzzle I want to get up there but it's too high to jump I guess I need to place the Bongo there to use it as a step stool okay there's The Bongo I found it now I can put it there jump on top of it and get there this Gap is too wide for me to jump over I need to place the thing there and then I can jump off of it to get across to the other side you get the idea I think they did a great job integrating items into the game world as a problem solving tool it makes them feel like they're more than just busy work as a means to an end Garfield 2004 has a lot in common with chibi Robo they both feature cleaning a home at the micro level broken up into sections some of which aren't accessible right away and then gradually relinquishing them to you as a reward but the weirdest thing is that Garfield came first so if anything chibi robo was inspired by Garfield I love that idea for some reason anyway as for what Garfield 2004 has to offer that isn't just cleaning it occasionally will throw something totally new at you you get to race with normal and ODI which is pretty fun there's a block stacking game you got to collect flowers for Arlene there's a miname where you have to put windup toys back on their shelves there's a lot of variety and it's spaced out evenly throughout your playthrough Garfield 2004 has all of the design attributes of a game people would like it's got a satisfying core gameplay loop with some interesting challenges here and there and plenty of stuff to break up the monotony why does it have a zero out of 10 well unfortunately there are plenty of answers to that question I think it's important for me to establish that I have really weird taste when it comes to video games the best way I can phrase it is I would rather have something unique than something good I will choose experimentation over a proven formula every single time and so I'm more willing to tolerate bad design than most people are in favor of getting to engage with some arbitrary characteristic that makes my brain Sparkle maybe the concept is bizarre or the controls are rough around the edges in a satisfying way or sometimes it's as simple as there's a cat in the game and I want to see the cat that's in the game I'm telling you all this to get across that it is very in character for me to fall head over heels in love with a terrible old Garfield game from 2004 I adore this game but it is so flawed and the issues add up fast enough that I imagine most players quit before they even got to see how many cool ideas has to offer not a single music track in this entire game is even tolerable they are all horrible the graphics can look pretty bad sometimes aiming your vacuum beam can be Jank there are plenty of bugs gamebreaking and otherwise there are tons of grammatical errors Garfield constantly says the same exact things over and over and over I'm sure I've seen something that goes there I'm sure I've seen something that goes I'm sure I've seen something that goes there and OD exists solely to annoy you [Music] these flaws are enough to get across that Garfield 2004 might not be the most quality of products and maybe perhaps it's not worth pursuing further and the predisposition that a lot of people have about licensed games namely them being bad I'm sure didn't help either but Garfield 2004 stands out among all other licensed games and that it actually does have something of substance to offer the player I can't make an entire YouTube video about Eminem's beach party there would be nothing to say but a video about Garfield 2004 I mean you tell me you're the one watching a video about it right now was this game intended to be a bare minimum licensed game and the developers accidentally stumbled upon something fun and interesting maybe the game is very flawed I'm not going to deny that but I feel like at the very least a four out of 10 would be justifiable but a zero it just feels like it's in bad taste I'm sorry Garfield 2 2004 is a concept worth exploring and they did so in a satisfying way it doesn't feel forced or overly vapid it doesn't demonstrate any cynical design Theory like a lot of licensed games do and that alone is something worth celebrating I feel like this game was Delta Raw Deal and I plan to undo that Injustice in two different ways the first is by making this video where I deconstruct it and offer an understanding and the second is for me to fix the game now what do I mean by fix the game well sometimes when you politely ask Windows 11 to play a 20-year-old game it'll say no thanks there are plenty of Internet communities dedicated to making old video games behave on Modern computers sometimes you got to patch the game or use third party tools or boot up a virtual machine but as for what Garfield 2004 needs no one cares about this game as much as I do so I had to figure out how to fix it myself first of all the game uses StarForce DRM which doesn't work on Modern versions of windows so I had to crack it to get the game to even start up at all pretty easy First Step second of all the game window is very small on a 4K display and if you try to run it in full screen it just crashes so I used a tool called DX wrapper to add borderless Windows support and to expand the resolutions the game was able to display allowing for a much larger game window and third of all this game predates the Xbox 360 so if you try to use an Xbox 360 or Xbox One controller it's not going to work so I used a tool called ZD to build a custom controller configuration so that you can plug in any modern Xbox controller to your computer and it'll stantly work with the game with no fiddling required at this point the game is finally playable so I was about to package it up and start sending it to some friends but then I was like well if I'm going to redistribute I may as well start fixing some things in the actual game