Cheat Index - Monster Garage Computer Review

It's as if Hollywood wasn't doing enough to ruin our favorite TV shows. That's the only rationale behind Activision Value's latest game, Monster Garage. Now, I've been a fan of the show since it first aired two years ago. The reality-TV concept married to a high pressure automotive engineering challenge is damned exciting to me, not just because of the open-ended mechanical problem-solving but also because of the incendiary personalities. Sadly, neither quality has managed to find its way into the game. What we're left with instead is a puzzle game that inexplicably straddles the line between Byzantine complexity and generic simplicity.

If you haven't seen the show, gear-head and all around guy's guy Jesse James is tasked with converting a stock car into an entirely different kind of vehicle. Viewers tune in every week to see Jesse and his team of five builders (a different group for every show) try to turn a Ford pick-up into a nut-shaker. Or turn a Mini Cooper into a snowmobile. The team gets $3000 (and a few freebies) and seven days to complete each project. The real excitement comes from seeing the different build teams interact as they try to turn a bus into a pontoon boat. As I said, the game fails to deliver any of the excitement inherent in the property.

Where, oh where, to start? I suppose we might begin with the basic functionality. Though we've heard rumors of people who've no problems whatsoever, our own, off-the-shelf version of the game crashed or locked up at least once every time we sat down to play it. Even after closing our screen capture program (the game unplayable with this running, which explains the dearth of screenshots), there were still enough crashes to make playing more an exercise in persistence than in problem-solving. These types of issues abound, from the minor irritation of typos in the interface, to the profound aggravation of not being able to save the game without simultaneously quitting it.

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