EyeToy: AntiGrav
Published by Sony Computer Entertainment America. Developed by Harmonix. For PlayStation 2. Rated E for Everyone.
What do the Power Glove, the Activator, and the U-Force have in common? All promised entirely new ways to play, and all were total crap. Gimmicky at best, these bizarre peripherals succeeded only in complicating the gameplay process, even though Lucas did make the finals wielding his Power Glove in the 1989 Fred Savage vehicle, The Wizard (in the process uttering the immortal line, "I love the Power Glove … It's so rad!"). Although the arcade industry's bread-and-butter has for decades been elaborate input mechanisms, home gamers have had to settle for light guns.
It was with some trepidation, then, that I hooked up EyeToy: AntiGrav, a futuristic racer from SCEA and Harmonix. "Your body is the controller," promises the back of the box. Huh? How could this possibly work?
Work it does, and damn well at that. The EyeToy, a camera that attaches to the USB port on the front of the PS2, is a snap to set up. Simply place it atop your television set, plug it in, and you're good to go. The AntiGrav manual issues dire warnings about the light setup necessary to maximize the EyeToy's performance, but I had no problem simply cranking up the overhead light in my living room. (Not that the camera's quality would mean much if the game weren't any good.)
Frankly, if this were a regular old racing game, it probably wouldn't be much to write home about. The tracks and racers adhere to a neon-drenched, cyberpunk aesthetic that I'm not sure was ever in style to begin with. And although the courses are huge, offering a ridiculous number of branching paths and several racing surfaces along the Z-axis, there are only five of them. To make matters worse, only one track is available at the beginning of the game; to unlock the second track, you must win on the first track not once, but three times, and repeat that for each level.
In addition to "Speed" mode, which is a garden-variety race to the finish line, there's also an SSX-style "Trick" mode, in which the goal is to rack up more points than your opponents by pulling aerial tricks. Tricks are accomplished by making different arm motions after your character flies off a jump. When your character gets enough air, four icons will show up at the bottom of the screen, dictating a sequence necessary to pull off that racer's unique super-trick. These, again, are standard issue for games of this type, although I appreciated that one of the tricks was called the "Reverse Curse."
An unimpressive multiplayer mode was also included. It's multiplayer in name only – one person races, and then the next person races his ghost. Obviously it would have been too much to ask of the EyeToy to track two players' movements at once, but an online mode could have worked well. Then again, I imagine making a new type of game is difficult enough without trying to master the PS2's sub-par networking capabilities.