too now this is where the fun begins so if you guys have been watching my channel for a long time you know that I used to mod video games I used to mod Super Mario Sunshine and Animal Crossing ever since I lost interest in Nintendo all those years ago I've been begging for an opportunity to mod a game again and Garfield 2004 fit the bill so I've spent the past few months working on a project called Garfield plus a general Improvement mod for Garfield 2004 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the game it's finished I made a website for it and everything you can download it right now but yeah let's get into how I did it and what all I changed Garfield 2004's assets like 3D models maps and textures are all stored in packed data files lots of games do this this is nothing unusual but this is a major obstacle because it's a proprietary format and surely no one is going to be passionate enough about this game to have cracked the code on how to pop open the data files let alone share their findings about how they did so oh well would you look at that just a few months ago this person managed to unpack the data files wrote a little article about how they did it and included a python script as well absolute Chad so now we have the assets but that's only useful if we can edit them and reinsert them back into a pack file the game can read I'm grateful that I have reverse engineer friends that I can get on my knees and beg to do the things that I want them to to do so I begged my friend the rat Hatter to help me with this dream and thankfully he thought my mission was funny and decided to indulge me he wrote a command line tool called Pac-Man that can unpack and repack Garfield 2004 pack files and made the whole thing open source so now the entirety of Garfield 2004's file system is at my disposal to modify so as for the changes that I actually made we can just reference the change log in the readme file and go from there enhanced DirectX support for Windows 10 and 11 users borderless Window mode and high resolution window support these three were done using DX wrapper which I talked about earlier it's a piece of Open Source software made by Elisha ringer the Retro PC gaming scene would not be the same without them this software is amazing and then we've got custom xinput controller support optimized for plug andplay with modern Xbox controllers this was done using ZD which is another piece of Open Source software made by Samuel Grossman the game would not be playable without ZD because the stock joystick support was completely broken onscreen UI guides have been changed to focus on Xbox controllers as opposed to to keyboard yeah so when you're using a joystick Garfield will show you keyboard prompts anyway that's very confusing so I changed them to more accurately represent Xbox button prompts because I don't want anyone playing this game with a keyboard the keyboard controls are horrible I even put a screen right at the beginning of the game politely asking the player to use a controller because that is unquestionably how the game is intended to be played all spelling grammatical and punctuation errors have been meticulously corrected Garfield 2004 has an exhausting amount of atrocious grammar and it was driving me crazy so I went through and corrected every single line of text in the entire game to not only make sense but to exactly match their corresponding voice lines enhanced Graphics I'm a graphic designer so of course I jumped at the opportunity to clean up a lot of the visuals I made a pretty intro and a pretty title screen I also replace this horribly ugly Ms paint loading screen with a much more pleasant one some item icons the coloring looks really off to how the item actually looks so I fixed those also I made the question mark bubble icon look much nicer and way more accurate to the Comics I'm sure I changed more Graphics than that but I can't remember what all I did the horribly grading background music has been replaced to better match the game Zen design Theory Garfield 2004 has some of the worst video game music I have ever heard for a relaxing game where you clean a house it's noisy and Grading and exhaused so I replaced the music with some more Chill Vibes I used some obscure Nintendo music that I thought would fit reasonably well fixed a bug where the classic console block miname has no music right so in the original game the game room erroneously plays the music from Block Puzzle game while the Block Puzzle game has no music at all I know this is a bug because the PlayStation 2 version works as intended in Garfield plus I fix this bug so it is not an issue replaced several unpleasant sound effects with ones that are nicer on the ears so yeah the annoying menu noises I replaced them with bubble sounds from Garfield go it felt fitting I also replaced the vacuum sounds with ones from Luigi's Mansion reduced Garfield's passive Bubsy esque chatter so every single time you walk past an item silhouette Garfield will say some variation of I wonder what goes there you will hear him say that probably 500 times in every playthrough it is completely unhelpful information it is not useful whatsoever so he no longer says those lines of dialogue I just remove them from the game initially my plan was to debsy the game entirely by making Garfield only talk when he has something important to say like when he's telling you where an item belongs but part of your reward for putting an item in its place is hearing Garfield make a unique quip about it that would be a lot of content for me to cut out it would mess up the game's reward system system and it's funny enough that I feel like it's worth keeping the total amount of puzzle pieces has been changed from the previously impossible to achieve 58 to 50 right so this is a major oversight that's in the original game it is impossible to 100% Garfield 2004 you cannot collect all 58 puzzle pieces if you look at the only game facts guide for this game the writer expresses their frustration about this exact thing so here's what's happening in late game when you fully clean a room you're rewarded with a certain amount of puzzle pieces but they don't give you a chance to pick up the puzzle pieces for cleaning the final room before the ending cut scene interrupts you and then kicks you out to the main menu usually the kitchen ends up being completed last so you're left with 56 out of 58 collected when the game ends that is incredibly stupid and unsatisfying you only need 50 puzzle pieces to build the puzzles in the game room and the extra eight are unnecessary so I reduced the upper limit to 50 implying that you have finished the objective and can now build the puzzle and any extra r just extra so those are all the major fixes I was able to make to the game I'm not a coder or a reverse engineer so here are some things my skill level wouldn't allow me to do but I invite anyone up to the challenge to do so in the Attic there's a miname where you have to put some windup toys away on their correct shelves thankfully this is only optional because it's completely broken in the PC version of the game when you complete a windup shelf and the door closes your vacuum becomes glitched and you can no longer suck or blow anything the only way to get it to start working again is by running into a spider I would have never figured figured that out so thank you PC gaming Wiki for that little tip this Min game functions as intended in the PlayStation 2 version this is one of those issues that's way too nebulous it's clearly an issue with the engine and it would be impossible for me to fix at my skill level one of the changes I really wanted to make was to remove ODI from the video game when Garfield enters od's sight line ODI will excitedly Dash into Garfield knocking him back for a moment before going back to wandering around aimlessly this happens a billion times per playthrough and is very very annoying and the PlayStation 2 version is even worse because OD will keep running into Garfield over and over and over and over until you kick him to get him to stop I couldn't find od's World coordinates and deleting his model just makes him invisible I tried removing the AI pointer from the game entirely but that just led to an inexplicable crash I was able to successfully replace OD with another Garfield but doing literally anything else caused the game to crash if you're up to the challenge of deleting OD Garfield plus will be even better here's a bug that's in the original game that I couldn't fix when you pick up an item the icon is mirrored horizontally in the inventory Cube and that makes things like the alarm clock look weird it looks normal in the chest menu but in the cube it's flipped on the x-axis I have no idea why that is and I have no idea how to fix it I also would have loved to put signs on each door labeling what each room was instead of having to use the color-coded doorknob Sparkles I was able to extract and view the map files using renderware Studio but actually crafting the unique 3D assets and adding them to the map files is a little out of my range I also wish that all of the chests in the game would lead to the same item pool I want them to be Minecraft ender chests basically another thing I would love to do but I don't know how I know that a lot of my ideas for Garfield plus are pretty high concept but I'm still very proud of what it is right now and I think it's a major step in the right direction in regards to making the game more playable and more palatable it is nice to see that a lot of people on the Internet seem to retrospectively like Garfield 2004 this game isn't terrible it's bad yes let me be crystal clear about that but it's bad in ways that still make it enjoyable this this entire video has been built around other people's opinions I thought it would be funny to phrase this video as me dramatically butting heads with critics that didn't like the game but the one constant throughout all of this is that none of it affected me or my enjoyment if there's anything you should take away from this video it's to generate your own opinions and I don't mean absorbing internet people's opinions through osmosis I mean actually sitting down and playing a game uninfluenced and feeling your own way about it there are way too many video games that I have to silently obsess over because it doesn't align with the opinions of the internet gamer cult but I for one am willing to put my foot down and say I love Garfield 2004 I love it so much I'm so grateful that I discovered it better late than never my life is better because it exists but I'm sure there will be plenty of people in the comments that are like this game actually sucks and you're just weird I have a Bubsy 3D poster on my wall it brings me daily inspiration why can't we both be right you have the ability to not agree with or respect my opinion and just because I'm in a YouTube video doesn't change that same thing with this critic that gave Garfield 2004 a0 out of 10 it's nothing personal I just don't respect this opinion well that's the end of my YouTube video thank you for watching it all the way to the end you can download Garfield Plus in the description I also made a new website it's very pretty you should go look at it I also gave my patreon a makeover please go look at that too but yeah that's all I have for you good bye my loves M I'll see you in the next one real soon

Channel: planet clue

Views: 290,573

Keywords: evan clue, kkclue, clue media, eclue, clue's house, toys, wholesome, animal crossing, acnh, new horizons

Id: qylymkoVnuo

Length: 19min 36sec (1176 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 27 2024